An American Manifesto

Aristotle Fiddles the Mean on Courage

2012-02-06T09:55:00.000-08:00

It's easy enough to set up a general law or rule. It's when you have to apply the rule in practice that the fun begins. So it is with Aristotle's idea of the mean when applied to the virtue of courage. He defines virtue as a mean between two vices such as "the man of practical wisdom would determine it", for the vices exceed or fall short of "what is right in both passions and actions while virtue both finds and chooses that which is intermediate." Then, when our man of virtue actually goes forth and acts in the world he acts upon three principles: he must have knowledge, must choose his acts for their own sakes, and must proceed from "a firm and unchanging character."

Very good, that is the theory. How does it work out in practice when considering the virtue of courage?

In practice Aristotle wants to privilege a certain kind of courage. It is the courage of the hoplite, the citizen-soldier that stood in line with his fellow citizens to defend his polis. You can understand why. The independence and civic pride of each polis depended upon the courage of its hoplites, the first heavy infantry in history. Heavy infantry is designed for "shock" battle, and victory depends on soldiers with the courage or the discipline to stay in line, not matter how bad things get. How about your Aristotelian mean then?

You might think that the professional soldier, experienced and knowledgeable in the "many empty alarms in war" and the contingencies of fighting, would represent the mean. But the professionals "turn cowards" when things turn against them "while citizen forces die at their posts." In other words, the professional soldier observes the mean of courage, while the citizen-soldier stands at an excess. Perhaps the professional soldier, although possessing knowledge, suffers a defect since he does not choose acts for their own sakes, but subordinate to the job of professional soldiering. Still, he seems to exhibit a firm and unchanging character: he does what is sensible and practical. Does not then the citizen soldier exceed the mean when he continues to fight shoulder to shoulder with his brothers against all odds?

The "sanguine" also merit the back of Aristotle's hand. They are "confident in danger" because they are used to success. But put them in a sudden firefight and they run, unlike the braver man who is "fearless and undisturbed in sudden alarms". The "ignorant" are just as bad as the sanguine, only worse. If "deceived about the facts" they often fly from the battle as soon as they are undeceived And as for courage from "passion", why "wild beasts act under the influence of pain". Men who fight under the influence of passion, when from anger or pain, are "pugnacious but not brave". They act not from honor or rule, but from feeling alone. But Aristotle allows their pugnacity as "something akin to courage." So here Aristotle keeps with his system: passionate courage is all from feeling, not a balanced application of feeling and reason.

To privilege his citizen-soldier, Aristotle must meddle with his definition of courage, defined back in Book II-2 as the mean between the excess of rashness and the defect of cowardice. "For the man who flies from and fears everything and does not stand his ground against anything becomes a coward, and the man who fears nothing at all but goes to meet every danger become rash." (1104a21-23) Now he wants us to forget that, for his hoplite must not observe the mean but exceed it if his polis is to win the shock battle of heavy infantry. Now he says that the man who "exceeds in fearlessness has no name". Really? I thought he was the rash chap. Not a bit of it. The rash man, it turns out, "is thought to be boastful and only a pretender to courage". Most of the rash men are "a mixture of rashness and cowardice." It turns out that the coward and the rash man are similar. They both of them exceed and they both of them fall short. So Aristotle's new analysis conveniently leaves the courageous man in the middle (rather than at the extreme you'd think he is at since both the rash chap and the cowardly chap fall short in the courage department).

Why all this fol-de-rol? Aristotle could have held with his excess-mean-defect model just by saying that the rash are wild and excessive. They want to rush out and attack the enemy rather than advance in the right way at the right time with the right intention. Sounds like he'd had a bad day in the agora and had forgotten his system for a moment.

So what then is the man of courage? He lives a mean between fear and confidence, but some things he does not fear: "poverty and disease" and "the things that do not proceed from vice". Certainly he should fear "insult to his wife", but he must "stand his ground against what is awe-inspiring" even unto death and be willing to face the noblest death, to fall in battle. Thus he fears what he should, and fears not what he should not, for the "brave man feels and acts according to the merits of the case and in whatever way the rule directs." Courage is the bravery of the hoplite soldier, but not the courage of the professional soldier, not the man in a fury of passion or anger, nor the habitual courage of the "sanguine" person used to conquering, not the courage of the ignorant. Courage is for "facing what is painful", accepting pain for the end aimed at. In the virtuous man, the virtue of courage is all the more excellent since the more virtuous a man is, the more painful is the thought of death.

The idea of the mean is a great idea. It's just that, when it comes to courage and the defense of the city-state, the mean between excess and defect just doesn't cut it. The deeper Aristotle gets into his analysis of the courageous person the more his model of the mean falls apart. See how he proceeds. In Book III-6 some things are to be feared; some are not. But the epitome of courage is courage in battle, courage against death, "the most terrible of all things". Never mind death at sea or from disease; the courageous man is only concerned with the noblest things: death in battle, which is "honored in city-states and at the courts of monarchs." But this is not a mean between excess and defect, but a striving towards the utmost. He is "brave who is fearless in the face of a noble death." What then becomes of courage as a mean "with regard to feelings of fear and confidence"? They are all forgotten in the celebration of a good death.

But wait, now we are done with Book III-6. In Book III-7, the brave man, "dauntless as may be" may now, Aristotle tells us, "fear even the things that are not beyond human strength". But he will "face them as he ought and as the rule directs". Now the courageous man is not fearless after all, and so we are back at the mean, and the right action at the right time in the right way. But he will, of course, do all this facing of fear only for a noble end.

You can go just so far with that. Then it is best to pull up like Mr. Brooke. In Book III-8 we gather to dispose of the courage of professional soldiers, the passionate, the sanguine and the ignorant, who are said to be courageous but, according to Aristotle, are not. We come to praise only the courage of citizen-soldiers who "die at their posts" rather than admit that discretion is the greater part of valor.

Finally, in Book III-9, Aristotle trims his notion that courage is a mean between confidence and fear. It is really more about fear, the "things that inspire fear", for "facing what is painful" just as the boxer takes the distressing blows for the pleasant aim of winning the "crown and the honors". Thus it is not necessarily always the case that the exercise of virtue is a pleasant, lifelong journey of eudaimonia. Getting there is often painful.

It's all very well to talk of virtue as a mean between excess and defect. But the man of virtue is not in fact living at a delicate balance point between two extremes. The virtuous person is hacking through a jungle armed only with a machete, he is living an arduous life that is located right out on the edge of the Bell Curve. The man practicing the virtue of courage is straining to the utmost to practice that virtue in the right way at the right time for the right reason. He is standing shoulder to shoulder with his fellow citizens slowly advancing towards the opposing line of hoplites. His reward is not to occupy a mean but to cherish the hope that, if he falls in the melée, his awful and painful death will be celebrated as noble and honored by his fellow citizens.

It is telling that the Prussians solved the problem of shock battle with "Prussian discipline" and file closers. They felt that the fear of combat could only be neutralized by the mindlessness of discipline and the fear of the sergeant. It was only the in the 20th century that the Germans turned away from compulsion and General von Seeckt called for soldiers "self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility." So for Seeckt courage came more from confidence, not from overcoming fear or a mean between confidence and fear. Courage is a matter of extremes, as Aristotle accepts, when he shifts his gaze from theory to practice.

How to Judge Actions

2012-02-03T10:15:00.000-08:00

If you are a philosopher like Aristotle or maybe a legislator in the business of judging the actions of lesser mortals, you need a template, a measure, by which to rule and hand out honors and punishments.

To do this you probably need to be able to "distinguish between the voluntary and the involuntary" action. Sometimes, of course, you have to do something, such as throw goods overboard in a storm, that you would normally never do voluntarily. And sometimes you would face death rather than voluntarily do something evil.

But what about things done by reason of ignorance? Obviously, says Aristotle, everything "done by reason of ignorance is not voluntary". Now he makes a fine distinction. Suppose you do something in ignorance that you would presumably not do voluntarily. If you repent of your action, your action is "involuntary." If you do not repent, your action is "not voluntary."

So, says Aristotle, if you throw a pointed spear at a friend, thinking that your spear "had a button on it", your action would be involuntary, since you would surely repent of your action. That is action in ignorance that is involuntary. It is hard to think of an action in ignorance that is "not voluntary," i.e., not repented. Suppose you threw a pointed spear at an enemy thinking it had a button on it. Would you regret the action when the poor chap fell down dead? If you didn't regret, the action in ignorance would be "not voluntary." Perhaps a better example would be Candidate Romney saying that he doesn't worry about the "very poor." Everyone thinks that this is a stunning error, because conservatives do too worry about the poor. But if the struggling middle--the folks that Romney says he does worry about--were to wake up and say to themselves, "Wow, finally a politician that cares about us and not the bloody poor!" then Romney would not repent of the action in ignorance. So that would be action in ignorance that is "not voluntary."

But Aristotle is not yet done. He does not want to admit that actions due to anger or appetite could be involuntary. The "wicked man is ignorant of what he ought to do" but that does not make his ignorance involuntary. Actions done in ignorance but where "the moving principle is in the agent himself" are voluntary. Thus we could say that the liberal welfare state policies that have cratered the working class are voluntary. Liberals may have been ignorant of the specific consequences of their policies, but they cannot hide from the results. It is evil to encourage people to exchange their birthright for a mess of pottage. Period.

Are Incontinent Fools Wise?

2012-01-27T06:04:00.000-08:00

You might wonder why Aristotle is so interested in incontinence that he devotes the whole of Book VII of his Nichomachean Ethics to it. Is that really a problem for philosophers to worry about?

Well, it is, at least the kind of incontinence that Aristotle worries about.

The continent man is one "ready to abide by the result of his calculations" while the incontinent man is "ready to abandon them." Why does the continent man abide by his calculations? Because he knows "his appetites are bad, and refuses on account of his rational principles to follow them." The incontinent man, on the other hand, abandons his rational principles "as a result of passion."

But if you chop logic like the sophists, worries Aristotle, then you might end up unraveling your rational spaghetti into believing that "folly coupled with incontinence is virtue." For if continence makes a man stand by a false opinion, then it is good if an incontinent man, that abandons "any and every opinion", abandons a false opinion.

Aristotle briskly clears away the problem of this sophistical mirage, the virtuous incontinent, for he argues that the incontinent man is in the position of someone "having knowledge in a sense and yet not having it, as in the instance of a man asleep, mad, or drunk." He is like a city that "passes all the right decrees and has good laws, but makes no use of them". He is neither good nor bad, just a muddle.

But what about the continent man with the wrong opinion? Well, Aristotle says, these are likely strong-headed people, "hard to persuade in the first instance and not easily persuaded to change". This is to suggest that an continent man can be consumed with "passion and appetite". On the contrary, the "continent man will be easy to persuade". For being a man of rational principle, he is not led by his appetites and his pleasures, but readily bows to rational persuasion.

But let us not confuse the incontinent man with the self-indulgent. The first stands by his choice, and is not apt to repent his follies, while the incontinent man means well but is led astray by his passions. The self-indulgent man is "incurable and the incontinent curable." Think of the difference between dropsy and epilepsy, says Aristotle. The "former is a permanent, the latter an intermittent badness."

So that's all right!

What About That Mean?

2012-01-20T09:34:00.000-08:00

Every virtue, says Aristotle, brings things into good condition. Therefore virtue is also "the state of character which makes a man good and which makes him do his own work well."

Does that mean that the harder you work at virtue, the better? Not exactly, for virtue is not found in extremes, writes Aristotle, but at the mean between two extremes. It is "an intermediate between excess and defect." Thus the great Aristotelian notion of the mean.

But the mean is not a rigid thing, half way between the extremes of excess and defect. If "ten pounds is too much for a particular person to eat and two too little, it does not follow that the trainer will order six pounds." The mean is an individual thing for each person.

Thus, the mean for Milo the excellent wrestler in the eating department would not the the same as for "the beginner in athletic exercises". Obviously, Milo would need to eat a lot more than you or me. He's a wrestler in training. Therefore the appropriate mean for him is a lot more than for the beginner. Today, we would say that it is one thing for a Tour de France competitor to consume 5,000 calories per day, but quite another thing for a couch potato.

The point is that "the master of any art avoids excess and defect, but seeks the intermediate," the mean between the extremes. But the mean for each virtue is not the same for everyone; the mean is the intermediate that leads to virtue in each of us. It is a "mean relative to us" according to a rational principle as a "man of practical wisdom" would determine.

Vice, of course, is different. There is no mean there for Aristotle. It is just bad. There is no such thing as "adultery with the right woman, at the right time, and in the right way". Of course that says nothing about adultery with a slave.

With the virtue of honor, according to Aristotle, the mean is "proper pride"; the excess being "empty vanity" and the defect "undue humility." Aristotle understands honor here as aristocratic pride. But in Honor: A History, the modern James Bowman defines honor rather differently. It is the reputation that a hoplite infantryman would have for staying in line, or a GI for supporting the buddies in his unit. It has nothing to do with aristocratic pride, but is rather the reputation for courage under fire.

Indeed aristocratic pride, so ubiquitous in The Iliad, is a corruption of honor. It is the insistence that an aristocrat be treated as though he were courageous and unflinching in combat, whether or not he is.

You could call aristocratic honor a vice.

How Many Divisions Has the Soul?

2012-01-18T10:33:00.000-08:00

Stalin famously inquired in 1944 how many divisions the pope had. Reportedly, Pope Pius XII replied that “You can tell my son Joseph that he will meet my divisions in heaven”.

Almost as confusing is Aristotle's explanation of the elements of the soul in Nicomachean Ethics I 13. OK, chaps, he says, there are, first of all, the rational and the irrational, although they are not quite as obviously discrete elements as "the parts of the body."

Never mind about the vegetative aspect of the irrational soul, he says, that operates even in nurslings and embryos, not to mention "full-grown creatures." This irrational element seems to operate in a world of its own and is uninfluenced by reason.

However, there is another irrational element that seems partially connected with the rational element, and indeed can be influenced by it. This element is an "appetitive" and "desiring element." It might move a man "aright and towards the best objects". But there seems to be another principle that "fights and resists" the rational principle. Thus the appetitive element shares in the rational element only "in so far as it listens to and obeys it".

Now here is where things get tricky. The appetitive irrational element seems to be subdivided into two parts, the one that does the right thing on its own, and the other capable of obeying the the rational principle as articulated, e.g., by one's father.

But what about the rational principle? What about that? Well, that seems to be divided into two sub-elements too. For "some of the virtues are intellectual and other moral". The man of good character we praise for being "good-tempered or temperate"; the wise man for "his state of mind".

So there we are. For the Aristotelian soul we have a rational element and an irrational element. We divide the rational element into the intellectual and moral, and the irrational into vegetative and appetitive. But the appetitive we subdivide into a rational part, insofar as it is persuaded by or obeys the rational principle, and the irrational part, which just does what it does, in opposition to the rational principle.

How many divisions has the soul? Counting only "leaf" elements, we have five. Counting all nodes from the complete soul on down, we have a total of nine. Who knows how many divisions there will be in heaven?

Remember, the point of all this is to understand that "activity of soul in accordance with perfect virtue" which is happiness or eudaimonia.

Who Gets to Judge?

2012-01-17T09:31:00.000-08:00

If we say, as we did yesterday, that we in western society are dealing with the Two Great Crimes of Modernity, then what do we do about it?

The two great crimes are really quite simple. Capitalism's great crime is plantation slavery, when business owners got to own the people that worked their sugar plantations, first in Cyprus, then in the West Indian sugar islands and Brazil. And then there was a fabulously profitable cotton slave plantation play in the good old USA.

The solution to this crime was that the capitalists should not be the judge of their own cause. A moral movement arose to critique plantation slavery, and plantation slavery is no more. In the US, of course, it took a civil war to persuade the plantation capitalists to abandon their slave profits.

The crime of the educated class is the totalitarian state. Any old tyrant can set up as a despot, but it takes an intellectual to come up with the totalitarian state where all aspects of human socialization are collapsed into government and politics, and anyone that uttered a peep of objection got carted off to a slave-labor camp.

Today the hard totalitarianism of the Stalins and the Maos is over and lives on in the twilight of Cuba, but our liberal friends are still keen on the authoritarian welfare state, in which society is half collapsed into the political sector, and liberals get lots of political and cultural power and, in their role as judges of the capitalists, a lot of power over the economic sector too.

How can we get out from under this soft totalitarianism? It's not that hard. We must just establish that the liberal educated class cannot continue as the judge of their own cause any more than the capitalists. Liberals have to choose whether they want to run the welfare state or whether they want to judge it. They can't do both.

Our liberal friends are rather like Bottom the weaver, the "mechanical" from Midsummer Night's Dream. They want to play the starring role of Pyramus, and then they want to play all the other roles too. On top of that they want to tell everyone else how to play their own roles.

I watched the South Carolina debate last night, and so I got to see the key moment, when Juan Williams lobbed the usual race-card question at Newt Gingrich about work and welfare. Newt knocked it out of the park, both on content and style. I particularly liked his asides on the taboo of upsetting liberals. The crowd (becoming more and more an actor in these events) cheered Newt lustily and booed Juan lustily. Why? Because Americans (considered in the strict sense of people that do not hyphenate their identity) are fed up with liberals playing Bottom the weaver.

Liberals keep saying they want a national conversation, but you better not disagree with them, or you are a racist. You had better not critique their welfare state programs, or they will call you a racist. But then, if you have a political debate on Martin Luther King Day that is supposed to be racist. If your campaign doesn't buy radio ads that target black radio that is supposed to be racist. I'm sure that, to suggest that the best way to avoid poverty is to finish high school, get married, and don't have children until you are in your twenties, is also racist, but I haven't actually seen anyone make that accusation.

There is a word to describe something that is so sacred, so holy, that it cannot be mentioned. It is called a taboo. But liberals are above all that.

Our liberal friends have a closed system that justifies their soft tyranny as kindness and compassion, and they have erected a remarkable policing system to intimidate their opposition and to control and marginalize any criticism of their rule. But sooner or later, someone will challenge the liberal culture of fear, someone will break the taboo, and the liberal police state will collapse.

Nobody will be surprised except the liberals.

Two Great Crimes of Modernity

2012-01-16T09:23:00.000-08:00

Let's tell it like it is.

Instrumental reason, the Enlightenment, write Horkheimer and Adorno, is a dance of domination, domination over nature and domination over man. "What men want to learn from nature is how to dominate it and other men."

Oh, gee, we already did. in Modernity's Original Sin. But let us do it again in a slightly different way.

The Original Sin of modernity, the application of instrumental reason to domination, resulted in two Great Crimes: capitalism's great crime and the educated elite's great crime.

The Great Crime of capitalism was the development of plantation slavery. It was the utter domination of men for the purpose of profit; for the slave plantations, right from the start in the sugar plantations on Cyprus organized after the Crusades, were always business enterprises: production for profit, and if it meant using up a few Muslim slaves, well, the pope said it was OK because the slaves weren't Christians.

We may say that capitalism, like Buddhism, has its Hinayana, its contemptible lesser vehicle, in industrialization, the harrowing process by which a rural population of farmers is transformed into a competent wage-earning workforce.

The Great Crime of the educated elite was the development of the totalitarian state. The totalitarian state of fond memory was the utter domination of men for the purpose of an idea, a vision of the perfect society, for the totalitarian state, right from its start in the Terror of the French Revolution, was always a soteriological secular religion, saving the world from exploitation and molding it into heaven on earth. If it meant using up a few rich peasants or the whole bourgeoisie, well, you can't make omelettes without breaking eggs.

The French Revolution and its Terror represented the totalizing of the Age of Reason. The fascist states represented the totalizing of Romanticism and its union with nature. The communist states represented the totalizing of Marxism and it class-war ideology. But the totalitarian idea has its Hinayana, its contemptible lesser vehicle, too. We may call it, with Jürgen Habermas, the "authoritarian welfare state."

The educated class is like any group of men for "men like power and will seize it if they can," in the words of Nicholas Wade. The educated class uses instrumental reason applied to the technology of state power to dominate other men. Only its goal is not profit, like the capitalists, but to rule the world as the benevolent and beneficent Oz. The problem is that instrumental reason is a tool for domination, and the means that the educated class uses for domination is the canonical tool for the domination of other men: politics and government.

Government is force, and politics is threatening force.

Over the decades, we have found ways of taming capitalism. Today's capitalists fight over market share, and when they succeed they benefit almost everyone. Their products benefit the consumers, and they share their extraordinary profits with their supporters, who are their investors and employees.

There has also been a taming of totalitarian educated elites, but not by much. If the full-on totalitarian state engulfed the whole of society into a soteriological political crusade and oceans of blood, the authoritarian welfare state, at least, only engulfs half of society, or at least its GDP, into the maw of the state and the projection of political power. But we cannot say, when government dominates all our worthiest cooperative instincts--the care of the aged, the care of the sick, the raising up of children, and the relief of the poor--that we have really tamed the totalitarian urge. The lesser Great Crime of the educated class still oppresses us as the industrial capitalists used to dominate the industrial working class.

Plantation slavery was ended by the rise of a great moral and religious movement that anathematized the exploitation of men and women as mere slavish cogs in a profitable production machine. We have yet to see the full development of a moral and religious movement to end the Hinayana of totalitarianism: the authoritarian welfare state and its reduction of all cooperative and caring instincts to a mechanical nexus of blind political power.

In my view this moral and political movement, that I believe begins with Edmund Burke in the 18th century, has yet to come to fruition because it has failed to inspire the people who will most benefit and socialize a world free from totalizing educated elites: women. When we talk of the authoritarian welfare stat reducing the care of the aged, the care of the sick, the raising up of children and the relief of the poor to care-less, compassionless centralizing, compulsory government programs, we are talking about all the best instincts and concerns of women reduced to bureaucracy and mind-numbing rules.

You can reduce capitalism to rules; that makes sense because capitalism is about sublimating the aggressiveness of human males to a fierce battle over market share, and men are always asking us to draw the line for them. But to reduce care of the most vulnerable to rules and regulations is insanity. Every woman knows that her aging mother needs health care that adapts to her individual need. Every child is unique, and it is ridiculous to fit armies of children onto the Procrustean bed of the government child custodial facility. And every poor person needs the personal attention that will turn mere relief into reintegration into the larger society.

Come on girls. You have a world to win, and nothing to fear except the chains--of suffocating government rules and regulations.

Happiness: Is Virtue Sufficient

2012-01-13T09:58:00.000-08:00

Our good friend Aristotle defines happiness (eudaimonia, the good life, or human flourishing) as "activity in accordance with virtue." But is virtue sufficient for happiness?

Obviously, we can say, it is not. In the first place, he considers virtue as the springboard of happiness. If you want to have a good life, your actions must be done in accordance with virtue. But virtue is the accumulation of habits and education, not to mention contemplation. They are the necessary means by which we can build the necessary facility, the aptitude, skills, and attitude necessary to a good life.

Happiness is not just a man living a life of virtue in isolation; it requires what Aristotle calls self-sufficiency. He means, by this, living not just in solitary virtuous splendor, but in a family, responsible for women, children and slaves, and the community of the city-state, "for man is born for citizenship."

And Aristotle tells us that happiness must extend over the whole of life. It is not just a moment. We cannot call a man happy if he has been buried, like Job, in unspeakable miseries and has lost everything: wife, children, camels, goats, and sheep. But we do not wait to call a man happy until we are sure that his descendants will also be happy.

Aristotle seems determined to confuse us when he suddenly turns from his assertion that the practice of political science in legislation is the highest good. in NE X 8 he ups and tells us that, "perfect happiness is a contemplative activity. This seems a rather unworthy descent into special pleading for his own function and profession. Do not plumbers think that the world begins and ends under the kitchen sink? Do not economists tell us that the world would be a better place if politicians listened more to economists? If the best life is a life of contemplation, where then is "activity in accordance with virtue?" He is getting close to the east Asians who tell us that the best is Nirvana, the absence of all striving and acting. In this case, of course, happiness as virtue collapses precisely into a trance of philosophy, and activity of life reduces to mere intellectual irritability.

Charles Taylor speaks of the best life in two dimensions: a basic human flourishing, of course, but also an attempt to reach for something higher, something transcendent. Perhaps Aristotle, in his bios theoretikos, his life of contemplation, is making his own reach for transcendence, for "the activity of God, which surpasses all others in blessedness, must be contemplative."

In that case happiness is just virtuousness, dissolved into blissfulness.

Aristotle's Waffle on the Function Argument

2012-01-11T10:47:00.000-08:00

In our western canon there is perhaps no stronger support for reason than Aristotle's "function argument" in Book I, Chapter 7 of the Nichomachean Ethics. But plenty of people have challenged the throne of reason.

For instance, in the Daodejing, the Chinese challenge to the rationalism of Confucianism, the ideal is not reason but an effortless spontaneity, the Dao, the Way of life. Everything is downhill from the Way.

When the way is lost, virtue appears; when virtue is lost, kindness appears; when kindness is lost, justice appears.

And, one might suspect, when justice is lost, then power appears.

Something similar appears in the West with the Romantic rebellion, a reaction against the totalitarian idea that Reason is everything.

In the Ethics, Aristotle hangs his hat on reason, that "the function of man is an activity of soul [anima] which follows or implies a rational principle," and a good rational principle, well executed, at that.

[H]uman good turns out to be activity of soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are more than one virtues, in accordance with the best and most complete.

This would add up to happiness (i.e. eudaimonia, which translates as human flourishing) and that in a complete life.

At the beginning of the Ethics, Aristotle tells us what all this is leading to: the highest good, as in managing the relations between men in the polis. Here he establishes that the highest good is the combination of subsidiary goods, as the skill of harness-making is subsidiary to horsemanship, and horsemanship subsidiary to strategy, and strategy to politics. And the highest good is clearly politics,

since politics uses the rest of the sciences... it legislates as to what we are to do and what we are to abstain from... this end must be the good of man.

But in Ethics X 8, Aristotle backs up a bit, and, once he has dealt with mere pleasure, and established "happiness is activity in accordance with virtue," he discovers that the highest form of happiness is found in "the man who is contemplating the truth", for he doesn't need money like the liberal man, or power like the brave man. "[F]or deeds many things are needed" but not for the contemplative life.

Anyway, says Aristotle, the contemplative life is much like the life of the gods, for it is ridiculous to imagine them running around doing absurd things like dispensing justice, signing contracts, or confronting dangers. No, "Happiness, therefore, must be some form of contemplation." The gods must "delight in what was best and most akin to them (i.e. reason)" in other words, philosophers, and "the philosopher will more than any other be happy."

This is straying rather far from the simple function argument, that happiness is virtuous action according to a rational principle, and that, moreover, the highest and best form of the good is political science and legislating the good of the polis.

In fact, if you think of philosophy as getting close to the gods, then it must be getting close to some kind of ineffable, effortless spontaneity. Which is what the non-rational Daodejing was proposing about the same time, only thousands of miles away in China.

Let's Keep Things The Way They Are

2012-01-06T09:33:00.000-08:00

For Aristotle, the natural order of things is the hierarchical order of city-state Greece. Masters rule over workers, patriarchs over households of women and slaves, and statesmen over states. Every action aims at some good, and the arts that combine subsidiary arts are better. Thus the highest good involves the rule of the state, for politics encompasses all the other arts as its rule encompasses the rule of all the subsidiary groups.

"Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal." Anyone outside the state, by nature rather than accident, is like Homer's denounced "tribeless, lawless, hearthless one." But Aristotle is taking Homer's words out of context.

When the ageing Nestor pats Diomedes on the back and tells him he's young enough to be his son, and is really a good chap, he says

Surely a tribeless, lawless, homeless man
Is he who loves to stir the strife of war
In his own people

and not a nice young man like Diomedes. Nestor is trying to calm the Achaeans, stirred up by Diomedes' harsh words against Agamemnon. Agamemnon has had it with the Trojan War and Diomedes, to the approval of the troops, wants to continue. Calm down, chaps; let's put a steak on the barbie, says Nestor.

By interpreting Nestor's remarks as a put-down of all heads of rebellion, Aristotle is revealing his wider agenda. He wants not just the natural evolution of things, but a specific order of things. He asserts the natural evolution of separated villages to coalesce into a state, thus enabling the bare needs of life to expand into the good life. Parts coalesce into wholes, wholes into bigger wholes and the more developed a thing, the closer it is to its nature. But that is not enough. He wants the old to rule the young, for the old aim at knowledge, not action. And of course men should rule over women and slaves and the Greeks should rule over barbarians, as today we would say that the educated should rule over the bigots and the bitter clingers.

This is a view of social life that experiences the good as an eternal hierarchy, a return to a golden age after the humiliation of the Peloponnesian War. It does not seem to comprehend the cycle of rise and fall, of birth and death. We moderns believe it is precisely in the conflict between young and old, between the established order and the rebellious tribeless, lawless, hearthless ones that life is injected into a declining dynasty, and a new social order grows out of an exploitative patriarchy. Natural to us means to maintain a harmony with the growth and the cycles of Nature.

For Aristotle the "final cause and end of a thing" is the best. For us it is the fleeting moment before the onset of "creative destruction" or the fin de siècle before the revolution.

Conservatism Three by Three

2011-12-29T10:10:00.000-08:00

What do we mean by conservatism? We do not mean, as the critics charge, an unreflecting culture of tradition. Conservatism, ever since Edmund Burke has been a self-conscious effort to balance the past, present and future.

Let us take three strands of conservatism and illuminate each one. First of all there is cultural conservatism, which finds its founding statement in Burke's declaration that we, the generation of the living, have a contract both with our dead ancestors and with generations yet unborn. Then there is economic conservatism that begins with Adam Smith's declaration of the Invisible Hand, that there is a natural cooperation between people that directs them into socially beneficial actions even when they are seeking their own self interest. Then there is political conservatism that begins with Montesquieu's doctrine of the three branches of government and the separation of powers.

The cultural strain that begins with Burke and his jeremiad against the mechanical culture of the Age of Reason, its reduction of everything to Newtonian mechanics and "sophisters, economists, and calculators" continues with people like George Eliot, who argued for the dignity of ordinary people, from Adam Bede to Maggie Tulliver to Mary Garth and to Mirah Lapidoth. In our time we have Berger and Neuhaus arguing for the dignity of authentic self-governing mediating structures between the individual and the mega-structures of big government and big corporations. And we have people like Lawrence Cahoone and his Civil Society working out the details of people living in dignity, equality and freedom. And there is Charles Taylor, a liberal Canadian philosopher, who makes a conservative case for a society that digests the modern ideas of freedom, equality, dignity, and expressive creativity into a blend that conservatives can live.

The economic strain that begins with Adam Smith and his Invisible Hand, was expanded with Ricardo's law of comparative advantage. Then in 1870 came the marginal revolution that unified the idea of exchange value and intrinsic value. Finally, Mises demonstrated the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism, and Hayek showed the impossibility of bureaucratic centralism: the man in Washington cannot hope to out-think the millions of consumers and producers. The idea that only a wise ruler can negotiate the conflicts of a people is shown to be impossible. People do better negotiating with each other than through the middle man from the government.

The political strain that begins with Montesquieu's idea of the three branches of government, legislative, executive, and judicial was implemented with astonishing success by James Madison. It remains unequaled in its approach to the political problem: how do you give government enough power to fight enemies, foreign and domestic, yet not too much power that it can oppress its legitimate opponents? Now Michael Novak has extended the separation of powers doctrine to society as a whole. Differentiating society into three sectors, economic, political, and moral/cultural, he proposes what I call a Greater Separation of Powers. In this view the separation of church and state, adumbrated in the First Amendment prohibition of an establishment of religion, is extended to the notion of a separation of power between the three sectors: separation of political and moral/cultural power and separation of economic and political power.

We have in this triple conservative vision a people independent and free and institutions that will protect freedom while encouraging social cooperation. Now all we need is the implementation.

And that starts, after the horror of Obama, with persuading the American people to abandon the welfare state Battle of the Benefits, the reduction of social life to a scramble for loot, and return America to a land that is first of all a society of Makers from its current shame as a robber band of Takers.

Liberals and the Decline of Violence

2011-12-22T09:16:00.000-08:00

In Steven Pinker's new book The Better Angels of Our Nature, the Big Idea is that states are essential to the decline of human violence over the millennia.

If you live in a non-state society, like a hunter-gatherer band, you will likely experience a violent death rate of at least 500 per 100,000 per year. That's two orders of magnitude bigger than the current murder rate of less than 5 per 100,000 per year in developed societies. And that includes so-called pacific tribes, like the !Kung in the Kalahari Desert and the "gentle" Tasaday in the Philippines.

The reason for this remarkable decline in violence is that modern states take over the defense of the borders and the defense of the streets from the people. Ordinary people are not involved in war, and they do not settle their disputes with force. They leave all that to the state.

In this view, of course, the "frontier justice" of the old West and the gun culture of the Jacksonians in the South are a threat to social peace. Also, Pinker points out, the modern state tends not to police the inner-city ghetto, leaving it "stateless." Police "seem to vacillate between indifference and hostility... reluctant to become involved,,, but heavy handed when they do so." They are inclined to let the "neighborhood knuckleheads" and their families fight out their differences, because otherwise the combatants will all end up in jail "for BS behavior" and would never show up in court to press charges over violence anyway. So why bother?

That's the liberal line. The conservative line is that in America, "more guns means less crime," in that when the citizens are disarmed the only people with guns are criminals. And conservatives rail against liberals that make it almost impossible to police the inner cities because any police action that liberals dislike is anathematized as police "racial profiling" or police brutality.

And then there is the lament of Victor Davis Hanson, that the rural areas of California have been abandoned by the law enforcers to vandals and looters--who are, of course, young Hispanic gang members.

It's clear that state policing, along with the rise of commerce, is the major cause of the decline in violence. But something has gone wrong if the police don't bother to police the cities and don't bother to police the countryside.

The "problem" is that every new immigrant group that comes to the US from the countryside still has a culture that deals with violence by feud, and it takes a generation or two to change the culture from "frontier justice" to state policing and legal procedure.

But liberals don't help when they encourage racial and cultural separatism, and delay the integration of immigrant groups into the great American mainstream. It's true that assimilated Americans aren't as patient as they might be with new immigrants, and the new immigrants don't trust the police. But liberals seem to concentrate their efforts on disarming white gun-nuts rather than immigrant gang-bangers. They make the police out as monsters, and thus discourage them from doing their job, which is to make life difficult for single young immigrant men with a taste for violence.

When you listen to your liberal friends you get the feeling that they have no clue what is going on in America. It's frustrating, but that is what you expect from the ruling class in an ageing dynasty. And liberal power depends on the faithful votes of the latest immigrants to the city. In the 19th century it was the Irish. In the 20th century the white working class. Now it is the blacks (immigrants from the rural South) and Hispanics.

One day, of course, the black and the Hispanic gang-bangers will all be rock-ribbed Republicans; they will be the despair of liberals much as the bitter clingers of the white working class are today.

But it sure would be nice if liberals would actually help immigrants assimilate to the city and its commerce instead of encouraging pre-industrial behavior. Why don't they read and learn from the books their liberal pals churn out: chaps like Steven Pinker?

End of the Age of Exploitation

2011-12-15T09:36:00.000-08:00

I'm reading a history of India right now. It's a Marxist history so it views everything through a lens of colonialism and exploitation. The Brits, you see, cleverly disturbed the traditional land-ownership and tax payment in India. They replaced "corrupt" officials with their own chaps who racked up the rent and the taxes on the poor suffering Indian peasants. Of course the peasants rebelled, time after time. On this view, in India's Struggle for Independence by Bipan Chandra, the Rebellion of "mutiny" of 1857 "was the culmination of a century long tradition of fierce popular resistance to British domination."

The interesting thing is that, up until about 1850, the Brits summarily dealt with rebellions. They put them down, "with prejudice," as the phrase goes, and then went on their merry way, making more money out of India. They were quite happy to exploit the Indians to the limit. Their indigo planters were representative. These chaps farmed out the cultivation of indigo plants to the natives, and then paid them next to nothing. Not surprisingly, in 1859, there occurred an "indigo revolt."

But this time the Brit overlords took a look at the situation and decided that the revolters had a point. Then in the 1880s the Indian intelligentsia formed the Indian National Congress and developed the idea of India as a nation and began to organize Indians of all faiths and castes in an all-India movement against the British. Then, you might say, it was all a matter of time.

The important thing to realize is the novelty of all this. Go back to 1800 and you have Arthur Wellesley happily marching troops all over central India in a war against the Maratha Confederacy. There was no scandal about that. But by 1857 the Indian Mutiny was a scandal, and the question of exploitation was an issue, and the British were ashamed.

Let's say that, between 1750 and 1850, the world changed. Let's say that it reflected the rise of middle-class intellectuals and the bourgeoisie and the "public square". These chaps had a different world-view than the landed warrior class that ruled up to the moment of the French Revolution. There was a religious side to the change that was manifest in the anti-slavery movement. And there was a secular side of it, that erupted in the French Revolution and the baby-boomers of the 1840s.

After 1850, therefore, exploitation--of slaves, of workers, of colonial peoples, of "others" became a scandal. The century from 1850 to 1950 was the Age of Exploitation. Everyone railed against exploitation, and the most notorious railers, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, created the most exploitative societies in human history.

And now, I would argue, the Age of Exploitation is about to disappear onto the ash-heap of history. Why? Because exploitation isn't just a scandal these days. It doesn't even make sense. It only made sense in the old agricultural age, when agricultural workers could be conveniently exploited and starved on the quiet out in the countryside. Today, we are all networked and each person is a resource that makes the most money for the ruling class if they are groomed into becoming a valuable "intangible asset" for the global economy.

But here we have Osawatomie Bam Obama still sounding the old cry: "inequality" and "exploitation." It's the last hurrah of the class warrior. It's the last hurrah because greedy employers today realize that they can make more money with skilled employees that can deliver more product than unskilled employees that you squeeze for the last ounce of blood.

Here's the dirty secret of the class warrior. Obama and the class warriors have to bang the drum for exploitation. I only realized why a few months ago. If you want a revolution, or you want to increase government power with taxes and spending and regulation, you have to argue for exploitation. Without exploitation there is no argument for increased government power. Without exploitation we all sit around and say, wow, what could we do better? How could we use our capital better? How could we improve the training of our employees. How could we improve our market position?

But the Obamas of the world are not interested in a society where there are mild or moderate problems. Because that doesn't call for force. They want big-time exploitation that calls for men on white horses, charismatic leadership, fake Greek columns, and vast government power. Otherwise what's the point?

When Does Justice Become Freeloading?

2011-11-18T09:42:00.001-08:00

In the old days of the agricultural age, justice suited the ruling landowner class. Nobody thought about the needs of the agricultural laborer. The only thing was to make sure that he paid dearly when he poached a rabbit or stole a sheep.

Even divines like Martin Luther were clear that the new liberty was for the townsman. The peasants should obey their landlords.

So when the modern era dawned some time in the 18th century, your average man was pretty well held down by a yoke of injustice. There was slavery, there was serfdom, there was indentured servitude, you name it. In the new conception of justice, that all men are created equal, the old hierarchical ethos no longer applied.

If we take the words of Robert William Fogel, a scholar of slavery, there are several things wrong with slavery, when viewed from our modern society. In Without Contract or Consent he sets forth a four count indictment of slavery:

"Slavery permitted one group of people to exercise unrestrained personal domination over another group of people."
"Denial of economic opportunity."
"Denial of citizenship... the utter exclusion of slaves from civil and political rights."
"Denial of cultural self-identification."

Obviously these are the words of a liberal, but they resonate with me, not just in the case of slavery but in all questions of justice. For in modern politics, the question of justice is usually decided by analysis of these four points but at a less extreme situation. If there is a question of injustice, then people are asking these questions: Is domination a problem? Is economic opportunity constrained? Is access to civil and political rights diminished? Is cultural bullying a problem?

Our liberal friends are experts at this sort of thing and they have unerringly focused on the one thing that validates the four questions. Is the person or group in question a victim? If he/she or the group is a victim then the power of the state can be deployed legitimately to redress the victim's grievance or claim of injustice.

But here is a thought. Let us categorize degrees of victimhood. Let us say that slavery is the worst. Then would come, in descending order, serfdom, political repression, economic exploitation, and last of all marginalization.

The question that conservatives ask is whether government is always the appropriate vehicle to redress these grievances. For our liberal friends it goes without saying that all of it, down to marginalization, can and should be addressed by legislation and government programs. But conservatives aren't so sure. We look at economic exploitation and say, well, if there is no serfdom or political repression then a free laborer is free to leave an exploitative situation. If you get the government involved in fighting economic exploitation you end up with collusion between big business and big labor, economic regulation, crony capitalism, and Solyndra. You get duelling exploitation. If we set up a government program to provide pensions for the disabled, then all of a sudden, people find ways of qualifying as disabled. Government employees seem to be expert at this kind of work.

And as for marginalization, which is worse, the marginalization of immigrants by conservatives that tell them to get with the program and Americanize or liberals that ruthlessly marginalize conservatives at the university with speech codes? Freedom means that people are free to deal or not to deal with other people. At what point does the freedom not to deal with someone become a marginalization or repression that requires the intervention of the state?

The problem with empowering the state to interfere at the lower levels of the slavery, serfdom, political repression, economic exploitation, marginalization axis is that people are human. They naturally think that government action is warranted when their friends are damaged. But they are quite unmoved when people they don't like are harmed.

One big reason for our gigantic government is that politics has recognized no limit on government action. If people are hurting, said President Bush, then the government must help. "We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move."

But that means that limited government is out the window.

But if someone is hurting then surely we must do something to help. The question is: who is we? Is the the government? Is it the neighbors? Is it business? Is it "society"? Our liberal friends are too quick to assume that if someone is hurting, then government must move. But it would be better for all of us if, instead of government, Americans moved. Because society, at bottom, comes down to humans acting sociably. When government moves, people don't need to, and their social instincts atrophy.

It comes down to the basic truth about government: government is force. So in every question about justice or marginalization, the question comes down to this: Is force the only way we can deal with this? Because when you use force, then the four count indictment above may apply. Never mind what the action does for the "victim." Does it end up dominating someone else? Or denying them economic opportunity? Or abridging their political and civil rights? Or their cultural self-identification? Chances are that it will, so we have to judge whether the cost is worth the benefit.

Because every time someone gets something from the government, the chances are that it amounts to freeloading.

Movements, Crowds, and Obama

2011-11-08T06:53:00.000-08:00

Everywhere we look we see movements, writes sociologist Peter Berger. But what is a movement? It is a crowd, but a special type of crowd, for "A movement is the preservation of a crowd experience over time."

But what is a crowd? Quoting Gustave LeBon, Berger defines a crowd as a collective event, and

a crowd creates a sort of collective mind, which is impulsive, impervious to reason and potentially murderous. Put in different terms: The crowd is inherently de-individuating, dismantling the moral restraints of civilization and reverting to a primitive state of unquestioned solidarity. There is a lethal progression from crowd to mob to lynch mob.

We can see the proto-crowd in the great apes and early humans.

Chimpanzees, our closest anthropoid relatives, engage in group dancing if faced with danger. So do tribal warriors as they go into battle... The individual surrenders his separateness to the sacred unity of the group, an experience often including possession by a divine being.

So it is with modern crowds and movements. Berger isn't too pleased with this, and he doesn't like the Tea Party or the Occupy movement, preferring the "vital center, spread across the two major political parties, thus marginalizing the extremes to their right and left." No doubt, and in this vital center, of course, the intellectual elite gets to call the shots.

But the point to get from this is that when any social animals experience themselves in danger they form into crowds, for in dangerous times you need to surrender some or all of your individuality for the benefit of the whole. That is what happens in armies, and any fighting unit. The individual must be persuaded to accept his own death or injury in the process of fighting for victory, for if every individual thought only of his own safety, an army would dissolve when the first shot is fired.

The Tea Party spontaneously formed as conservative Americans sensed danger immediately upon the election of Barack Obama. They came together in crowds, and formed a movement to "preserve that crowd experience over time." That movement helped cause the big 63 seat change in the US House of Representatives in 2010.

The Occupy movement is a similar movement on the left. Its members feel danger in the threat of budget cuts, so they are crowding together to find the collective courage to oppose them. They have chosen Wall Street as the symbol of their fear. Walter Russell Mead writes that it is curious that the Occupy folk see Wall Street as the enemy, since Wall Street is as vital an element in the blue Democratic coalition as the goo-goo upper middle class, the public sector union employees and the welfare beneficiaries.

The trick, of course, is for your movement to be effective. If it progresses immediately into a lynch mob then it may provoke opposition from another movement. If it is too individualistic it may not accumulate the collective power to make changes.

The reason that the United States is dividing into two opposing movements is instructive. It is because the current ruling class, the "vital center," has failed to govern well. It has failed to moderate the demands of conflicting movements and interests to a level that can be comfortably afforded by the overall society. Thus the United States is dividing into two extremes that feel profoundly threatened by the other.

President Obama seems to be doing his darnedest to accelerate the process.

Freeloading: What We Give for Free

2011-11-03T07:49:00.000-07:00

The big problem for humans as social animals is the question of free ridership. For nothing destroys social cohesion like freeloaders.

We have seen how human societies deal with freeloading: through government force, through the notion of divine justice in religion, and through the free choice in economic relationships.

In fact though, society actually encourages the freeloading of people who aren't doing well. We have a variety of ways of talking about this: helping the less fortunate, feeding the hungry, reaching out to the poor. There is clearly a suspension of judgment. Never mind how the poor got to be poor, let's just help. Judgment, if any, is on those expected to help. It is considered a moral failing not to help. Judgement is not canceled; it is merely suspended. It reappears as soon as we start to differentiate between the deserving and the undeserving poor, as George Bernard Shaw did so cunningly in Pygmalion.

In the abstract, we all sit around and wonder why we all can't just get along. Noam Chomsky, famous leftist, told the Occupy Boston folks that they should "Occupy the Future." Said he:

The Occupy outposts are trying to create cooperative communities that just might be the basis for the kinds of lasting organizations necessary to overcome the barriers ahead and the backlash that’s already coming.

The thing is, Noam, that everyone is in favor of cooperative communities. That is what "human society" means. The problem comes in the next moment. For instance, your cooperative communities seem to be having a real problem with crime and pilfering. Not to mention sexual assault. According to reports the Occupy folks are investigating and dealing with these problems on their own without referring them to the police.

Earth to Noam. When communities deal with crime without the police it is called vigilantism.

The whole idea is that government has a monopoly on force. If someone has broken the peace, by sexual assault or by theft, then the peace forces are the only chaps supposed to deal with it. It's called due process. Law enforcement without the government leads to lynching. And so on.

In other words, the newly created "cooperative communities" are already having to deal with the free-rider problem. And one of the ways of dealing with freeloading is with force. When force is needed you call in the government.

Years ago, a communications engineer told me that when a electronic communication works, that is a non-problem. The whole point of communications protocols is to deal with cases where communication has failed. The same is true of human society, or "cooperative communities." What do you do when things go wrong?

One way that things can go wrong is that someone commits a sexual assault on another person. WHen that happens you call in the police.

Another way that things can go wrong is when Democrat banker Jon Corzine bets the firm on Eurobond default and bankrupts the firm MF Global. What do you do then? Call in the government's bankruptcy court.

As soon as things start to go wrong, then the question of being free to do what you want and collaborate in communities any way you want comes into question.

Now it is obvious that the Occupy folks don't want to have government getting in the middle of their community affairs. That's natural. We capitalists don't like the government getting in the middle of our capitalist acts between consenting adults either.

But at some point, the freeloading has to stop. We give freely to others. Up to a point.

The point at which the freeloading has to stop is what we are all arguing about. It is called politics.

Freeloading, Welfare and the Rich

2011-11-02T08:05:00.000-07:00

For any human society--for any social animal--the big issue is freeloading. The biggest threat to social solidarity is free-ridership.

At one level, we are all free riders. We all benefit from society way beyond our contribution. Even a chap like the late Steve Jobs could not bring forth his consumer-electronic trinkets without the rest of society. After all, what did he know about solid-state physics, computer processor design, software design, touch display technology? The brilliance of Steve Jobs was his ability to put things together: as in entrepreneur.

Despite the huge benefit each of us obtains from our membership in society, we humans are quick to accuse the other chap of freeloading. Lefties accuse the rich of "exploiting" the poor. Union members accuse the bosses of screwing the working man. Righties tell the poor to "get a job." And President Obama wants the rich to "pay their fair share."

Obviously, we all care deeply about free riding. The question is: what do we do about it? Here, as usual, we turn to Michael Novak and his Gaulian division of society into three parts: political, economic, and moral-cultural.

We can attack the free-rider problem politically, by using force. If we want to do that then we assign the politicians to do the job. Government is force, and politics is power. Politicians will gladly go after the rich and make them pay more taxes. But the problem with that is that the politicians will also listen to the would-be crony capitalist that comes bearing political contributions. And the politicians aren't all that smart. They will find, in a crisis, that all kinds of institutions are "too big to fail" and that in the present emergency they must free ride on the rest of society. You could also ask the politicians to tell the poor "to get a job." We did that back in the 1990s when President Clinton signed the welfare reform bill that reformed one of the 79 federal welfare programs. But many people disapprove. They call welfare reform "balancing the budget on the backs of the poor."

If you don't like force, there is an alternative. You can shame the freeloaders. According to Nicholas Wade in The Faith Instinct, this is what religion is all about. Policing freeloaders is a costly business, and you make people mad because nobody likes being bullied around and told to pay more taxes or get a job. So you discover that, in addition to the usual earthly policemen there is a divine police force that is willing to catch the freeloaders and make them pay. Even if the freeloader gets away with it throughout his earthly life, the gods will make him pay in the next life. It's a cunning system, but it requires a proper socialization in childhood to inculcate the idea of divine justice.

Another way to deal with free riding is to let the economic sector worry about it. The economic sector works like this. If you think that Joe over there is a free rider, you don't deal with him. You don't hire him. You don't work for him. You don't buy from him. There is a certain elegance in this approach. It doesn't require force. It doesn't require a government program. It doesn't even require public shaming. It's just a private thing. You say to yourself: "I don't like the cut of that fellow's jib." And that is that.

Let us do a bit of reckless simplifying and tell a story of freeloading down the ages. In the hunter-gatherer age, the dominant response to freeloading was religion. It was appropriate because force was expensive and created blood feuds, and because communities were small enough that an individual couldn't really decide that another individual was a bad apple and refuse to deal with him.

In the agricultural age there was an increase in the use of force, because the political elite was rich enough to afford an army. But still, the idea of divine justice was very strong.

In our age we have reduced sharply the use of divine justice to curb freeloading. In response the political sector has stepped up its enforcement against freeloading. Unfortunately, as we saw above, there is a lot of disagreement about who the freeloaders are. It isn't me, it isn't thee; it's probably that guy behind the tree. The modern age has also seen a big increase in the regulation of freeloading by the economic sector. Arguments over freeloading create division in society. So modern man has expanded the economic approach to freeloading.

The loosening of social ties and the breakdown of the local extended family in the modern age means that you can choose who you will deal with. You can even refuse to deal with a family member, and it isn't the end of the world. Control of freeloading by refusal to deal works. People who try to cheat other people are likely to suffer a reduction in income, and therefore pay a penalty for their freeloading.

Many people have tried to revive the divine justice approach to freeloading, especially our environmental friends. They urge us to "save the planet" by recycling and by reducing our carbon footprints.

When you look at freeloading this way, one thing comes out very strongly. We have a wonderful solution to the freeloading problem in our market system economy, but nobody gives it any credit. Attack freeloading with government force, and you create division in society because everyone disagrees about who the real culprits are. Attack freeloading with religion, and you must face the problem that in recent centuries the belief in divine justice has declined. Even among believers there is more belief in a loving, forgiving God than a stern divine patriarch.

The obvious choice is to let the people be the judge of freeloading in their own lives. If they make a mistake, and refuse to deal with a guy who really does contribute to society they are only hurting themselves.

But that would be too easy, and not as much fun as a public humiliation of the evil doers.

Augustine and Government

2011-10-20T09:37:00.000-07:00

Christianity is held up by two philosophical tent poles, and one of them is St. Augustine. He had a jaundiced view of government.

Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms?

He goes on to declare that the defining attribute of a kingdom over a robber band is "impunity", for only government can rob without consequence.

Every government loots the nation to feed its supporters, but some loot more than others. Take Cuba, for example. After the United States returned the government of Cuba to the people after the intervention of 1898, the free Cuban government quickly descended into the crudest corruption. Writes Tom Gjelten in Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba:

Cuban politics had grown dirtier by the year, with electoral fraud practiced on all sites and widespread graft within the government itself... In the fall of 1905 Interior Secretary Fernando Freire de Andrade began dismissing government employees, even schoolmasters, who favored the opposition Liberal Party[.]

The Liberal Party withdrew its candidates from many races in the fall elections. By August 1906 the Liberals had backed an insurgency that was marching on Havana. By the end of September the government had resigned and the US took over again.

The more that people look at government for benefits and rewards, and the more that politics descends into a fight for spoils.

It's instinctive, of course. People feel that the more the other guy has, the less than they have. And it certainly applies for the agricultural age. The more land that I have, the less that's available for others. The more powerful my patron, the safer I feel, even if he keeps most of the loot for himself.

In the industrial age, things are different. The more products that corporations make, the more that's available for everyone. The richer the corporate CEOs get the more jobs they can create at their corporations, And you never know when someone is going to invent something and create a whole new form of wealth: textiles, railroads, steel, electricity, autos, radio, TV, computers, internet.

The latest invention seems to be the horizontal fracking technology that is creating a boom in natural gas and is causing US domestic oil production to reverse its decades-long decline.

Here is the deal. We humans are programmed instinctively to believe in a fixed pie, with more for you meaning less for me. Yet capitalism has produced a new reality. The better I serve the consumer with better products and services the bigger the pie and the more there is for everyone.

When will President Obama get the message?

Bacardi and Fidel

2011-10-19T10:04:00.000-07:00

In my view, everyone has it wrong. The capitalists pride themselves on being rugged individualists when in fact nearly all capitalist enterprise is profoundly collective and cooperative. The political activists pride themselves on being compassionate collectivists when in fact they are the most naked selfish and vain individualists imaginable.

Take the case of Cuba. There was a time when the Bacardi rum company was the poster boy for Cuba: "the one that made Cuba famous." But then along came Fidel Castro and nationalized the company--and everything else that moved in Cuba. Bacardi's factory became "Administrative Unit 1, a subdivision of the Santiago Beverage Combine, which in turn was under the Provincial Directorate of Beverage and Liquor Enterprises." It's all told with clarity and charm by NPR correspondent Tom Gjelten in Bacardi and the Long Fight for Cuba.

If you look at the story of the Bacardi company and the men that led it, they combined unquestioned leadership ability with the talent to herd a bunch of cats, from the Bacardi family to the talented employees. Along the way there were numerous challenges, from bankruptcy after an earthquake in Santiago de Cuba to figuring out why the rum made at Bacardi's factory in Mexico tasted different from the rum made in Cuba.

Then there is Fidel Castro. From his public debut as a student activist at the University of Havana he demonstrated himself as the most rugged individualist that ever lived. Writes Gjelten:

Tall and solidly built, with a long, sloping nose and high forehead, the nineteen-year-old Castro projected self-confidence and authority. His fellow students were either drawn to him as a natural leader or put off by his know-it-all attitude and his tendency to monopolize conversations.

And of course as he matured, he because more know-it-all and more monopolistic.

The fact is that even though capitalism ruthlessly uses people and resources, it must successfully mix them together and fine tune them in a thousand different ways every day; otherwise it will decline and die. It lives and dies by cooperation, charming consumers into buying, and employees into over-performing.

But government is a horse of a different color. It talks a good line about community and cooperation, but in fact what is does is force. It divides people, exploits people, and everything it does has the taint of coercion. And when things go wrong it blames the people. Governments decline and die when the lose the will to use force.

In the 19th century and thereafter, business people and socialist activists have all agreed that business is the acme of rugged individualism and the survival of the fittest. So it is, except that most of the time business is a team effort and a never-ending need to serve the consumer.

Government, on the other hand, tends always to an undeclared civil war and a naked attempt to loot the state on behalf of your supporters. Because with government there is always the temptation to resort to force. Why not? The government has a monopoly on force.

Well, there's a reason why not. Humans are social animals, and that means that they survive as cooperative beings that work with each other, because it turns out that cooperation is much more effective than individual effort. When it is necessary to resort to force within the community it means that cooperative social behavior has failed.

And for anyone that doesn't get it, we humans have conducted a planet-wide experiment in the efficacy of force. It was called Communism. Everywhere it was tried it killed social cooperation and turned society into a prison where everything was conducted by the rule and nothing was done by trust and good will.

Government, Business, and Religion

2011-10-13T10:01:00.000-07:00

In the lefty documentary The Corporation the usual suspects on the left excoriate business for its soulless attention to profit. They, the corporations, don't believe in anything, says documentarist Michael Moore. That's why they will sell him the rope to hang them with.

That's not really fair, Michael. Corporations do too believe in something. They believe in production for profit.

Generations of lefties have been outraged about this, and generations of practical people have tried to come to terms with it. But it's true. Business will do what it takes to make a profit, subject to the the natural and social limitations placed on it.

Wouldn't it be better to go back to a simpler age where economic activity was more closely integrated with human values? Yes, it would. And it would be nice to put all the evils of the world back in Pandora's Box.

But that fact is that humans are resourceful and inquiring creatures and over the recent millennia we have differentiated our simple hunter-gatherer culture. No longer are governing, production, and meaning all mixed together in a unified single narrative and ritual. Now they are differentiated and specialized. Just like our knowledge of the world, which used to be called natural philosophy, is now differentiated into a hundred disciplines and specialties.

Today we have government, and government is the specialist in force. Apologists for government spill barrels of ink trying to show that government is kind and compassionate, but they are fooling themselves. People resort to government when they give up on getting what they want by exchange or persuasion. They go to government to because they want to use its force.

Today we have religion, and religion is the specialist in meaning. It may be that the world has no meaning, as the Stoics insisted, but humans, and indeed all living things, act as if it does. It is the job of religion in its broadest sense, encompassing transcendental faith, secular faith, culture, and language to breathe meaning into the world. It is meaning that tells us what we "ought" to do.

Today we have business, and business is the specialist in production. As Marx realized, business in the old days was veiled in custom and mystery, but capitalism has stripped it of all its mystery, and reduced everything to "callous cash payment." Business is all about exploitation: using human and physical resources in the most cost-effective way. Exploitation is not necessarily good or bad. It is just getting the best value for money.

So when the lefties rail on and on about the "harm" that corporations inflict, we have go say: so what? If you don't want corporations to buy clothing from sweatshops then make it illegal and put the CEOs in jail if they break the law. And when the CEO of a public member-owned cooperative does the same thing, put him in jail. That is what government is for, en-"forcing" the law. But in the real world, things aren't quite as simple as they appear in lefty documentaries. The workers in sweatshops are usually teenage girls fresh off the farm. And their wages, small as they seem to us, actually mean a lot to their families back on the farm. So, do we insist that sweatshops pay more? Even it that means that those teenage girls don't have jobs?

The bigger question is the question of meaning. We think that human life means more than government force and capitalist production. We humans are social animals, and that means that we don't like to force our kin, our friends and our neighbors. We would rather persuade them. We don't like to use our kin and our friends as means to an end. We want good for our friends for its own sake, because we wish them well. The great challenge of the modern era, where people deal all the time with people who are not their kin or their neighbors is how to make the whole world social and persuadable, avoid treating strangers as numbers, and keep force to a minimum.

In other words, how do we create a culture where CEOs don't ruthlessly externalize all their costs, because we have built a culture that teaches people to think about the harm they do to other people before they act?

Social Animals in an Age of Instrumental Reason

2011-10-03T10:40:00.000-07:00

The trouble with capitalism, Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto, is that it is inhuman.

The bourgeoisie... has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment." It has drowned... [everything] in the icy water of egotistical calculation. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

And on top of that, the bourgeoisie had also conquered the "modern representative State" making it into a "committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie," and dominated presumably by the same commercial, calculating culture.

What Marx and Engels forgot to add is that culture itself had bowed to the cash nexus, for it was in the 18th century also when a professional writing class emerged into the public square, producing cultural product to be marketed to the great middle class by "publishers" with the idea of making money from culture, and truckling to the fantasies of the reading public. And that leaves out the great calculating religious movements, specifically the Great Awakening of the mid 18th century in Britain and British North America that was run like a modern political campaign, with planning, advance men, advertising, and free media. How inhuman, how calculating, exploitative, lacking in spontaneity, is that?

A century later, in the middle of World War II, a new generation of Marxists faced a world at war and looked into the abyss. The whole modern project, they realized, from science to capitalism to the modern state was the project of "instrumental reason." But instrumental reason, wrote Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, is pure domination. Bourgeois business ends up as bourgeois domination, and this is already encoded in the idea of Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. "What men want to learn from nature is how to dominate it and other men." And so "Enlightenment behaves toward things as a dictator toward men."

The more you think about it the more you realize that everything is tainted by this indictment. Business and its pursuit of profit, government bureaucracies and their attempt to confine the world in a box of rules and regulations, movies, books and their prurient exploitation of fantasy, academic scholars and their pursuit of knowledge for the sake of tenure and fame, everything is exploitation, using other people for your own ends.

So what do we do about it? Let us propose three ideas. First, there is the idea of the separation of powers. The sine qua non of winning battles is the idea of strategic concentration. Concentrate your forces and disperse the forces of the enemy. The way to limit the exploitation by instrumental reason in all sectors of modern life, from business to government to moral/culture is by a greater separation of powers, preventing the sectors from ganging up against society as a whole: no crony capitalism and the unholy combination of politics and business; no established churches (and that includes secular churches like liberalism) and the unholy totalitarian combination of religion and politics.

But if the principle of force is to be reduced, then how does society work? The second answer lies in the very structure of the human brain, its approximate division into rational, emotional, and instinctive spheres. If the rational sphere is all about exploitation, bending the world to our will, and the instinctive is about staying alive from moment to moment, the emotional sphere is the world of the social animal, the reduction of conflict from the bloody murder of force and feud at least to social hierarchy, the hierarchy that kept the peace in the agricultural age, and at best to friendly social cooperation, the egalitarianism of the old hunter-gatherer groups.

Marx writes of what had been drowned in the "icy water of egotistical calculation." It was the emotions: the "heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor," "chivalrous enthusiasm," and "philistine sentimentalism." No doubt these emotions are as capable of dominatory excess as instrumental reason. But as a mitigation between the pitiless gaze of reason and the blind workings of instinct, it provides the rose-colored vision of the social virtues. If the world of the future is to be a world in which domination is minimized then it must be a world in which people cooperate and work together without the promptings of the lash or the enforcement officer. That would be a world in which the four pagan virtues: prudence, justice, temperance, and courage; are joined to the three Christian virtues: faith, hope, and love.

The third idea is the working out of voluntary cooperation. It was Adam Smith who noted the peculiar operation of economic cooperation. Man the social animal takes care of his own needs by satisfying the wants of others, thus delivering public benefits from private selfishness. Despite the despotism of instrumental reason, people do not often try to exploit each other, especially others with whom they have a long-term relationship. They like to cooperate. Even in the most rigorous bureaucratic organizations, even in the modern army, people have found that the best instrumental results are obtained when people are freed from the tyranny of rules, when they are given responsibility and are encouraged to work together and help each other.

Humans are social animals. Humans do best when their natural sociability is encouraged and developed. What a concept!

"Too Many Takers -- Not Enough Givers"

2011-09-01T09:40:00.000-07:00

That's the considered response from an Irish cab-driver. Larry Elder asked him what the No.1 economic problem was for welfare-state Northern Ireland.

The problem with the welfare state is that it rewards takers and penalizes givers. Why should that be?

The reason is not that difficult to figure out. It is that government is force, politics is power. Politics is the rule of the powerful, the guys with the guns. Of course, they may not actually display their guns, not all the time. The most effective government is the one that never has to show its guns. But the political sphere is the sphere in which things are decided by force. It may be the force that is legitimated by the "mandate" conferred to an electoral majority by winning an election. Or it may the mandate conferred by winning a civil war or conquering another country.

The power conferred by force is the power to set the rules and the power to take away.

But humans are social animals. The great trick of any species of social animal is that the advantages of social organization are, for the most part, not based on force. In the best social systems people sacrifice for the good of the community not because they are forced to do so but because they want to give, to contribute to society.

In the basic unit of society, the family, the parents give and the children take; it must be so. The parents give so that their children may grow up to adulthood and then give in their turn. In the market economy, people only get to receive if they are willing to give. Workers must develop skills to make themselves useful to employers. Business people must make and sell a product that other people want before they can take anyone's money. In religion people are socialized into becoming givers: people who want to give to others, and people who are reluctant to resort to conflict within a community.

The welfare state is different. It is the opposite of a social system. It is an anti-social system. It is based on the idea that people have basic economic rights, enforceable by the state, and that anything short of an adequate transfer of economic goods to the less fortunate is unjust. Thus it rewards takers, people that demand assistance, and it penalizes givers, people that think up ways to serve their fellows. There is nothing new in this. Robber bands have operated according to this principle since the dawn of time.

Our modern problem is that the welfare state, beginning with the modest transfers of a century ago, has followed its internal logic to the point that, we can now see, it leads to national bankruptcy. Also, it encourages a host of social vices. It encourages people to work less; it encourages people not to have children. It encourages children to abandon their ageing parents to the state. It encourages ageing parents to sicc the state on their children.

The welfare state. It's simple really. "Too Many Takers -- Not Enough Givers."

The Liberal Establishment of Secular Religion

2011-08-29T15:44:00.000-07:00

When we search for the central injustice pressed down upon the brow of the American people, we always end up at the central conceit of the liberal ruling class. The big liberal idea is the separation of church and state, that no one religion or sect gets into a special relationship, an establishment, with the state.

Liberals are very pleased with themselves about this. That is why it is their central conceit. Liberals are not as other men are, theocrats and moralizers trying to legislate morality. They insist that morality should be a private thing, not forced into the bedrooms of America by would-be theocrats.

But the idea that liberals are not in the moralizing business and not trying to legislate morality is a delusion. For if we expand the notion of religion from a particular religious sect or church to a more general definition, where we define "religion" as a belief system that organizes the meaning of life and establishes a definition of the good from which a system of ethics can be developed, then it is easy to conclude that our liberal masters, in violation of the spirit of the First Amendment, do in fact operate an establishment of religion, whereby liberals advance the belief system of the upper-middle class educated elite to a privileged status vis-a-vis the state. And what liberals do from the moment they get up in the morning is try to legislate liberal morality.

Have they ever succeeded! Liberal ideas are taught in government schools, in government universities; they are broadcast by government radio (NPR) and government TV (PBS). And of course the organs of the welfare state constantly broadcast and teach the essential humanity and compassion of the authoritarian welfare state. And liberals have the cultural power to run a kind of Holy Office of the Inquisition where dissidents and heretics to generally established liberal shibboleths may be shown the instruments of torture.

Oh, we are not talking about the instruments of physical torture, nothing so crude, darling. But liberals have their way of making you see the light.

There is the accusation of racism. Most Americans will do anything to escape an indictment of racism. And now liberals, with the help of the gay activist community, is making like very difficult for anyone that questions the moral status of gay marriage.

Indeed, if you disagree with any liberal notion you are risking some sort of social shaming. Create a political movement like the Tea Party, and pretty soon you will be fending off accusations of incivility, racism, extremism, and crypto-violence.

Some day, Americans will birth and grow a moral movement to end the reign of the liberal establishment of secular religion. Perhaps it is already born. It cannot come too soon. For if America is to rebuild itself out the social and economic wreckage of Hurricane Obama it must find a new moral ground, as Americans once created the moral foundation to build a movement to end plantation slavery.

It cannot come too soon. Life is good for the liberal upper-middle class in America. Liberalism has successfully built a nation and a culture well adapted to its needs and values. There is preferment and there are sinecures for those who serve the established church of liberalism. But other Americans must struggle in moral subjection and daily deal with the cultural humiliation dealt out to those that dare to question the Articles of liberal faith.

America needs a reformation, a cry of protest against liberal orthodoxy and hegemony. Only then can it become what it was prophesied to be, the shining city on a hill, still a beacon for all who must have freedom.

Stitching Novak and Cahoone

2011-08-19T08:23:00.000-07:00

Michael Novak, in his book The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, divides modern society into three sectors: political, economics, and moral/cultural. That is the spirit of democratic capitalism, a polity in which the powers and the activities of politics, economics, and culture are separated, so that no single sector dominates the others. I have called Novak's idea the Greater Separation of Powers, extending the notion of the separation of powers from governmental separation of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches to society as a whole. Separation of church and state, for sure, and also separation of economy and state.

But I've recently read Lawrence E. Cahoone's Civil Society: The Conservative Meaning of Liberal Politics. Cahoone critiques the political culture of "neutralist liberalism", the idea that "government is to remain effectively neutral in questions of substantive morality and the meaning of human existence," and develops a sophisticated outline of civil society: what it is, institutionally and culturally. I am wondering how to stitch the two notions together.

Come on, you say, surely it is obvious!

OK, I give in. Of course it is obvious. Cahoone's civil society is simply Novak's moral/cultural sector.

Cahoone writes that the conditions of civil society include: the autonomy of the social, social equality, spontaneous order, institutional pluralism, and market economy. That is, civil society needs all these conditions in order to flourish and thrive. Novak writes that democratic capitalism is a society of “three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is pluralistic and, in the largest sense, liberal." "A democratic capitalist society is, in principle, uncommitted to any one vision of a social order."(p67) Therefore moral-cultural institutions belong to the system, but they must not command the system. History is understood as "emergent probability." Community is relaxed to the notion of "free persons in voluntary association." Loose as its community is, it still extols the communitarian individual, the bourgeols that practices "fellow feeling, common sympathy, and benevolence" while pursuing self interest.

What I find in Cahoone is a sharper definition of civil society, differentiated from political and economic culture, that strengthens and extends Novak's three-sector model. He identifies principles that can be used by civil-society proponents in the great moral movement ahead. Autonomy of the social means that culture and values come from civil society and not from politics, which is about power, not living together. Spontaneous order means that we cannot have economic or moral direction from the political sector because economic and moral order arise spontaneously from people living and working together. They cannot be rationally developed in a government committee room. Institutional pluralism means that different moral and cultural traditions will be competing for the right to be taken seriously and enrolled in the cultural consensus. And this civil society must be located next to a market economy. Civil society is not itself the market economy. It needs the market ecoomy, but only abuts the market economy. "The rules of civility are not the rules of the market."

The train wreck of Obama politics and Obamanomics is about to utterly discredit the current ruling class of the educated elite. It will create an opportunity for new ideas and a new culture to replace the failed authoritarian welfare state. Just as Eastern European dissidents discussed Novak's Spirit in samizdat chapter by chapter as they were planning for the end of socialism, so we must study Novak and Cahoone so we will be ready to lead the American people to a better future.

Riots and Civil Society

2011-08-12T08:30:00.000-07:00

Peggy Noonan, as usual, asks the critical question in the aftermath of the London riots and the Philadelphia flash mobs.

When the riot begins or the flash mob arrives, the best the government can do is control the streets, enforce the law, maintain the peace.

After that, what? Britain is about to face that question. We'll likely have to face it, too.

The usual answer, she writes, is "The government has to do something. We must start a program, create an agency to address juvenile delinquency." Only that seems to be a joke these days. After all, the youths of London have been programmed, agencied, and delinquencied to death in the last half century. And still we get riots?

The conservative answer to the failure of the authoritarian welfare state with its programs, its agencies, and its flexible responses is "civil society." That goes back to Edmund Burke and his "little platoons." Berger and Neuhaus addressed it in To Empower People where they argued for "mediating structures," of family, church, association between the individual and the state.

But recently I have been reading the work of Lawrence Cahoone. His Civil Society: The Conservative Meaning of Liberal Politics is a profound critique of the failure of "neutralist liberalism" and an argument for civil society. Of course, his book is not a font of policy prescriptions, ammo for politicians eager to "do something" in the present crisis. It does little more than describe civil society: What it is, what it means, and what it does.

Even in the chaos of the London riots we can see civil society at work. From the Daily Mail.

In Dalston and Hackney, north-east London, Turkish shopkeepers and their families fought back against looting youths, before spending the night standing shoulder-to-shoulder in an attempt to deter further attacks.

One man said: 'This is Turkish Kurdish area. They come to our shops and we fight them with sticks.'

Well, that is getting close to tribalism, but you get my point. When the chips are down, civil society means that the men get together to defend their neighborhood. You can also see that where families have degraded into single mothers and children, the defense option has suddenly become problematic. The neighborhood women defending their homes, assisted by their feral children?

Cahoone describes civil society in two major chapters of his book. The first, "Civil Society," describes civil society institutionally; the second, "Civility, Neighborhood, and Culture," describes it from a cultural perspective.

The key point is that civil society is informal, a "quasi-independent association of households." It is not government, but it is an association that relates to government. In detail, Cahoone describes five characteristics of civil society:

The autonomy of the social "Society gets its norms from the inside rather than from institutions outside it."
Expansion of civitas to society There are no subjects, only citizens. Aristocrat and commoner are united in their "Frenchness" or "Englishness."
Spontaneous order Social order emerges out of "social interactions not coordinated by command" or political will.
Institutional pluralism No "single agency dominates social life." There are different types of institutions competing and many competing within each type.
Market economy Civil "societies must have market economies," but civil society is not the same as the market; it abuts the market economy and "the rules of civility are not the rules of the market."

You can see that anyone taking these notions seriously must be a foe of what Juergen Habermas called the "authoritarian" welfare state.

At the cultural level, writes Cahoone, it is important to keep front and center the idea that civil society is not politics. It is primarily "living-with, not talking-with." It has these qualities: "membership, freedom, civility, and dignity" that must not be violated. It is a loose form of association, with moral rules, obligation, and civility that falls short of a binding social contract. It requires above all a recognition of dignity, "recognizable worthiness," a rough equality so that banker and laborer take care to relate as equals, treating each other with civility and dignity.

The culture of the neighborhood and of localism is threatened in the modern era, partly by the growth of the modern economy and state, and partly by "liberal anti-localism." When liberals want to do something, they do it at the national level. Yet it is clear from the London riots that the marginalization of civil society at the neighborhood level leaves the local community naked to the power of the thugs.

The essential core of the civil society is its "dialectic of civility and culture." There cannot be a "pure civility." It "must be informed by some cultural tradition." But not just one tradition. Thus civil society implies a diversity, a competition of cultural narratives, with some inside the cultural consensus and some left outside. The point is to minimize coercion, so that competing narratives can try to change the consensus. "Civil society and culture engage in a kind of dance" in which "the point is to keep dancing."

The deeper you immerse yourself in this kind of thinking the more you understand just how it challenges and threatens the current hegemony of the liberal elite and their authoritarian welfare state. Liberals cannot bear the idea of a spontaneous order where they cannot direct the national conversation. They cannot bear the idea of giving up control of the local neighborhood; they cannot bear the idea of toleration and co-existence with conservative culture.

Modernity is a mix of "market, civil society, and nationalism," writes Cahoone, and when you think about it, our liberal friends are at war with all three. They want to control the market, marginalize civil society, and neuter nationalism. And for what?

Right now, we see the whole liberal project teetering, and some prophesy that it is about to collapse in ruins. Given the weakness of President Obama, there is no telling what may happen. But the cultural and political opening created by the liberal crack-up creates an opportunity. With the right ideas and a new appreciation for civil society modern conservatives can work with the American people to conceive and birth a new order, in which the war on modernity will be defeated, and the three sectors of modernity can grow and flourish in freedom, trust, and dignity.

But first we must dash aside the poisoned chalice of the authoritarian welfare state.

Conservativism and Organized Religion

2011-07-26T09:39:00.000-07:00

An e-mailer wrote me asking about an assertion I made that "religion is the only thing that will 'get people to live together without being bossed around by police and government.'" He wonders "is there no place for the atheist conservative/libertarian? Or the agnostic? My religion is very personal and I do not wish to share it with others in a formal, organized setting."

It's a tricky question. Most people in the educated elite today find "organized religion" a little distasteful, and express their search for meaning in more personal, philosophical terms. Including me. Right now I am listening to a Teaching Company lecture series called "The Meaning of Life: Perspectives from the World's Great Intellectual Traditions" given by Jay L. Garfield of Smith College. Garfield skirts around Christianity but gives full value to the Bhagavad Gita, Aristotle, the Stoics and Epicureans, Confucius, the Tao, Buddhism, Hume, Kant, Mill, Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Gandhi, and the Native American Lame Deer. All very private and personal.

But the implication of 20th century philosophy from Wittgenstein to Habermas is that meaning is a shared thing. There is no private knowledge; indeed private knowledge doesn't make any sense. The immensely successful knowledge of the natural sciences is instrumental, an attempt to understand nature in order to dominate it--and other humans. But it is also social. Scientists advance the boundaries of knowledge by bouncing ideas and claims off each other and shamelessly appropriating other peoples' ideas. If you read Charles Darwin, you will find that he mentions another scientist or naturalist and their findings on every page.

If knowledge is a "knowledge game" between people, then the way to knowledge is a process of discourse between people.

When it comes to moral knowledge the importance of knowledge as a social process, a discourse between equals, suggests that discourse creates a community, even that community demands a discourse.

Let's return to the question: Can there be such a thing as a private religion, can moral ideas exist except in a social setting where people are held to their commitments?

The immense value of organized religion as it has flourished in the United States under the doctrine of the separation of church and state is that religion provides a means of social consensus and control that operates in the space between individual and government. The point about society is that it is social. People live in a community and they influence each other and live together most of the time without resort to government and to hegemonic power. It is only when they fail to resolve their differences that they resort to government and force.

To live in a private space is to live beyond the influence of others. It means not having to listen to the opinions and maybe the authority of others. I fear that the modern yearning for privacy--in which all of us participate--is little more than a flight from accountability. We humans are social animals. We live together. If we are honest with each other we must acknowledge that the modern turn of increased individuality and government represent a troubling shrinking of community and social life, and who knows where it is leading us?

Anyway, the limit of privacy and individuality is the point at which it bumps up against another person and another idea of the good. Then what? Do we work together to resolve our differences or invoke the nuclear option and call in government?

Energizing Civil Society

2011-07-22T09:29:00.000-07:00

Suppose we agree with Edmund Burke that it is the "little platoons," with Berger and Neuhaus that it is the "mediating structures", and with Lawrence Cahoone that civil society is the essential ingredient for the liberal republican society because "under conditions of civility, membership plus freedom equals dignity." Now what?

The what is obviously the culture that animates the civil society. The whole point of civil society is that it is a space of people living together without the interference of government, a community that, most of the time, resolves its problems internally.

But obviously, people do not just jolly along with their neighbors in a vacuum. They are inspired by trust in each other.

In The Faith Instinct Nicholas Wade makes it clear what it takes to get people to live together without being bossed around by police and government. It is religion. In the crudest terms, it is the threat of divine justice. People that behave badly may not be punished in this life but they will certainly be punished in the next one.

To expand this notion we could say that culture, in the broadest sense including religion, folkways, philosophy, and moral movements, is what makes civil society--people living together--work and give life meaning.

In the United States in the last century we have experienced a culture war between people who wanted to continue the Judeo-Christian religious cultural tradition and those who wanted a break with it in the direction of more sexual freedom, more cultural creativity, and more government in the areas of health, education, and welfare that were previously the responsibility of the Church and civil society. The situation has become complicated by the entry into the United States of East and South Asians with their faith traditions. How can all these traditions be brought together and blended so that civil society is still possible?

The answer is fairly simple. The three great cultural traditions, Abrahamic, Hindu, and Confucian, must come together to tame the modernist war on tradition and the mediating structures of civil society. For the great traditions are united in their knowledge of the importance of personal piety, the moderation of the individual impulse with the social impulse. They stand in the way of radical individual license and radical government power.

The moment for this coming together is now, as the modernist combination of radical individualism and overweening government crashes morally, economically, and financially all over the world. The great power of instrumental reason in the economic sector and the political sector must be tamed, and the place to do it is in the middle, the public sphere between the megastructures where people come to live together or close to each other and take off their political armor and economic weapons.

Is this possible? Can we really succeed in taming the monster? We already tamed the monster of plantation slavery, that Original Sin of capitalism. Now it is time to tame the monster combination of antisocial individualism and anti-human big government. It can't be that hard.

Cahoone and "Neutralist" Liberalism

2011-07-19T20:25:00.000-07:00

The starting point of Lawrence E. Cahoone's Civil Society: The Conservative Meaning of Liberal Politics is that the "neutralist or proceduralist liberalism" of left and right (i.e. Rawls and Nozick) is inadequate.

[Neutralism] either contributes to chronic social problems or blocks attempts to address them. Most troublesome is the rigid distinction of the political from the social and particularly the cultural spheres of life.

The problem is that "political theory has become more specialized, purified, and rationalized... Active citizenship, the language of public duty, and... cultural context..." have been cast aside by our liberal friends. Politics reduces to "rights, opportunity, and prosperity." For libertarians it reduces to "individual liberty;" for egalitarian liberals to "individual liberty plus cash." Missing from this view of society is the idea that politics and economics issue from society; they are not free-floating universal ideas good in themselves. The Good must be anchored in actual people and actual community.

This notion is the increasingly ubiquitous idea of "civil society" and Cahoone defines it in four ways.

First, civil society expresses the "priority of the social, the conviction that extant societies gain their norms from within, not from government, Church, or military organizations."

Second, Cahoone states the importance of "spontaneity," the idea that civil society lives in a space between the contractual relations of Toennies' "Gesellschaft" and the "Gemeinschaft of shared traditional morality."

Third, civil society is "intrinsically local," arising out of people living together or living near each other. Nineteenth century Populism was an attempt to express this against the hegemony of elites.

Fourth, for Cahoone, civil society means holism, "the total ensemble of social relations and culture." It is that whole that should drive "political affairs."

Of course, it is the holist view, that society and culture should drive politics, that is problematic for our liberal friends. The whole thrust of modern liberals is to short-circuit the local and traditional--experienced by liberals as benighted and cramped--in favor of the universal and global. But it is, of course, their politics of the universal that has bombed the local community to rubble, and bombed until it bounced the local community of lower income folks that have a less robust defense against the hegemony of the elites than the ordinary middle class. It is the opposition to the local and the particular that drives liberal opposition to modern conservatism, modern enthusiastic Christianity, and most recent of all, liberal opposition to the Tea Party.

Lawrence Cahoone, using modern philosophical ideas deveoloped in the last 50 years, says that "neutralist" liberalism can't deliver the kind of society that most of us want. What does that mean? It means that sooner or later, "most of us" will insist on change, whether liberals like it or not.

Frankly, we'd prefer that liberals work with us on this. But there is always the other possibility, that liberals will fight rather than switch.

That would be a shame.

Cahoone's Civil Society

2011-07-15T09:18:00.000-07:00

Over the years, I have come to believe in this one infallible rule of life. It goes like this. If I am wondering about some problem of political philosophy, chances are that some chap has written a book solving it.

It's obvious, really. I've been spending most of my adult life working and raising a family. And I'm not quite the sharpest knife in the drawer. Not dumb or something, but certainly not genius category.

Now my biggest problem over the years is this. We conservatives need a thinker who will refound the conservative tendency in the latest and greatest concepts from the world of ideas.

Up to now the best that I'd encountered were Michael Novak and his Spirit of Democratic Capitalism and Berger and Neuhaus and Empowering People.

But they don't light a candle next to Lawrence E. Cahoone and his Civil Society: The Conservative Meaning of Liberal Politics.

Cahoone begins with a critique of "neutralist" liberalism, the idea that liberals are just neutral adjudicators in the world. In fact, of course, neutralism is impossible, because any political action in the world is action towards a vision of the good. Then Cahoone formulates a "postmodern" conservatism using his deep and broad knowledge of 20th century philosophy. And we are talking here of everyone through Habermas and the neo-pragmatists, the latest, greatest idea that at every level of reality that we experience there are irreducible facts that are not just combinations of elements from a lower level.

The point about conservatism, Cahoone writes, is that it looks at society as a whole, that culture, politics, economics, and living-together are all of a lump; in this lump it is culture that is primary.

Liberals have their own heroic story of individuality and democracy and progress, but the values... are worldly and immanent. Modern conservatism contacts ultimacy via a non-political, ultimate transcendence that is left vague.

Conservatism is big on authority, and authority is an interesting space between compulsion and complete freedom.

Hannah Arendt clears a space for authority. Authority can only exist in the absence of both force and persuasion...

We may characterize, but not explain, the authority in the way Aristotle understands the person with phronesis [practical wisdom or prudence]: the authority is someone who habitually gets it right.

Cahoone has a solid definition for "what government must be or do."

Government must be legitimate and good... These minimal conditions of good government are: assurance of the survival of society... the enforcement of law; prevention of conquest; and avoidance of tyranny, corruption, the intentional punishment of the innocent or the intentional reward of the guilty.

And there is this:

There are four main goods internal to the notion of civil society: membership, freedom, civility, and dignity.

Well, that's a start, and I have not really begun to internalize the breadth and depth of Cahoone's argument. But you'll be getting a lot of Cahoone from me in the near future. After the debacle of Obama we are going to need some really good ideas to get American back to its place as the city on a hill, the last best hope of man for people who must have freedom.

Modernity's Original Sin

2011-07-08T09:37:00.000-07:00

Hey, said the serpent to Eve. Eat that apple and you could learn a thing or two.

So she could and so she did. But the thing about the apples from the tree of knowledge is that the knowledge they bring doesn't solve anything. It just raises the stakes.

That is the point about Original Sin. It isn't the sin itself, its the self-consciousness. Back in the old Garden of Eden you can live your life away in the bliss of ignorance. If you live, you live. If you die, you die. But after acquiring knowledge and the power it brings, life is no longer the simple bliss of ignorance. Life is serious; life has responsibilities.

So it was in the Dawn of the Modern Age. Bliss it was to be alive, and to be young was very heaven. Mankind ate anew from the Tree of Knowledge, and the new sciences, the triumphs of instrumental reason, burst like flowers into bloom. But then came the bitter fruit, the responsibilities of power, and the reality of the modern Original Sin.

Instrumental reason, the Enlightenment, write Horkheimer and Adorno is a dance of domination, domination over nature and domination over man. "What men want to learn from nature is how to dominate it and other men."

It was the businessman that first applied this dictum in the years right after the Crusades. They built rational, efficient plantations on Cyprus, and eventually in the West Indies, to grow and refine sugar. They made tons of money, and they enslaved men and women to work the plantations, first Muslim slaves on Cyprus, and then Africans from West Africa. It ended up a huge, global business, and many fortunes were made and country houses built upon it. But the ruthless pursuit of wealth, made by rational planning and by enslaving men and women as mere factors of production, inspired a moral movement of rejection, the anti-slavery movement, that curbed and humbled this pure application of instrumental reason to business. And from that time we have always demanded of businessmen that they limit their appetites and their plans, treading lightly on the earth, and dealing gently with men. It turned out, anyway, that it was better that way.

But it was not just in business that the modern knowledge of instrumental reason could be applied. The new educated elite wanted to apply instrumental reason to politics, to make government equal and rational, to build a perfect society, carefully administered in every department, articulated in every joint, peaceful and just. But, Horkheimer and Adorno warned: "Enlightenment behaves towards things as a dictator towards men." And so it was that the effort to build a perfected, articulated society led to the most awful and cruel dictatorships ever known. In Nazi Germany, 6 million Jews killed; in Russia 10 million Ukrainian peasants killed. In China 30 million peasants killed in the Great Leap Forward alone.

When capitalism committed its Original Sin with plantation slavery, the educated middle class rose up in a moral movement that socialized this new force, creating a new moral culture to critique and to humanize capitalism, the efficient calculating monster.

But it has proved much harder to socialize instrumental reason when applied to politics and government. This is not hard to understand. The new educated class was just the social agent to critique and tame the economic monster. But it has proved remarkably resistant to the many critiques of its own monument to instrumental reason: big government and administrative bureaucracy. Instrumental reason applied to business created the bourgeoisie of merchants and manufacturers and barons of finance. Instrumental reason applied to politics created the educated class that occupies the commanding heights of government, education, and culture. It has the means to marginalize its critics and it uses it.

We humans must socialize the government monster, and tame this monstrous force. It will take a moral movement, just like the anti-slavery movement. It was already envisioned, two hundred years ago by Edmund Burke, but his sentiments did not grow into a moral movement. Not then.

But now that we see the failures of big government all around us, and its profoundly mechanical, un-social, in-human culture, it is time to rise up and develop the moral critique of rational, instrumental, big-government politics. It is time to put the "social" back in society.

Exploitation and the Master Race

2011-06-28T10:06:00.000-07:00

President Quixote's curious performance in office since 2009 are attributable to his "seductive beliefs," writes Monty Pelerin in the American Thinker, echoing Thomas Sowell here and here. "Exploitation ideology" is the driver of the belief system that seduced Barack Obama, as Sowell illustrates.

One of the painfully revealing episodes in Barack Obama's book "Dreams From My Father" describes his early experience listening to a sermon by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Among the things said in that sermon was that "white folks' greed runs a world in need." Obama was literally moved to tears by that sermon.

In my research for An American Manifesto I have come to realize what the exploitation ideology is all about.

If you are a revolutionary that wants to seize political power or you are an activist that wants to increase goverment power you need an exploitation theory. Exploitation theory explains why the world is in a mess. It is because some people are exploiting other people. The only remedy is force. We must fight the exploiters and put them in their place. So anyone, like Barack Obama, who wants political power and wants to exercise it, will probably, given normal intelligence, come up with an exploitation theory. Man bites dog. The only cause for surprise would be a believer in big government that didn't believe in an exploitation theory.

But what about people that already have power, the ruling class? How do they justify their power? They usually develop a Master Race theory. You know how it goes. We landed aristocrats are something special; you can tell because we are bigger and better warriors than the inferior peasants in the country and the money-mad merchants in the city. For Marxists, the master race is the vanguard class that runs the "dictatorship of the proletariat." What about the Progressives that came to power in the US in the early 20th century? No sooner had they come to power than they developed eugenics to justify their right to power and to reduce overbreeding in the unfit lower classes. Our liberal friends in the ruling class of today are confident that they have the right to rule because they are the most educated and intelligent; Republicans are typically not intelligent enough to rule.

The Nazis, of course, ran an exploitation theory and a master race theory at once. The Germans had been tricked out of their rightful place as the most advanced country by a stab in the back orchestrated by stinking Jewish bankers. As a Master Race of Aryans, they had a right to conquer the world and rule it. It was obvious.

Conservatives, of course, have our own version of exploitation theory. We believe it is big government run by liberals that is choking the country to death. Therefore conservatives should replace liberals in the councils of government. Only then will the gross exploitation of the entitlement state come to a just and necessary end.

What about a conservative Master Race theory? Our master race theory probably goes something like this. We, the people of the advanced democracies, are the fortunate heirs to an astonishing tradition of democratic capitalism which has raised the capitalist West from a grubbing life of $1/person/day back in the 18th century to an unimagined prosperity of $100/person/day in the 21st century. Because we've figured it all out, people ought to copy our way of life. And if they refuse and rebel against it, like the Islamist terrorists, we will have no option but to sicc our armed forces on them.

The saving grace of conservatives, if we have one, is that we believe that government and therefore force should be limited. Unlike our liberal friends.

Big Units, Blue Social Model, Meta-narratives

2011-06-22T10:01:00.000-07:00

If you read Walter Russell Mead you will quickly bump into "the failure of the Blue Social Model." If you read Michael Barone you will soon encounter talk of the decline of the Big Units: Big Government, Big Business, Big Labor.

These chaps are saying that the great meta-narratives that have sustained the growth and the dominance of the liberal administrative welfare state are breaking down. They no longer explain the way the world works or the way the world ought to work.

And yet, we read daily of the efforts of the National Labor Relations Board to bring back the past: to stop Boeing from assembling aircraft with non-union labor and to change the rules on union organizing by administrative ukase.

The funny thing is that none other than lefty postmodernist Jean François Lyotard has declared that overarching meta-narratives of this kind are bound for the ash-heap of history.

Meta-narratives roughly equate to the everyday notion of what principles a society is founded on. They form the basis of the social boand. The meta-narratives of the Enlightenment were about grand quests. The progressive liberation of humanity through science is a meta-narrative.

For our liberal friends the overarching meta-narrative is the big-government program, that our lives are given meaning when we all contribute to and belong to big-government programs guaranteeing pensions, health care, education, and welfare.

The problem is that when meta-narratives are concretely formulated and implemented, they seem to go disastrously awry. Marxism is the classic case of a meta-narrative based on principles of emancipation and egalitarianism which, when implemented, becomes perverted to totalitarianism under Stalin in the Soviet Union.

In the case of liberal administrative welfarism, we get the utter waste of one-size-fits-all programs captured by the producer interest and slowly delivering less and less service for more and more money--until the whole thing collapses in sovereign debt default.

Yes, but if the old meta-narratives are no more, where shall we go, what shall we do? Lyotard recommends the little narratives of Wittgenstein's language games.

[These are] limited contexts in which there are clear, if not clearly defined, rules for understanding and behavior. We no longer give credence to total philosophical contexts like Marxism which ostensibly would prescribe behavior in all aspects of life, rather, we have lots of smaller contexts which we act within. We are employees, we are students. These roles legitimate knowledge and courses of action in their limited contexts. By fragmenting life into a thousand localized roles, each with their particular contexts for judging actions and knowledge, we avoid the need for meta-narratives. This is the nature of the modern social bond. Our effectiveness is judged in the context of how well we perform in each of these many limited roles.

Thus, instead of sacrificing ourselves into a grand narrative, we "what legitimates knowledge in the postmodern condition is how well it performs, or enables a person to perform, in particular roles."

But judgment by results is the "instrumental reason" of the Enlightenment, and Horkheimer and Adorno have already noted that pure instrumental reason leads to domination: totalitarianism. That is where the three sectors model of Michael Novak comes in: the Greater Separation of Powers between the political, the economic, and the moral/cultural.

Obviously the blue social model, the Big Units notion, ObamaCare, wise regulation by experts at the Environmental Protection Agency or the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau conjured up by activist academician Elizabeth Warren to be free of Congressional oversight, all these things belong to the big-narrative age. They do not say: let's try something and see if it works. They say: here is the big picture solution; just fall in line and believe and everything will come out right because we have the best experts in charge.

My belief is that we are going into a political cycle that will be the most convulsive in our lifetimes. Our liberal friends are pushing ahead on all fronts on their meta-narrative as though this is their last chance before their Liberal Hour is over. But my hunch is that we will see a monster repudiation of the liberal meta-narrative. Because, after all, the United States has always been a society built upon the pragmatic notion of doing what works.

That's why I voted for Barack Obama. I felt that, when the American people saw what liberals were about and felt it in their pocketbooks they would reject it. And I predict that in 2012 they will do so.

The Political Philosophy of Late Liberalism

2011-06-17T07:46:00.000-07:00

How convenient that I should be discursing on the justification of political power one day and the political nostalgia of uber-liberal E.J. Dionne the next. Let us mix them together and see what happens.

I first argued that, because government is force and politics is power, then you can only justify the resort to government (force) in exceptional circumstances, which I argued were invasion and injustice.

Then I laughed at E.J. Dionne's sudden nostalgia for President George W. Bush. All Democrats are nostalgic for the previous generation of Republicans.

But it was the offhand statement of liberal principle that resonated with me. Dear old President Bush actually wanted to do more with government, huffed E.J.; not for him mere "cutting taxes, slashing regulation or eliminating large swaths of government" like today's lot.

Unlike this crowd of Republicans, Bush acknowledged that the federal government can ease injustices and get useful things done.

Notice how this jars with my examination of the necessary springs of political action. In my view, government is force and it is illegitimate to do anything unless it requires force. But E.J. Dionne takes a more avuncular approach. He writes like a member of the Ruling Class. Of course he would. Yes, he intones, we compassionate elitists want to ease the injustices of life. We want to do useful things.

But the problem is that he leaves out the element of force. Government does not trot up one day and put a shoulder to the wheel of justice. It writes laws and raises taxes and spends money taken from taxpayers by force. Reasonable people might conclude that the injustice in question had better be a pretty serious injustice to justify all that force. Nor does government turn up one day and say that we're here to help on a useful project. It takes money from taxpayers by force and bond-holders and spends the money on some useful thing. But the money spent on that useful thing cannot be spent on some other useful thing. Maybe today that useful thing is the most useful thing that anyone could imagine. But what about tomorrow? For sure, the folks hired to do that useful thing will scream and yell that to abandon that useful thing will result in food being removed from the mouths of children. But producer interests always say that.

What we have here is the situation of every ancien regime, which came to power in some former time and now casually justifies its power not with the burning flame of rage and subordination, but with the avuncular self-inflation of the aristocratic scion: Yes, darling, just leave the injustice and all the complicated stuff to me. You wouldn't really be interested.

The great challenge of our era is the problem of every comfortable age. When people can afford to pay someone else to do the dirty work, they start the descent into decadence. You hire out the cleaning of their house, the raising of the kids, the driving of the car, the investment of the capital, the tallying of everyday expenses, eventually even the "work". And step by step, faster than you think, you become decadent and soft--not necessarily badly behaved, but soft in the sense of "use it or lose it."

The problem of the liberal welfare state is that we leave the organization of all public and communal affairs to liberals and bureaucrats. But the health of American life depends on the involvement of everyone in the day-to-day activities of social life, from high politics to neighborly cooperation and to family life. When government does all these useful things it means that necessarily ordinary people get excluded from participation. In other words humans as social animals are excluded from social life.

The whole point of modern American conservatism is to think and act upon this great truth. Everyone has a contribution to make, and it is a great injustice to exclude the great mass of ordinary people, as E.J. Dionne does with such cavalier presumption, in favor of liberal scions and their bribed supporters in government and on the entitlement rolls.

The Grounds of Political Action

2011-06-15T07:46:00.000-07:00

Government is force. Politics is power. So every political initiative is a program of force. Ever government program is an exercise of power.

But humans are social animals; we understand that only in exceptional circumstances is there a warrant for force. Thus political actors feel the need to justify their campaigns of force and power.

Every justification of force, it seems to me, comes down to two scenarios. Either the community is threatened by an invader--the Russians are coming--or the community is ruled by a tyrant--off with his head! These two springs of government action are so obvious as to be truisms, yet we often forget first principles. The two principles are also intimate. It is the need to repel the invader that invests the executive with the mandate of force, and it is the continuance of this power after the victory over the invader that creates the occasion for the abuse of power and the occasion of injustice.

But let us look at this from the position of the political activist. If someone wants power he has two roads to power. He can energize the community against the frightful danger--of Russians, Germans, Islamists. Or he must rile up the people against the monstrous injustices perpetrated by the current ruling clique. Again, this is almost a truism. If the nation isn't threatened by an invader, then why should the nation submit to the extraordinary subventions required in a national emergency? If there isn't a gross injustice then where is the justification for mounting a head of rebellion with all the risks of failure?

Our liberal friends have developed a curious version of all this. In the first place, they want to believe that there really isn't a threat from the invader. That is all just nationalism, and patriotism, we all know, is the last refuge of a scoundrel. But our liberal friends don't want to throw away the opportunity to wage war, so they came up with the moral equivalent of war: wars on want, on poverty, on global warming, on pollution.

But it is the liberal response to injustice that is really ingenious. For liberals argue that it is they, the political elite, that is the agent most appropriate to correct the injustices so keenly felt by working people, women, minorities and the traditionally marginalized. What a coup. The liberals defend their political power by siccing the police on greedy bankers, unjust employers, rogue polluters, and racist, sexist, homophobic bigots.

The question that we non-liberals must ask is whether our liberal friends have overdone all this. You can say that, e.g., it was necessary to use government force to reverse the age-old injustice of slavery and to bring African Americans to full citizenship by force. You could say, perhaps, that the working man needed assistance in the turmoil of the early industrial revolution. But it seems to me that in the early 21st century there is a ton of government compulsion going on that is based on the flimsiest possible demonstration of injustice. The world is, after all, seething with injustice, from the most petty problems in the workplace through the most savage enslavement of a whole people. The question is: where is the dividing line between a minor humiliation and a need for government force?

That is the great task before us.

The Welfare State: When It's Broke

2011-06-10T07:53:00.000-07:00

The fight over the welfare state will, at the tactical level, occur around the questions of national bankruptcy and a sovereign debt crisis.

But the moral-cultural question is the fulcrum around which political and economic leverage will work. For the great question about our modern age is this: How much are we slaves to our system of instrumental reason, the great edifice of science and technique? To what extent is our prosperity founded upon the mankind's domination of the natural world, and to what extent is it founded upon the domination of one man or woman by another? We use natural resources as though we owned them. We domesticate and use plants and animals as though we owned them. We use other people as employees, as service personnel, as means to our ends. But at what point to we acknowledge that this use is a kind of slavery. We each act as if we owned the whole world and that everything is subject to our commands, down to the last penny in our bank account.

The question of domination is pretty clear when a human is bent to the yoke after an army is defeated in battle or a nation is defeated in a war. The wrong is pretty clear when an oil company pollutes a vast ocean in an oil-well blowout. But what about an employee under industrial discipline? What about a citizen forced to pay for and to join a government program? What about children sent to school for ten to twelve years according to compulsory attendance laws? What about the conversion of wild plants and animals to human breeding and domestication? What about the use of "non-renewable" natural resources? What about the release of "greenhouse gases" into the atmosphere?

In human society these questions to be resolved according to the prejudice of the current ruling class. A century ago the ruling class was the commercial middle class, and so questions got decided according to their prejudice about employment, credit, and personal interest. Now the ruling class is educated liberals that rule with the support of the working class and government program dependents, so a different set of prejudices dominate.

The question is: isn't there a better way to decide social and economic questions than the domination by elite prejudice and political power? Can't responsibility and power be distributed more widely?

This all reduces to the problem of mistakes and the ways in which mistakes can be recognized and corrected. For it seems that it is very difficult for humans to recognize a mistake unless it has already caused a disaster. This is certainly true at the individual and family level. It is often true in business, where CEOs can sometimes run a corporation into the ground rather than quit a money-losing strategy, limited only by the equity and the credit of the corporation. This is especially true in politics, where special interests can usually block reform of their wasteful and dangerous subsidies and privileges up to the point where the very survival of the state is threatened by a sovereign debt crisis.

The problem in communications, an expert once explained to me, is not how to transmit the data. The problem is what to do when something goes wrong and a message is garbled. How do you resend the message, and how do sender and receiver finally agree that a correct message has been sent and received? The same is true in human society at large. When things are going wrong, when do we take corrective action? How long can we afford to put off corrective action, if we can agree what that action should be? When there is a mess in the business sector, the mess is cleared up in the bankruptcy process. It's a painful process, as judges and lawyers wrangle over the details of who gets to take the shortest haircut. When you decide such matters in the political sector it means that the correction will be decided by force, or at least a show of force. Humans can do better than that.

Domination and Dependency

2011-05-24T09:05:00.000-07:00

The great theme of the Left is oppression and domination. When it's not exercised about the ordinary domination of traditionally marginalized peoples and groups, it ponders how reason itself creates domination.

Reason, argue Horkheimer and Adorno in The Dialectics of Enlightenment is man's effort to dominate the world. You can see the development already of bourgeois consciousness and rationality in Homer's hero, the cunning Odysseus, as he battles, using instrumental reason, with pre-rational forces from Cyclops to Circe to the Sirens. And notice that Odysseus makes his followers block their ears with wax so they they will keep rowing his ship for him and won't hear and respond to the entreaties of the Sirens. There's domination for you, exploiting the workers to get himself out of a jam!

So Odysseus is just like the bourgeois businessman that tries to dominate nature and less-developed humans with his technological developments and energies.

There are three strong objections to this argument.

First, what makes humans any different than all the other living things? Humans must battle and adapt to carve out a niche in this world just like other living things. If humans have been spectacularly successful in doing this, what's the big deal?

Second, the great question about domination is: what does the dominator do with his domination? Does he dominate the rest of creation and create a desert for all the competing humans and species? Does bourgeois capitalism make a desert out of its economic domination? The answer is that, starting at the latest with the Romantic rebellion and the beginning of the industrial era, mankind has understood with penetrating insight the limits of instrumental reason. Humans cannot live a slash-and-burn life, using and abusing without limit. With great power comes great responsibility, as the comic hero says. The counter-theme of the great power of instrumental reason is the need to curb and to mitigate its power. This is remarkably well developed in the culture of free enterprise which dislikes extreme power, and has developed a legal system to protect the weak from the domination of the powerful.

Thirdly, the real domination threat comes from the dominatory culture of modern governments, which, under the encouragement of left-wing elites, has driven the size and power of government to unprecedented levels. In the United States, the government's credit is under threat from the huge programs that transfer monies from the productive sector to the dependency sector. (In other words, the rich, dominating capitalists are paying swingeing taxes and penalties so that the politicians can pay off their supporters.) Thomas Sowell writes about this in "Dependency and Votes." Whenever we discuss cutting "entitlement" spending, he writes, the politicians rush out and peddle scary stories about the poor going without food and the elderly going without their meds. But the poor are presently fatter than ordinary Americans and the elderly are richer (15 times richer than the under 35 year-olds) than ordinary Americans. So what is going on?

The goal is not to keep the poor from starving but to create dependency — because dependency translates into votes for politicians who play Santa Claus... Independence makes for a healthier society, but dependency is what gets votes for politicians... “Entitlement” is just a fancy word for dependency.

And dependency is just the other side of the coin from domination. If you dominate someone, you hold them in dependency.

So here is a question. Why does the Left, that cries out to the reverberate hills about the evils of domination, support, defend and expand the most dominatory system ever devised by the instrumental rationality of mankind?

The Embarrassing Poor

2011-05-20T09:54:00.000-07:00

Our lefty friends like to tell a story about the poor that goes like this. In the old days of the feudal era the people had their place and the lords had their responsibilities. The result was that the poor got taken care of. But then came the rise of trade and the poor fell through the cracks. Over and over, beginning with the Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601, the state tried to come up with a way to meet society's obligation to care for the least among us, but more and more, as capitalism developed, the poor got shunted to the margins of society. But then came the modern era of social politics, and the state finally developed compassionate and targeted programs to help the poor and to mitigate their marginalized status. What's needed to finish the job is more funding to help people in need.

The reality is that the poor have always been an embarrassment and an afterthought. That is why the poor always features in moral and religious systems. We want so much to forget about them, but the moral critics insist that we remember them.

Were the poor really looked after in the feudal era? It's hard to know, of course. But the numbers indicate that they didn't do well. Poor people had fewer surviving children than rich people, according to Gregory Clark in A Farewell to Alms. Anyway, the reality of the feudal era was periodic famines and wars. Guess who got the short end of the stick? In the early modern era, with more wealth available, society could afford to spend money on bureaucratic responses to the poverty problem. Instead of personally doing something about the poor, communities could hire it done. There were two kinds of relief: "indoor" relief where the poor were warehoused, and "outdoor" relief where the poor were helped outside of actual institutions in private homes. In the 18th century in the Anglosphere this "doing something" developed into the workhouse, the place where the poor were warehoused and supervised by masters and beadles like Dickens' Mr. Bumble. By the end of the 19th century, inspired by Dickens and a new generation of social activists, everyone was disgusted with beadles and workhouses and so the relief of the poor was changed from institutional assistance in insane asylums and workhouses to the provision of assistance with money. Now in the early 21st century the notion of "welfare" through outdoor relief is perceived as a failure, so a new approach is likely.

But really, nothing has changed. The poor are, then as now, an embarrassment--people that don't socialize in socially acceptable ways. They have damaged families, they have limited work skills, and they survive by their wits and by scams rather than through mainstream work for wages. The solution to the "poverty problem" is for each of us, individual by individual, to work with the poor and reintegrate them into socially acceptable roles within society. But that takes work. We would rather pay the government to do it, and forget about the poor. No doubt that is why we have been willing to listen to our liberal friends when they told us that it was the height of compassion to give liberals money to help the poor. We believed them because we wanted to believe them. But now the poor, though materially better off than ever before, are socially and spiritually worse off, as Robert William Fogel asserts inThe Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism. And the reason why is that the modern welfare state shovels money out to the poor but lets their culture wither away. So now, people are starting to demand that we "do something" about the rampant pathologies of the "underclass."

The question is: shall we "do something" in the old bureaucratic way, maybe forcing the poor to work, or shall we "do something" about ourselves, reawakening the old moral obligation to do something personally about the poor?

The Wages of Centralism

2011-05-11T09:34:00.000-07:00

Back in the mid 19th century a cabal of Bostonians decided to centralize the education of children in the Bay State into a state board of education. This plan would lower the crime rate by 90 percent, promised Horace Mann, the "father of the common school." Over the decades schooling for American children changed from the education favored by parents to the education favored by the upper middle class. It evolved from a combination of babysitting and basic literacy and numeracy that prepared most children for an entry into apprenticeship and work in the early teens to the present system of government child custody, in which parents are legally required to surrender their children for a twelve year term without possibility of parole. Not surprisingly, the system fails to educate children well, and particularly fails to educate the children of barely literate parents.

Given how well centralism worked in education the educated elite decided that the same principle should apply to a variety of other social activities from the economy to health care. In the 1940s liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith developed the idea of "countervailing power" in which the Big Units of business, labor unions, and government would negotiate outcomes in the national economy by the weight of power. It seemed to work well for a few years, but in fact ended up pledging the wealth of the nation for unaffordable benefits. Thus the Big Unit corporations pledged future profits that turned out to be insufficient to pay for worker pensions. Big Unit unions looted profitable corporations and reduced the steel industry and then the automobile industry to contemptible shells. Big Unit government created entitlements to pensions and health care that have resulted in an unfunded liability of $100 trillion.

The problem is that Big Unit politics hollows out the mediating institutions that provide the real strength and resilience of society. Big Unit administrative centralism reduces everything to a conceit of elite competence, an assumption that you can design an effective, adaptable education system for all children. It reduces business corporations to crony capitalists, cringing for political favors. It reduces the luxuriant web of self-help social welfare organizations to a bare government safety net. It tempts people to wither their family and social connections and obligations and rely in the first place upon government benefits.

We can see the wages of centralism by looking at the society wide numbers. People who rely primarily upon government benefits present significant social pathologies. Marriage in the upper middle class is about as prevalent as ever; marriage in the lower 20 percent is off from 83 percent to 48 percent. Back in the 1950s 96 percent of men were in the labor force, and only four percent were not in the labor force either working or looking for work. Now 20 percent of men are out of the labor force, and for men without a high-school education 35 percent are absent from the labor force.

The century from 1848 to 1948 was called by F.A. Hayek the century of socialism. The years before 1848 were years of preparation for socialism; the years after have been years of exhaustion. But the problem is that socialism is not and never was "social," or, in the words of John Dewey, the Great Community in which to conduct a discourse among citizens about their communal life. Socialism has always been an elite ruling the many through administrative centralism, and administrative bureaucracy is, by design, a system for controlling people, not for discourse among people.

The great irony of our age is that precisely the system that the educated elite has been fighting against for 150 years is the system that is, in the true sense of the word, "socialist." It is the combination of a free, property-owning economy where the "discourse" is conducted through economic actors communicating in their buying and selling, producing, advertising, borrowing, lending, and investing. It is achieved through political actors discussing the limits of force, and through cultural and moral actors discussing the meaning, the "why" of it all.

But that is what the educated elite cannot bear, for a truly "social" society would deny the educated elite its "leading role." It would be reduced to merely one voice among many.

The breakthrough moment for modern humans will be the moment when they smash the power of the educated elite and demand to live in a world purged of the totalizing strangulation of political hegemony. Humans are social animals, not servile animals, and it's about time we refused the humiliating wages of centralism.

Why Obamomics is Failing

2011-05-06T09:37:00.000-07:00

Today, with 244,000 new jobs from the Labor Department's Establishment Survey, people are talking about "better than expected."

But if you look, as I do, at the Household Survey you see a downtick in Employment of 190,000 and an uptick in Labor Force of 15,000. (That's why the Unemployment Rate went up to 9.0 percent.)

What is going wrong with the Obama recovery, which Jay Cost shows is the worst in 50 years? I will tell you why. The problem is that the ruling class of the educated elite is grasping the wrong end of the stick. At both ends.

Back in the old days, humans lived in egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands. Their government was up close and personal, and it wasn't very powerful. Humans hate it when other people have power over them. Then came the agricultural age, and egalitarianism went out the window, replaced by rigid hierarchy that we know and hate as the feudal system.

But then, about 500 years ago, a new age began to dawn. It combined, in a curious way, both hierarchy and equality. We call it democratic capitalism.

On the one hand, everyone was to be considered equal "in the sight of God" as we say. On the other hand, hierarchy was allowed to form as successful businessmen piled up huge fortunes in the new economy that delivered mass-produced goods for the ordinary person. So we may say that, while the hunter-gatherers were egalitarian right across the board, and the agriculturalists were hierarchical right across the board, the new democratic capitalism embraced political equality and economic hierarchy.

But then arose a reactionary movement that tried to turn the new democratic capitalism upside down. Let us call it social democracy, the rule of the educated elite. This movement of well-born and well-educated men and women sought to impose egalitarianism on the economy, and hierarchy on politics. They were scandalized by inequality of economic condition, but insisted that government should be controlled and staffed by people like them, educated experts that could develop a rational economy and politics out of the chaos of the free market. But the trouble is that it doesn't work.

The new rule of the educated elite doesn't work in economic terms because the hierarchy of the educated experts, attempting to impose equality on the economy with their faddish ideas on planning, energy, education, health care, and the relief of the poor, just cannot adapt to the irreducible complexity of the economy. You can say: we should pursue alternative, clean energy solutions. But the economy is likely to prove you wrong, or deliver clean energy in an unexpected way. As things start to go wrong, of course, the educated experts turn to more and more hierarchy and compulsion to impose their egalitarian solutions on the economy.

The Obama administration is testing the concept of social democracy, the rule of the educated experts, to destruction. What is needed is not for targeted government programs to create green jobs and very fast trains with the rich paying "a little more" in taxes to make sure that the results are egalitarian. What is needed is for the government to create a level economic playing field where all people can compete to serve the consumers with the best products and services. That means dissolving all the special subsidies and mandates that assume that the educated expert knows best, and lowering tax rates and regulations so that the best economic actors can get on with finding out what a recovering economy needs to get its mojo going.

Let's say this again. The whole point of democratic capitalism is to treat everyone equally before government and the law. Then it says: go get 'em, and the people that figure out what the consumers want, and deliver it to them with innovation and reliability get to make tons of money, which they then probably give away in philanthropy years later. People that are good at this, or just lucky, get to climb the greasy pole and get more resources to deploy to back up their ideas. People that aren't so good at this game get to work for other people.

The question is: why does the educated elite work to hard to destroy the remarkable combination of equality and hierarchy that we call democratic capitalism and turn it upside down? What is their problem?

Educated Youth and Educated Elite

2011-04-29T11:16:00.000-07:00

Our era is the Age of the Educated Elite. It is this elite that constitutes the Ruling Class, as Angelo Codevilla has argued. Its interests, its visions, its prejudices are what drive the culture, drive politics, and channel the economic sector.

This Educated Elite sits on high, in groves of Academe, in the judge's seat in our courtrooms, in the throbbing pulse of media, and the compulsive images of movies and TV.

Today we have a vast centralized administrative state because the Educated Elite wanted it. We have a cruel racial divide because the Educated Elite willed it and deepened it. We live in subjection to minute and pervasive government regulation because the Educated Elite has legislated its morality upon us.

The rule of the Educated Elite could never have succeeded without its alter ego, the angry and idealistic young people we may call Educated Youth. Beginning, let us say, with Marx and Engels in the 1840s, Educated Youth has played a critical role in the political project of the Educated Elite. It is Educated Youth that plays the "idealism" card. It is Educated Youth that runs the street protest action. It is Educated Youth that gets in the faces of the middle class and demands "change." In Emile Zola's Germinal it is the Educated Youth Etienne that provokes the miners into strikes and violence--and then abandons them to their fate and heads off to his next gig. In the Sixties it was Educated Youth that ran the big anti-war demonstrations and that demanded "change" from the academic establishment in the universities. What could the Educated Elite do but accede to the idealistic demands of Educated Youth?

By the time that the young Barack Obama came up through the system the role of Educated Youth had been formalized into the practice of "community organizing," with Educated Youth descending from on high into, say, the South Side of Chicago to organize the laid-off steelworkers.

In other words, the key active ingredient in the over-under coalition of the Educated Elite and the Helpless Victims is the organizing power of Educated Youth to whom falls the task of organizing and radicalizing the Helpless Victims for which government must supply pensions, health care, education, and welfare.

We may think of the modern education system, particularly the modern university, as a training system designed to produce Educated Youth, with the capstone being the highly rated selective college. The whole operation is rather like the Jesuit education system of old which was designed to indoctrinate the children of the faithful early and often and to identify and induct into the priesthood the best of the best.

It is obvious that any successful effort to dispatch the modern Ruling Class, the Educated Elite, onto the dust-heap of history must split the Educated Youth off from the Educated Elite. It must deny the officer class its supply of eager young subalterns ready and willing to die for the cause.

Central to this effort has to be a transformation of education. It must start with a large expansion of school choice, charter schools and vouchers. But the goal must be to get the government out of schooling altogether, on the principle that government education is a violation of the separation of church and state. Education is, in part, a cultural and religious thing. For sure, education is needed to make youngsters literate and numerate, but that is just a part of its social role. Education is also the business of creating adults in accordance with some moral/cultural vision of the good. Government should not do this, for if it does it acts as an establishment of secular religion, and the constitution forbids an establishment of religion.

The remarkable modern phenomenon of home-schooled children--from spelling bee winners to Tea Party activists--that easily out-shine the products of conventional schools are a living witness to the possibilities of a transformation of the education system. It is a witness to the difference between raising up a child and confining a child in a custodial facility.

Liberalism: Crony Capitalism and Skewed Scholarship

2011-04-22T09:03:00.001-07:00

What do you call the research-on-demand work of the climate science community? They are the chaps who have obediently produced the end-of-the-world global warming scenarios for their political paymasters, proving that global temperature is increasing at an unprecedented rate in the past century: the fabled hockey stick, and that CO2 is the main driver of climate change.

That's not to say that the Michael Manns and the Phil Joneses and the Keith Briffas don't believe in their science. Of course they do. That's what makes Climategate so sad.

In one word, as Marx would say, for noble, honest, independent scholarship, we have naked, brutal, direct, "skewed scholarship."

That is the nature of the academy in the liberal patrimonial state. Educators and scholars and moralists and researchers get to realize what side their bread is buttered on. When education or scholarship or morality or research is funded by the government, the educator's, scholar's, moralist's or researcher's bread is buttered on the side that delivers research that makes the case for more government power.

In this sense we may say that Skewed Scholarship is closely related to another feature of the modern state, the state run as a patrimonial estate by the educated elite: in a word, Crony Capitalism.

Crony Capitalism is the market economy dominated by the patrimonial state. CEOs and capitalists learn that the way to make easy profits is by getting aligned with major government objectives. It used to be public electric power in the 1930s. In the 1950s and 1960s it was aerospace. In the 1970s it was energy conservation and environment. Now it is clean energy and very fast trains. (Did you know that the Chinese are slowing down their very fast empty trains so they can lower the ticket prices?)

Crony capitalists cozy up to political actors and get favorable terms written into legislation. They figure out how absurd pipe-dreams like goals for renewable energy, wind and solar, can be turned into subsidies and guarantees and sweetheart deals for their companies.

So we may say that when you have a overweening patrimonial state that has money and power and a desire to dominate the economic and moral-cultural sectors, you get, as a law of nature, Crony Capitalism and Skewed Scholarship. Jonah Goldberg has called this political system Liberal Fascism. By whatever name we are talking about the tendency of the modern political system to tip more and more in the direction of political primacy, where the political system gets more and more power over the rest of society (to deal with its bigger and bigger failures) and makes bigger and bigger toadies of the crony capitalists and the skewed scholars.

The joke is, of course, that eventually, when the politicians run out of other peoples' money they blame the crony capitalists and the skewed scholars. Speculators, they cry! Speculators are driving up the cost of gasoline! The skewed scholars, of course, suffer a less dramatic fate. They just end up testifying before an unfriendly Congress that is suddenly shocked, shocked, by the mistakes in their research. And then their grants dry up.

He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword. Should that include crony capitalists and skewed scholars? Well, yes. They are living from the crumbs that fall from the table of government, the patrimonial state of the educated liberal elite. And government is force; politics is power.

Hopes and Fears

2011-04-15T09:22:00.001-07:00

As President Obama begins his billion-dollar journey towards reelection there are two things he will want to remind us that really matter. First, there is the fear of another Republican presidency. We don't want to go back to that. Second, the hope for the future, to "pass on to our children a country that we believe in." He made all this clear in his April 13 speech at George Washington University. He attacks Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) for the pessimism of the Ryan Budget Plan.

I believe it paints a vision of our future that is deeply pessimistic. It’s a vision that says if our roads crumble and our bridges collapse, we can’t afford to fix them. If there are bright young Americans who have the drive and the will but not the money to go to college, we can’t afford to send them.

Who wouldn't fear an America like that? But there is hope.

The America I know is generous and compassionate. It’s a land of opportunity and optimism. Yes, we take responsibility for ourselves, but we also take responsibility for each other; for the country we want and the future that we share... We don’t have to choose between a future of spiraling debt and one where we forfeit our investment in our people and our country.

Let us think a little about how this business of hope and fear works. There is political hope and fear, economic hope and fear, and religious hope and fear. In China we would talk about the Three Hopes and the Three Fears.

At the political level, we talk about our fear of enemies. If you are a conservative, you fear Islamic extremism. If you are a liberal, you fear right-wing militias. Politicians are eager to lead us, to battle against the forces of darkness and lead us to the Promised Land. For conservatives that would be America, the last best hope of mankind on Earth. For liberals, it would be Peace and Justice.

At the economic level, we fear deprivation: hunger, homelessness, the Homeric horror of the man who is clanless, lawless, hearthless. But we hope for prosperity: a good job, successful career, and a nice little nest egg to ease the declining years.

In the soul, the depths of the ego, the fear is loneliness, the slough of despond, meaninglessness. We hope for salvation, for meaning, for a fullness of heart.

In the simple community all these hopes and fears are mixed together: we do not differentiate between the political, the economic, and the religious. They are all integrated in our minds. Thus is it that the modern politician, tugging at the ancient chords of memory, frightens us with hobgoblins that threaten our safety, our economic wellbeing, and our sense of meaning, and promises to lead us to peace, to prosperity, and make sense of the meaning of it all.

But the question is: what business has the politicians to talk about prosperity, when that is an economic function? And what business has he to talk about the meaning of life, or even the meaning of America? That is for moralists, for writers, for preachers.

Here we have the Great Question. In our articulated, differentiated world the politician seeks to enfold all of life into the political. But we know that when the political is folded into the religious the result is holy war. And we know that when the political is folded into the economic the result is, at best, crony capitalism and, at worst, the economic disaster of Maoist China.

Thus the Great Hope. We believe in the Greater Separation of Powers, to keep political power out of the economy and economic power out of politics. We believe in keeping moralism out of government and government out of morality.

We believe in an America where a politician that promises prosperity would be laughed out of court. What, after all, does a politician know about creating a business, and building prosperity? He knows nothing except shilling after votes. What does a politician know about morality, who taxes Peter so he can pay Paul for his vote?

Let the politicians stick to politics, defending us from enemies, foreign and domestic. Let the businessmen and the workers stick to products and services. Let the writers and the moralists stick to their appealing entertainments and their glorious visions. Let the moralists criticize the politicians and the businessmen. Let the politicians curb the businessmen when they cheat and steal. And let the rest of us keep the politicians on a very short leash and stop them short when the affect to moralize and imagine that they can manage the economy.

Wisconsin and Multitude

2011-04-01T09:51:00.000-07:00

The response of our Democratic friends to the 2010 midterm elections has not been good. Democratic legislators in Wisconsin and Indiana fled the state rather than allow Republicans a quorum to pass legislation they didn't like. Now we have reports of union leaders threatening Main Street businessmen with boycotts. That's when they are not trying to stop the legislation with friendly judges and attempts to pack the state Supreme Court.

There is a simple word for this kind of behavior: Injustice, and the liberal playbook says that when the power elite does this it sets up a prerevolutionary situation. When the ruling class games the system so that it can never lose, the people have no choice but to rebel. In other words, if conservatives were doing this, liberals would be screaming about Resistance! and Liberation! and taking to the streets. But liberals seem incapable of understanding that Resistance! and Liberation! could happen to them as they become a corrupt and cynical ruling class.

In my view there are three competing world views in the United States. There is the elite liberal view, which sees the American people as a backward and unevolved people that needs to be organized and assisted by an educated elite. Then there is the conservative view, in which the American people are sturdy, inventive yeomen, building families and businesses with practical Yankee ingenuity. Finally there is the radical view, which sees the American people as an oppressed people that needs to be organized into a movement for resistance and liberation. The point here is that, if you are a liberal, every problem needs to be solved by a government program run by educated experts. If you are a conservative every problem looks like an opportunity to get the government out and return it to the private sector where entrepreneurs and civil society will soon sort it out. But if you are a radical then every problem is an occasion for a resistance movement, in which the radicals will lead the masses to victory over the capitalists and the wealthy.

Obviously, in Wisconsin, it's a bit rich for the lefties to play the radical card and pretend that the overpaid and underworked government employees they lead are in fact helpless victims of a cruel and unjust system. To a conservative it is pretty obvious that the union members we have seen on TV are the paid supporters of the liberal elite. But it's not surprising. For liberals, a problem either requires a paternalistic government program or a resistance movement. When liberals are in charge they play the avuncular and evolved philosopher king; when tossed out of office they play the community organizer.

Some liberals have come to the realization that they need to update their world view. In Multitude Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argues that the left needs to move on from its old unitary categories of "people" "masses" and "working class." They propose the notion of "multitude." With the recent changes in the world economy it doesn't make sense to talk about workers producing things, mere material production. Today we have a more diverse "social production," not only the production of material goods but also the production of communications, relationships, and forms of life." Instead of the working class producing material goods we have the multitude cooperating to produce social goods.

In so far as the multitude is neither an identity (like the people) nor uniform (like the masses), the internal differences of the multitude must discover the common that allows them to communicate and act together. The common we share, in fact, is not so much discovered as produced.

See what is going on here? Hardt and Negri, hacking around in the thicket of their lefty jargon, are finally coming around to the argument that conservatives have been making for 250 years: with Adam Smith that there is an "invisible hand" guiding each individual into serving the whole; and with F.A. Hayek that the market economy is the result of millions of decisions by a multitude of consumers, business people, workers, buyers and sellers that could never by achieved by an administrative bureaucracy in Washington, DC or Madison, WI.

Only guess what! Hardt and Negri think that the multitude will form a new force of resistance, violent resistance that is superseding the old forms of civil unrest, guerrilla bands, and wars of liberation. The new resistance will be not be

a political body of which there is a head that commands, limbs that obey, and organs that function to support the ruler. The concept of the multitude changes this accepted truth of sovereignty. The multitude, although it remains multiple and internally different, is able to act in common and thus rule itself.

But this is exactly what conservatives say. No need for a political administrative elite of liberals--the head--telling the American people what to do. We are competent adults and perfectly capable of acting in common and ruling ourselves.

Hardt and Negri look upon social phenomena like the Seattle rioters of 1999, the anti-Bush "netroots," and the social-media coordinated March 2011 London rioters that spun off the official labor-union Alternative march as the wave of the future.

But I think they are blind to the truth. Their "netroots" are a few spoiled twenty-somethings playing at being the multitude. The real multitude contains the moderate voters that put the Republicans back in charge of the House of Representatives. It is the Tea Party that spontaneously formed a movement of resistance after the election of 2008 and now is putting steel into the spines of elected Republicans in Congress. When the liberal left responds to this movement of resistance with manipulations of the legal and political system using their pals in the government apparatus to thwart the will of the people they are setting up a pre-revolutionary situation.

The reason we have elections, and laws, and rules of procedure is so that we can have peaceful changes of government. The great question in politics for any partisan faction is this. If we defeat the current government at the ballot box will they release their grip on the levers of power and concede defeat? By their actions in Madison, Wisconsin, and their shenanigans over budget cuts in Congress our Democratic friends are telling us that they don't intend to go quietly.

In Multitude Hardt and Negri talk about "biopower" a term coined by French lefty Michel Foucault that refers to the numerous and diverse techniques the modern state have developed "for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations." In lefty discourse this malevolent power is always the corporations and the wealthy. But suppose the American people should come to decide that the malevolent power is composed of the liberals, the lefty academics, the MSM and the government employee unions that exercise "biopower" to tax them, regulate them, and control them in a profoundly unjust system? It wouldn't be the first time that a tired and incompetent dynasty completely misread the sign of the times.

Why Liberals Go On About Inequality

2011-03-25T09:59:00.001-07:00

Here's a cute little item in The Atlantic. It's a map about inequality, The 12 States of America, showing the change in per-capita income in the United States between 1980 and 2010. It takes the US county by county and shows which have experienced increasing real per-capita income and which have been experiencing declining real per-capita income. The counties are divided into twelve categories, such as "Immigration Nation," primarily Hispanic, where real per-capita income has gone down, and "Monied Burbs" where income has gone up.

The subtext is obvious. The rise in income inequality is unjust and requires a political response.

This is, of course, the classic view of the "unconstrained vision" discussed by Thomas Sowell in A Conflict of Visions. If there is inequality, say our liberal friends, then the presumption is that it is unjust and that political means must be deployed to correct the imbalance. Thus it is unjust that the counties in "Immigrant Nation" show a declining real per-capita income from $42,800 in 1980 to $38,900 in 2010.

Conservatives, who generally believe in a "constrained vision," and worry more about the fairness of the process than the results, would take a different line. We would say: well, of course the new immigrant counties are going to show reduced per-capita income. Immigrants from Latin America typically show low skills and thus cannot command high-paying jobs. The question is whether the process allows the immigrants to better themselves and create a better life for their children.

Since per-capita income has increased across the board from about $2-3 per capita per day in 1800 to $100 per capita per day in 2010 it would seem that inequality is not a bar to opportunity. Nearly everyone has running water, TV, and indoor heat today, and the poor are fatter than the rich.

The question for the future is whether it is the political system that creates inequality. Let us make a "constrained" vision argument on inequality. Chances are, says the conservative, that if there is persisting inequality then it is a product of the political system, that some people are denied fair access to the economic system. For instance, people on welfare are encouraged by the political system to divest themselves of jobs and spouses because you need to do that to qualify for benefits. But studies show that unmarried, jobless people are typically more likely to be poor than married people with jobs. To what extent, then, does the welfare state create inequality rather than fight it?

In simple terms, let us look at the situation of Hispanic immigrants who by all measures are less wealthy than native-born Americans. All people, presumably, would agree that we want to help them become part of America. The question is, shall we help them by working on the process, observing how the economic and political system helps them or hurts them? For instance, many Hispanics work off the books, because of illegal immigration status, or because of high payroll taxes. Or should we provide Hispanics with government benefits: welfare and health benefits to boost up their incomes directly?

Conservatives need to be very clear about these issues, because the crisis in government finances will permit a nation conversation on the efficiency and the justice of the pervasive welfare state programs. We've spent a century trying to solve inequality by direct subsidy and providing benefits to the low income community. Now we have an opportunity to change the conversation and work on the economic process and remove the unjust taxes and regulations that make working in the formal sector difficult for the low paid. It helps, of course, that there is no more money for more government programs.

On the level of rhetoric, of course, it's OK to accuse the liberals of using inequality to increase their political power. Bigger government benefits to low-income families increases liberal political power whereas process improvements don't benefit anyone except ordinary unorganized Americans.

Springtime for Freeloaders

2011-03-17T09:09:00.000-07:00

The big problem for humans, indeed all social animals, is freeloading. Whenever you have a society, there is always a temptation for the individual to lie, cheat, or steal. It's the nature of society that the benefits are spread widely and can be enjoyed by all, even those that don't contribute much, or perhaps, anything.

In the society of the great apes, the freeloading problem is solved by the dictatorship of the alpha males. But ancient human society in the hunter-gatherer groups, evolved, we believe, from the great apes, was egalitarian. So how did the hunter gatherers deal with the free-rider problem? The answer is: religion. Instead of a real life alpha male forcing the freeloaders up to the mark, they discovered that the gods were willing to do this job, thus avoiding the need for overbearing alpha males. And, as a special bonus, even if the gods didn't get around to punishing evildoers in this life, they would punish them in the next one.

Every society must deal with freeloaders; the question is how? Clearly, there is a spectrum of response, from a pure this-worldly alpha male model to a pure other-worldly alpha male model.

In our society we seemed to have developed a different approach, and I suspect that it is a consequence of the rise of capitalism.

Capitalism relies upon a network of trust. Capitalist actors, consumers, producers, and middle-men, build up long-term relationships of trust, backed up by a legal system that deals with the egregious defaulters. Science backs up this model with the Prisoners Dilemma concept, where it turns out that the best strategy is to trust people that act in a trustworthy manner towards you, and have nothing to do with people who demonstrate untrustworthiness.

But there has been, since the beginnning of capitalism, an opposing meme, that the capitalist trust network is fundamentally unjust because it creates unequal results. Hard workers, or just lucky workers, make more, and unlucky or less endowed workers make less. This offends the hunter gatherer instinct for equality.

There is a double catch here. On the one hand, some capitalists succeed not by hard work, but by luck. On the other hand, some unlucky workers are not just unlucky, but freeloaders taking advantage of the successful work of others.

In the 19th century, in a spontaneous process, people developed new social structures to ameliorate the luck quotient by developing labor unions and fraternal associations. These social institutions extended the solidarity among blood brothers outwards to non-related people who declared themselves the moral equivalent of brothers. Thus unlucky people could be assisted by their union or Masonic brothers, and nascent freeloaders encouraged to mend their ways, or get expelled from the brotherhood.

We threw the fraternal model away in the early 20th century and replaced it with the welfare state.

But the welfare state is a full-on encouragement to freeloaders. It tells members of society that if they are victims, they deserve help; that is their right. There is no mechanism to encourage social behavior. If you qualify for help, you get help. Obviously there is no limit to this sort of thing. It encourages everyone to discover a "right" and to demand support from the rest of society because of some disability.

We can see, from the recent Wisconsin events, that it is very difficult to tell the benefit recipients that the money is gone. Typically they react with rage. Freeloaders, like most evildoers, are not like Shakespeare's Iago, who delights in his villainy. They justify their evildoing with lies and self-deceit. They persuade themselves that they deserve what they steal; they have a right to it.

But obviously, the Springtime for Freeloaders is coming to an end, the welfare state is running out of money.

The question for reformers, working to restore a society of trust out of the debris of the age of freeloading, is how to proceed? Hawks like radio host Hugh Hewitt are pushing Republicans in Congress to press the pedal to the metal, and set up a showdown with Democrats, replicating the actions of Gov. Scott Walker (R) in Wisconsin.

But I wonder. I think that the freeloaders are going to have to see the bottomless pit opening up under them before they will be willing to give up their "rights," and I don't think we have reached that point. I don't think the average benefit recipient has a clue how close we are to a real financial meltdown.

Against that is the call of conscience, the need to be right with the divine judge. It is all very well to plan strategy and put your opponent in an impossible position. But against that is the moral imperative, to do the right thing.

And the right thing is to repair the government finances, no matter who it benefits today, or who it benefits tomorrow.

Because in the end we all must stand before the divine judge.

It's Not the Rule of Law

2011-03-03T09:09:00.000-08:00

We westerners like to witter on about the importance of the rule of law--compared to those lawless Islamic radicals, for example. The importance of law in the western canon goes right back to Homer and the Iliad. "A clanless, lawless, hearthless man is he that loveth dread strife among his own folk." So spake Nestor to his fellow Greeks at the gates of Troy. In modern terms, meat-and-potatoes conservative Sean Hannity speaks about people who go to work, follow the rules, pay their taxes, and obey the law. Yet this rules and laws principle reaches its apotheosis in the administrative welfare state where every social need is provided somewhere in a vast bureaucratic rulebook. This is what the culture of rules and laws leads to?

In fact, the world doesn't work on rigid rules at all. It may be that the lifeless world of cold steel and plastic works in a mechanical way, according to universal laws that provide one rule for all motion. But the social world does not, and we can get a clue from an unremarked fact about the mechanical world. The world of Newton's mechanics only works because of lubrication. The great clanking steam railway locomotives that I remember from my youth only worked because of the oil and grease in their bearings. Without the lubricating oil keeping the metal parts apart, every machine in existence would grind to a halt in seconds. Sure, the laws of mechanics and heat engines apply, but they are all framed by abstracting away the fact of friction. Friction is an annoying problem that gets introduced into mechanics by the back door. The same applies to social life.

Clausewitz famously introduced friction into his theory of war. Friction and the "fog of war" are what makes nonsense of every plan of attack. Shakespeare's Portia famously exposed the difficulty of enforcing a contract gone wrong. How do you measure out the pound of flesh that is specified as the forfeit? You can't live just with contracts and rules, you need also mercy, that falleth like the gentle rain from heaven. And people in their day-to-day activities replace strict rules with the flexibility of give-and-take. In British law this used to by symbolized by the two-track legal system, with courts of common law and courts of equity.

Even the lordly President Obama has already started to shade the majestic rules of his universal comprehensive health plan with waivers--for the politically connected big corporations and labor unions.

In the hunter-gatherer culture, humans worked up many answers to the friction problem. They designed their religion to deal with the freeloader problem; they organized all-night ritual drumming and dancing to soften and melt their feuds and animosities. Their political structure was remarkably egalitarian.

In our times we have capitalism which is a social system to reward flexible adaptation to the needs of others. It lies upon a hard bed of rigid commercial and contract law, but its everyday operations use give and take. Whatever the rules may say, it is the aim of every business owner to charm and please his customers, to create a long-term relationship that shades the starkness of buy-and-sell into a practical friendship.

Our great clanking welfare state is built upon a classic mistake. It built a vast machine of great complexity but forgot about the lubrication.

The great task of the next age of reform to to replace the clanking mechanical monstrosities with new institutions based upon the eternal principles of social life shared by all the social animals. For social animals, rules are not chiseled on tablets, or promulgated from a throne; they hover in the air suspended in a mist of social cooperation and give and take. This is a lesson that many forgot in the mechanical age. The sooner we relearn it, the better.

Between Freedom and Administration

2011-02-17T08:31:00.000-08:00

When a corporation declares bankruptcy, it is common to say that it is operating "under administration." It is a polite way of saying that the corporation is no longer free to direct its own affairs. It operates only at the pleasure of its creditors acting through the courts. Administration means subjection.

In a similar way, Jean-Francois Revel, writing The Totalitarian Temptation in the bleak years before Ronald Reagan when it seemed that democratic capitalism was dying and that communism would take over the world, or at least participate as full partner in the future, wrote of the essential fragility of the totalitarian state. It must act with force and severity because it does not serve the hopes of its citizens, he wrote. Totalitarian states are fragile and brittle; their administrative structure makes them rigid and slow to adapt to changing conditions and needs.

The democratic state, on the contrary, ever since its birth in the three branch theory of Montesquieu in the 18th century, is a system that disperses and devolves power into separate and flexible institutions. From the three-branch state of executive, legislative, and judicial powers, Revel suggests six new powers that have arisen since the 18th century: business power, union power, media power, police power, military power, and diplomatic power.

Now I like to work from Michael Novak's three-sector model: political, economic, and moral/cultural, so it immediately appears to me that his nine-power model is clearly deficient in the moral/cultural realm. He leaves out, as a Frenchman well may, churches, fraternal associations, charitable groups, cultural associations, organizations that are not formed either for economic enterprise nor for political purposes.

But his differentiation of the executive power is interesting and useful. The chief executive is commander-in-chief, but under democratic capitalism there is a clear separation between the civilian leadership of the armed forces and the uniformed armed services themselves. This separation is intended as a separation of powers to prevent military dictatorship; it keeps the army out of politics and hopefully keeps the armed services from too much meddling by the politicians. The police power is also a deliberate separation from the unified executive. The idea is to limit the power of the executive to use the police power for political purposes, to criminalize and weaken the opposition. Notice that the separation of military and police power from the executive is a big deal to our liberal friends, and a credit to them.

Yes, but what about separating the administrative power from the executive, so that the operation of government departments is kept at a distance from elected politicians and their desire for the power to reward their friends and punish their enemies with government largesse.

This, perhaps, is the next stage in political evolution. It is easy to see why our present ruling class, the educated elite, has little interest in curbing the executive's influence over administration. Administrative centralism is the very life blood of the modern state. Our modern educated youths organize their lives to succeed in the system of administrative centralism, with its credentialism, its ticket punching, and its social power. A vast media empire is devoted to the boosting of the cultural and political power of the high fliers that go to selective colleges, establish reputations as political or foundation staffers or young academics, and then become honored experts, mandarins in the administrative welfare state, and the authors of the complex administrative initiatives that are offered in season to mitigate the administrative failures of a previous round of administrative innovation--the consequences of the law of unintended consequences.

The effect of the system of administrative centralism is similar to its extreme version, the totalitarian state. It solves every political problem with compulsion, with a new schedule of administrative regulations, and new subsidies and penalties. Each new ratchet of compulsion rigidifies and fragilizes. It sets society up for a fall, for the whole point of practical politics is to stop people going off and doing things without permission.

But the lesson of the modern era is that humans are social animals that can achieve amazing things when you give them the dignity and the freedom to innovate and serve their fellow humans without the club of administrative centralism. The whole apparatus of prices and ownership and credit and profit is a spontaneous human social organism that strongly encourages people to serve the needs of their fellow humans. The differentiated universe of social cooperation is a vibrant organism of life; the centralized administrative pyramid of the unified state is a mechanism of lifeless automation and compulsion.

The great challenge of the next generation is a moral/cultural one. It is to proselytize a new faith in freedom and dignity, and to marginalize the false faith in unity and compulsion. For the lesson of the 20th century is that centralization and compulsion through political power is a temptation of Satan himself. That was what Satan famously offered Jesus Christ: power over all the world.

But Christ said No; get thee behind me, old chum. And you can see why, not just from a moral point of view, but a practical point of view. Everything that political power touches turns to stone. Olease, for God's sake, keep politics and compulsion out of it; we humans are social animals, not regimented ants.

Just look at the commanding heights of the poltical sector. Government pensions are a mess, and about to bankrupt the states. Government health care is a mess as people massively overuse health care that is "free at the point of delivery." Government education has been on a decline for a century, as nobody values education that is free, and the failures lead to more and more regimentation and compulsion and the universal incarceration of children in government educational facilities. Government welfare is a joke, a program that could not have been better formulated if its intention had been to destroy the culture and the families and the work skills of the poor.

So what do we do? What is the first step back to freedom and dignity and away from administration and compulsion? Stay tuned; the best is yet to come.

Beyond Blame

2011-02-11T09:17:00.000-08:00

If we want to understand who to blame for the current cock-up in government, it is easy: our liberal friends.

It is liberals that have championed the neo-feudal welfare state and its politicization of everything.

Yes, of course, years ago liberals had noble thoughts about helping the helpless. But because their social vision did not extend beyond the administrative model of the absolute monarchs, their noble initiatives have inevitably descended into simple patronage politics. Politicians bid for the votes of the voters by dangling benefits before them. Inevitably, they offer more than the economy can deliver, and so, at some point, the government runs out of money to tax, borrow, or print.

So far so good. But there is a question ultimately more interesting and more uplifting than the tawdry question of blame. After all, all governments are a mess, stumbling from one disaster to another. All governments. Even in its heyday in the 19th century, the British Empire was a succession of disasters. First there was the mess of the Crimean War. Then there was the Indian Mutiny, called, in India, the Uprising. Then there was Gordon in Khartoum, followed by the Boer War. What a mess!

No, my question is: what is it about the belief system of our liberal friends that led them into the blind alley of the administrative welfare state? What was it that allowed them to imagine that their big government would be any different from the big governments of history? What made them believe that the vast expansion of government would be anything other than a moral and cultural disaster? What made them think that you could have liberation, dignity, and justice with a big overweening government? After all, the whole point of a good belief system and its moral universe is to help its believers and practitioners avoid the common pitfalls of self-delusion and hypocrisy. A good religion should be a prop, and help you live a worthy and a meaningful life. It should not lead you into a reactionary political system and a swamp of hypocrisy.

In my view the big problem is that our liberal friends cannot see that their moral and political enthusiasms are, in the strict sense, religions. They think that they have grown beyond the superstitions and the narrowness of religious belief. In fact they think that religion is on its way out as people come to rely on science and reason instead of fanciful belief in gods and spirits.

In fact, of course, the history of the modern era is the story of one secular religious movement after another. You can start with the French Revolution and its cult of Reason. Then there is Romanticism, a belief that there is something deeper than reason that explains the nature of life. There is socialism in all its variants, the nostalgic idea that we can return to the Garden of Eden of perfect, eternal community. There is Comte and his Religion of Humanity. There is fascism, the nostaglia for the tribe and the kindred. There is Nietzsche and the Ubermensch, the extraordinary individual. There is the cult of creativity, the transformation of the natural generative urge into a metaphor of non-physical creation. There is the puritanical environmentalist movement that seeks to purify and save a polluted and corrupted world. It goes on and on.

Our liberal friends fail to understand that the meaning of life, its telos, is always a mystery. We do not know our human purpose, if we have a purpose. We do not know how we should act in order to survive and flourish. We do not even know if human survival is warranted. What we have is faith. We believe that certain ways are the best way to survive, to flourish, and to create a moral society. In the day-to-day social life we try to work out what is best for us, best for our families, best for our larger social groupings, and best for the world. In the arena of national politics, liberals believe in certain liberal folkways and conservatives believe in certain conservative folkways. It seems pretty certain that the other guys have got the wrong end of the stick and are likely to bring the nation to disaster. And because government is almost always a train wreck in progress, the governing class must bear the weight of the blame.

In the United States, over the last century, the educated class of liberals, progressives, creatives, secularists--whatever you want to call them--have dominated politics and culture. It is their ideas that drive the government, with its trillion dollars a year in government pensions, its trillion dollars a year in government health care, its trillion dollars a year in government education, and its three-quarters of a trillion dollars a year in government welfare. It is liberals that dominate the universities, liberals that dominate the entertainment media. They have caused the current crisis because they lacked the self-consciousness to realize that they, just like everyone before them, have a religion. It's a secular religion, for sure, but religion all the same. When you take your religion and you breathe it into all the organs of government, legislating morality with that secular religion, then you break down the separation between church and state, between the political sector and the moral/cultural sector. Of course, you don't believe that. You think that only right-wing preachers and right-wing politicians can create a theocracy.

But it takes a remarkably narrow and pinched understanding of the modern age not to understand that, in socialism and communism, and now in environmentalism and the climate change movement, we have what we have often had in the past, militant religions enthusiastically pursuing a vision to save the world from sin.

ObamaCare and the Bigger Question

2011-02-07T09:51:00.000-08:00

Why do liberals believe that the only way to improve the delivery of health care is by more compulsion? That is, after all, the assumption behind ObamaCare.

There are millions of people without proper health insurance, say liberals, the millions of the uninsured. We propose to correct this with a system of subsidies paid out of taxes and mandates and administrative regulation. In other words, faced with the problem that many people lack the means to acquire the middle-class approach to health care, government should force the nation to supply health insurance to them.

The liberals get to this position through a political narrative of inequality and oppression. They observe that many people cannot afford the social goods of health care and education. They conclude that the reason is injustice. It may be that a minority--racial or ethnic--has been historically marginalized. It may be that employers exploit their workers with low pay and limited benefits. It may be privilege, that certain groups have access to desirable social goods because of their parents' social and economic position. It may justs be that skilled people can afford more than unskilled people. Or there is the poverty-line argument. It takes a certain amount of money for a family to afford the basics of food and shelter, and society should assist those people that fall below that standard.

But in all cases, our liberal friends make the same leap. If there is a deficiency, it should be made up by a government program. Our liberal friends do not seem to understand what they are saying when they do this. They are saying that there is no way of providing social goods except through a lot of force and compulsion.

Oh really?

Many of the arguments that liberals make, of course, begin by assuming that force is needed. If you make the inequality argument, you are saying that only a certain degree of inequality is just, and that inequality in excess of that standard requires government intervention. The marginalization argument and the employer exploitation argument imply that discrimination, a veiled form of force, is abroad and probably can only be corrected by countervailing force.

The conservative argument is that, while exploitation and privilege certainly abound in the United States, they are not absolute barriers to a decent life. Uneducated immigrants and kids from single-parent families have a hard row to hoe. But they can and do get ahead. Indeed, they mostly do. In fact, we add, if you look at the numbers you learn that it is very difficult to be poor in America if you finish high school, get married, and don't have a child in your teens. That expresses the notion that even with a basic education, you can earn a decent wage in America to get food, shelter, and modest luxuries.

The question we wish to open is this. Why do we assume that "social goods" should be delivered through government? "There is such a thing as society, it's just not the same thing as the state," says Prime Minister David Cameron. In fact, as social animals, humans derive much of their feeling of self-worth and meaning from contributing to social enterprises, whether in a work team, a family, a church, or a benevolent association. Conservatives believe that it is part of everyone's duty to be aware of the needs of people they know, and to work to help them when they need help. These services are best delivered person to person, face to face. Failing that, it is best to deliver them through small, local organizations rather than big bureaucratic administrations. Failing that, it is better to deliver services through big non-profit associations than big government departments.

Why is that? Why is it better to help the helpless and the less fortunate face to face rather than through a big organization? It is partly because each person is an individual, and has specific and personal needs that are not easily accommodated to the rules and procedures of a large bureaucracy. It is also because people feel a larger obligation, both in giving and receiving in a personal face-to-face relationship. People feel more obligated to do the right thing around people they know. With a bureaucracy, they find ways to game the system, because nobody will know, and nobody will care.

There are some social goods, perhaps many social goods, that can only be delivered using force. But conservatives believe that, for the headline social goods of pensions, health care, education, and welfare, a sharply reduced government share would be beneficial to all: to those that must step up their help for their fellow citizens to those receiving help from their fellow citizens. It's the social thing to do.

Conservatives believe that ObamaCare will either get repealed or it will lead to a meltdown in health care. We believe that there has to be a better way than force.

Liberals Administering Prosperity

2011-02-03T05:51:00.000-08:00

President Obama talked a Reaganesque line in his State of the Union speech about business and innovation. Here's his paean to business.

Our free enterprise system is what drives innovation. But because it’s not always profitable for companies to invest in basic research, throughout our history, our government has provided cutting-edge scientists and inventors with the support that they need. That’s what planted the seeds for the Internet. That’s what helped make possible things like computer chips and GPS. Just think of all the good jobs -- from manufacturing to retail -- that have come from these breakthroughs.

Notice the "but". But government needs to step in to fund basic research, to plant the seeds of the internet.

Here's where our liberal friends smuggle their statism in the back door.

The internet, Mr. President, was invented through DARPA research because the Pentagon thought that the government needed a communications network that could survive interruption in nuclear war. In other words, the government invented the internet for reasons of defense. The government paid for semiconductor research because it needed lightweight electronics for ballistic missile guidance. In other words, the government was looking after its own needs, and its core responsibility of defense.

But this is an imperfect world. Politicians and experts aren't satisfied by the mundane tasks of defense. They want to save the world. That's how we get from defense research to climate-change research. But saving the world is not a government task. Saving the world is a religious task. It's the job of people with a moral mission, not a defense mission. Moral missions, of course, are much more fun. You can divide the world into the good guys and the bad guys, and you can lead a moral crusade against the bad guys. But never mind about that. Government doesn't just want to lead people on moral crusades; it wants to feed every child and put two cars in every garage.

The big problem, in other words, is mission creep. And when government gets into mission creep in the economic sector it starts building technological and economic white elephants. Mission creep leads to waste and corruption and to crony capitalism. Government doesn't make people more prosperous. It just gives money to its supporters, and stiffs the rest.

This really isn't hard. Government should stick to its basic functions and people in political life should stick to the dull and dutiful job of defending society from enemies that want to kill us or defraud us. The fun job of saving the world should be left to moral leaders. And the hands-on job of innovation and making new products should be left to businessmen, scientists, engineers, marketers, designers, salespeople, and investors.

When government tries to get into the business of innovation and basic research not related to its core functions, it makes a mess. That's because government is force, politics is power. Business is different. Business is about imagining and then creating products and services. Business is about listening to consumers and responding to their every whim. Leave business to business, and concentrate on applying force on them when they do something criminal. Otherwise, leave them alone, and above all, don't tempt them into crony capitalism.

The Indictment

2011-02-01T06:39:00.000-08:00

For the last century and a half everyone has been whaling on the middle class--the bourgeoisie, the factory owners, the booboisie--and tremendous fun it has been. As with most calumnies there was a grain of truth in the indictment of the middle class and everything it stood for. The bourgeoisie, dignified and free, had in the industrial revolution transformed society from an agricultural age to an industrial age. Millions of lives had been transformed; completely new ideas and practices had sprung out of the ground; untold wealth had been created. But there was a terrible cost. Millions of people found themselves toiling and working in satanic mills in squalid slums on the edge of want and starvation; if that was the bottom line of the industrial age, it needed radical surgery.

That was the judgment of a new class that emerged out of the revolutions of 1848, the educated middle class radicalized by the turmoil and the suffering of the high industrial revolution in Europe. These people were young, they were educated, and they were idealistic. They saw that the toiling masses that wove the textiles, mined the coal, forged the steel, and drove the railroad locomotives worked and lived on the edge of poverty in conditions little short of hellish. What was the point of the new age of rights and liberties, of inventions and manufactures, if they could not lead to concrete improvement in the lives of the masses? They decided that political revolution, or at least radical reform, was needed to create a better society.

A century before, educated young men like John Wesley and George Whitefield had chosen a different path. They had led farm laborers and mechanics into a social movement of aspiration and responsibility. They believed that the lower orders had the ability and the virtue in them to rise and to prosper even without political transformation. But the 1848 generation of educated youth believed that it was the system that prevented the workers from rising. To the youthful Karl Marx, the old agricultural order, in which the feudal lords had exploited the serfs, had given way to more of the same, a new system of oppression in which the bourgeoisie exploited the industrial proletariat. In response to this perceived injustice, the 1848ers constructed a political vision that would raise them, the educated class, to political hegemony as permanent guardians of the proletariat. Practical activists, they adapted the political structure of the absolute monarchs of the 17th century for their own use. These monarchs had needed expensive standing armies to maintain their power, and that required a revolution in the organization of the state. It needed discipline, loyalty, a rational organization, and money. The monarchs found they had to cut through or circumvent the web of institutions separating them from their subjects and tax them direcly. To do that they needed a state bureaucracy staffed by professional administrators. Just like its parallel military organization, the state bureaucracy came to control the individual citizen as the military bureaucracy controlled the individual soldier.

Sounds familiar? Yet that is exactly what the generation of 1848 decided, as they worked to build a system that could deliver rights, benefits and programs to the helpless workers. They needed a system of administrative centralism to control society and extract the resources they needed to right the injustices of an unjust age.

Of course, the 1848ers were wrong. The workers were not condemned to everlasting poverty. They began to prosper steadily in the second half of the 19th century, perhaps assisted by legislation. Maybe we never needed the 1848ers and the educated political class.

Too late: now we are stuck with them and their system unless we rise up and change it. Because their system of of administrative centralism is unjust.

The modern central administrative state is just as unjust as the state bureaucracies of the absolute monarchs, and for the same reason. A society in which the major activities of life have been brought under the direct administration of a political ruling class is necessarily unjust, for it collapses political society into an administrative organ that is nothing more than the instrument of its ruler.

Thus we can say that the administrative welfare state that the post-1848 educated class, now out liberal friends, have imposed upon the American people is an abomination. It is deluded, for it attempts to solve a problem that never existed. It is unjust, for it puts a thumb on the scales of justice to advantage politically favored groups over others. It is cruel, for it substitutes government compulsion for voluntary cooperation and responsibility. It is wasteful, for it rejects the efficiencies of the market for the rigidities of government. It is corrupt, for it favors its well-connected supporters and politically powerful interests over the unconnected and the unorganized.

The administrative welfare state, the regime of administrative centralism invented by the absolute monarchs and perfected by the post-1848 educated class, is the rule of injustice. Once it was royal injustice; now it is liberal injustice.

It is an abomination, and it shall not stand.

The Social Challenge

2011-01-27T06:42:00.000-08:00

When conservatives want to do something about the cost of entitlements, social democrats say, as President Obama said at his 2011 State of the Union speech, "let’s make sure that we’re not doing it on the backs of our most vulnerable citizens."

When conservatives react against a universal government program of health delivery, they say that "no one should go without health care." Or if it's a program to deliver health care to children, "no child should be without health care." On education, the cry is No Child Left Behind. Even President George W. Bush got behind that slogan.

When people make deliver these challenges, they mean that there ought to be a program. There ought to be a nation government program of health insurance paid for with tax dollars and administered by the federal government. Or child health care. Or education. As if that is the only way to deliver social goods.

The conservative challenge is to change the argument. Nobody doubts the need for social goods. The question is whether the administrative centralism is the right, or indeed the just way to do it.

A century ago, many advanced social thinkers were confident that these social goods could and should be provided by administrative centralism, tax-funded government programs negotiated in the political sector through comprehensive legislation and administered by a department of the central government.

A century later, this vision seems hopelessly naive. In the first place, the negotiation of social goods in the political sector is extremely divisive, and descends into a brawl over dividing the spoils of political victory. In the second place, governments have demonstrated that, on average, they deliver these services very badly. In the United States, the government pension programs have all grossly overpromised pensions to current and future beneficiaries. The government health care programs have distorted the health care delivery system and greatly increased costs because of the "third party" payment problem. The education system has been captured by the producers, and one political party has been completely neutered by the power of the teacher unions. The government welfare system has succeeded in wrecking the low-income family.

So if President Obama warns against harming the most vulnerable citizens, he would have a point--if he were directing his concern against the cruelty and the injustice of the present administrative welfare state. It has notoriously spawned social pathologies, divided the nation, and wasted valuable resources. Governments in the United States spend about one trillion dollars a year on government pensions, one trillion dollars a year on government health care, one trillion dollars a year on government education, half a trillion dollars a year on government welfare, and it does it badly.

Conservatives have an alternative to this cruel, corrupt, unjust, wasteful, and deluded system. The conservative argument is that the universal delivery of social goods through government like old age pensions, health care, education, and welfare is a bad idea and there are other, better ways to realize the promise of universal health care and universal education. The answer is to take these social goods out of the grip of the state and hand them back to society.

There is such a thing as society, it's just not the same thing as the state. Society, on the view of political philosopher Michael Novak can be thought of as three separate and coequal sectors. There is the political sector, which specializes in activities that need force; it says, you must. There is the economic sector, which specializes in activities that need cooperation and exchange; it says, we can. There is the moral/cultural sector, which specializes in moral questions; it says, I should.

Conservatives ask: why do our liberal friends insist, against all the evidence, that social goods can only be delivered according to the principle of force?

Blue Social Model: That's All There Is?

2011-01-18T07:36:00.000-08:00

Our liberal friends live and work and write as though the "developed" model for western countries, the bureaucratic social welfare state and the bureaucratic corporate model were the final end point of social development. Thus: "developed."

But Walter Russell Mead argues that they must be kidding us.

The "blue social model" had its good points, but putting working people onto unionized bureaucratic life-employment tracks and putting white-collar people into corporate bureaucratic life-employment tracks pretty obviously can't go on much longer.

Ironically, many social critics on the left were appalled by the bureaucratic system.

Social critics spent decades, rightly in my view, denouncing our school system from Pre-K through Ph.D. Mediocre, conformity inducing, alienating, time wasting: the school system trains kids to sit still, follow directions, and move with the herd.

And what we have seen over the last generation, the years after the "developed" moment in 1970, is that the economy is much more fluid and entrepreneurial than the "blue social model" assumed. We've seen remarkable changes, technological and social, in the last generation.

As the economy becomes more fluid, more entrepreneurial, it is clear that raising one generation after another of aspiring time-serving bureaucrats is not very effective.

We have a stuff-rich society where even the "poor" have a lot of material comfort. But now it's time to think beyond material to meaning.

The blue social model, for all its merits, separates production and consumption in ways that are ultimately dehumanizing and demeaning for large chunks of the population. The true value of human life does not come from consumption, even lots of consumption. It comes from producing goods and services of value through the integration of technique with a vision of social and personal meaning. Being fully human is about doing good work that means something.

Our liberal friends have been very good at designed meaning for themselves. They are all in favor of extended education, of creative arts, of meaningful activism, of saving the planet. But all these paths of meaning seem to be accompanied by notices that say "conservatives need not apply." That is, after all, the meaning of assaulting conservatives about their hateful and violent rhetoric. It is to say that conservatives have nothing to contribute to social meaning.

But our liberal friends are heading for disaster. The next social model must include everyone in the conversation, and that means a moral/cultural model that includes not just liberal discourse but moderate and conservative discourse as well.

By denying ordinary Americans the right to contribute to the cultural conversation, liberals are denying them the right to live lives of meaning.

When liberals deny the right to a life of meaning, there is only one thing to say. Liberal cultural hegemony is unjust, and it will not stand.

Spirit Level Week: The Bourbon Left

2011-01-07T09:46:00.000-08:00

It was famously said of the French Bourbon kings as they returned to France after the fall of Napoleon that they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing. It's tempting to say the same thing of our liberal friends.

What did President Obama and the Reid/Pelosi Congress think they were doing? And what do Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, authors of The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger think they are doing, offering up the same-old same-old after a century of the centralized administrative welfare state.

The answer is that, in the absence of formal religious belief, our liberal friends collapse their moral and cultural beliefs into their politics. What began as a moral movement 150 years ago determined to do something about the horrible sufferings of the poor in the big industrial cities of Britain and the USA has developed into a broad established church. Slowly, over the years, the concern has changed. Originally it was helping the poor, men and women that you could see suffering on the other side of the tracks in your home town. Then it became a more amorphous war on poverty--notice the abstract noun.

But now "poor" and "poverty" doesn't cut it. Not when "Overweight among the poor seems to be strongly associated with income inequality." You mean that the poorer someone is, the fatter?

Now the broad church of the educated ruling class wants to talk about "inequality." But the agenda is the same, and even the characters are the same, including the Rowntree trusts, that helped set up the agenda for the welfare state over a century ago.

When disaster strikes, it strikes harder in cities that lack a culture of trust. Thus, after Hurricane Katrina, Wilkinson and Pickett tell us, Governor Kathleen Blanco (D) warned looters that National Guard troops were locked and loaded. But 160 years ago Alexis de Tocqueville noted the "equality of conditions" in America; people trusted each other. And so it turns out, according to Wilkinson and Pickett, that opinion polls find that "most people can be trusted" in more equal societies. And that goes for the US. New Orleans is the most unequal city and has very little trust. North Dakota is equal and has high trust.

All things being equal, everyone wants a less unequal society. But the question is: how? The answer running through The Spirit Level is more of the same, more liberal top-down centralizing, social-science based programs. If you read through The Spirit Level there is no attempt at discussion about the effectiveness of the usual liberal nostrums. Anything that liberals like is good.

The one thing that Wilkinson and Pickett do not discuss is the possibility that it is welfare state policies that create inequality.

Back in the mid 19th century women like George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell were writing novels about life at the edge of poverty. The stock villain was the young man of good family who didn't have to make his way in the world, who had an income or an allowance from his parents, and couldn't think of anything better to do than run up debts and get working-class girls knocked up. In Middlemarch the great sub-plot grinding away off-stage from the lovely Dorothea and the awful Casaubon is the moral drama of Fred Vincy, wastrel son of the mayor and manufacturer Mr. Vincy. But Fred cannot get the sensible, practical Mary Garth to marry him until he gets his life together and gets a job. What a concept.

Of course, in the lives of the educated ruling class, this sort of culture is taken for granted. Nobody respects someone without a career. Today nobody respects a woman without a career.

But liberals keep insisting that these rules don't apply to the lower orders. We've got to treat the excluded and the deprived like 19th century cads, bailing them out of their messes, paying their debts, and excusing their debaucheries. They're depraved on account they're deprived, Officer Krupke.

The lesson of the mid-century moralists was that people needed to live in a moral community in which they really depended and relied upon the good conduct and the good will of their neighbors. Why won't our liberal friends extend the same respect to their political clients instead of treating them like moral imbeciles?

No they won't, because after a century of the welfare state they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

Part I: Equality Without Context

Part II: Who's to Blame?

Part III: What About Equality?

Spirit Level Week: What About Equality?

2011-01-06T09:15:00.000-08:00

The hot new liberal book The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argues that, since the more equal developed countries demonstrate lower health and social problems, we should implement more egalitarian initiatives, such as higher taxes on the rich and employee-owned companies. But can this politically compelled egalitarianism work in practice?

Let us look at the question from a Marxian perspective. Marx maintained that laws and culture are a "superstructure" built upon the base of underlying "productive forces." Here is what he wrote:

[M]en inevitably enter Into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely [the] relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of consciousness.

It is notable that hunter-gatherer society was usually extremely egalitarian. Men combined immediately against anyone who tried to become a powerful leader. Boasting, e.g., about hunting prowess, was verboten and food-sharing was widespread. In Marxian terms, we can say that the nature of hunter-gatherer life called for a strict egalitarianism.

But the agricultural revolution seems to have changed all that. It ran on different productive forces, and the superstructure was different. From our perspective, agricultural society was remarkably oppressive and hierarchical. It was a status society, in which the status of the people and the social hierarchy was fixed and inherited. A warrior landed class ruled over all. We can see that the peculiar nature of agricultural life required this exploitative superstructure, for the agricultural peasant is extremely vulnerable to plunder and piracy. He must store enough food to survive from one harvest to the next and save enough seed corn to grow the new crop as well. The peasant desperately needs defense from raiders, and the price in subjection and servitude was very high.

It seems clear that the industrial revolution changed the productive forces significantly. The productive forces that got us from $3/day two centuries ago to $100/day today require, according to Deirdre McCloskey in her Bourgeois Cycle, a bourgeoisie dignified and free. Boourgeois trading and bourgeois innovation are astonishingly productive, creating a free lunch of wealth in which all can participate. The social superstructure is egalitarian, in that anyone can trade and innovate, but it is also hierarchical, allowing successful upstarts to become very wealthy, lording it over their fellows with trophy wives and executive jets before they get religion and give all their money away in philanthropy.

Wilkinson and Pickett see an end to the economic growth and innovation of the bourgeois era. On the one hand, people in the developed countries no longer find improvement in their quality of life from income increases, and the search for material wealth increases anxiety rather than wellbeing. On the other hand, we need to transition to a sustainable lifestyle to deal with the "problems of global warming and the environmental limits to growth."

You can see what is going on here. Wilkinson and Pickett are proposing a return to a hunter-gatherer social system, where competition and innovation is self-consciously directed at combining "acceptable living standards with a sustainable economy".

Never mind whether this vision is desirable. Is it possible? If modern society is governed in order to return it to the steady state of the hunter-gatherer era, can we survive and thrive? On Marx's view of the productive forces, we are bound to wonder. And, to apply the Precautionary Principle, we would have to suggest that the burden of proof is on the egalitarians to prove that their egalitarian future will actually work.

One thing to keep in mind: the egalitarian countries admired by Wilkinson and Pickett are often countries with a very low total fertility rate. Germany reports 1.36 children per woman and Japan reports 1.26 children per woman. However Sweden is up at 1.80. Maybe the problem will be solved when the egalitarian countries cease to exist.

Part I: Equality Without Context

Part II: Who's to Blame?

Part IV: The Bourbon Left

Spirit Level Week: Who's To Blame?

2011-01-05T09:38:00.000-08:00

In The Spirit Level Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett determine that people in developed countries with high inequality (i.e. the US and UK) suffer more health and social problems that people in low inequality countries (i.e. Sweden, Japan).

For Wilkinson and Pickett, the solution is government programs to mitigate inequality, such as higher taxation of the rich and/or promotion of employee-owned companies.

We hope we have shown that there is a better society to be won: a more equal society in which people are less divided by status and hierarchy; a society in which we regain a sense of community, in which we overcome the threat of global warming, in which we own and control our work democratically as part of a community of colleagues, and share in the benefits of a growing non-monetized sector of the economy.

In other words the solution to our problems is the enactment of the current center-left agenda, a world congenial for university professors to live in.

Yesterday, we looked at the absent historical context in Wilkinson's and Pickett's analysis. Now let's look at the absent political context.

Wilkinson and Pickett note that inequality has risen in the United States and the United Kingdom recently, especially in the 1980s during the presidency of Ronald Reagan and the ministry of Margaret Thatcher. In both nations, inequality increased by about 40 percent. The question is: was that good or bad? Was it inevitable, after the Great Inflation of the 1970s, or could it have been avoided? They also show that in the United States social mobility, expressed as a percentage of sons' income explained by fathers' incomes, as gone down since 1980. Is that due to fathers giving their sons a leg up at the family firm? Or is it the result of lousy government education in the inner cities, and the demolition of the low-income family by welfare?

The fact is that it is very difficult to obtain clear answers to these questions, good people disagree profoundly about them. Moreover, it is very difficult to change any government program once it has been started up.

So when a couple of university professors talk easily about reducing status and hierarchy, regaining a sense of community, overcoming the threat of global warming, and turning work into a community of colleagues, we have to ask a question. What gives us any confidence that political action can ameliorate these problems? Let's take them one by one:

Status and hierarchy. If you start more government programs you are going to increase status and hierarchy. Today we have a definite hierarchy in the west. The educated ruling class is at the top of the hierarchy and uses its political and cultural power to shame and blame anyone that dares to challenge it. So more of the same will reduce status anxiety and oppressive hierarchy?
Sense of community. More politics will restore community? It is precisely the government takeover of many social and moral tasks that has torn the gut out of "community." Ordinary people are denied local cultural and social power by a centralized bureaucratic state. Reduce the power of the state and you will get more of a sense of community.
Global Warming. Whatever may or may not happen with global warming, the scientific consensus is that reducing our carbon footprint is going to do very little to reduce carbon dioxide. The left's program of big government to the rescue is likely to be an economic disaster.
Community of Colleagues. Yes, it sounds very nice, but this is the central error of the left, that everyone wants to get out in the evening for a nice political meeting. Some people want to be involved in management; some don't. It is certainly true that employee ownership exposes employees to significant risk, because it ties their entire prosperity to the success of their employer. Some people think that people shouldn't put all their eggs in one basket. And anyway, it is unlikely that center-left professors have a clue what will work in the economic sector. Even the people that are most successful in business haven't got a clue. And, of course, if economists knew what would work they would all be billionaires.
Non-monetized Economy. I'll tell you what you'd get in a non-monetized economy. Status and hierarchy; who you know, not what you know. The miracle of the money economy is that it is no respecter of persons. A product is a product; a service is a service. Remove money from the equation and you get people-to-people. Status not contract.

The big question in the years ahead is what to do about the monster state we have created over the last century. How are we going to reform it? How can we reform it? Wilkinson and Pickett do not address the question of government reform. Well, they wouldn't. They are professors from government universities tied into the educated ruling class. Why would they imagine that you can improve on a good thing? They don't even think about it. They just know that more power for the educated ruling class is a good thing.

Part I: Equality Without Context

Part III: What About Equality?

Part IV: The Bourbon Left

Spirit Level Week: Equality Without Context

2011-01-04T08:49:00.000-08:00

I first became aware of The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by British university professors Richard Wilkinson and Kat Pickett over the weekend. I followed a link from RealClearPolitics to The New York Times: "Eliminating Inequality is Good for the Soul" was the link. Actually, the article by Nicholas Kristof was titled "Equality, A True Soul Food." Writes Kristof:

So why is inequality so harmful? “The Spirit Level” suggests that inequality undermines social trust and community life, corroding societies as a whole. It also suggests that humans, as social beings, become stressed when they find themselves at the bottom of a hierarchy.

So I picked up a copy of the book. It argues, from lots of research and government data on developed countries, that health and social problems are higher in more unequal societies, right across the income spectrum. Getting specific, these problems are higher in the US and the UK, where inequality is high, than in Germany, Sweden, and Japan, where inequality is lower.

Let's accept the book's argument, that people do better in an equal society, and think about what it means.

The big problem is that Wilkinson and Pickett provide no context. They present data that shows inequality; they talk about hierarchy, about exclusion, and about deprivation as though humans are blank slates on which social and political structures write their story.

OK, let's provide some context. The US is more unequal that Germany and Sweden. Why might that be?

The US is notable in that, ever since the 1830s, it has been receiving millions of immigrants, people who, in most cases, have come straight off the farm. This was true for the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, and then, after World War II, the blacks coming off rural poverty in the South, and latterly Hispanics coming off the farm in Mexico. These are people thrown into a world for which they are ill adapted. They are not migrating from one farm to another. They are moving off the farm and parachuting into the industrial city. They are going to have to struggle and adapt to make it in the urban industrial world of the city. You think that's easy?

In the UK there has been, since World War II, a significant influx of immigrants from the West Indies and South Asia, and this has swelled recently, by design, during the recent Labour government.

It is notable that, in the more-equal countries, in Scandanavia and Japan, there has been little immigration, until very recently. Here's a story about how Japan discourages immigration (and low-wage competition) from the Philippines.

Our lefty friends have, over the last two hundred years, been repeatedly scandalized by the messy facts of reality. First they were appalled by the chaos of the industrial revolution. Well, just how would this unprecedented change in human society from agriculture to industry occur without wrenching difficulties? In the early years of the industrial revolution, the migration was at least within the countries industrializing. But soon, with the advent of steam navigation, the great migration became trans-Atlantic. Now of course the Chinese people are migrating at a rate of 15 million a year into the burgeoning cities. The idea that a compassionate political elite could manage this migration, the greatest migration in human history and the greatest increase in human population in history, without severe problems is laughable. Of course, when an actual left-wing activist was in charge of China's adaption to the modern world, the result was that tens of millions of Chinese starved to death in the Great Leap Forward. Same thing in Russia, where about ten million people starved in the 1930s. At no time in the industrial development of the UK and the US was there famine. In fact the record for the US and UK is that, in the wake of the industrial revolution, increase in well-being was consistent and extraordinary with notable blips, in the 1840s and the 1880s and the 1930s when government screwed up the economy. In the US and UK, there was a notable increase in inequality in the 1980s. Perhaps that had something to do with the economic recovery after the Great Inflation of the 1970s. You remember the Great Inflation. It was caused by an excess of Keynesian economics and was inspired by the notion that politicians and economic experts could fine tune the economy, avoiding unemployment with just a little bit of inflation.

The lesson from the last two hundred years is that, when change happens, the result is that the early adopters do very well, but the great mass of people struggle to catch up. There's a word to describe how that appears in national income statistics. Inequality.

But if you remove the context from your analysis, you aren't going to know much about what your numbers mean. And Wilkinson and Pickett don't seem to have a clue.

Part II: Who's to Blame?

Part III: What About Equality?

Part IV: The Bourbon Left

Raising the Conservative Game

2010-12-31T09:46:00.000-08:00

Ring out the old, ring in the new. 2010 was a great year for conservatives, as this center-right nation lurched away from a left-liberal central government. But what about the future? What really is our vision; what do we want to accomplish for America and what do we want America to become?

Here are some basic ideas for raising our game.

No more Moral Equivalent of War. Way back, a century ago, philosopher William James proposed to replace war (which, in 1906, seemed on its way out) with the Moral Equivalent of War to inspire the youth of the world with high purpose. It sounds like a wonderful idea until you start to think about it. If you are going to rally the youth of America to some great political project, and you screw them up to a moral-equivalent-of-war fever, then you are bound to set up a moral equation: good vs. evil, us vs. them, inclusion vs. exclusion. At least, in the old days of the nation state, the us vs. them was Americans vs. the rest of the world. But when you do the moral equivalent of war instead of real war, you end up dividing America; you end up with the moral equivalent of civil war. Thus, people that oppose the war on poverty are mean-spirited; the people that oppose civil-right legislation are racists; the people that oppose saving the planet are deniers. Conservatives believe in something higher than the moral equivalent of civil war.
Yes, there is a free lunch. When Milton Friedman and other economists railed that "there is no such thing as a free lunch," they were opposing the typical welfare state politics that takes money from Peter to give Paul a free lunch. Paul's lunch ain't free, chaps. Peter paid for it. But, as Deirdre McCloskey writes, again and again, there really is a free lunch, Virginia. It is the free lunch we have gotten from a bourgoisie, innovative and free. Today, food costs less than 10 percent of income, against 80 percent in 1800. We have tons of clothing, rather than one suit of clothes for work, and one for Sunday. Life expectancy at birth is 80 instead of 30. And it takes 10 hours to travel from London to Seattle instead of 10,000 hours. If that isn't a free lunch, I don't know what is.
The difference between state and society. Scratch a liberal and when they talk about the needs of society they are talking about government programs. Surely, we can understand that the only thing the government can do is declare war and break things, or take money from Peter to pay Paul. But the whole point of society, of social cooperation, is what goes on between consenting adults outside the cockpit of force. We conservatives long for a society in which force, government force, is constantly being pruned back, instead of luxuriantly growing, year on year.
The war on the poor. A century ago, you could say that something had to be done about the poor suffering in squalid slums. In fact, of course, they were doing much better than a century before, at least in the developing West. So now we have showered material goods on the poor so that the poor are fat and the rich are thin. But in doing so, we have demolished the culture of the poor. Their families are reduced to mother and children; their work culture has been ruined by government welfare, and their authentic institutions, the benefit club, the labor union, the ethnic association, have been bombed out of all recognition. Liberals did this, and they need to understand that their cruel, corrupt, unjust, wasteful, and deluded government programs are the bombers that devastated the poor.
The Greater Separation of Powers. Our American founders gave us a government of three branches. They created this divided government as a defense in depth against political power. But now we need to go further, to construct a new bastion against power. We need to extend the idea of the separation of church and state into a separation of the political sector and the moral/cultural sector. Liberals have a meme that describes what we must avoid: "legislating morality." Yet they do it all the time, writing criminal laws to criminalize behavior they regard as immoral or unethical. Let conservatives counter with a new meme: "Don't criminalize immorality." We've got to find ways for naming and shaming bad behavior rather than criminalizing it. We also need to separation economy and state. The last 100 years is a story of the exploitation of the economic sector by the political sector, and it stinks. Money is worth 1-2 percent of its value a century ago, and politicians plunder the economic sector at will. This must end. The economic sector needs clear signposts and rules; it cannot thrive in a thicket of activist-inspired regulation.

Conservatives have one great near-term goal, the repeal of ObamaCare. That's great, but then what? In Governor Chris Christie (R-NJ) we have a champion of spending restraint, as he cuts waste and shames the bureaucrats that repose on their sinecures. But you can't change America just by pruning and cutting. You've got to have a vision of the future. And we know, after the century of Big Government, that the great social needs of humans just don't get met by the liberal culture of compulsion.

Force: Liberals Playing With Fire

2010-12-30T09:16:00.000-08:00

First we thought it was just ordinary government incompetence. Now we understand that the slow snow removal in New York City after the Christmas snowstorm was actually a work slowdown organized by the supervisors in the city Sanitation Department. According to reporters for the New York Post:

Selfish Sanitation Department bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts -- a disastrous move that turned streets into a minefield for emergency-services vehicles, The Post has learned.

The supervisors are upset, apparently, over "a raft of demotions, attrition and budget cuts."

This shows, in a graphic way, the problem with allowing the government to do anything beyond fighting wars. Everything in government comes down to a power play. You would think that, in an emergency, the natural human instinct to come together would rule over petty interests and bureaucratic battles. But it turns out that in the modern centralized administrative state even the most basic functions of government, the recovery from a natural disaster, ends up sacrificed to the god of political power.

Conservatives and political scientists take note. This is the Achilles heel of our liberal friends. They just don't have a clue that government is force, and politics is power. If you let the government perform some service then it will turn it into a fight.

The great question for mankind, the social animal, is to find out how to limit the brutal cost of force and compulsion. In The Faith Instinct Nicholas Wade tells how, in hunter-gatherer societies, religion played a vital role in reducing the need for force. One strategy is the concept of divine punishment. "In small societies, the person who takes on the role of enforcer exposes himself to general resentment, not to mention retaliation from the miscreant or his relatives." It's usually best to get everyones' agreement and have the miscreant killed by one of his relatives. Alternatively, you can persuade everyone that God will punish miscreants, that God knows everything we do, and will punish misdeeds either in this life or the life to come.

A system of supernatural punishment carries enormous advantages for a primitive society. No one has to assume the thankless taks of meting out punishment and risk being killed by the offender or his relatives; the gods perform this chore willingly and vigilantly.

No legislation is needed. No police force is required. The question that must come to every concerned citizen is: Why do we have the expensive apparatus of legislation, police, courts, jails, and parole officers? And why have we dispensed, in a significant degree, with the notion of divine punishment? In my view, it is because we can afford it. We can afford the enormous expense of the force machine, whereas the primitive society cannot.

But, you may say, can we afford it? Can we save the planet when we are wasting precious resources on policemen, hangmen, and jailers? It's a good question.

Historically, of course, the development of penal institutions have paralleled the attack on divine punishment conducted by our liberal friends. Liberals wanted to do a bunch of things that the gods had traditionally disliked. They wanted to free themselves from social control, particularly on the sex front. Liberal men wanted multiple sexual partners. Liberal women wanted liberation from exploitation by the patriarchs. But the problem is that you can't limit the damage. If the gods don't care about sexual license then what do they care about? And when the gods aren't in control, you have to erect the vast apparatus of government compulsion that is so much a feature of our modern age, and which creates so much resentment among the non-liberal citizenry.

My advice to our liberal friends is to get back to some kind of supernatural punishment system. Maybe Gaia cares so much about the planet that she will punish people for environmental crimes without needing an expensive EPA. And if she cares about saving the planet, maybe she will expand her powers to other important areas of social control.

Either way, it is clear that the more government we have, the more we will place ourselves at the mercy of bloody-minded sanitation workers and their ilk, for whom nothing exists except their selfish needs and the satisfactions of wielding political power.

McCloskey Wrapup: Big Fact vs. Big Mistake

2010-12-29T09:52:00.000-08:00

The great theme that runs through Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois Cycle thus far--in The Bourgeois Virtues and Bourgeois Dignity--is the Great Fact. In the past two centuries the prosperity of the average human has risen from a life at $1-$3 per day to the present $30-$137 per day in constant dollars. For the average human, the difference is at least an order of magnitude. If you isolate on the fortunate United States and you account for improvement in products and services, e.g., airplane travel, the difference is two orders of magnitude, meaning that the average person swings 100 times the products and services that his ancestor enjoyed two centuries ago. This has never happened before in history. Never.

Now you would think that everyone would be sitting back gob-smacked, as the Limeys say, but in fact they are not. In fact just about everyone is pretty peeved about the whole thing, from conservatives that mourn the corruption of manners to Marxians--McCloskey prefers "marxoid"--insisting that the whole thing has been achieved on the backs of the workers. But for me the most telling objection to the Great Fact is the responsible prediction that McCloskey extracts in Bourgeois Dignity from John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy. Call it the Big Mistake.

Mill again: "It is only in the backward countries of the world that increased production is still an important object: in those most advanced, what is economically needed is a better distribution, of which one indispensable means is a stricter restraint on population."(p.384)

Here we see the foundation of the 20th century and its centralized administrative state, supervised by a wise and disinterested educated elite. Here we see a forthright manifesto of force--benevolent, sensible, avuncular force, of course, but force nonetheless. Mill was saying that the only way to extend the benefits of the industrial revolution to the poor was by force, and the only way to prevent a population explosion was by force.

And Mill was wrong. Dead wrong. At the moment he was writing a nobody of the name John D. Rockefeller was just starting to reduce the cost of illuminating oil from 80 cents per gallon to 8 cents, and a nobody of the name of Andrew Carnegie was about to reduce the price of steel by two-thirds. Not to mention that in 1871 a chap called Orville Wright was born in Ohio. Not to mention that in 1870-71 about four people in four different countries reinvented economics with the marginal revolution.

On the population front, of course, we now know that middle-class people possessed of fantastic prosperity don't fill the world with an excess population. If anything, they need to be firmly walloped with a wet noodle and told to get a life and get some kids on the ground.

What we know today is that all that political force of the last century was unnecessary. The modern economy, driven by a bourgeoisie dignified and free, would have covered the poor in riches without all the government programs because, indeed, the staggering rising tide of the modern free lunch, the free lunch of cheap energy, cheap steel, cheap travel, cheap food, cheap everything, created a world in which the poor are fat and the rich are thin. And all the while nobody noticed. Or if they did, they complained because it wasn't good enough.

Let's say it again. Governments in the United States, as faithfully recorded and broadcast by usgovernmentspending.com, spends the following each year.

	Government Pensions	$1.0 trillion
	Government Health Care	$1.1 trillion
	Government Education	$1.0 trillion
	Government Welfare	$0.8 trillion

If the poor get rich along with everyone else, what's the point of four trillion dollars of compulsion every year?

Yes, you say, but what about government education? Surely that is worthwhile. Not really. Not according to Deirdre McCloskey. Once a family gets literacy, she argues, it never loses it.

Then male literacy in England rose to perhaps 30 percent in 1580 and to 60 percent by... the 1750s... My father was the first in his family to graduate from university... All of his three children did likewise... [B]oth of my two did, and doubtless my two grandchildren will, too.

McCloskey's Norwegian ancestors "were reading by the late sixteenth century, and never stopped." And all of this without compulsory government education.

But McCloskey is perhaps too optimistic. Perhaps there is a way to extinguish literacy. It is called the welfare state. Here is the testimony of police Inspector Gadget in Britain:

I once saw a bloke in custody, who was in my year at Ruraltown Comp. The Sergeant asked him if he could read and write before offering him the custody record to sign. He said he couldn’t. I interjected. ‘I was at school with you buddy, you can read and write for God’s sake’ he said ‘I used to be able to but I forgot how’. He hadn’t had to read or write anything for 20 years, so he simply forgot how. An ‘agency’ for everything, all on a plate. A filthy mean little plate, but a plate none the less.

The reason that most people acquired literacy over the past millennium is that it was useful to them, very useful. It kept them out of the mine and the stone pit. It qualified them for good jobs indoors. But when the government will give you money for nothing, what's the point?

The point is: when you find you are doing something wrong, something stupid, stop doing it.

Three hundred years ago slavery was ubiquitous; 150 years later it had become a scandal. Two hundred years ago, absolute government and its centralized administrative bureaucracy was a scandal. Today it is ubiquitous.

But big government doesn't have to stay ubiquitous. We can change it. We can make it a scandal again.

If we believe in the "bourgeois virtues" and if we believe in "bourgeois dignity" that people should have the dignity and the freedom to innovate for the benefit of each other, then there is only one thing to say about the vast centralized administrative state inspired by the Great Mistake of good old buffers like John Stuart Mill and what we might call the Great Lie of the not-so-good folks like the post-1848 clerisy of intellectuals and activists. The saying has a familiar ring to it:

"This Shall Not Stand."

McCloskey Week: The Messenger

2010-12-24T09:16:00.000-08:00

The message of Deirdre McCloskey's mammoth Bourgeois Cycle is that good old bourgeois culture and ideas are a mammoth blessing on humankind. Whatever middle-class people say about middle-class prudence, the bourgeoisie is not a One Big Thing class. It practices all the virtues, devoted to the sacred as well as the profane. And it is the triumph of bourgeois dignity, the success of innovation and the good old college try--over aristocratic pride and peasant doggedness--that has elevated humankind from a perilous life consuming $3 per day to the present US consumption rate of $120 per day, a change that has particularly benefited the poor.

But what about the messenger? Deirdre McCloskey is perhaps more interesting than her message, for Deirdre McCloskey started out life in 1942 as Donald. Only in the 1990s did s/he take the plunge and decide to become a woman.

Thus we have the most unapologetic apology for the bourgeois culture and capitalism being written by a transsexual. The conservative heroine of our time is a GLBT chappie or chappette.

And not just that. McCloskey is a multi-disciplinary writer, an economist, expert in economics and economic history who is also well-read in philosophy and literature and culture. On top of that, she affects a girlish style that no woman-writer-wanting-to-be-taken-as-seriously-as-a-man would ever dare to essay.

In my view, we conservatives have needed a Deirdre McCloskey for decades. We have needed a serious political philosopher that knew the foundations of the grand western project but also knew all the ins and outs of recent cultural thought, the modernisms and post-modernisms that leaves most conservatives non-plussed and resentful.

The great question of the coming years is what comes after the century of big government and the centralized administrative state. Its ruling class has been, in McCloskey's words, the post-1848 clerisy, the cultural and intellectual movement that appeared on the radar in the revolutions of 1848 and has dominated culture and politics ever since. Our task is to delegitimize this cruel, corrupt, unjust, wasteful and deluded movement and substitute something else in its place. We cannot do this without thinkers that "know the best that has been said and thought in the world" in the words of Matthew Arnold, and are not afraid to shout it from the mountain-top.

Something tells me that the utterly shameless Deirdre McCloskey is just what the world has been waiting for. God does indeed play dice, and He does indeed like a cosmic joke. So the idea that the conservative future should be midwifed by a flaming transsexual girlishly arguing for a return to the virtues and a celebration of bourgeois culture and dignity is so crazy that it must be right.

And Deirdre McCloskey has only just begun. Volume three of the Bourgeois Cycle is already written, and three more volumes are planned.

McCloskey calls her books "The Bourgeois Era," but I think she is mistaken. Her project is of Wagnerian scope, and her bourgeois project is just as over-the-top as the Ring Cycle. So, for me, her bourgeois project is nothing less than "McCloskey's Bourgeois Cycle."

McCloskey Week: It's Not What You Think

2010-12-23T09:20:00.000-08:00

What was it that propelled the economic Hockey Stick of the last 200 years, the step change in economic prosperity from $3 per day back than and since forever, versus the $120 per day in economic prosperity we enjoy today?

Never mind that. What about the things it was not, the plausible reasons for modern prosperity that writers from Marx to Weber floated before the world, and that turned out to be wrong, wrong, wrong?

Most of the second volume in Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois Cycle, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the World, is given over to exploding the "reasons" that the educated class have come up with for modern prosperity. It was not:

Thrift, Greed, Protestant Ethic. Sorry chum. There is no indication that thriftiness was uniquely in fashion in the 18th century. In fact it is likely that the crucible of the industrial revolution, Britland, has always been moderately un-thrifty. Same with greed. You think that people were less greedy in ancient times? How about the plains of Ilium? And recent scholarship says that Catholics have just as much of a Protestant Ethic as Protestants.
Capital Accumulation. A lot of people have assumed that the industrial takeoff could not have occurred without a lot of saving, a storing up of capital to finance the takeoff. But it didn't happen. The textile revolution was financed out of personal savings and modest capital improvements.
Oppression, Stealing.It wasn't financed by starving the workers, or the profits from the slave trade, or the ill-gotten gains of the enclosure movement. For one thing, a lot of the industrial revolution took place away from the center in out of the way places, organized by nobodies, where economic regulation could not find it.
Transportation. It wasn't transportation improvements, although they didn't hurt.
Coal. Nor coal. Although it helped.

No, it wasn't all the economic materialist reasons that all the experts want to believe. It wasn't education either, because innovation is typically transfered directly from one person to another.

No, according to Deirdre McCloskey, it all comes down to dignity--just like in Singin' in the Rain. It was dignity and liberty for ordinary people. She quotes Dr. Johnson:

That the attempts of such men [projectors] will often miscarry, we may reasonably expect; yet from such men, and such only, are we to hope for the cultivation of those parts of nature which lie yet waste, and the invention of those arts which are yet wanting to the felicity of life. If they are, therefore, universally discouraged, art and discovery can make no advances.

Any new project, Johnson goes on, exposes "its author to censure and contempt" and if people were discouraged by contempt or stopped by censure nothing would ever get done.

And that is exactly McCloskey's point. If anything is to change in this world, people have to believe in change, and the rest of us have to resist our instinct to prevent it. We have to take the attitude of Samuel Johnson and look with tolerance, even approval, upon the mad projects of the projectors.

McCloskey Week: The Moral Case Against Obamanomics

2010-12-22T09:24:00.000-08:00

Writes Peter Wehner in Commentary and The Weekly Standard about the current political situation:

[I]t does strike me that a compelling moral argument on behalf of conservative economics specifically, and capitalism more broadly, has been sorely missing from the public debate.

Well, you could start with the moral case put forward by Deirdre McCloskey in her Bourgeois Cycle. She says, more or less, that the difference between our modern middle-class society and the previous oppressive regimes is the revaluation of the things that bourgeois, middle-class persons do.

Under the old regime we had an "elite of Brahmins and warriors [living] by the dignified collection of rents and taxes imposed on the lower classes."

So now in the liberal welfare state we have liberal Brahmins and tenured class warriors living on the dignified proceeds of the progressive tax and regulatory system.

What is needed, in McCloskey's terms, is a reevaluation of the worth of liberal activities: taxing, spending, regulating, dividing, blaming, subsidizing when compared with bourgeois activities like innovating, producing, serving, building, anticipating, trusting, cooperating, competing.

It seems, against all odds, as though this is actually happening. That is why the Democrats are sitting around in a state of shock. Because, against all odds, the Great Recession of 2007-2009 has resulted not in a frightened populace eager to be led to safety but an angry Tea Party pointing the finger at bailouts and handouts to favored Democratic political constituencies.

The heart of McCloskey's argument is that it was not thrift, or a Puritan ethic, or the transport revolution, or the piling up of capital, or coal, or the slave trade, or imperialism that created the freedom of the past two centuries. That's not what created the economic Hockey Stick of the last two hundred years that has built an economy where the average American spends $120 per day instead of $3 per day, and can live a life of greater scope and moral depth than under the old daiy necessity of getting food.

The difference was that, for the first time, the bourgeois code of innovating and inventing and adjusting was valued and appreciated rather than considered low and dishonorable. It is not surprising that the central idea in left-wing rhetoric from Marx to the Fabians to today's "progressives" is to damn the middle class, the higgling of the market, and the people that bury us in goods and services, the evil corporations. The whole point of the class warfare strategy is to marginalize the people that respond to market changes, that anticipate the needs of the consumer and make a lot of money out of it.

The net-neutrality push by liberal foundations is a prime example of this. God forbid that internet providers should start charging a premium to people downloading movies and videos. People have rights!

A central argument of McCloskey is that we are what we think. We got the society of freedom and the economy of innovation because people got out there and said freedom is good, innovation is good. Liberals are going around saying regulation is good, free stuff from the government paid for by the rich is good.

The moral case against Obamanomics centers around the moral case for freedom and the right of people to order their lives without getting permission first from the government.

This shouldn't be that hard. Government screws up everything it does, and the policy of force that is buried in every government program always leads to tears. If we conservatives and libertarians can't convince the American people of the moral and practical worth of our ideas for each individual American, then we deserve a generation of Obamas and their big government delusions.

McCloskey Week: Bourgeois Dignity

2010-12-21T09:05:00.000-08:00

What did it? What was the cause of the Hockey Stick? No, we are not talking about Michael Mann's hockey stick, the spurious "hide-the-decline" surge in global temperatures in the last century. We are talking about the real hockey stick, the extraordinary surge in human well-being in the last two hundred years.

As Deirdre McCloskey reminds us, time and again in her Bourgeois Cycle, right through volume one, The Bourgeois Virtues, and volume two, Bourgeois Dignity, we are talking about a staggering change. In 1800 humans on average subsisted on about $3 per day in today's dollars. Today, in the United States, we each of us get to dispose of $120 per day. That is forty times the spending of two centuries ago.

And even that really underestimates the change. I recently watched the promo movie at the Boeing visitor center at Paine Field, Washington. They had a shot of a Mayflower-style ship. In the days of sail, it took thousands of hours to get from London to Seattle. Now you can do it in ten. And there are a whole bunch of other things we have today which weren't available to the richest and most powerful of humans two hundred years ago.

The key thing that changed, according to McCloskey, was not technological change, but a cultural, rhetorical change. About three hundred years ago, around the North Sea, societies started to respect the commercial bourgeoisie and the things that it did. It allowed, for the first time, the bourgeoisie to do what comes naturally, to innovate and change things.

That's why McCloskey would rather not call our present economic system "capitalism." The real essence of the modern era is not capital, piles of money, or ruthless accumulation. It is the spirit of innovation, of seeing an opportunity and taking it. "I seen my opportunity, and I took it," said the ward-heeler George Washington Plunkitt. We should call our modern system "innovation," she writes. What happened is that, about three hundred years ago, people stopped ragging on the bourgeoisie.

People stopped sneering at market innovativeness and other bourgeois virtues exercised far from the traditional places of honor [in religion, politics, and war].

All of a sudden, the traders and the merchants were according a dignity and a liberty they had never had before.

Even so, people really didn't realize what was happening. In the mid 19th century, the classical economists didn't really grasp that everything had changed. It was Macaulay, the last of the Whig historians, who really understood.

If any person... after the crash in 1720 [had told that] in 1830 the wealth of England would surpass all their wildest dreams,... that London would be twice as large... and mortality would have diminished to one-half,... that men would be in the habit of sailing without wind and would be beginning to ride without horses, our ancestors would have given as much credit... as they gave to Gulliver's Travels.

Of course our lefty friends still don't want to credit what has happened. That is because they can't get beyond the first stage of every capitalist improvement. The first person to benefit from a new idea is the capitalist innovator and his profit. But then the competitors rush in and everyone benefits from the innovation.

[T]he profits from innovation go in the first act mostly to the bourgeois rich. But in the second act... the poor get better off in real terms.

Of course, some people do suffer from innovation, and we have often not done enough to help them. Our liberal friends, the folks that McCloskey calls the clerisy, in the years after the failed revolutions of 1848--and indeed ever since--insisted upon seeing the capitalist economy as cruel and unjust.

But surely you cannot say that the principal cause of a rise in income from $3 per day to $120 per day was the cruelty of the capitalists in grinding the faces of the poor working class. Or indeed that it was the legislation of the welfare state. The increase in wealth was caused by innovation, middle-class entrepreneurs released from the bonds of age-old prejudice against risk-taking innovation, and allowed, finally, to do their stuff without being put in the stocks.

And when the opponents of the bourgeoisie got their way, in Russia, in Germany, in China, in Cuba, misery and poverty ensued.

You can't say all that enough, and Deirdre McCloskey, in her Bourgeois Cycle, says it. Again and again.

McCloskey Week: Conservatism's Big Problem

2010-12-20T09:25:00.000-08:00

There's a problem at the heart of the modern project of conservatism in America, and it's a simple problem. How can you hope to convince liberals of the truth of conservatism when conservatism is based upon three-hundred-year-old ideas?

F.S.C. Northrop identified the problem precisely in his Meeting of East and West.

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Hueman scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.

The secular religion and the politics of our liberal friends is based upon this faith. British empiricism and the American founding fathers are all very well, but they cannot speak for the modern era. Hence the need for an educated elite, a "living constitution," and a big federal government. As if to underline this, Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot has absolutely no references to Immanuel Kant.

Sorry chums. If the conservative mind has nothing to say about Kant, whose transcendental idealism points in a straight line to Einstein, relativity, and quantum mechanics, then it's not going to appeal to the broad community of thinkers and doers of the modern era.

So what conservatives have needed, like an oasis in the desert, is a thinker to put the conservative case in the context of the entire three-ring circus of modern thought, starting where Hume left off with Kant, continuing through Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and the preenings of the postmodernists, and then ending up saying: well, that's all very well, but these chaps ultimately missed the point, and here's why!

I am pleased to announce that this prophet of conservatism has now emerged. Her name is Deirdre McCloskey, and her work is a grand apology for the middle class, an over-the-top Bourgeois Cycle built upon Wagnerian principles just like the Ring Cycle. That is to say: it is long, it is ambitious, it is insufferable, and it is brilliant. And it may never get finished. McCloskey is now 68ish, and has only finished the first two volumes of her multi-volume epic.

OK, so what is all the fuss about?

In the first volume, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce McCloskey argues for a return to virtue, all seven of them. Although the bourgeoisie insists that it is a practical venture, an effort of pure prudence, bourgeois actions belie this. The commercial middle class practices all the virtues, the four cardinal, masculine, pagan virtues of: Prudence, Temperance, Courage, and Justice; and it also practices the Christian, theological, feminine virtues: Faith, Hope, and Love.

The trouble is that the clerisy, particularly the post-1848 clerisy, has turned against a multi-faceted faith in all the virtues, and has plumped instead for the One Big Thing. In Kant, it was Duty.

Kant made a mistake in rejecting as a constituent of ethics the unreasoning particularities of philosophical anthropology or philosophical psychology.

A very guy thing to do, of course. No woman in her right mind would or could come up with a One Big Thing narrative of meaning. Although some have tried.

In Bentham the one big thing is utility. In Marx, the big thing is labor. It is a materialist view of life:

If virtues cannot be connected to self-interest or genetics, to utility or power, they are, in the early twentieth century philosophical term of Vienna and Cambridge, simply "meaningless."

McCloskey calls this the "Prudence Only" approach of the modern era. But Prudence-Only is not how the world works, and particularly not how the bourgeois middle class works. That's important because it is the commercial bourgeoisie and its virtues that has brought the western world from $3 a day of real material consumption in 1800 to $120 a day in the US today. Meanwhile the Prudence Only materialism of socialism and communism has created nothing out of nothing. What is needed is a return to the virtues, as the movement of virtue ethics has been doing since 1958.

You can see, very easily, how this sort of thinking solves the conservatism problem. It is exactly what conservatism has needed. We want a thorough discrediting of the One Big Thing ethos, which for modern American liberals means that liberals get to call all the big shots because they are more educated, more evolved, and more knowledgeable than the average bitter clinger. We want someone who can argue the hind tails off the liberals all day, and then go out and party all night. And now we have got it.

Liberals Please Step Aside

2010-12-13T10:09:00.000-08:00

Everything is set for a new century of growth, writes Walter Russell Mead, except for America's political class.

America has everything it needs for success in the twenty-first century with one exception: a critical mass of thinkers, analysts and policy entrepreneurs who can help unleash the creative potential of the American people and build the new government and policy structures that will facilitate a new wave of private-sector led growth.

It's the intellectual class that's the problem. It is backward looking and reactionary. In several ways.

Support for statism. "Since the late nineteenth century most intellectuals have identified progress with the advance of the bureaucratic, redistributionist and administrative state. The government, guided by credentialed intellectuals with scientific training and values, would lead society through the economic and political perils of the day. " Yeah. I'll say.
Interest and class. "Most intellectuals today still live in a guild economy. The learned professions – lawyers, doctors, university professors, the clergy of most mainline denominations, and (aspirationally anyway) school teachers and journalists – are organized in modern day versions of the medieval guilds. " Actually, I would say that the liberal guilds are caricatures of the old medieval guilds, which were, at bottom, self-governing social organizations perched perilously under the warrior aristocrats that ruled the age. The liberal guilds are little more than political pressure groups. They are not true "mediating structures."
Training gap. "We are much less effective at teaching and supporting people who are able to master the essentials of many complex subjects, integrate the insights from this kind of study into a coherent social or political vision, and communicate what they have learned to a broad general lay audience. " Hmm. The trouble with this sort of thinking is that it assumes the continuation of the current bureaucratic administrative elite. Suppose that the new elite to come doesn't operate that way. Suppose it operates more by spontaneous association and the promotion of ideas and leaders from below instead of the top-down processes of today. Suppose that the future is Tea Party, not Anointed Ones?

Actually, all this is beside the point. The big question, in my mind, is whether our current liberal elite--the "clerisy," the Class of 1848, the New Class, the educated elite, whatever you want to call them--will have the decency to leave the stage without pulling the scenery down around them, and the rest of us as well.

The foundational assumptions of American intellectuals as a group are firmly based on the assumptions of the progressive state and the Blue Social Model. Those who run our government agencies, our universities, our foundations, our mainstream media outlets and other key institutions cannot at this point look the future in the face.

Who cares? Don't look the future in the face, liberals, if you don't want to. The trouble is that liberals don't want to let the rest of us, who do want to look the future in the face, take power and get on with America's future. Because the whole point of modern liberalism since its invention in the culture of the revolutions of 1848 is political power. It wasn't ever really about the working class, or women, or minorities, or gays, or whatever. It was always and only about the power of the intellectual class.

What these chaps cannot face is that the ordinary chaps who really made a difference in the industrial age, men like the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Edisons, were not men from the intellectual class, nor did they have pretensions about themselves. Nor were they interested in political power. They just wanted to build their businesses in the intoxicating days of the 19th century. When they had strutted their hour upon the stage they were quite happy to go home and let someone else take over.

Unlike today's intellectual class.

The Liberal Syllabus of Errors

2010-12-10T09:24:00.000-08:00

Whether or not President Obama has done a number on Republicans (by increasing spending in the tax-cut compromise) or betrayed his Democratic base (by abandoning his promise to raise taxes on the rich) the fact is that the Bush tax rates continue. And the battle for the mind of America continues.

Absolutely critical is what the professionals call "messaging." We conservatives need to hammer away at the fundamental things that liberals have got wrong and persuade the American people, the moderates in the middle, that the liberals have got it wrong. As in:

Corporations are evil. Corporations are big institutions that make products and deliver services to people. Since the limited liability corporation emerged in the mid 19th century the prosperity of the ordinary person that works for or buys from big corporations has sky-rocketed at a rate unprecedented in human history. Ordinary people that have been protected from big corporations in socialist countries and in the Third World have not done so well. This is evil?
The rich should pay their fair share. The rich already pay more in tax as a percent of reported income than the middle class. How much more do you want? The record is that as you lower tax rates on the rich they mysteriously report more income. So, it seems from a practical point of view that if you want to tax the rich you should find a sweet spot that encourages them to fire the lawyers and tax accountants and just pay up.
Inequality is the problem. Hey, it's morally tricky that some people make more money than others. Some people make obscenely more. But all we know is that, in the last two hundred years, the societies that didn't worry too much about inequality experienced the most increase in general prosperity while the societies that worried most about inequality experienced the least increase in prosperity. Anyway, once you let the government start messing with equality it merely starts to shovel money at the government supporters, irrespective of need. Government supporters just come to get defined as deserving and government opponents defined as undeserving. How unequal is that?
The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. The majority of the poor in the United States cool their houses with air conditioning and own automobiles, and live in houses that, on average, are the same size as the the average house in Europe. And, of course, the poor benefit from the startling increase in life expectancy of the last two centuries. The poor are immeasurably richer than they were two hundred years ago. But then so are the rich.
Americans are racists. Let us put it this way. In the last two hundred years there has been a sea change in the way that humans think about people who look different from them. Call it the influence of the Enlightenment or global commerce. In this move liberals were often a couple of inches in front of the rest of us. But often liberals have exploited race for political power, as in Affirmative Action, diversity, and racial quotas. In general, ordinary Americans have shut up and kept their heads down in the race wars while liberals have pontificated and shamed and blamed. Except for one shining moment in the 1960s liberals have plenty to be ashamed about when it comes to race.

Well, that will do for today. But it is an important subject. If we are to curb liberal political power we have to persuade the American people of the utter folly and utter delusion of liberal ideas and liberal talking points. And the next two years, as liberals try to squirm out of the mess they have got into, will be crucial.

Trust in the Slum

2010-12-03T10:39:00.000-08:00

Suppose we accept that in the rarified air of high commerce that the economy runs on trust.

But what about life at the bottom? What is it like in the mean streets of the western inner city What about commerce in the slums of the third-world city? There, surely, you will find naked capitalism, where the rich get richer, the strong survive, and the poor go to the wall.

The poor don't write, but researchers do, and we have recent research on life on the mean streets of the underclass city. According to Hernando De Soto, commerce in the informal economy of Lima, Peru, is all about gaining the trust of the consumer. According to Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, life on the South Side of Chicago, where President Obama used to community-organize, people struggle along with a remarkably entrepreneurial will. And in the third-world slums of Hyderabad and Africa, enterprising education entrepreneurs run schools that outperform the government schools. When there are any.

Hernando De Soto described the informal economy of Lima, Peru, in The Other Path twenty years ago. He tells the story of the Andean peasants moving to Lima in the teeth of bumbling opposition from the political system and the formal business sector.

The peasants needed property rights, to build houses, to earn a living, and the political system, oriented towards the exchange of favors, did not understand. The politicians and the bureaucrats made it almost impossible, mainly by suffocating bureaucracy, for migrants to live and work in the city legally. What could the migrants do?

One way that peasants could earn a living was by selling goods as a street vendor.

Street vending is illegal, but the peasants did it anyway. In 1986 when De Soto conducted a census of street vending in Lima, he found over 91,000 vendors. Street vendors start as "itinerant" vendors, with no fixed location. Vendors soon establish a fixed route every day so they can establish a reputation for reliability and earn the trust of their customers and credit from suppliers. But, of course, itinerant vending with a limited supply of goods cannot earn as much as vending from a fixed location on the street, so successful vendor soon finds a place to set up a barrow or a stall illegally on the sidewalk. If it's a good pitch, he is soon joined by other vendors. This competition is beneficial, because it helps create a critical mass: "vendors realize that the safety, cleanliness, quality, and variety of goods available" affect the volume of customers and the power of numbers helps to defend them against the government and competing interests. Eventually the successful street vendors combine to build a "minimarket" and then move off the street into permanent markets that they have combined to build and operate. Denied access to the institutions that are supposed to reward trust and reliability, the newcomers to the city must create their own culture of trust without the assistance of the formal legal system. The process is clear. These rural peasants combine to win formal property rights out of a society that hardly knows they exist, and resists their attempts to earn a living from the burgeoning city.

Informal trading is not the only off-the-books activity in Lima. New housing is typically built by "invasions" of state-owned land on the periphery of the city. Mass transit is furnished by informal bus companies that operate in a curious no-mans-land between legality and illegality. And there is a vast economy of small-scale manufacturing that operates outside the law in order to hide from expensive labor laws and business regulations.

The story in The Other Path is clear. The immigrants to the city want to establish property rights for themselves. But they find that they must deal with a political system for which power and the exchange of favors is the only true reality. So they must fight for the right to acquire property rights in their housing and their employment.

That's a sober thought for Tea Party Americans as we struggle with the favor factory of the modern administrative state. How do we convert this corrupt culture of compulsion and its divisive political warfare into a culture of social cooperation, a world where people can abandon the trenches of political attrition and work together to serve each other and benefit society with their wealth-creating skills? How do you reform a political system so that there is less politics?

Life after Liberalism

2010-11-24T09:45:00.000-08:00

Women yearn for love; men yearn for victory. Our liberal friends yearn for the perfect ten-point program. Alas, our dreams are fantasies. Yearning for love, women live with the grief of loss; yearning for victory, men live with the humiliations of defeat. And liberal government programs end in perfect failure.

The beginning of wisdom is to dissolve our fantasies, to surrender to loss while ever keeping the light of love shining, to accept defeat while continuing to fight the good fight. But what of the perfect government program?

For two hundred years our liberal friends have pursued a chimera. They have longed to create a perfect world of peace and justice through a system of centralized administrative government. Their method has been to remove certain socially necessary activities from the economic sector and subject them to the administrative control of the government, the political sector. This, of course, has the effect of stripping these activities of their social character and reducing them to a transaction of force, for government is force, and politics is power.

Each act of force is the victory of the strong over the weak; it is the triumph of power over love. And so, wherever liberal programs hold sway, there is no peace and no justice. At best, liberal government produces a society of envy policed by surly officiousness. At worst it descends into the hell of political terror. At its best it operates with the Keystone Kops incompetence of the US Transportation Security Administration; at worst it slashes through history with the murderous rage of the Soviet KGB.

Every life ends in death; every government ends in default. It is our task to imagine and to build a life after the default of liberal government.

It is possible to set forth on this quest because we now know that the trajectory of liberalism has passed its apogee. It must now end in default, because it cannot deliver on its promises. It must either default on its promises, or default on its debt.

As liberal government defaults on its promises, it will lose its power. It creates a space for a new power, a new foundation and a new order. We already know what this foundation must be. It must be a new dedication to the principles of limited government set forth in the US Constitution. Our society is not a single government monolith nor can it flourish and grow when all social transactions are collapsed into the political sector.

Our modern commercial society is founded upon a differentiation of the public square into three sectors. There is the political sector, the realm of force where people jostle for power. There is the economic sector, the realm of trust where people cooperate to serve each other's needs. Finally, there is the moral-cultural sector, the realm of faith where people search for the meaning of it all. The differentiation of society into these three institutional sectors means that society cannot be yoked to a single purpose or moral vision. It is a plural society, with many competing moral visions, many economic actors competing to serve, and many political actors lusting for power.

Our liberal friends, in their century-long liberal dynasty, have used their power to blur, and sometimes collapse the separations between the three sectors. With their secular religions, socialism, fascism, and communism, they sought to fold the moral-cultural sector into the political. Whenever they succeeded, the result was tyranny. With their war on business they sought to fold the economic sector into the political. Whenever they succeeded, the result was poverty.

Our task is simple. We must renew the promise of the differentiated society. There must be a renewal of the separation of church and state, to keep the political power from co-opting and corrupting the moral-cultural power. And there must be a renewal of the separation between economy and state, to keep the political power from dominating and corrupting the economic power.

Of course, this practical and honorable project will not bring in the millennium. But it will heal the corruption of the centralized liberal administrative state. It will let women dream of a love free of liberal rapine, and it will let men dream of victory in a life free of the liberal kowtow.

And people will rejoice in Life after Liberalism.

Liberal Government as Secular Theocracy

2010-11-04T08:57:00.000-07:00

If you give conservatives a chance, says the Angry Left, they will create "theocracy" and "legislate morality."

That was the way in the 2000s that our liberal friends experienced the Bush administration, led by a self-confessed Christian. And that is how our liberal friends experienced the Bush administration decision on embryonic stem-cell research.

Theocracy, as defined in Wikipedia, means the rule of the priests, or a society in which the church and the state are more or less unified into a single organization. Using Michael Novak's three-sector analysis of modern society, we could say that a theocracy occurs when the moral/cultural and political sectors are pretty well unified. Obviously, any such organization would quickly get itself into the business of legislating morality--the moral system of the church implemented in the legislative output of the legislature full of priests and ministers.

That's exactly the model of the administrative welfare state run by our liberal friends. There is only one difference. When liberals complain about "legislating morality" they are talking about laws that attempt to regulate personal sexual morality. But the whole point of liberalism is to translate their views on social morality into law.

Liberals experience unregulated capitalism as fundamentally immoral. They see poverty, they see economic exploitation, and they call it immoral. They demand that society do something about it. And what do they demand? They demand that everyone be forced to support their moral vision of government programs to ameliorate the social evils of capitalism.

What can you call this but legislating morality? Liberals emphatically reject the idea of laws to regulate individual morality. But they emphatically support the idea of laws to regulate social morality. They call it "social justice" or "economic justice." What is that other than legislating economic morality?

In liberalism, the functions of moral commentary and political action are combined, collapsed into a single operation. The liberal intellectual experiences himself as both moral arbiter and political strategist. The classic liberal intellectual product is the political manifesto, identifying a moral outrage in society, analyzing it, and proposing a political, legislative, big-government solution.

It's really pretty simple. Liberal government is a "secular theocracy."

The Educated Youth Movement

2010-10-29T09:36:00.001-07:00

How do we understand President Obama and his curious life journey from semi-abandoned son of a Sixties girl to graduate of leftist Midwest Academy and Radical-in-chief? I believe that the best way is to understand the movement of the left as a kind of religious movement, a secular religious movement of moral renewal that ended up, as so many religious movements do, wanting to capture the political system, become an established church, and legislate its morality upon the populace--in their own best interests, of course.

But isn't this idea of a secular religious movement rather a stretch? Not really, not if you read Discovering God by Rodney Stark.

In Discovering God Stark puts his sociological theories about religion to the test. Mainly, he asserts that there is always a latent demand for religion in society. But usually the supply of religion is throttled by the ruling elite, because religious movements tend to upset the status quo, including the political status quo. The ruling elite prefers to capture religious sentiment into an elite-dominated state religion.

Following Marx, we educated moderns like to think of religion as the "opiate of the masses." But Stark asserts that religious movements are very often started by well-to-do youngsters. Rather than plunge into the hurly-burly of ordinary life they choose a life of asceticism and meditation. Take Buddhism:

Combined with the doctrine that life is inevitably a succession of sufferings and sorrows and that in addition one must strive to frustrate all desires, to become a true follower of Buddha or Mahavira [the founder of Jainism] is to embrace unrelieved pessimism. Such pessimism seems to have attracted some alienated members of the elite to become monks or nuns, but it surely "could not attract the minds of the laity."

Buddhism quickly died out in India, but thrived in China where it grafted on Gods and an afterlife.

The movement started by educated youth in the years after the Napoleonic Wars also embraced unrelieved pessimism, the notion that the lot of the workers would inevitably get worse and worse. It was also godless. And it was particularly attractive to sons of the prosperous middle class. Think Marx, Engels, the Fabians, the Progressives and of course our modern liberals.

This Educated Youth movement began with a moral critique of modern middle class society and then went on to propose a radical reform, to purify it of getting and spending, and to restore an ancient vision of the pure community. It was, of course, a community that had never been. But after the first efforts to found such communities failed, the Educated Youth movement realized that mere voluntary religious communities weren't going to work. They decided that their secular religious movement had to become a state religion. It had to take over the apparatus of the state and impose its moral vision on a society corrupted by "false consciousness" using the force of the law and government bureaucrats.

Of course, the awful rigidities of this moral system, when imposed in practice, results in untold horrors and religious wars. The proselytizing Educated Youth movement naturally faced opposition and it naturally decided that force was necessary where persuasion couldn't persuade.

President Obama is a complete product of this movement. You can call him a socialist, or a radical, or a Marxist. But these names really are the names of individual sects in the overall Educated Youth movement, the secular religious movement to purify corrupt democratic capitalism with a state religion of caring, sharing and, now, saving the planet.

With President Obama the Educated Youth movement is reaching its moment of truth. For its millenniarian promises are turning to dust. Its government-centric model of social cooperation is foundering on a mountain of debt, corruption, and injustice and the ordinary people are rebelling.

For ordinary people the godless religion of pessimism and asceticism doesn't really work. What ordinary people need is an optimistic religion to tell them that their work, their struggles and sacrifices, their families and their loved ones will all come out right in the end, and that virtue will triumph.

In the United States, most of the time, the Educated Youth movement has operated behind a veil, pretending to be moderates instead of extremists. President Obama has been an expert in this, hiding his radical past and his radical friends with the help of a complicit media.

But sooner or later we ordinary folks are going to have to challenge the Educated Youth movement. This challenge must begin, it seems to me, with a separation of the Educated Youth church and state. Let our liberal friends remain free to proselytize all they want. But let's stop them short of building a state church to their liberalism and using government power and taxes to force their belief system upon the rest of us.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof: It's in the Constitution, chaps.

Let's curb the Educated Youth movement and close the doors of its established Church of Liberalism.

Government is Force, Politics is Power

2010-10-07T08:36:00.000-07:00

The world is full of people that talk about the sweet and gentle things that government does. It helps the poor; it gives grandma her health care; it cares about kids.

Er, not exactly. When the government does something it does it with your money. It is you that helps the poor, gives to grandma, and cares about kids. Government is not about caring; government is force. Let's expand this notion a little further.

Government is Force. What is a government, reduced to its essentials? It is an armed force that occupies an area of land with the power to extract tribute from the people living there. It might be a band of twenty guerrillas, hiding out in the mountains. But unless it gets money from a foreign power, it will survive by extracting tribute from the people it controls--by force. If it doesn't extract tribute by force, it isn't a government, it's a business.

Politics is Power. People that go into politics are people who like to fight. They want power. They run for election and the make promises to the voters about a glorious future they have in mind for the voters. But the promises are by-play. The name of the game is to get the support of the voters and get your hands on the levers of power.

Government Spending is Handing Out Plunder. Government spending is the loot that a government distributes to its supporters. Reduced to the minimum, the guerrilla group in the mountains, government spending is spending to keep the guerrilla group armed and fed and keep the taxes coming in. But as a guerrilla group becomes a formal government it acquires the power to support not just its armed fighters but its civilian supporters. So just as a victorious armed raid on a neighboring land ends with a division of the plunder, so also does a victorious political party distribute the loot among its supporters. But wait, you say! What about all the wonderful things that government does with health care and education?

The fact is that everything government does, it does badly. Social Security? If we have to force people to save for retirement we would do better forcing everyone to have an account at Fidelity or Vanguard. The money would actually go into creating jobs for young people when we want to stop working. Health care? The current system gives a ton of people free health care by forcing other people to pay for it. People use free stuff freely. If people actually paid for their health care (and saved for the big expense of health care in the last six months of life) it would cost a lot less. Education? Half of the kids entering college need remedial courses. What about the kids that don't go to college? Let's not even think of going there. Welfare? Government welfare has destroyed the low-income family.

To repeat: government buys votes by distributing plunder to its supporters. In the old days of the absolute monarchs government used to buy support with sinecures and pensions. Today it buys support with tenured jobs and social spending. So nothing has changed.

Taxes are Tribute. Taxes are the tribute that the laborer pays government for the right to earn a living. The first thing that our guerrilla group in the mountains does is start collecting tribute to keep its armed group fed and armed. It collects taxes by going around from house to house requisitioning food and money at the point of a gun. In a settled society, government exacts tribute from everyone that works or buys and sells. Thus every time that a worker gets a paycheck, the government takes its share. Every time a merchant sells a product, the government gets a share. Every homeowner pays a tax on his property. It is tribute, the tribute that the servant pays to the master.

Debt Ends in Default. Whenever government issues debt it is spending now and taxing later. Chances are that it won't do the hard thing, and fund the debt with taxes. Instead it will default on the debt. Sooner or later all governments default on their debt. Usually they don't flat out refuse to pay interest and principal. Instead they inflate the currency. Or they "reschedule" the debt by unilaterally lowering the interest rate and moving the maturity to a later date. Or they throw the evil bankers in jail. Or they just take money out of peoples' bank accounts. Remember, government is force.

The great question about any proposal for a new government spending program is simple. Is this really something that has to be done by force? After all, if it were worth doing, someone would already be doing it. Without force.

The Three Liberal Conceits

2010-10-01T10:06:00.000-07:00

It feels like 9/11, watching the twin towers burning, thinking about "one hour buildings" and wondering what comes next.

I'm talking, of course, about the mid-term elections on November 2. We are looking at the Democratic Party as it trails a black cloud of smoke and we are wondering: could the whole thing come down in a great crash? And if it did come down would it be in that dreadful slow motion descent of the twin towers, or the sub-second dump of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis? One moment it was there, the next moment it was in the river.

Everything is collapsing on the liberals all at once. Their multidecadal war on the private sector, where they want to boss banks and corporations around to help workers get good jobs or to help minorities buy a home, is in ruins, as their confident Keynesian stimulus has failed. Their war on want is a mess as the administrative manipulations of a thousand social programs make dependents out of proud workers. Their war on tradition is a mess as the sexual revolution turns into a re-commodification of sex.

There are, I think, Three Conceits at the heart of this liberal meltdown. Let's take them one by one.

First, there is the Economic Conceit, the idea that government can run the economy. There certainly is a need for the government to commandeer the economy in case of all-out war. But the record of the last century is that, absent war, government should keep its cotton-picking hands off. Government shouldn't muck around with monetary policy and the credit system. All it does is institutionalize inflation and play favorites with the credit system. Government shouldn't muck about with corporations vs. labor vs. the consumer. The wreck of the auto companies ought to tell us that. As George McGovern found out when he opened a resort hotel and then went bankrupt, business is incredibly difficult. Politicians shouldn't make it harder.

Secondly, there is the Social Conceit, the idea that government can spread the wealth and alleviate poverty, that government can run the education system and supervise the health care system. No it can't. The education system is dead in the water, and has been for a generation. The reason? It's been captured by the producers who don't give a damn about the consumers, children and parents. The Obamis are in the middle of bollixing up the health care system by leaning on it to serve an additional 30 million people who are reluctant to pay for their own health care. Government just can't do this efficiently and effectively.

Thirdly, there is the Moral Conceit, the idea that government can muck around legislating morality. Oh yes, liberals believe in legislating morality all right. That's what all the fuss about abortion and gay marriage is about. Liberals decided to change, by judicial fiat, the moral rules on babies and marriage. Now everyone wants to use the government to force their moral views on the rest of the nation.

What is going on here? What do liberals not understand?

I think that we need to look at society in a new way. Think of a circle, divided into three sectors. One is the political sector, with the institutions of government at all levels. This is the sector of force. Then there is the economic sector, of businesses and consumers, producing and consuming products and services. This is the sector of stuff. Then there is the moral/cultural sector, with various non-economic institutions, churches, schools, charities, foundations, and voluntary associations. The point about these insitutions is that they are not immediately economic. They have moral or social goals, not economic goals. This is the sector of faith.

The big mistake that liberals have made, as reflected in the Three Conceits, is that the political sector can supervise and co-opt the other two sectors. It can't. The political sector is the sector of force, and force is the only thing it knows. When you do force in the economic sector you get serfdom. When you do force in the moral/cultural sector you get a clash of faith, a religious war, and even a religious civil war. The three sectors need to be separate and equal in a Greater Separation of Powers. None should dominate another sector, and no two should gang up on the third.

This is all very well, but there is something missing. It is people. It one thing to understand the relationships of the institutions in society, it is another thing to figure out the people.

The people, I believe, are a circle in the middle. Call it the personal sector. The personal sector is the face-to-face sector, where people deal with each other verbally. It is the sector of trust.

The whole universe of society is a question of trust, but trust is only possible between face-to-face people. Without people in the middle you have nothing but force, the mechanical interactions between inanimate objects rather than the relationships of trust between people.

So when we say that the three sectors should be separate and coequal, and kept so by a Greater Separation of Powers, we understand also that this social compact is made possible by the folks in the middle, in the personal sector. These people in the middle act in face to face relationship with other people and it is the trust that they develop over time that creates the delicate balance between the sectors.

It is people representing institutions in the economic sector that link with people representing institutions in the moral/cultural sector that put material content into moral concern. It is people representing institutions in the moral/cultural sector linking with people representing institutions in the political sector that define the boundary where moral disapproval turns into legal restraint. It is people representing institutions in the economic sector linking with people representing institutions in the political and moral/cultural sectors that define the boundaries where a bad deal turns into a fraudulent deal.

Our liberal friends are good people. But they were tempted by vanity, and vanity turned into conceit. And now conceit is turning into humiliation.

After November 2, let's cut the political sector down to size and reanimate the spirit of trust that turns adversaries into friends.

Then we can build an America as it was meant to be.

Our Subversive Individualism

2010-09-28T06:42:00.000-07:00

I'm reading Francis Fukuyama's Trust, and there's a fabulous chapter where he compares the individualism of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism with the east Asian Confucian tradition.

Confucianism puts a big weight on conforming to society, particularly to the elders in the family.

But US Protestantism is radically individualistic. It began by cutting out the mediating position of the Catholic Church; now believers could have a direct relationship with God with no human gatekeepers in between.

In the long run, the individual's ability to have a direct relationship with God had extremely subversive consequences for all social relationships, becaue it gave individuals a moral ground to rebel against even the most broadly established traditions and social conventions.

Yet, Americans, freed from conformity, actively seek out voluntary relations in our famous aptitude for voluntary associations. So, in a way, by freeing us from the age-old obligations of being born into an existing social world, our individualism frees us to be freely social.

Here's an example of this working out in practice, with the American Thinker's recovering liberal, Robin of Berkeley. She notes how she has always been a perfectionist, ever since her mother threatened to withhold her love.

This is my first childhood memory, a hazy image seared into my brain: I am in my bedroom at around age 5 with my mother, having just done something naughty. My mother explodes, "If you keep doing things like that, I won't love you anymore."

Night after night, I cried myself to sleep, overwhelmed with despair at this potential tragedy. It didn't seem humanly possible to survive without her love.

Robin solved the fear of being cast out into loveless isolation by becoming a perfectionist. "I became an anxious adult, a pleaser, someone who bent over backwards not to offend." It meant, of course, that to make a mistake was always an appalling trauma.

Until now, until the scales fell off her eyes when Obama became president.

Recently, Robin made a mistake in one of her articles. But it wasn't a matter of life and death any more. Now she could ask God for forgiveness.

I realized this: it doesn't matter ultimately what any person thinks of me. I am living my life before an audience of One. And in the end, it is only His judgment that matters.

It is a profound mystery that, in her life as a liberal, Robin of Berkeley was imprisoned in a cruel world where there was no redemption except through liberalism. But the liberal priests never quite offer their congregants absolution and redemption. Certainly not Obama.

The extraordinary power of Protestant individualism is that, by loosening the age-old bonds of social conformity, it liberates us from our personal demons and empowers us, most of all in these United States, to open our hearts and enter into voluntary friendly social association with the whole world.

What a country.

A Separation between Economy and State

2010-09-22T09:37:00.000-07:00

Everyone seems to agree that the separation between church and state is a good thing. You don't want ministers legislating morality, and you don't want a "theocracy." When the political and the religious collapses into one, especially in the modern era of secular religions, you get tyranny and terror.

But what about separating economy and state? For some reason there is a lot less enthusiasm for that.

But why? The record on government meddling in the economy is dismal. Since time immemorial governments have abused their power to regulate currency, visiting untold miseries on their people. And governments have often thought that they had a much better idea of how to run a business than the business owners themselves. Has there ever been a case when a government has actually picked a winner?

At the US founding, people were divided about whether to encourage an agricultural economy or a manufacturing economy, the famous divide between Jefferson the landowner, and Hamilton the businessman, lawyer, administrator, and central banker. In the event their posturing was meaningless. The economy flowed and swelled into thousands of channels, more or less ignoring the government when it could. The federal government did have a lot of influence, of course, mainly by screwing up the credit system again and again.

Of course, nobody is suggesting that the economy should be completely separate from government. Business needs settled and predictable law about thousands of things, and it needs government force, on occasion, to enforce contracts that have gone bad, and wind up the affairs of bankrupts.

We stand at a moment that is particulary propitious for a change in the relationship between the economy and the state. We have had a particularly nasty banking and credit crisis mostly caused by government meddling in the market for housing credit. Government has encouraged, over the last century, reckless lending and borrowing for home mortgages. That is to say, the government has encouraged homeowners to get mortgages loans very close to the value of their homes. As we have seen, that sort of thing creates a systemic risk. When millions of homeowners can't pay their mortgages and/or have mortgages underwater, it raises questions about the solvency of major financial institutions, from banks to government-sponsored enterprises like Fannie and Freddie.

There are, obviously, bound to be occasions when the financial system will fail. I am thinking of nuclear war devastation and an asteroid collision. But it is unacceptable to have a financial system that fails in peacetime. When that happens there is only one answer. The system was set up to fail.

We know why the system failed. It was corrupted and weakened by a thousand different government interventions where the government warped the economic system to achieve political ends, and reserved the power to intervene in routine economic relationships for political gain.

Of course, businesses play their part in this racket. They importune for subsidies and privileges on the grounds of national defense or energy security, or local economic benefit. Usually, they are merely trying to raise the bar against new entrants into their business.

Obviously we can't change everything overnight. The government has got into the micro-management of business over decades, and a reckless change would be foolish. But here are some principles that could guide us in separating the economy from the state.

Privatize the credit system. The government has utterly failed to manage the monetary and credit system safely. In fact it has used it, again and again, for political gain.
More equity, less debt. Two hundred years ago we needed banks because there wasn't a big market in debt and equity securities. Today equity is easy, and it could be cheap.
No government businesses. They are inefficient and they compete unfairly.
No administrative regulation. In the recent meltdown the SEC failed, the Fed failed, the regulators of Fannie and Freddie failed. So what's the point?
No more subsidies. Subsidies just encourage corruption, and waste resources.

Well, that's a start. The fact is that government is terrible at supervising business, and business ought to keep its hands out of bribing politicians. If they can do that, then we will all benefit, for it is the wealth created by business that provides revenue for government and it is the regime of peace provided by government and the performance of promises supported by law that allows business to thrive.

Surely that's something we can all agree on.

Government's Poisoned Chalice

2010-09-10T10:18:00.000-07:00

The record of the last century is stark. Everything the government has gotten into it has screwed up. Royally.

Want to talk about education? Things are so bad that we are now starting to wonder whether college is really worth it.

Homeownership? Government has been encouraging home ownership for nearly 100 years. The result is that fewer Americans own their own homes than Canadians.

If you look at all the areas of public life that are screwed up, government is in the middle of it. And it all started, in every case, with the best intentions.

Government decided to get involved in education, to educate our children. Yet government has loved education to death. Maybe 150 years ago education was a little rude and crude. But now we incarcerate all our children in government educational facilities complete with metal detectors. It is incredibly expensive yet about 15 percent of adults are "below-basic" in literacy and numeracy. Fifty percent of kids entering college require remedial courses. Government has loved education to death.

A century ago government got interested in homeownership. It pushed lenders to offer riskier loans and then people lost their over-leveraged homes in the Great Depression. It solved that problem by making it even easier to borrow money on a house. The result is a huge overbuilding and overpricing of homes that all came crashing down in the last two years. It has loved home-owners to death.

There are the workers. It was 150 years ago that "educated youth and middle-class intellectuals" got all worked up about the workers. The workers were having a hard time in the middle of the greatest migration ever, from the country to the city. They started suffering and dying in public, while the peasants had been starving for thousands of years in private. So government decided to help the workers. They gave their labor unions special exemption from laws against monopoly, and looked the other way when they descended to thuggery. They stopped child labor. They regulated hours of work. Then they gave the workers "benefits" like health insurance and pensions and unemployment pay. Only the workers didn't own these benefits. They got them from loving politicians. Now the great industrial corporations are dying, throttled by their labor unions and work rules, and government workers are paid 50 or 100 percent more than private sector workers. Government has loved labor to death.

Then there are African Americans. First we enslaved them, then we liberated them, then we Jim Crowed them, then we segregated them, then we integrated them, then we affirmative actioned them. So now about 70 percent of African American children are born to a single parent, and more African American men are in jail than in college. We have loved African Americans to death.

In fact, there's a good argument that when government comes calling with a a communion cup of government spending and political patronage there is only one thing to do. Dash the poisoned chalice to the ground before a drop passes your lips.

There are only two things that government can do. It can do force and it can do compulsion. It amounts to the same thing. If it's a question of forcing a foreign power to respect American power, government can do it, albeit at enormous expense.

If it's a question of beating up rowdy young lower-class males, government can do that too.

But when it comes to making a society, government is helpless. Because society is not a question of force, it is a question of cooperation, of nudging, of influence, of somehow getting people to do the right thing short of forcing them.

In the face-to-face society, we get people to do the right thing with a frown and a shake of the head. Let's check with Rodney Stark in Discovering God.

Social life is only possible to the extent that groups exert social control--collective efforts to ensure conformity to the moral standards of the group... So, from infancy humans are raised to believe that the norms of their group are the "right" way to behave and are trained to conform.

But as society becomes larger we need formal methods of control.

Formal social control is expensive--contrast the cost of dirty looks from neighbors with that of maintaining a police officer.

When humans start living in towns and cities, the detection of violations of moral standards becomes a problem. People can be anonymous in the city, and soon find that nobody will know of their evil misdeeds.

Enter "sin," invented during the Axial Age in the millennium before Christ. It solved the problem of misdeeds in the anonymous city. Your neighbors may not know of your misdeeds, but God will know! God will punish misdeeds, and even if you manage to avoid paying for your misdeeds in this life, God will punish you in the next one. Pretty clever, as long as people believe in God, of course.

Our age is an age that has tried to abolish sin. Of course, it has not worked. In some cases sin has been smuggled in the back door, where "sexual harassment" has replaced the disapproval of the cad. But mostly sin has been replaced with a gigantic government bureaucracy empowered to look into every crevice of your life to detect evildoing.

Bureaucracy is not society. Heavy-handed law enforcement is not a replacement for self-responsible freedom. In life after liberalism we must find a new code so that most of the time social control stops short of force, what we so charmingly call "law enforcement."

Now, I wonder what that might be? I wonder if anyone has invented it already. I wonder if it is working, already, around us every day, only we just don't appreciate it.

What do you think?

Our Friendship vs. Their Resentment

2010-09-03T10:26:00.000-07:00

After the success of the Glenn Beck Restoring Honor rally, some of our liberal friends are determined not to be outdone. Labor and religious leaders and the NAACP are organizing a rally on the National Mall for October 2.

"The AFL-CIO is determined that the Tea Party and its corporate backers are not going to get the final word,” said AFL-CIO executive vice president Arlene Holt Baker. "We will expect tens of thousands of union families to come."

"We are fueled by hope and not hate," Holt Baker said.

I have a suggestion for the labor and religious leaders and the NAACP. Don't.

If you chaps mount a rally it will show up a profound difference between the goal and the vision of the Beck folks and the goals and vision of you lefty chaps.

The difference that will come out for all to see is the difference between friendship, not to mention faith, hope and charity, and the resentment that powers the left.

The mainstream of western thought owes much to the commonplace assertion of Aristotle, that we are social animals. The notion of human sociability suggests the idea that we should resolve our differences in a spirit of friendly negotiation rather than by force.

That was the point of the Restoring Honor rally. It was a friendly gathering. In fact the folks that attended spent a lot of the time friending each other on Facebook. A young black woman at the rally told the media not to call her an African American, but an American. "These are my family," she asserted, echoing the words of an older black man who testified to the media back in the spring.

The speakers at the Beck rally also emphasized the Christian values of faith, hope, and charity, not to mention the notion of the providential God that is shared by both Christians and Jews.

They did not mention specific goodies they wanted in recompense for past injustice.

Living under a providential God, or blessed to live in the culture of American exceptionalism, we Americans discover a responsibility to deserve the providential love of God. So the rally speakers emphasized that the future begins with us, with our dedication to responsibility, friendship, kindness.

But the left believes in a culture of resentment, a resentment nurtured in the minds of helpless victims cheated of their rightful place in the world by oppressors and exploiters.

There is, of course, plenty of injustice in the world, and resentment is a natural sentiment that all of us experience. We resent the friend that got into Harvard when we didn't, the co-worker that gets a promotion that we didn't, the guy that got the girl that we didn't. Resentment shows up in the seven deadly sins as envy, only resentment is envy on steroids.

You want to watch that envy, because, according to Roger Scruton in A Political Philosophy resentment is the emotion that leads to totalitarianism.

I see [resentment] as an emotion that arises in all societies, being a natural offshoot of the competition for advantage. Totalitarian ideologies are adopted because they rationalize resentment, and also unite the resentful around a common cause. Totalitarian systems arise when the resentful, having seized power, proceed to abolish the institutions that have conferred power on others, institutions like law, property and religion which create hierarchies, authorities and privileges, and which enable individuals to assert sovereignty over their own lives.

Once the resentful acquire power they reduce everything to pure power, and "dispense with mediating institutions"; individual rights are replaced by central control. We have seen how this works. Central control everywhere seems to mean bureaucracy.

Converted into a "centralized power structure" society becomes transformed into an army. An army is, after all, a centralized power structure for projecting power on neighboring territories.

But in the totalitarian power structure the power is directed inside the territory, at groups targeted for punishment. These targeted groups become the replacement for the ancient scapegoat in which tribal societies purged themselves of the wrath of the gods.

The Jacobins targeted the aristocrats and then "emigrés." The Soviets targeted the bourgeoisie and then "kulaks." The Nazis targeted the Jews. Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) targeted Communists.

Our liberal friends, unfortunately, have too often toyed with this inflammatory material. They used to target the malefactors of great wealth. Then it was the big corporations. Then it was the racist South. It used to be the religious right, but now it is the Tea Party activists, who are stigmatized and marginalized as racists, bigots, sexists, and homophobes.

It is, of course, laughable to turn the Tea Party into the liberal scapegoat-du-jour. These chaps haven't done anything yet except go to rallies and pitch out a couple of Republican senators.

But there is a bigger issue in the resentment/scapegoat dynamic. In its original form, the scapegoat was the king. It had to be. It must be the king who must be sacrificed to propitiate the gods. That should be obvious. The king is the representative of the tribe or nation. If something has gone wrong, then he should take the blame. To sacrifice a lesser person is an insult to the gods, and would provoke the gods to greater wrath.

The scapegoat concept is understood in the corporate and military shibboleth that, when things go well you say that your team were the ones that made it possible. When things go wrong, then you, the leader, take the blame.

President Bush understood this. He understood that he had to be the national scapegoat for the unpopular war against terror. He bowed his head and took it like a man--like a mensch, you might say.

But liberals don't understand this. That is why they are going ahead with their October 2 rally, which will doubtless be a display of liberal resentment. Of course, Jim Wallis, liberal evangelical, insists that it will all be sweetness and light. "[W]e must move this country forward beyond divisiveness and hate, to rebuild and reclaim our destiny," he says.

But then why does organizer Holt Baker talk about the "Tea Party and its corporate backers?" Corporate backers? He means, one assumes, the libertarian billionaire Koch brothers and the Scaife family that fund groups like Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks.

My advice to liberals is to put money into keeping as many of your senators and representatives in the game as possible. make sure that your troops are properly led and execute on a good strategic retreat.

But don't try to pretend that you can turn out a grass-roots movement this fall that can rival the Tea Party.

Because if you showcase your political philosophy of resentment up against the Beck philosophy of Restoring Honor you guys are going to look like the sore losers.

What Conservatives are For

2010-08-20T09:15:00.001-07:00

The last two weeks have been brutal for our liberal friends, and they just don't understand what went wrong.

Obviously, they said, this whole 9/11 Mosque controversy is about rights, the right of freedom of religion. Moslems have a right to worship and government has no right to circumscribe that right. Anyone who disagrees is a bigot. Period.

Our liberal friends, I reckon, were put on this earth for one great thing. They were put on this earth to midwife the civil-rights revolution. In their finest hour in the early 1960s they insisted on realizing the promise of the American revolution that all men are created equal. They insisted that the original sin of the American founding should be redeemed. They risked a lot in pushing through the civil-rights acts, and lost the South for a generation, just as Lyndon Johnson feared. Conservatives like Barry Goldwater and Bill Buckley didn't get it; they got all caught up in legalisms.

The trouble is that liberals, put onto this earth for that one thing, want to fit every issue into the civil rights mold. They are like the hammer: everything looks like a nail. They've made women's rights into a civil-rights issue, gay rights into a civil-rights issue. And now they want Muslims to be an historically marginalized group and apply the civil-rights solution to them too.

The conservative retort to liberals on the 9/11 mosque issue is simple, and it illustrates what conservatives were put on this earth to do.

Conservatives say to liberals: Yes, of course Muslims have a right to put up a mosque anywhere they want. The question is: should they exercise that right. Or should they think about the insult that such a mosque, so close to a site where 3,000 people, mostly Americans, were killed by Muslim terrorists, represents to New Yorkers and most Americans. Should Muslims, in a spirit of friendship and kindness, forbear to exercise their undoubted rights.

We conservatives are saying is that politics in particular and social relations in general are not just about rights and the rule of law. Life is not merely a mechanical thing about following the rules. Nor is it just an adversarial proceeding as in a court of law. Nor it is a blind application of bureaucratic rules. Life is give-and-take. Life is friendship. Life is restraint, holding back when you know you are about to hurt an acquaintance.

Indeed, if you try to reduce everything to a pound of flesh you will find that you inevitably end up committing one cruel injustice after another. The quality of mercy is not strained / It falleth as the gentle rain from Heaven.

This need to blend rules with the sentiment of mercy and friendship has been at the heart of modern conservatism since Edmund Burke railed against "sophisters, economists, and calculators" 220 years ago. Here is the full quote from his Reflections on the Revolution in France.

The age of chivalry has gone and that of economists and calculators has set in, and the glory of Europe has departed.

Perhaps Burke was a little overwrought that day.

In the next few years we will see conservatism applied to the moral and material mess created by the bureaucratic leviathan we call the welfare state. Conservatives will be doing what they were made to do: pointing out that you cannot reduce the social relation--the caring things like care of the aged, care of the sick, the education of children--to rules and bureaucracy.

That's what conservatives are on this earth to do. To show liberals where they went wrong.

A Culture of Friendship

2010-08-13T09:56:00.000-07:00

If liberalism is the culture of compulsion, then what should conservatism's culture be?

Simple. It should be the culture of friendship, and not just because Aristotle wrote that friendship was the basis of politics, indeed all social bonds.

We could also all it the culture of involvement, of engagement, of voluntary cooperation. All this is just trying to say one thing. The culture of reason, of laws and regulations for everything, of experts declaiming from on high, of politicians dividing us, of bureaucratic busy-ness has failed. It is not kind, it is not generous, it is not thoughtful, it is not human.

Also, it does not understand the huge "diversity" in humans that complements our undeniable sociability. This is not just a question of justice, that people should have a right to be different, but a question of survival. A field of genetically identical wheat will be devastated by a single infestation of wheat rust. But a diverse population will respond to pestilence, or indeed anything, in lots of different ways. Some will perish, others will survive, still others will thrive.

This means that instead of everyone following the single ruling-class-approved trajectory of life, the road of government custody in schools followed by government supervised work and government-dependent old age. In the culture of friendship people would choose different trajectories, providing only that they did not harm the lives of others.

Let us examine how this would work in the realm of social services that form the core of government function in this age of the administrative welfare state.

Instead of the rigid governmental social structures, the government school, the government welfare, the government health care, the government pension, people would obtain these vital social goods in a web of friendship and social service. People would provide social services to others and receive social services from others in appropriate measure.

How might this work in the simple case of the government pension? In the current culture of compulsion each worker is forced to pay a jobs tax that goes to pay the pension of an older person. This plan, we now know, is doomed to failure because people have demanded and politicians have legislated benefits that cannot be paid.

But in the culture of friendship, middle-aged people save from their income. They save so that, in due time, they will accumulate enough capital that younger persons can use it to work and create enough wealth to leave the older person a share of this wealth creation as interest on the capital saved and invested in the younger generation. Thus we have a double exchange of friendship. The older person prudently saves, not wishing to be a burden on the young generation, and gives the accumulation of this saving to the youngsters for them to work and found new families. The young generation gives back a dividend from the wealth created by the combination of capital and work in a spirit of friendliness to the old 'uns.

There is not just one trajectory here, but many. Some will work in large organizations and accumulate capital in the financial markets. Others will establish businesses and sell them, as they get older, to the younger generation. Or they may hand them down to their children. Others will build up businesses that can be operated by younger people while providing them with an income.

There is, of course, a natural flexibility in this arrangement. If the older person saves a lot, he can retire from work early. If there is a banking crisis that reduces the value of investments then the older person must plan to work a little longer. If the younger person turns the investment into an extraordinary success then all benefit.

Thus does the culture of friendship triumph over the culture of compulsion.

We will see in future episodes how the culture of friendship triumphs over the culture of compulsion in the other great social functions: health care, education, and the relief of the poor.

This is not rocket science. It is merely a recognition that we humans are social animals, and that our greatest asset is our sociability, our capacity for friendship, for wishing good things not just for ourselves, but for others.

The Culture of Compulsion

2010-08-06T10:27:00.000-07:00

What is the center of the conservative critique of liberalism? It is, I believe, that liberalism has replaced the community of social relationship with a rigid mechanism of administrative bureaucracy.

Of course, the old ways of traditional face-to-face community had its problems. It was often unreflectingly conservative and often hardened hierarchy into oppression. The question at the beginning of the modern era was how to replace the often oppressive hierarchy of the old regime with a new web of freedom.

In the adventure of freedom the Anglo-Saxons attempted a balance of powers that tried to compromise between national power and local loyalty, and set the different branches against each other in a separation of government powers. The French attempted to erect an empire of Reason, and it led directly to the guillotine and the Terror. The Germans erected an empire of rational hierarchy from schools to state bureaucracies to the armed forces. They turned a nation of poets and thinkers into an army. It was an army that could conquer the French any time it wanted to, but it led to the ruin of 1945.

You'd think that everyone would get the message but they didn't. In all the great areas of political life we moderns have marginalized instinctive, cooperative voluntarism and built up huge structures of rational administration.

We have built up huge government pension programs wonderful in their mechanical completeness but utterly unconnected to underlying economic reality. That is to say, we have decreed what is to be paid to older people in benefits and what is to be paid by younger workers in taxes and contributions, but we have no way of balancing the two. In all western nations, the government pension program is breaking down.

We have built up huge government health care programs. The British National Health Service is the largest administrative organization in the world after the Indian Railways. Each administrative system reflects the latest ideas from the politicians, from the health producer interests, and political interest groups. But it cannot respond to the day-by-day needs of ordinary people and adjust itself to their priorities. It is subsidized at the point of delivery but ruinously expensive overall.

We have built up huge government education systems. These systems require that children be sent upon compulsion for most of their childhood and youth to government custodial facilities to learn--not very much. The education system is designed around the needs and notions of the educated professional class. Thus it assumes that every child should prepare for a college education, ignoring the fact that most people learn by doing. The system responds, as any government program, to political winds and desperate attempts by politicians to respond to the latest disaster. But it cannot respond to the individual needs of parents and children. It pits parents against each other as its centralized administrative structure forces it towards one-size-fits-all.

We have built up huge government welfare systems. These systems treat the poor as passive objects of compassion that either qualify or do not qualify for benefits. But humans are not passive objects. They are resourceful creatures, descendants of a species that has hacked a habitat out of a nature that only rains down its blessings upon the adaptable. Thus the poor and the not-so-poor develop a cunning knowledge of the system and learn how to adjust their lives to qualify for benefits. They become world experts in qualifying for government pensions when youthful twenty-somethings; they expose the lie of an intelligent elite assisting helpless victims proving themselves intelligent exploiters of a mechanical monster.

These vast administrative structures marginalize ordinary people. They make them into cogs in a vast machinery. The administrative state turns people from free citizens responsibly serving their fellows in voluntary cooperation into dependent drones anxiously searching for the right shaped benefit outlet in which to plug in for a battery charge.

There must be a better way. There must be a way of building a society in which the ordinary person has a social and responsible role, something with more dignity than an insecure dependence on a government program.

Beyond Corruption and Injustice

2010-08-03T08:10:00.000-07:00

It goes without saying that the modern liberal administrative state is unjust. It's corrupt, cruel, and wasteful as well. And its deluded practitioners continue to sing its praises in the face of all its failures.

Liberalism is, after all, not just a political philosophy, but a secular religion.

The larger failure, I believe, is liberalism's culture of compulsion. Modern society under liberalism is a society of a million laws, and ten thousand regulations.

It wasn't supposed to be that way. Supposedly, the bright light of reason and justice would chase away the inequality, the indignities, the superstitions of the old regime. Then everyone would live in freedom and community.

In fact, the liberal regime requires tight regulation and widespread compulsion throughout society. Instead of the glorious future of cooperation, it turns out that in the liberal state vast structures of supervision and mandate are required. Rather than a liberal society, we now have a liberal administrative state in which everyone is forced to do the right thing.

What went wrong, and what can we do about it?

That is the core of this American Manifesto. What went wrong with the liberal dream? What turned it into a nightmare, where limited government turned into big government? What turned the poor into the underclass? What turned respectable citizens into adult adolescents? And what do we do now?

"You must suggest an alternative," said Margaret Thatcher.

It is time to toss liberalism onto the dust heap of history, and start to imagine an alternative. I call it "life after liberalism." What will it be like?

First of all, it cannot be a society where all decisions are made by a political elite. Government is force. Politics is power. Politicians only know about playing power games and dividing people so that they can win elections. The more we empower politicians, the more they will divide us. The reason we call it "society" is because it is more than a top-down administration. All must participate according to their abilities, and all must take responsibility.

It cannot be a society where all decisions are made by reason and by rule. Rules and reason are wonderful things, but they are mechanical and clumsy. "The heart has its reasons that reason knows not." Humans are social animals and the social virtues are not mechanical and rational, but instinctive and emotional. Human society must be a blend of instinct, emotion, and reason.

It cannot be a society of "one size fits all." The difference between humans and machines is that you can write manuals to maintain machines and leave a mechanic in charge. The maintenance of humans in good running order we call a "relationship." No one rule or caned procedure will suffice. Yet, of course, our ruling class attempts to rule us exactly according to the orthodox principle of "one size fits all." We have one compulsory government pension scheme, one compulsory health care program, one compulsory education system. They cannot imagine a society where people take care of their own needs in voluntary cooperation, without the supervision of the politicians and experts.

You'll find, as An American Manifesto takes shape, that there is another way. In the life after liberalism, we will demote politics to a coequal between the economic and the moral/cultural. We will re-strand the withered chords of face-to-face society and responsibility. We will discover how we already have the means for each of us to escape the compulsory "one size fits all" prison of the liberal administrative state.

As Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain puts it: "There is such a thing as society. It's just not the same thing as the state."

In other words, to call a thing "social" or "public" does not mean that the government must do it. It only means that people do it, and that they do it in the community that we create beyond the old boundaries of family and kindred. It might be government, but it is more likely to be a church, a fraternal group, a business, a charity, a sports association.

Yes, Virginia. There is life after liberalism.

Manifesto: Marx and Engels Style

2010-07-21T14:15:00.000-07:00

It was 1848 when young Karl Marx, son of a lawyer, and Friedrich Engels, son of a textile manufacturer, penned their Communist Manifesto. It was a baby-boom era, the baby boom that followed the Napoleonic Wars, and young people were feeling frisky.

But today, a year and a half after the inauguration of Barack Obama, modern day conservatives are feeling frisky. Maybe it's time to pen a "Manifesto of the Conservative Movement of the United States." Here's how it might begin:

A spectre is haunted the liberal west -- the spectre of conservatism. All the powers of the liberal establishment have entered into a secular alliance to exorcise this spectre: liberal left and Islamic extremists, left-wing professors and Hollywood moguls, Democratic politicians and government unions, feminists and gays.
Where is the conservative who has not been decried as "religious right" by opponents in power? Where is the Tea Party activist who has not been calumnied as "racist." Where is the objective reporter that has not hurled back the branding reproach of extremism, against the more advanced conservative activists, or anyone that does not truckle to the reactionary liberal elite?
Two things result from this fact:
I. Conservatism is already acknowledged by all in the liberal elite to be itself a power.
II. It is high time that conservatives should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of conservatism with a manifesto of the conservative movement itself.

I'll send the full text over to American Thinker. Then, next week, we'll put it up here.

Announcing "An American Manifesto"

2010-07-19T20:04:00.000-07:00

After a year and a half of President Obama and his Democratic Congress Americans are looking at each other in and wondering.

Surely there is a better way to imagine America than the liberal vision of competing victim groups and the presumption of helplessness.

Surely there is a better way to govern America?

Surely we can imagine a better future for our children than an ever-enlarging government.

Surely American deserve better than a government that does less and less with more and more.

It is time to create "An American Manifesto." It is time to imagine life after liberalism and start to create it. It is time to believe in a new America without a thousand liberal interest groups. It is time to imagine an America without a million laws. It is time to believe in an America built upon friendliness, bound together with kindness, and healed with forgiveness.

If we want an America like that, then we have to step up and build it. Liberals can't do it. They wouldn't know how to start. Conservatives must do it. But we can only do it if we reach out to moderates and independents. We must offer them the hand of friendship, and say: there's got to be a better way.

So let us join together, conservatives, moderates, independents, and even a few enlightened liberals. Let us reason together and draft An American Manifesto: Life After Liberalism.