Iran and the Chimera of "Self-Sufficiency"

Ever since the dawn of the modern age movements have erupted again and again calling for a return to “self-sufficiency.”

That’s what mercantilism was all about.  That’s what socialism is all about.  And that is what the current regime in Iran is all about.  We don’t need no stink’n trading.  We can make it all here ourselves.

So in Iran, Amir Taheri writes:

Mr. Ahmadinejad insists that the only way Iran can preserve its "Islamic purity" is to reduce dependence on foreign commerce.
"Whatever we can produce we should do ourselves," the president likes to say. "Even if what we produce is not as good, and more costly."

Er no, old chum.  The central insight of the modern commercial era is the law of comparative advantage.  Everyone should do what they do best, and hire out everything else to other people.

It is the exact opposite of the idea of President Ahmadinejad and the rest of the self-sufficiency enthusiasts. 

Generally speaking, the record shows that countries that follow the path of self-sufficiency, or “autarky,” are countries following the path of self-impoverishment.

Of course, for the rest of us, it is no bad thing when thug dictators follow ruinous policies of national impoverishment.  Go ahead Chavez; go ahead Ahmadinejad.  Make my day.

But you have to feel sorry for the people in Venezuela and Iran and the rest of the thug-dictatordoms.  Because they get to pay the price for the follies and the delusions of their leaders.

For Dionne It's All About Compulsion

Things don’t look too good out there for people like us, writes E.J. Dionne, Jr. in the aftermath of the French election.  What with France, Labour’s problems in Britain, Sweden, Canada (land of single-payer health care), and Germany, social democrats are in retreat.  In the light of all this

the social democratic and liberal left faces a big problem because globalization makes the movement’s core pledge — to produce economic growth that lifts up the poor and the middle class as well as the rich — far more problematic.

Er, just a minute E.J. Do you really understand what you are saying? Tell me more.

For much of the period after World War II, national governments found it relatively easy to redistribute wealth and income through taxes and decent wage agreements negotiated by strong labor unions. Globalization and heightened competition are taking a toll on unionized industrial jobs, while national governments have less freedom of action when capital is so mobile.

Is that what you really believe?  That you can really help the poor and the middle class with the big clunking fist of redistribution and monopoly union wages?

How do you account for Britland, where the economy (for all workers) has bounded ahead since it abandoned progressive economic policy?  Or Ireland, that has become a Celtic tiger, changed in twenty years from the poor man of Europe to a per-capita GDP now higher than Britland, France, Germany, Italy, you name it?  Would that have anything to do with the moment in the 1980s when the Irish government lowered tax rates and government spending, do you think, E.J.?

E.J., somewhere along the line you have got it backwards.  The progressive promise has always been to redistribute income the the poor (middle class? come on) irregardless of the effect on the economy.  It was a matter of social justice, remember?

And “decent wage agreements negotiated by strong labor unions” is what killed the steel industry, and is on the point of killing the automobile industry in this country.  Was it really worth it to give a few workers a decade or two of aristocratic privilege for that?  The whole rust belt, home of the unionized industrial worker, is rusted out.  Do you think that is maybe because labor is priced out of the market and the state governments in the rust belt are just too anti-business, E.J.?

The lesson of globalization is something that you progressives can’t bear to learn.  It is that a vibrant economy with low tax rates and low privileges lifts all boats in a sudden, overwhelming, flood tide of prosperity.  They tried it in Hong Kong in the 1960s.  They tried it in Britland and the US in the 1980s.  They tried in in China, in Ireland, now in India, and maybe tomorrow in France.  Yah think, E.J.?

All that progressive politics does is slow it down with compulsion and class warfare pitting people against each other.

Of course, nobody ever denied that the progressive welfare state was a bonanza for progressive activists, politicians, and experts.

That is something we can all agree on.

Democrats Still Opposed to Missile Defense

For forty years after World War II the defenses of the United States were aligned to “contain” the Soviet Union.  Most of the time Democrats had to be dragged along kicking and screaming to contribute to the effort.

Not surprisingly, the Soviet Union did not appreciate this.  To them, the United States was engaged in a strategy of encirclement.  Of course, they were right.

But since 9/11 the United States has switched its front.  The front is no longer aligned along the borders of the Soviet Empire.  It is aligned around the Islamic empire.

As James Hackett writes:

President Bush is showing that his ABM treaty withdrawal, missile defense deployment in Alaska and on Aegis ships, overthrow of Afghanistan’s Taliban regime and removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq were all part of a worldview in which national security is the highest priority.

Part of the proposed disposition of the US armed force is to put missile defense radars and interceptors in Poland and the Czech Republic, a proposal that the Poles and Czechs think is rather a good idea.

Only two voices seem opposed.  President Putin of Russia and Democratic Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.  Seems like old times.

It reminds me of the defense policy of Scientific American.  To that magazine’s editors, there there have always seemed to be two types of weapon systems.  There are weapon systems that work but that should not be deployed because they are destabilizing.  Then there are weapons that do not work that should be canceled.

The folks in Congress seem to have a similar idea.  Writes Hackett:

Just as support [for missile defense] is developing in Europe, some members of the Democratic-controlled Congress want to reduce funding for the sites there. The Strategic Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee has cut the administration’s $310 million request by more than half, to $150 million, which is the wrong message to send to our European allies. Subcommittee Chairwoman Ellen Tauscher, California Democrat, explained earlier that some members think more operational testing is needed.

What is it about these people? 

Netroots: On Chait in TNR

Here is how the netroots experience their birth in the aftermath of the contested 2000 election in Markos Moulitsas Zúñiga and Jerome Armstrong’s book, Crashing the Gate:

Five years ago, the Republicans took over the government through nondemocratic means. Establishment Democrats, for the most part, stood back and watched as a partisan judicial body halted the counting of presidential votes. While conservative activists led the charge on behalf of their party, there was nothing happening on our side.

That is a version of reality that conservatives and Republicans would certainly contest.  But never mind.  That’s the netroots’ story and they are sticking with it.

It is certainly true, as Jonathan Chait writes in The New Republic, that the netroots experience themselves as another great political movement like the conservative movement that hit the radar with the Goldwater campaign in 1964 and brought Ronald Reagan to the presidency 16 years later.

And he certainly captures in his article the flavor of the netroots, at least from the perspective of one who is not a member.

What is interesting, for a conservative, is how much he gets wrong about the conservative movement.  That is always a frustrating, but also an exhilirating experience.  After all, if mainstream liberals don’t really “get” the conservative movement, after all these years, so much the better.

The bigger question is: Just what is the netroots movement for?  For it is the difference between the netroots and the conservative movement that is most telling. 

The conservative movement went critical in the 1960s in a coming together of political activists, books, interests, and scholarship.  It was a coming together of people who believed that the welfare state was the wrong road for the modern world and who wanted to think and organize around the project of reforming it and/or replacing it.  On the way the original fusion of libertarians and traditional conservatives developed into a big tent that included evangelical Christians, Jewish liberals mugged by reality, and Reagan Democrats that felt uncomfortable in the post-patriotic McGovernite Democratic Party.

The question is: who do the netroots represent, beyond a cadre of angry college-educated children of the welfare state?  Where do they want to take the United States?  What do they want to change?  Where are their books?

In Chait’s view the netroots don’t really have a philosophy and they don’t really have an agenda.  Pushed to say what they believe in they regurgitate a fairly conventional liberal agenda.  Only more so.

Let’s look at it another way.  Conservatives formed a movement because they wanted to change the welfare state.  That’s what movements are for, to mount an insurgency against the establishment by political organizing and winning elections.  Conservatives wanted to move the nation away from top-down management by experts and activists.

The netroots appear to be forming a movement to oppose the establishment for not opposing the insurgent conservatives with enough energy.  Maybe that’s a brilliant idea: putting some backbone into wimpy liberal establishment types and make them fight for the programs that help poor people.

Or maybe it’s a catastrophic error.  It could just as well split the Democrats, as the right-wing patriotic side of the party splits off from the left-wing netroots.  Or it could move the whole party to the left, away from the center where the independent voters are.

I come back, again and again to the analysis of Lee Harris in Civilization and Its Enemies.  To him we are talking about the war between the western team and the eternal gang of ruthless men.

Why it is that the netroots seem, rather obviously, a gang of ruthless men?

Center-right Sarkozy Wins In France

Because the left has liked to represent Nicolas Sarkozy, the next president of France as “fascist” and “right-wing”it is important to state that Sarkozy is a conventional center-right politician. 

Sarkozy believes that the science is in on the economy, that capitalism and limited-liability companies work for the average person, and especially for the marginalized.  That’s about what everyone on the center-right believes.

Sarkozy thinks that there ought to be sensible control on immigration and that immigrants have a responsibility to integrate with the land in which they wish to live and work.  That’s about what everyone on the center-right believes.

But Sarkozy has a problem. When the center-right Reagan/Thatcher revolution began a quarter of a century ago in the Anglosphere it was founded upon a widespread understanding among the voters that something was wrong and something had to change.  As the folks at  Mark Steyn agrees, but in more colorful language.

[The French are] sick of crime and unemployment and on the whole could do with rather fewer Muslims on the streets, but they’re not yet willing to give up on the economic protectionism and lavish social programs that lead, inexorably, to the crime and unemployment and a general economic and demographic decline leaving the nation dependent on mass immigration and accelerating Islamization.

After all, why should they?  The preachers of the left have taught the French people for a century that they deserve a life of security and sinecure and tenure by right.

We wish the best for our French friends, but fear that things will have to get worse before they get better.

Don't Frighten the Horses

Analyzing the British local elections of last week Charles Moore conducts a seminar in the politics of the twenty-first century.  He is talking about the consequence of the ascendancy of New Labour under Tony Blair, but everything he says applies to our own Democratic Party.

The brilliance of Tony Blair is that—even though schools don’t educate and government health care doesn’t work and the nation is overrun with immigration and surly youths have turned the streets into a battlezone—people don’t think that anything can be done about it.

While New Labour has been throwing money at schools and health care they have been enormously increasing the size of the public sector.  And in that public sector there are “privileges in employment and pensions which are quite beyond the reach of the rest of us.”

But it is not just the public sector that has been increased.

These changes enormously increase the political class. Again as in other parts of the EU, thousands of people can now have entire, well-paid careers working for political parties in commodious offices. They start as staffers to the elected; then they get elected on list systems over which the voter has no control; then, if they are lucky, they become MPs.

Of course, in politics as in the Church, many are called but few are chosen.  No problem. If they can’t become elected officials,

they can get jobs as regulators and governance experts and special advisers or even-better-paid versions of the same thing in Brussels. The power of party political patronage is now 18th-century in its abuse, but thoroughly 21st-century in its enormous size. 

Sound familiar?

But here is the corker.  Despite all this huge government failure: services that don’t work, government workers that don’t work, huge taxes, endless meddling and regulation, if you propose to change it the voters get scared and go running back to their incompetent welfare state party bosses and ward heelers.

So just like America’s Republicans, David Cameron cannot propose sweeping changes that will end forever the dull failing mediocrity of the lefty welfare state.  Oh no.

[O]ne longs to advise Mr Cameron to proclaim an arresting analysis which breaks decisively with all the dreary Continentalism described above, but I am sure that at this point it would not work. He is right that the Tories are still "in recovery" rather than fully accepted. If they try to be clever, dangerous, bold, they will just frighten people.

This is what is so maddening.  We know what to do about the welfare state.  The science is in.  It has been for at least a generation.  Abolish the government pension programs; they never work because the politicians always over-promise.  Abolish government health care.  It doesn’t do much for life expectancy.  Abolish government education.  It doesn’t really do much educating.

But anyone who advances the modest agenda of ending government programs that don’t work is ruthlessly stigmatized as a madman.  It just isn’t fair.

Actually the voters are right.  As much as the political class loves bold, persistent experimentation, the voters instinctively understand rapid change is not for them.  They know, the ordinary people, that they are the folks that get left with the mess when the suits move on.

So the way to reform the welfare state out of existence is by baby steps, with a little reform here and a minor privatization there.

As Senator Everett Dirksen used to say forty years ago, a billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you are talking about real money.

It’s just like the antarctic Shackleton expedition a century ago.  When they took the sled dogs out to kill them, they took them out individually and applied the coup de grace out of site behind a hill.

That way the other dogs wouldn’t get nervous.

Tories Advance in Brit Local Elections

Britain’s Conservative Party oustripped forecasts of 600-700 by gaining over 875 seats in the British local council elections.  As the BBC put it: 

It may not have been the surge many had been hoping for, but Mr Cameron has always stressed the party has an electoral mountain to climb if it is to win the next general election and, with around 800 seats gained, it outstripped its forecasts.

But the goal of the Tories was to make real improvement in the North (wiped out in the 1997 general election) and to chip away at the Liberal Democrats (many disaffected Conservative voters have been sojourning with the LibDems).

And that is exactly what the Tories achieved.  They had some notable successes in the north of England, and in their 875+ gain they took almost 500 seats from Labour and almost 150 seats from the LibDems.

The centerpiece of the Cameron strategy is to appeal to centrists with themes like work/life balance and global warming.  Those centrists are the LibDem voters that the Conservatives must attract if they are to win the next general election.