Let's Keep Things The Way They Are

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.

Obama Deepens the Divide

The Gang of 14 that tried to compromise the Democratic filibustering of judges during the Bush administration had a reason for their fudge.  They knew that the "nuclear option" of demanding an up or down vote on judges would deepen the red-blue divide.  It would make Democratic supporters mad.



Politicians are famous for avoiding tough decisions; they know that people on the wrong side of a tough decision appear in force at the next election.  Politicians want their supporters to be energized and raring to vote.  They want the opposition to be divided and demoralized.



So when President Obama does a recess appointment of Richard Cordray as chief of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and three recess appointments on the National Labor Relations Board when Congress technically isn't in recess he is asking for a fight.  He is sharpening the red-blue divide in America.



When Republicans do this sort of thing the mainstream media regards it as outrageously "divisive."



I'm not anxious to argue the constitutionality of the president's actions.  Clearly the Republicans are playing games and using technical gimmicks to avoid a formal "recess."



My concern is something bigger.  It comes from my definition of "government is force, and politics is talking about force."  Or you could say that politics is civil war by other means.  On this understanding of politics and government you have in your mind all the time the fact that any winner on any issue in politics is winning a fight, not persuading the losers about an argument.  That is why politicians usually try to pass big issues with a "bipartisan majority."  They want to create the atmospherics of consensus, that everybody got something to take home with them.



The great achievements of the Obama administration have mostly been raw partisan victories: stimulus, ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank.  In addition the Obama victories have been expressions of the pure liberal approach to politics, that almost everything could and should be a bureaucratically administered program of regulation.  Thus there is almost nothing in the Obama achievements that conservatives have participated in and have supported.  Conservatives believe that government programs and regulations are wasteful at best and usually end up as a corrupt banquet of the special interests.



There was another time in our history when the nation was profoundly divided about its future and when each side used every trick in the book to get one-up on the opposition.  It was the 1850s in the run-up to the Civil War.

Can Romney Beat the Mark of Bain?

Candidate Mitt Romney advertises his private sector experience as a qualification for the presidency.  Democrats say that Romney at Bain Capital put "profits over people."



Here's Randy Johnson, a worker laid off when Bain Capital decided to close a plant during a labor dispute.  "I really think [Romney] didn’t care about the workers. It was all about profit over people."



It's interesting how union members, whose unions work through intimidation, are outraged when other people do the power play.



But there are many Americans that long for a lifetime job and bridle at the fluctuations in the capitalist market place.  They take personally the decisions of business leaders and blame them for the failures that hurt them personally.



Or, like a Seattle supermarket checker told me a year ago, they don't want to close the state liquor stores because they don't want to lose the jobs.



They are asking for something that they cannot have except under communism.  And that, we remember, was a system where the government pretended to pay the workers and the workers pretended to work.



One fine day, conservatives are going to have to persuade Americans that we are all better off if we let the market do its work, accept that businesses rise and fall, and that people suffer when once proud titans of industry fall to earth.



Because the future is uncertain, and many magnificent plans shrivel up in the cold light of day.



Meanwhile, Mitt Romney needs to do something about the mark of Bain, and persuade us that he can  move the economy off its Obama dead center.

Decline of Violence and Guns

In his new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker documents the extraordinary decline of violence, from 500 deaths per 100,000 per year in the non-state hunter-gatherer era, to about one tenth of that number in the agricultural state era to the present 1 to 5 deaths per 100,000 per year in the industrial democracies?



What did it?  Well, first of all, it was states with police and courts that put a stop to the private justice of feud and revenge.  And also the Humanitarian Revolution of the 18th century and the Rights Revolution of the 20th century.  And "gentle commerce."



So what about the conservative line of More Guns Less Crime?  Pinker notes that violence is higher in the South and the gun culture.



But it is also higher, he admits, in the inner city, where the peace of the Leviathan state doesn't extend.  That's because the police don't bother to enforce the law for the poor in the inner city.  The police "seem to vacillate between indifference and hostility,... reluctant to become involved in their affairs but heavy handed when they do so."  A Harlem police sergeant describes how this works.

Last weekend, a known neighborhood knucklehead hit a kid.  In retaliation, the kid's whole family shows up at the perp's apartment... The victim's family was looking for a fight... But all of them were street shit, garbage.  They will get justice in their own way.

The police and the district attorney could have prosecuted, but "none of them would ever show up in court."



This, of course, is why the conservative argument about guns and concealed carry works.  It's because liberals have so bollixed up the policing of the poor that the writ of the government of a monopoly on violence doesn't extend to the inner city.  Policing of the poor is a battle royal between liberals who say that violence is due to "root causes" like poverty and conservatives calling for law and order.  In that no-mansland, justice and policing have collapsed, and private justice obtains.



Fortunately, in some places, policing has been restored to the inner city.  There is Bill Bratton's work in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles, based on the "broken windows" theory of James Q. Wilson to prosecute minor disorders, and implemented through a system called CompStat that tracks crimes and measures the effectiveness of police in following up.



But the Bratton system is hard work.  The CompStat system requires leaders at the top to work hard pushing the neighborhood officers to perform.  You can't expect too much out of that when you consider that police are, after all, uniformed unionized bureaucrats.  And there are always liberal social justice groups looking for a way to accuse officers of "police brutality."  The default position for the police is just to show up and let the activists fight it out.



Steven Pinker has to tread carefully.  He can't rubbish his liberal friends too much, or they will trash his book.  But he wouldn't want to give conservatives too much credit.  That might encourage the fascists.  That makes his book into a work of Straussian esoterics.  For the street liberal, the book is OK because it mouths all the liberal shibboleths.  But if you know where to look, it tells a different story.



In my view, the whole thing comes down to commerce.  Business needs peace, and business encourages trust in strangers.  Fierce local and tribal rivalries are bad for business, and so, wherever business grows, violence declines.  It takes a lot of work by liberal and lefty agitators to keep the people enraged at greedy businessmen and corporations.



And wherever liberals have destroyed the peace with their destructive politics, people will need guns to defend themselves against liberal anarchy.

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.