Raising the Conservative Game

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

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

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.

Back to start: Conservatism's Big Problem.

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 in FY 2011.

	Government Pensions	$1.0 trillion
	Government Health Care	$1.2 trillion
	Government Education	$0.9 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[rehensive]. 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."

And now, five years later, Bourgeois Equality, here.

The Wrong "Road to 60"

Some Republicans are learning the wrong lesson from the filibuster-proof Senate of 2009-10. Grover Norquist is mapping out "The Road to 60" for the next two election cycles.

Social Security reform failed in 2005, on his view, because Republicans only had 55 seats in the US Senate and Democrats absolutely refused to countenance any reform. So Republicans are going to have to get to 60 so that they can ram reform down the Democrats' throats just like the Democrats rammed ObamaCare down Republican throats.

(My recollection was the Republicans couldn't even get Social Security reform out of the House in 2005.)

But this gets it all wrong. There is no point in reforming entitlements unless Republicans can forge a bipartisan majority with moderate Democrats. It would be a terrible mistake to craft a plan and ram it down Democratic throats. That would create a Democratic rejectionist movement and years of rancorous division.

Anyway, Republicans aren't going to need to get to 60 to pass entitlement reform. Back in 2005 Democrats never imagined that we'd be in a situation where states were going bankrupt, public pension plans were underwater, and the federal debt would be heading for 100 percent of GDP. They know, at least in a semi-conscious way, that their programs are in trouble.

When the Republicans start on Rep. Ryan's Roadmap and start to tentatively reform entitlements they will start be able to find Democratic votes. And if they can't find them in 2013 or 2015 they will find them sooner or later.

Republicans must understand that they are moving into a strategic advantage. If these entitlements go belly up it will be Democratic voters that will suffer most. The sooner the Democrats do a deal the better their voters will do out of it. The longer they wait, demagoguing the "cuts," the worse it will be for the "little people."

Democrats don't yet realize that their breakout effort in 2009-10 was a strategic blunder of monumental proportions. They have created issues that Republican candidates will run on for a generation. ObamaCare is going to kill them, because anything that goes wrong in health care will get blamed on ObamaCare and Democrats. And now that Democrats don't have the legislative power they had before the election they are trying to do everything by administrative ukase: instituting "death panels" at the Department of Health and Human Services and pushing carbon dioxide regulation at the Environmental Protection Agency. They couldn't have thought up a better way to creat Republican voters if they had tried.

The centralized administrative state has had an amazing run during the last century. But now it is running up against the reality that it is profoundly undemocratic and profoundly unjust. Democrats have no idea the trouble they are in. Not yet.

The Six Government Mistakes That Led to the Meltdown

One thing our liberal friends seem to be determined to do is to turn their faces away from the truth of the Great Recession.

No, Virginia and New York Times readers, it wasn't greedy bankers or even stupid borrowers. That is mixing up the symptoms for the cause. The cause of the Great Meltdown was government. In fact there were six, count 'em, six different government mistakes, according to Mark J. Perry and Robert Dell in The American.

1. Bank misregulation "incentivized (not merely “allowed”) the creation and highly-leveraged systemic accumulation of the highest yielding AAA- and AA-rated securities among banks globally. Mostly, these banks acquired securitized US mortgages."
2. Continually increasing leverage. "Creditors with the lowest cost of capital generally drive underwriting and leverage standards within the segment in which they compete. In the residential mortgage market, with government entities [Fannie and Freddie] historically being the low-cost providers of capital and the dominant purchasers and guarantors of loans and securities, it is reasonable to hold government accountable for system-wide leverage."
3. Abandonment of proven credit standards and the "enlargement of the riskier subprime and Alt-A mortgage markets by Fannie and Freddie." Government was forcing banks to make high-risk loans.
4. Creditor bailouts by "FDIC, Federal Reserve, Treasury Department, and Congress" starting in the 1980s. Creditors normally control business lending through a variety of devices. But when they are protected by, e.g., deposit insurance, they don't bother.
5. The increase in deposit insurance. It was not just FDIC but the "unchecked expansion of coverage up to $50 million under the Certificate of Deposit Account Registry Service beginning in 2003."
6. Low interest rates from 2001 to 2005. This encouraged the teaser rates on Alt-A and subprime mortgages that made "the rollover or refinancing of short-term instruments all the more precarious" in 2006 and 2007.

The rhetorical problem for conservatives is to boil this sophisticated analysis down into a sound bite. Because we really need to create a meme and a national consensus that government was to blame for the Great Meltdown. It needs to go something like this. Look, you can't fool me. Greedy bankers are always greedy bankers. The problem here is that greedy politicians encouraged greedy bankers and borrowers to become stupid greedy bankers and borrowers. "Government turned greedy bankers into stupid greedy bankers. And that's no error."

And there is no excuse for that.

McCloskey Week: The Messenger

The message of Deirdre McCloskey's mammoth Bourgeois Cycle -- in The Bourgeois Virtues and Bourgeois Dignity -- 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.

Back to start: Conservatism's Big Problem.

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 LGBT 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."

Next: Big Fact vs. Big Mistake.

McCloskey Week: It's Not What You Think

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?

Back to start: Conservatism's Big Problem.

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.

Next: The Messenger.