Euthyphro gets tangled in knots

What is the right way to live?  And what is the right thing to do next?  What duty to we have to bow to the nation's gods?  And what happens when your idea of the right conflicts with the rest of society?

That is Socrates' problem as he runs into the young Euthyphro (the name means "right-thinking" or "sincere") outside the very court where he is shortly to be tried for the impiety of corrupting the youth.  Fortunately, Euthyphro is an expert on piety, at least until Socrates start to interrogate him.

To start with, Euthyphro believes that natural law takes precedence over positive law for he asserts that he can prosecute his father for encompassing the death of a non-relative of Euthyphro, an action not allowed in Athenian law.  His action against his father implies that the just or prudent man has a duty of care--even with respect to murderers.

Socrates' legal problem is that he is accused of religious innovation, putting words into the mouth of the gods against the general consensus.  But it is clear that, from the point of view of Euthyphro, the law of the gods is whatever is revealed to him.  If Euthyphro decides to prosecute his father, it is because he is right and doing the pious thing.  So what is wrong with Socrates doing the same thing and expounding what is revealed to him?

But Socrates, still concerned about his own case, presses Euthyphro on the definition of piety, or righteousness.  Piety is what pleases the gods, says Euthyphro, or, as we might say, righteousness is following God's law.  But the gods often quarrel, says Socrates, citing the poets, (suggesting that we can obtain knowledge of the gods from epic poetry) pointing out that it is often difficult to determine what pleases the gods, since they disagree, as humans do.  So piety is what pleases all the gods, or, as we might say, justice is following God's law scrubbed of scriptural inconsistency.


Then Socrates raises a chicken and egg question.  Do  the gods like piety because it is pious, or is something pious because it is loved by the gods.  In the one case natural law is binding on God, in the other omnipotent God defines what is good and bad.


Socrates sets a new trap for Euthyphro.  He gets him to agree that piety is a part of justice, in fact that the pious part of justice is concerned with "the care of the gods" and the rest of it "the care of men."  But this raises the question of just what the point of serving the gods is.  "Sacrifice and prayer" says Euthyphro.  In other words, "piety would be a knowledge of how to give to, and beg from, the gods."  This is to say that humans have a personal relationship with God.  But there are difficulties with this, for how could the gods possibly be benefited by a gift from a human?

In fact, it seems that Euthyphro is confused.  We would say that he is like the Supreme Court Justice that knew pornography when he saw it.

Poor Socrates: he still doesn't know how to defend against the charges of impiety.  He wants a logically consistent rule to define piety and impiety, suggesting that the idea of the good should be logically consistent.

So let us rank the philosophical ideas that bubbled out of Socrates and Euthyphro.

1. Natural law takes precedence over positive law
2. The just or prudent man has a duty of care
3. The highest good can be revealed to the seer
4. Righteousness is following the highest law
5. The idea of the good should be logically consistent

Bank Runs and Youth Runs

After we learned our lesson in the Great Depression it looked like the era of the bank run was over.  What with deposit insurance and all there were no bank runs in the developed nations for decades.  Only now, it seems, things have changed, according to economist Tyler Cowen.

The modern bank run means a rush to withdraw from money market funds, the disappearance of reliable collateral for overnight loans between banks or the sudden pulling of short-term credit to a troubled financial institution.

This "shadow" banking system, at about $15 trillion, is bigger than the formal banking system protected by deposit insurance.  Tyler Cowen goes on to worry about the danger of credit collapses and deflation, and discuss proposals by some to extend credit guarantees.  But that, he worries, would just expand the problem of moral hazard and "too big to fail."



From a macro perspective, of course, the problem is fairly simple.   The credit system needs to be small enough that its overleveraged sector can be rescued in a crisis by blending it with underleveraged actors.  That's what they did in the 1907 crash.  Wall Street brokers might have been overleveraged, but US Steel was not.  Unfortunately in the century since then the approach has been to use the entire nation's equity as a guarantee against financial panic.  That approach fails when the nation's credit comes into question in a sovereign debt default.



The basic problem is that plungers (private or public) endanger the whole system when they find themselves, in a crisis, underwater.  The plungers back in 1907 were the quasi-bank Trust Companies.  The plungers in 2008 were Fannie and Freddie and the homeowners taking out overleveraged mortgages encouraged by the politicians--and Wall Streeters along for the ride.  When you set up a system like that, designed to fail, you get what you pay for.  Sooner or later, average people realize what is happening and they head for the exits.



They talk about "extraordinary delusions and the madness of crowds" as if lordly elitists are not just as subject to "groupish" delusions as the average person.  But you wonder where else the potential for a "bank run" might lie.



You wonder if a panic might soon happen with the youth vote.  Here is Jeff Jacoby reporting on Mitt Romney.

"I don't mean to be flip with this," said Mitt Romney during a Q-and-A with students at the University of Chicago last week. "But I don't see how a young American can vote for a Democrat." He cheerfully apologized to anyone who might find such a comment "offensive," but went on to explain why he was in earnest.



The Democratic Party "is focused on providing more and more benefits to my generation, mounting trillion-dollar annual deficits my generation will never pay for," Romney said. While Democrats are perpetrating "the greatest inter-generational transfer of wealth in the history of humankind," Republicans are "consumed with the idea of getting federal spending down and creating economic growth and opportunity so we can balance our budget and stop putting these debts on you."

Yeah.  When you put it that way, you gotta wonder.  And what about student loans.  At least homeowners can get out of their mortgages by walking away from them.  But you can't walk away from a student loan.



Why do you young 'uns vote for Democrats?  Apart from the fact that you have just spent 16 years listening to unionized liberal teachers in government schools and universities?  Is it just the free sex--which isn't all that free any more?



The simple answer is, of course, that young people believed Barack Obama when he promised hope and change and the wonders of green energy.  Young people didn't realize that everything the Democratic Party stands for is a chimera.



But young people are finding out now.  And that makes you wonder whether all of a sudden there will be the political equivalent of a bank run this November as students and twentysomethings realize that they had better get out before it is too late.

Aristotle and Justice

These days when we talk about "justice" we either mean the "Justice!" of the left, the overturning of oppression, or the equable workings of bourgeois justice, the disentangling of the mess of bankruptcy or the curbing of single young men with the criminal justice system.

But it is obvious from the Nichomachean Ethics that justice was a rather different concept back in ancient Greece.  For instance, Aristotle starts right off in Book V with his virtue-as-mean approach when he asks "what sort of mean justice is, and between what extremes the just act is intermediate."

These days, we don't talk about a "just act," except when discussing an Act of Congress.  But Aristotle says that by "justice" we mean "that kind of state of character which makes people disposed to do what is just and makes them act justly and wish for what is just".  What is he talking about?

He continues by defining the unjust man, as "grasping and unfair", as men that "pray for and pursue" the things they should not.  So on this argument we are talking about justice in relation to our neighbor.   Indeed he goes on to define justice as "another's good", doing "what is advantageous to another".  Thus the "worst man is he who exercises his wickedness both towards himself and towards his friends, and the best man is not he who exercises his virtue towards himself bu he who exercises it towards another; for this is a difficult task."

Then Aristotle goes on to discuss the two divisions of institutional justice: "in distributions of honor or money" and in "a rectifying part in transactions between man and man."  In distributive justice he calls for a distribution of equal when the parties are equal and unequal when the parties are unequal.  And the distribution must be "according to merit".  The only trouble is that people disagree about merit.  Democrats identify is "with the status of freeman", oligarchs with wealth or noble birth, and aristocrats with excellence.  Thus the just is "proportional; the unjust is what violates the proportion."

When we come to rectificatory justice, the idea of proportion is different.  Here we have an inequality created by a injury.  The job of a judge is to try to restore a damaged equality with a penalty.  The man who has committed the injury has made a gain, and the other party has suffered a loss.  The idea is to rebalance gain and loss, penalizing the man who has made an unjust gain: "therefore corrective justice will be the intermediate between loss and gain."

Some think that justice is "reciprocity," and Aristotle finds that the normal exchange of goods and services is inspired by this kind of justice.

But what about political justice, the relation of all this to men as citizens?  It requires, Aristotle says, "men who are free and... equal."  Given their propensity for injustice "we do not allow a man to rule, but rational principle, because a man behaves thus in his own interests and becomes a tyrant."  So in Aristotle's time as in our own, people wanted a government of laws, not of men.

The Marxists have made a big deal about "reification" the objectivification under capitalism of ideas and social relationships into things and commodities.  You can see their point.  Justice in our time is a much heavier and ponderous thing than it seemed to be for Aristotle.  And the blame for that must lie mostly with the Left, beginning with the Marxians, who want to make everything into a matter of justice and "reify" every issue into a monster government bureaucracy.  There is something in Aristotelian justice that is still ethereal and light as air.

That is a spirit that we should try to recapture for ourselves in the long journey to escape the ponderous mechanisms of justice under modern big government.

America After Blue Destruction

For conservatives longing for an end to the Age of Liberal Hegemony Walter Russell Mead has good news.  The "Blue Social Model" of the liberals will end not just because conservatives hate big government but because the mid-20th century bureaucratic model is so inefficient that liberals will give it up.  Liberals want government to "do" things.  They are becoming frustrated that it is getting progressively more and more gummed up.

There is an anti-government case for moving beyond the blue model and there is a pro-government case. Some people will push to transform the civil service and increase the productivity of workers in government and government-related services (above all, health and education) because restructuring and re-engineering government is the only way they can provide the services they want the public sector to provide.

From a rational perspective, you would have to agree.  But you wouldn't have noticed any such notion from the rapid expansion of government under President Obama.  ObamaCare, after all, is the biggest monument to bureaucracy even enacted, and creates dozens of new bureaucratic committees with the IPAC, the Independent Payments Advisory Commission, at the very center of its bureaucratic lotus flower.  Maybe some lofty academics have a gleam in their eye, but you wouldn't know it from the liberals you meet at parties, who have an unquenchable faith in "single-payer" healthcare.



No, I suspect that there really is little chance that the Democrats will agree to reform their welfare state in time.  Why should they?  It would mean suggesting to their voters that they have been lying to them all this time.  The only way Democrats will go for reform is when "austerity" hits, when the government is forced to reduce spending because it can't sell its debt to the bond market.



The world doesn't work by timely accommodations to reality.  It works by "creative destruction," as George Will writes in an article about that good old American institution, Sears.  In the middle of the 20th century everyone shopped at Sears.  But a chap called Sam Walton in Bentonville, Arkansas, had a different idea, and today Sears is going down for the count.



What will the government of the future look like?  Don't look now, liberals, but the best leading indicator is the military.  The big battalion model grew up in the era of gunpowder as generals learned to differentiate the feudal host into rigidly hierarchical and disciplined regiments.  They built a rigidly bureaucratic government to tax the people so they could afford their expensive, bureaucratic armies.


But the rigid model began to break up in the 19th century with rifled gun barrels and the "lethal battlefield."  By the end of World War I the armies had developed a new model based on the squad, often led by an NCO. In the 1920s the German Army under Gen. von Seeckt decided that it needed a new kind of soldier: "self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility."

Today, the US armed forces operate under just that kind of philosophy.  Responsibility is pushed downwards as far as possible.  And with the rise of special forces, the trend is likely to intensify.

The bureaucratic model gradually spread from the regiments of the absolute monarchs to the social programs of the welfare state.  Today, government is a monolithic monster that rewards place-men and people who go along to get along.  If liberals really want government to be effective they will have to change the model to the responsibility model that now obtains in the armed forces and also in the private sector.

But conservatives must ask: do we really want a new generation of liberal government employees "self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility?"  Imagine the damage they could do!  On the other hand, perhaps the responsibility model would force government to be less oppressive and less hegemonic.

It would probably be better for us all if government goes down for the count, so that almost everyone would agree that big government was a human disaster that must never be repeated.  But that would mean horrible suffering for the folks that drank the Kool-Aid and turned their lives over to government.  That would be a tragedy, not just for them but for all of us.

Obama Doesn't Care About Debt

Should we worry about the debt and the deficit?  Everyone says they do, politicians especially.  But nobody does anything about it.



Except now.  Except for Rep. Paul Ryan and his second House budget.  The first one is here, and the second one is here.  The White House doesn't like Ryan's budget.

The House budget once again fails the test of balance, fairness, and shared responsibility. It would shower the wealthiest few Americans with an average tax cut of at least $150,000, while preserving taxpayer giveaways to oil companies and breaks for Wall Street hedge fund managers.

What Democrats care about is their programs.  Writes David Harsanyi:

Democrats are willing to move heaven and earth for the things they do care about. They were prepared to whip up political turmoil and put the presidency and Congress on the line to pass Obamacare. Yet they won't risk offering a budget, lest anyone glimpse their priorities.

Some of the things that Democrats care about are patronage/clientage things, like the great social programs that dish out benefits to ordinary voters and dish out a little on the side to the poor.  Other things are elite things, like green energy and the environment and abortion, which are issues that the educated class cares about.



But debt and deficits? Not so much.  Because for Democrats the programs are the thing.  They figure that, one way or another, their programs will survive in the rough and tumble of partisan politics.



Unfortunately, in the long term, the one sure thing about governments is default. The point about debt and deficits is that, when you get to the Grecian formula, where the government cannot issue debt except upon ruinous terms, and the next step is sovereign debt default, then ordinary people are going to suffer.



Why?  Because when you Go Greek two things happen that are bad for ordinary people.



First of all, the government defaults on its debt and devalues the value of money and ordinary people are usually invested in government debt through their savings and their pension funds.  So ordinary people get screwed out of their savings.



The other thing is that government expenditures get cut.  When you look at where the money goes, and the place to look for that is usgovernmentspending.com,  you see that most of it goes to ordinary people for ordinary Social Security, ordinary Medicare, ordinary Education, and then some stuff for Welfare.  Out of $6 trillion a year in spending, you get about one trillion each for Pensions, Healthcare, Education and Defense, plus (once we get out of the Great Recession) $0.5 trillion for Welfare.  So that is $4.5 trillion out of the $6 trillion.  And that is before interest on the national debt.



Politicians and the educated class don't need to worry too much about deficits and debt and default.  They have skills and assets and connections.  They will probably come out of it OK.  But ordinary people will get screwed.



Back when the Soviet Union collapsed, I asked a Pole about conditions in the old Communist block.  He said that it really hit old people the worst.  They ended up "eating the paint off the walls."  There is no reason to expect that things will be any different when our government runs out of other peoples' money.

No It's Not the Internet, Peggy

As a baby-boomer male, I guess that I know less than nothing about the world of today's battle of the sexes.  But I take a flaccid note of the voices of the young and strong.



Here is "Christian libertarian" Vox Day taking out after Peggy Noonan for suggesting that today's War on Women issues from the baleful influence of the Internet.



Oh no it doesn't, writes Vox.  It issues from the profound injustice visited upon young men these days.  It started for him the day that a girl started a fight with him on the playground and he got into trouble. "[G]irls were just as good as boys, but we must never, ever hit them back even when they physically attacked us."

It is neither the Internet nor the anonymous commentary it provides that has brought about the ongoing revolution of the male perspective concerning what once used to be known as "the fair sex." It is, rather, the result of the first generation steeped in feminist propaganda from kindergarten to college graduation reaching an age where their voices are finally being heard. And the voice of the male half of Generation X and those generations following it is a contemptuous one indeed, because many of these men, including some of the most articulate, understand how utterly they were lied to by every authority figure they ever knew concerning the opposite sex.

Here's how:

• In high school Gen X was told that girls wanted "nice guys" but found that they preferred "socially dominant and the athletic".
  
  


• In college Gen X was told that girls were just as interested in sex as boys were.  Only it turned out that sex was rape for any reason--or for no reason.
  
  


• "When we entered the workforce, we were told that women only wanted equal pay for equal work, then watched as they called in sick more often than we did, came in later and went home earlier than we did, asked us for help in doing their jobs, then were handed promotions and raises by virtue of their affairs with the middle managers and executives."
  
  


• And woe betide anyone that committed the sin of expressing interest in a woman while "insufficiently attractive".
  
  

So Vox Day's generation has rejected the pretty lies they were taught.  Through better experience they have won through to a new social horizon.

What Peggy Noonan does not realize is that whereas men once assumed that a woman was a lady until proven otherwise, increasing numbers of them assume women are shallow and superficial until they are provided with credible evidence to the contrary.

And as the "game" theoretician Heartiste insists, there is no darker hell than the world of the "beta male".  Here he suggests to Charles Murray that rather than shame men into shaping up he should try shaming women instead.



One thinks of Stein's Law.  "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop,"

Obama's Flubbed Debt Deal and January 2013

Is the mainstream media stepping away from Obama?  That's one possibility in the wake of a tick-tock story in the Washington Post about the debt-deal negotiations last August.



The official line, of course, is that the Republicans are to blame because they refused to compromise.  But WaPo reporters Peter Wallsten, Lori Montgomery and Scott Wilson tiptoe up to a different judgement.

Obama, nervous about how to defend the emerging agreement to his own Democratic base, upped the ante in a way that made it more difficult for Boehner — already facing long odds — to sell it to his party. Eventually, the president tried to put the original framework back in play, but by then it was too late. The moment of making history had passed.

Or you can take Rush Limbaugh's Monday morning judgement: Obama lied. The Republicans had agreed to a tax increase. But Obama wouldn't agree to a plan that would upset his base.



Who knows what really went on. But it becomes more and more clear that the liberals will not agree to genuine spending cuts until the US goes Greek. And after all, why should they? If the money is still there, they should insist on their programs, their tenure, and their sinecures.



The Democrats' man at the Wall Street Journal, Alan Blinder, worries that the federal government is heading for a fiscal cliff in January 2013 unless something is done.

If the House and Senate don't act in time, a list of things will happen that are anathema either to Republicans or Democrats or both. The Bush tax cuts will expire. The temporary payroll tax cut will end. Unemployment benefits will be severely curtailed. And all on Jan. 1, 2013. Happy New Year!

On top of that there are $1.2 billion in spending cuts from the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction that kick in in January.  All told, Blinder predicts 3.5 percent GDP in fiscal contraction in January from tax increases and spending cuts in January unless something is done.



But this is silly.  The reason that all this stuff has been kicked down the road to January 2013 is that there is a stalemate between liberals and conservatives right now.  Liberals don't want to reduce their programs and conservatives are damned if they are going to cough up more dough to fund the liberal welfare state.  Sooner or later, the American people are going to have to choose.  Otherwise, as in the case of Greece, other forces will start to choose for them.



In November the American people will get to choose whether they want President Obama to impose the Democratic solution on this stalemate or whether they want a Republican to impose a Republican solution.  Whatever the solution is, it will be something of a kludge, representing the political state of play that will emerge from the election results.



My betting is that the Democrats would have got a better deal in August 2011 than they will get after November 2012.



Hey, that's democracy.