Pinker's Better Angels

Steven Pinker, who last scandalized us by insisting that humans are not The Blank Slate that social engineers want us to be is back with another.



This time in The Better Angels of Our Nature he is telling the story of the decline in violence--over the decades, centuries, millennia.  Then he tries to tell us why.



Yes, why is it that humans don't murder each other at the rate of 500 per 100,000 per year as they did in good old hunter-gatherer days?  Is it strong states, that suppress the private justice of feud and revenge?  Or the Humanitarian Revolution of the 18th century when the public square opened up to civil discourse? Or "gentle commerce" in which it pays for people to be nice to each other?  Or maybe the good offices of liberals that midwifed the Rights Revolution of the second half of the 20th century, de-marginalizing blacks, women, children, animals, and gays? Or all of the above?



When Pinker sets up a Manichean opposition between the Inner Demons and the Better Angels of our nature, you get a little uncomfortable and Brookeish.  Maybe it's time to pull up.  It's true that, e.g., the Church put a lot of effort into raising the consciousness of Church members in the late Medieval period and states curb private wars.  But the rise of Nazism and Communism required an intensification of conflict skills: counter-ideologies and a will to dominate the hated Hun and the cruel Commie.



It is not that violence is bad and peace is good.  Different times and contexts call for different measures.



But it seems to me that, if you are a liberal, you have to credit Darwinian natural selection.   Societies these days that feature more cooperation and less conflict seem to outperform societies that license conflict and mayhem.  No wonderful elite, just the working out of nature's plan.  Until the Mongols appear at the gates of Beijing or the Arians on the plain of Mother Ganga.  Then, all of a sudden, the skills of peace don't seem quite so urgent.



Pinker does at least provide tons of references to a groaning load of research, good, bad, and indifferent.  And for me the big take-away is the Public Goods game.  Here's how it works.



You give the players a pile of chips.  You suggest to players that they secretly put chips in a pot, which will be multiplied by a factor (often 2) and then shared out equally to each of them.  Typically, after a few rounds, only a hard core of givers continue to contribute.  Everyone else decides to keep their chips and take whatever the hard-core givers contribute.  The only way to get free-riders to contribute is to punish them.



Well now.  Who knew?  The only way you can get people to contribute to the public good is either to force them to contribute or punish them if they don't.  What a concept.



Like I said.  Government is force, and politics is talking about force.  And the force of government putting its hand into my pocket and forcing me to contribute is violence without the billy club.



The irony of Better Angels is that while liberals like Pinker boost the wonders of peace and non-violence it is liberals that encourage violence in the underclass, free-riding in the middle class, and a huge state that takes, by force, 40 percent of the national product.



That's why the Frankfurt School noticed that, while actual violence might go up or down, instrumental reason is always a tool of domination.  It is not a Better Angel as Pinker suggests.  It is a tool, for good or for ill.



That is something that we conservatives wish that liberals would realize.  Their wonderful rational plans, however well-intentioned, still amount to plans of domination.  And domination, according to Pinker, is an Inner Demon.

Will Wall Street Own Romney?

There's a bit of a dust-up about Kevin Williamson's recent "Repo Man" article in NRO.  Kevin argues that there's a reason why Wall Street went for Obama in 2008 and why they are swinging to Romney in 2012.  They are betting that Romney won't do anything to curb the extra-high leverage tricks and off-balance sheet borrowings that helped make the Crash of 2008 such a mess.  Anyway, they aren't conservative:

Here’s what Wall Street doesn’t want: It doesn’t want to hear from Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann or even Newt Gingrich, or suffer any sort of tea-party populism. It wants you rubes to shut up about Jesus and please pay your mortgages. It doesn’t want to hear from such traditional Republican constituencies as Christian conservatives, moral traditionalists, pro-lifers, or friends of the Second Amendment.

Radio host Hugh Hewitt says that's all rubbish, and it is "Bilderberger" stuff to think that "they" are working to get the fix in on Romney.

I’m just not going to buy that. I do think they might show up in a Sarah Palin T-shirt, and I do think that they are generally often quite conservative, very Evangelical. Some are deeply Roman Catholic, traditionalist, generous, high-minded people.

Hugh, you are wrong.  There may be some Catholics on Wall Street, but, based on my own limited experience, Wall Street is not evangelical.  In fact evangelical is radio-active for Wall Street.



I think that Kevin has it exactly right.  Finance is important, but the intersection between finance and  politics is nothing but trouble.  That's because the politicians need the finance guys to float their debt.  Right now, with the sovereign debt crisis, they really need the finance guys.  Right now, I read, banks are sopping up all but about 20 percent of government debt.  Why?  Because they don't have to hold reserves against government debt--good as gold, you see.



But there's a problem.  Government debt, especially in Europe, is not as good as gold.  There is a good likelihood that one or more governments will default on their debt.  That means that the banks ought to be holding reserves against those questionable government loans.



The whole point of proper accounting is that it properly accounts for risks and rewards.  The whole point of a balance sheet is to show assets and liabilities as honestly as possible.  But when the Basel banking regulations say that sovereign debt is a "risk-free asset class" then the regulators are encouraging banks to lie on their balance sheets.



You can see the intersection of politics and finance here.  Politicians need the banks to sop up their debt.  Banks like the idea of holding debt that doesn't require reserves.  Very often in this world, people want things they shouldn't get.  And that is certainly true at the intersection of politics and finance.



What happens if things go wrong?  Then the politicians have to bail out the banks because, hey, the banks were just following orders.



Under Dutch Finance, invented by the Dutch four hundred years ago, rock-solid government debt is the foundation of the credit system.  But under French Finance, invented by John Law three hundred years ago, governments trade on the rock-solid reputation of Dutch Finance to game the system.  Government debt turns out to be not so rock-solid after all, and then Poof!



The credit system works when the counter-parties can be trusted.  Trust is important because high-leverage, unavoidable in banking, requires that the parties work to manages their assets so that they will always be able to meet their obligations.  There is no way you can be sure that the other guy is really doing this:  you have to trust him.  That's why J.P. Morgan famously said that the most important factor for a banker in evaluating a would-be borrower is trust and character. "Because a man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom."



That's because when trust fails, then the whole system grinds to a halt.



Kevin Williamson is arguing that we need to get back to a financial system where the bankers are expected to manage their banks so that they will not require bailouts.  That means they need to keep a distance from politics: no rent-seeking by the bankers, and no bullying by the politicians.



One fine day, a president is going to need to unwind the present corrupt connection between finance and politics.  Kevin Williamson is afraid that it won't be Mitt Romney.

Conservatism Three by Three

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.

Yearning for a True Conservative

I know.  All the Republican candidates are disappointing.  The serial Great Conservative Hopes have each turned out to have feet of clay, and Mitt Romney isn't anyone's idea of a conservative standard bearer.  Anyway, Mitt doesn't seem to have the cojones to go head to head with President Obama and the Chicago gang.



If we are looking for real conservatism, I don't take second place to anyone.  In my conservative vision, we chuck every social program in the can, from Medicare to welfare, because we humans are social animals, not soldier ants.  We can be trusted to do the social thing, most of the time.  But what really makes us into monsters is a check from the government.



The point to remember is that after Obama, we will need a president with the talent to get things done.  We know what needs to be done.  We need a reform of Medicare; we need a tax reform to reduce loopholes and reduce tax rates.  We need a sensible energy policy, and we need to roll back the environmental extremism of the Obamis.  We need to shake up the education system, and we need to defund the "grant" economy, the slush funds that keeps liberals in their Priuses and  their yeasty urban enclaves.



In other words, we need as president a man with the management skills to implement on a big program.  Looking around, you'd say that it wouldn't hurt if this guy had enough work ethic to do a business degree and a law degree at the same time.  He would have experience in the business sector, knowing when to save an ailing company and when to sell it.  Maybe he should have run a high-profile public project.  Of course he should have been the governor of a state.



Sounds a lot like Mitt Romney.



In the best of all possible worlds we would have  another Ronald Reagan and all of America would rise up and elect him by acclamation.  In the real world the real Ronald Reagan was always, even to Republicans, a rather questionable character.  Was he the real thing, or a lightweight movie actor, like the liberals insisted?  And what about the payroll tax increases of 1983?



It is only now, in the miseries of Obamadom, that the Reagan years seem like a Golden Age when giants walked the earth.



The political and economic situation in the United States is not that dire.  The problem is that every solution will require that Democrats take a hit.  Of course they will.  Just about every government program in existence is a slush fund for Democratic voters, from government universities to government welfare.



Think of it from the therapeutic point of view preferred by our liberal friends.  Democrats are substance abusers, addicted to enormous quantities of taxpayers' money.  They won't be willing to get straight until they hit bottom.  And pusher Obama certainly won't be the man to tell them that their addiction is ruining their lives.

2012 Isn't 1912 Isn't the Dark Ages

The real outrage in Osawatomie Bam's speech on Dec. 6, 2011 wasn't the "liberal history."  Liberals have to talk like that.  Liberals have to say that back in the Dark Ages at the turn of the 20th century people were outrageously exploited and some said it was all the price of progress.  Otherwise they don't have the therefore.  Therefore, we need big government programs to protect the exploited and the unprotected.  Run by caring and compassionate liberals with your tax dollars.



The outrage is that liberals like President Obama are still saying, after boosting the government from 7 percent of GDP to 40 percent in one century, that it's still not enough.



But it is still discouraging to read a chap like Barry Rubin making the Brooke argument.  All that Progressivism was all very well--it had a point--but now we need to "pull up" before we "go too far."

There is such a thing as balance. America’s rapid industrialization after the Civil War put the system out of balance and threatened to wreck the country’s constitutionally-mandated system. Robber barons, monopolies, exploitation of labor, and the buying and selling of legislatures were all commonplace. Only due to reforms, largely backed by Democratic presidents before most of us were born, was the balance corrected.

So legislatures were not being bought and sold in, say, 1812?  Labor was less exploited, as in plantation slavery and indentured servitude?  Let's get real here.  In 1900, the price of illuminating oil had been reduced by 90 percent--by Standard Oil.  The price of steel was down by 66 percent--by US Steel.  Railroads blanketed the nation so that, for the first time in history, farmers could sell their grain to the world.  But people were migrating to the US in their millions (because they could do it safely and inexpensively in the new steamships).  That kept wages down.



Here was the problem.  The political elite was afraid that the new rich, the men who had built the big corporations, would contest for political power.  Of course they would.  After all, politics for politicians isn't everything, it is the only thing.



So the Progressives set about shredding the power of the business elite and institutionalizing their own power--to control politics, to control commerce, and to control the culture.  To do that, they needed a scapegoat, and what better than to stigmatize the new barons of business as monopolists and robber barons and exploiters?



The cure was worse than the disease.  The Progressives turned the proud self-made business elite into cringing crony capitalists.  And they created "social insurance" programs that weren't social, they were regimental; and they weren't insurance, they were Ponzi schemes.



Here we are, 100 years later, and the "progressives," relabeled "liberals" who were relabeled "Progressives," are still retelling their "narrative."



Well, the postmodernists say that the "narrative" that historians tell us is really an apology for power.  When President Obama tells us a story of exploitation he is merely setting us up for bigger and bigger government.



Back in the 19th century, people were quite a bit rougher with each other than we are today.  You can tell that from the lynching statistics, and I mean 50 white-on-white lynchings a year and 50 white-on-black lynchings a year in the 1880s.  But how bad was it?  Well, when the school inspector went visiting factories employing 13-year-old children in 1912 she found that the children much preferred work to school.  Why?  Because their employers treated them better than their teachers.

The Left Doesn't Like Vaclav Havel

Vaclav Havel, Charter 77 activist and former president of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, was a hero of freedom.  So the left doesn't like him.  Let's piggy-back on Ron Radosh's review of two negative lefty anti-Havel screeds.



First of all there's the Guardianista Neil Clark who didn't like the way that Havel dissed the "achievements" of Communist Eastern Europe.

Havel’s anti-communist critique contained little if any acknowledgement of the positive achievements of the regimes of eastern Europe in the fields of employment, welfare provision, education and women’s rights. Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first.

It's helpful to have the point made so clearly, because it makes it so easy to debunk.  Let us make it clear.



Democratic capitalism is the system that puts "the economic needs of the majority first."  We know that because wherever democratic capitalism has been tried it has brought the majority up from $3 per day to $100 per day.  In socialist countries the opposite is true.



And let us be clear about the reasons for this.  Under capitalism, millions of people make millions of decisions in which they determine how to better their lives by serving others.  Under socialism, millions of people sit and follow orders while a few politicians and bureaucrats determine what is best for them "in the fields of employment, welfare provision, education and women's rights" so that "the economic needs of the majority" come first.  But there's a problem with this noble vision.  If the politicians and bureaucrats foul up, as they did time and time again in the socialist countries, and as they do in the government sector in the capitalist countries all the time, well, too bad.  Their intentions were good.



Then there is Geoffrey Robertson at the Daily Beast, writing from the arty left.   He's upset that the neocons have adopted him as one of their own.  To him, Havel was a man of the democratic left, and it's a sacrilege for him to be tarnished with neocon-icity.



That's the other side of the left, the world of fashionable "affect."  Capitalism and Reagan and Thatcher are wrong because they send out the wrong "vibes."  That's a problem that we have in the United States, where the educated class sneers at the unwashed masses in "flyover country" for their unsophisticated culture and their anti-intellectualism.



Too bad.  Vaclav Havel was a man of freedom, and whatever his faults, we salute him.

It's the Strategy, Stupid

Conservatives like to get our knickers in a twist every time our Republican heroes get out maneuvered by their wily Democratic foes.  And in the payroll tax flap they seem to have got their heads well and truly handed to them. Why, they thought that the Social Security Trust Fund was supposed to be a sacred trust!  That's what the Democrats have been telling us for the best part of a century.



But think what the Democrats are telling us with their payroll tax holiday:

1. Trust fund, schmust fund.


2. What matters is President Obama's reelection.


3. High taxes do too matter to the economy.


4. They are stuck with a stupid payroll tax reduction because they have shut off the real solution, lowering marginal income tax rates.  Millionaires and billionaires, old chap.

Let's step back a moment and look at the lay of the land.  The bigger picture is that, for the last ten to twenty years, Democrats have been on the back foot.  They had to run Bill Clinton as a centrist and had to concede welfare reform.  They had to run a non-stop campaign of character assassination against President Bush to keep their base energized.  And now, on defense and foreign policy they have basically endorsed the Bush doctrine.  Only they lack the intestinal fortitude to do it.



On economic policy they are having to lie to themselves that it was greedy bankers that caused the Crash of 2008 and not government credit policy and housing subsidies.  They totally muffed the recession by passing all their big government agenda before the economy got a head of steam.  And anyway, their Keynesian policy stuff is rubbish.  It was rubbish in the 1930s, and it is even more rubbish today because the government is up to its ears in debt and can't really mortgage the nation to "stimulate" it.



What the Obamis are demonstrating in living color, for those of us with eyes to see, is that the weight of government really matters, most especially when the economy is weighed down with underwater mortgages and unknown future costs associated with ObamaCare.  And it doesn't help that the Dems are keeping various sacred cows alive on crony capitalist life support.



Look at the big picture.  It tells you that the Dems are toast.  Because they are running out of other peoples' money.  All the sound and fury is telling us something.  Macbeth knew, in the moment before a messenger reported to him that Birnam Wood was on the move:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

So it is, when the roof is about to fall in.



The American people don't know nuttin' about economic policy.  But they do know when things aren't working.  And when they feel that things aren't working they reckon it is time for a change.  Like right now.