Keynes a Symptom, not a Cause

The current wails about "austerity" signal the real problem with the big-government welfare state.  The Wall Street Journal properly points out that the Keynesian notion of austerity vs. growth is what Candidate Obama used to call a "false choice."

Spend more and you're for growth, even if a country raises taxes to pay for the spending. But dare to cut spending as the Germans suggest, and you're for austerity and thus opposed to growth.

This is a nonsense debate that misconstrues the real sources of economic prosperity and helps explain Europe's current mess. The real debate ought to be over which policies best produce growth.

And government spending doesn't increase prosperity.  How could it?  Government spending forces one set of people to pay for the goodies of another set.  What good could possibly come from that?

The bigger issue is the unsustainability of the welfare state model.  It is analogous to a homeowner up to his ears in debt.

When you ring up a lot of debt you are anticipating your future income.  You are assuming that you will have income in the future to service your debt.  But what if things go wrong?  What if you don't get the promotion, or your workplace closes?  Then you are in a world of hurt and if millions of people have overborrowed like you then it will endanger the health of the whole economy.  As Bagehot pointed out in the 19th century, the economy depends on "sound" people managing their money with prudence.

The welfare state is the same.  It sets up a high level of government spending assuming that the good times will always roll.  People sign up for the government programs and the free stuff and reduce their work effort to match.  When there's a recession the government revenues fall off and the programs that looked affordable in the good times cause the national debt to soar.  And of course the last people on earth to think that maybe government spending should be cut are the beneficiaries of all the free stuff.  That is called "balancing the budget on the backs of the poor."

Even if we say that welfare state spending is, overall, a good thing there is still the question of how much of a good thing the nation can afford.  A century of the welfare state shows it is almost impossible to adjust the size of the welfare state until there's a crisis.  The only time that government tightens its belt is when there's a looming sovereign debt crisis or galloping inflation.  This is surely not the best way to run a railroad.

In fact, of course, the social needs that government dominates--pensions, health care, education, and welfare--are not necessarily activities that must be performed by government.  They are social needs, for sure, but the clumsy force-centered model of government is surely not the way to meet such needs, which are not best met with one-size-fits-all government.

In fact the opposite is true.  The relief of the poor should not be a responsibility shuffled off on the government.  It should be the responsibility of each of us, as individuals and as groups joined into social service organizations.  Education is the same.  We are all called to raise up and educate our children, and to be there to help with our neighbor's children, and it is monstrous to shuffle it off on government functionaries who, like government workers since the dawn of time, think only of their emoluments and pensions.

Moreover, these social tasks are particularly the interest of women.  You can tell that just by listening to the conversation of women.  Yet our society encourages women in "careers," which were originally a brilliant notion to cure men of soldiering and divert their attention to fighting for dominance in organizations for the production of products and services rather than organizations for the securing of loot and plunder.  This is what we want for women?  Did anyone ask women what they wanted for themselves?

Keynesianism is not an economic system, it is a tactic for getting government out of a jam.  In the modern economy the government's demands upon the economic system have a depressive effect.  That's because it is all waste.  But this depressive effect becomes really serious in an economic downturn.  The Keynesian tactic solves this by continuing the government programs at their pre-recessionary levels, borrowing the money that's needed to continue its handouts, and inflating the currency to create an artificial stimulus.  Usually it works, at the cost of a 20-30 percent decline in the value of money.  But in a big downturn, like the aftermath of the 2008 credit crisis, some nations will be in danger of sovereign debt default before the economy recovers.

The solution is to radically reduce the size of government.  That will have two benefits.

First, it will reduce the weight of government spending and debt on the economy and enable government to respond with huge expenditures if there ever is a real catastrophe needing government help: think major earthquake or war.

Second, it will reduce the amount of freeloading and put the freeloaders to work helping their fellow citizens by producing products and services and by neighborly volunteer effort working to solve social problems.  This will benefit the freeloaders, and help them live happier, more productive lives, and also deliver more prosperity to society as a whole.

Confusion on Socrates' Last Day

Being a civilized community, the Athenians of Socrates' day executed people by hemlock poisoning in the evening of the day of execution. And so Socrates' young friends gathered at the prison on the day of his execution before he took the draught of poison.  Naturally they talked about immortality, and Socrates indulged in a bit of  argument by reckless analogy.  For instance, he argued, if we sleep and then wake and then sleep again, it follows that living and dying is analogous, and if we know things that we seem to have learned before we were born then we must have an immortal soul.

Socrates' young friend Simmias suggests that Socrates is wrong about the immortal soul.  After all, if you break up a lyre, then its harmony is gone forever.  So if the soul is a "kind of harmony or attunement" then it too is destroyed "when our body is relaxed or stretched beyond true measure by diseases and other evils".

In Simmias account, harmony refers to the relation between the tones from the different strings of a well-tuned lyre.  The harmony is "something invisible, without body, beautiful and divine".  Thus it is an instance, a particular of the Form of harmony, the eternal relationship between tones, the music of the spheres.  Given the context, Simmias does not think of the harmony of the instrument as the eternal Form itself, but the specific harmony of a given instrument achieved by tuning the strings.  Once you break the instrument or cut its strings you have lost the specific harmony of the instrument, its particular harmonic beauty.  Thus, he says, using a Socratic argument by analogy, the individual soul is lost when a body dies, because its particular harmonies are lost with the body.

Socrates attacks the idea of the soul as a kind of harmony.  First, if the soul is the composite of the elements of the body, then it could not have existed before birth.  But his learning-by-recollection argument proved that the soul exists before birth. Second, if a lyre can be more or less harmonized, presumably according to the specific tuning, surely that is different from a soul, which cannot be more or less of a soul: it is just a soul.  Conversely, if all souls are souls in harmony they must partake of harmony equally.  So how can "one soul have more wickedness or virtue than another"?  Thirdly, it seems impossible that the soul could rule the body if it is analogous to harmony, for "it could never by out of tune with the stress and relaxation and the striking of the strings".  In fact the soul is quite the opposite, since it rules over the elements of the body, "directing... inflicting... holding converse" with it.  So the soul cannot be like harmony.

Simmias  was too modest, and did not make the most of his argument.  The soul is indeed like the harmony of an instrument, providing you don't get too reckless with the argument from analogy.  Harmony is an ideal, an invisible quality that the lyre is designed to approach.  Yet the soul of the instrument, its harmony, is merely banished to a musical underworld if a string is broken, or the instrument is damaged.  Every recreation of a musical instrument invites the eternal soul of harmony to inhabit it once more.

Socrates demands from his young friend a much higher bar for a valid argument by analogy than he requires of himself.  He has recently argued that sleeping and waking are like death and birth, a pretty good stretch.  Why shouldn't the soul be the composite of the elements of the body?  We could say firstly, that the soul, the harmony of the body, only inhabits the body when its components all come together in birth.  Secondly, a musical instrument can be badly tuned or badly played, and this is analogous to wickedness in the soul.  Certainly a virtuoso instrumentalist can take a so-so instrument and make it sing.  Thirdly, why could not the soul be like an instrumentalist struggling to create harmony out of an instrument that is part good instrument and part bad instrument like the chariot myth of the Phaedrus.  The strings are forever going out of tune and it is up to the instrumentalist to struggle with disharmony and strive to create good harmony.

Socrates was a wily old man, and his young friends were too young and inexperienced and in awe of the great man to critique his arguments properly and wrestle them to the ground.  It is up to us to set things to rights.

Liberals Out of Touch

In the New York Times review of Charles Murray's Coming Apart, Nicholas Confessore tells us a little more than he intends about liberal denial.  Writes he:

You will learn about working-class laziness, but you will find little discussion of the decline of trade unions or the rise of a service economy built on part-time work without benefits.

Murray's thesis is that the welfare state has led to a breakdown in white working class culture, the bottom 30 percent of white America: a decline in marriage, a decline of civic culture, and a decline in men working. Meanwhile things are peachy keen up in the top 20 percent.  Marriage is doing fine, and divorce is even declining.  People work like mad.

Murray argues that the welfare state has hollowed out the bottom 30 percent.  But Confessore grumbles that things would be fine if only unions were still strong and benefits were still robust.

So let us give Michael Barone a word.  He was raised in Detroit, and there is something he wants you to know about those good union jobs for good wages and benefits.

I don't know how many times I've seen liberal commentators look back with nostalgia to the days when a young man fresh out of high school or military service could get a well-paying job on an assembly line at a unionized auto factory that could carry him through to a comfortable retirement.

As it happens, I grew up in Detroit and for a time lived next door to factory workers. And I know something that has eluded the liberal nostalgiacs. Which is that people hated those jobs.

That's one of the reasons why the unions ended up killing the automakers.  They insisted on "30 years and out" for the workers that hated their jobs, and then they insisted on health benefits for their retirees.  It was a bridge too far for the automakers.

One of the things that advanced lefty thinkers have been pondering for the last half century is that big, rationally-designed bureaucratic organizations are inherently oppressive and exploitive.  They necessarily treat humans as merely a means to an end, a labor resource, whether the big organizations are corporate or governmental.  Of course they have ended by tying themselves in knots over this because they can't let go of the idea politics is everything and that that enlightened thinkers ought to be organizing the lives of the workers.  They can't let go and let the workers organize their lives like any social animal.  They have to butt in and save the workers from themselves.

So we have the rank-and-file New York Times reader in denial about the 1950s and the philsophers in denial about the limits of politics.

I just took a quick look at Wikipedia's stages-of-grief article.  Did you know that there are critics that say the Kübler-Ross model is rubbish?  It is perhaps more accurate to term the denial-anger-bargaining-depression-acceptance progression is not a healthy, but a victim response to life challenges.  Since our liberal friends don't believe in adaption in a societal context (because it is social Darwinism, darling) they regard unfavorable trends as an insult to their self-esteem.  Thus they respond to change with disfunctional denial and rage.

We are called all our lives to adapt to changing circumstances.  The liberal model of the bureaucratic welfare state just doesn't work.  We are never going to have an economy again with "good union jobs at good wages" where we can sit back like bumps on a log and extract monopoly wages from our fellow citizens.  It was a fantasy back in the 1950s and it owed everything then and now to liberal political power.  Do liberals want to lead their followers out of a dead end, and encourage them to compete in the new world economy, or do they want to exploit their victim-denial response until the whole system collapses as in Greece?

Romney Team Comes to Play

The name of the game in politics is defining what people are allowed to say.  You can talk all you like about the First Amendment, but the truth is that there are a lot of things that you aren't allowed to say, not if you want to keep out of trouble.  We all understand this instinctively; it's part of who we are as social animals.



What is going on here?  It is simple.  If government is force, politics is intimidation.  The whole point of politics is to intimidate the other side into silence or meaningless babbling.  You want to be able to laugh off their proposals as so far out of the mainstream that they have left America; you want to be able to cast them as unpatriotic--liberals hate being on the receiving end of this.  And you want to be able to cast the other side as racist, sexist homophobes--conservatives hate being on the receiving end of this.



In normal times, in between elections, conservatives are at a disadvantage in the intimidation wars, because the mainstream media, from which most Americans get their news, tends to parrot Democratic talking points.  It's true that Fox News provides some push-back, but not a lot.  Put it this way.  The charge of racism sticks to conservatives and can be a career-ender.  But nobody dares to read the racist Reverend Al Sharpton out of polite society.



Everyone knew, during the Republican primaries, that as soon as the party had chosen a nominee the Obama campaign would launch a monster campaign of intimidation, and Republicans feared that Mitt Romney wouldn't be up to the challenge.



Well, forget that one.  The last couple of weeks, with the "never did a day's work in her life" flap and the Dog issue, demonstrate that the Romney campaign is ready to play rapid-reaction politics.  The campaign jumped on the Ann Romney attack with Twitter, and demolished the "war on women" meme.  Now with the discovery that Barack Obama claims to have eaten dog meat, according to the first of his autobiographies, the "dog-on-the-roof" meme is neutralized.



That's important.  My liberal friends love to bring up the story of the Romney dog on the car roof.  But hey, what about dogs in the back of pickup trucks?



Oh, and by the way, if you are worried about Mormon polygamy, what about Obama's dad?



All these side issues are, of course, "distractions."  But they are part of a campaign because they are attempts to intimidate the opposition, or counter attempts to intimidate.  It's good that the Romney campaign seems to be ready to play the intimidation game and win.



The question is: Can the Obamis take it?  The Obama people are from the one-party city of Chicago, where intimidation rules, and anyone that isn't a Democrat knows that you have to pay to play, and lay your tribute at the feet of the politicians.  But can they deal with their own dust being kicked up into their eyes?



Stay tuned.

More Platonic Immortality

In the Phaedo, the Socratic dialog that Plato wants us to believe took place on the day of Socrates' execution by poison, the condemned philosopher and his young friends discourse on the question of immortality.  It all revolves around the "proof" of the soul as a permanent unchanging thing.  For one thing, if you can understand geometry then it must be that your soul existed before you were born and that you are merely "recollecting" what your soul learned before birth.  We can understand concepts like Equal even though there are no two things on this Earth that are exactly equal.  So we must have learned about Equal in the underworld.

But even if our souls were born before our births, what if the soul is dissipated away in death, ask Socrates' young friends?  Well, since the soul is unchangeable and nearly fixed, and is to the body as the Forms of the Good and the Beautiful are to actual instances of goodness and beauty, then it stands to reason that the soul is as immortal as the Forms are eternal.

In the Socratic argument by analogy, it is possible to argue almost anything, as long as you choose the right analogy.  We want to believe that we, or at least our soul or spirit, will live forever, so any analogy looks good to us.  For me, though, the meaning of immortality is closer to home; it is children.  All the rest--Heaven and Hell, sitting at the right hand of God, the life eternal in the next world, divine judgment--they don't resonate for me.

Modern philosophers, chastened by the shaking of the foundations of the last century, have come to this.  As you rise in complexity, each leap seems to involve an irreducible mystery, a secret ingredient.  For instance, we are as yet unable to describe chemical reactions in terms of physics.  Chemistry is not merely a branch of physics: there is something extra at work.  So also there something irreducible in the leap from organic chemistry to biology, chemistry in the service of living things, and then in the leap from vegetable to animal.  So also in the leap from great ape to human.  It is some spark, some spirit, some irreducible something, the mystery in-between body and mind.

This mystery, this spark, is kept alive from parent to child, from the ancestors to the living generation to generations yet unborn.  It is more than the contract between generations, it is a mystery.  We only know that, when a human dies without issue, that individual human spark dies forever, the spark of immortality quenched.  But all is not lost, because other humans, other children, pick up the fallen lantern, and hold it aloft once more.

For humans, as social animals, are not just their progeny, nor yet their footnote in history, an earnest increment to knowledge, to techne, or to affect.  Humans are not just individual egos but intersubjective communicators that affect each by speech actions.  All humans affect each other all the time, and the precipitate of their communicative reactions blend into the human destiny, immortal and forever, and this seeding of the future is not just broadcast by the genius from an ivory tower, but also those "who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

Today we are bidden to release our grip on all foundations, all divine props, all familiar spirits, all relationships with the divine, and all hopes for immortality.  But humans still search for meaning, live as though life could last forever, and long to find eternal bliss.  It may be that the idea of immortality, and a divine judge at the gate of Heaven, is merely a device of social control to put the fear of God into mortals here below.  Now that God is dead, the court of divine judgment has been replaced by the judgment of history.

Through all the changes in religious and secular orthodoxy and the terrible threats issued from gods to humans as from masters to slaves, most humans most of the time instinctively shrink from betraying the future to the present.  There is no more damaging judgment on a fellow human than "he has no future."  Humans live as if their lives matter, forever, and so each human contributes, in her particular life, a single spark to human immortality.

Sex and Nostalgia

The usual hit on conservatives is that we are impossibly nostalgic for a past that never was, of perfect marriages in spotless suburbs: mom and dad and three children.  Anyway, it was never as spotless as the nostalgists pretend:  think of Mad Men drinking and bonking the night away before they get home to Scarsdale.

But maybe the opposite is true.  Maybe in the old days the relations between the sexes was much more exploitative than the one-man-one-women-for-life of the bourgeois ideal.  Certainly the aristocracy regarded marriage as a power and property transaction.  Young princes and princesses were ruthlessly married off for reasons of state and dynastic survival.  And the poor?  They were struggling to survive, and mostly failing.  Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms argues that before 1800 agricultural society in England was a downwardly mobile society in which the rich had more surviving children than the poor, and the extra rich children crowded out the children of the poor in the scramble for resources.  After the industrial revolution the poor developed into the respectable working class and adopted bourgeois cultural norms--at least until the welfare state came along.

Perhaps the bourgeois cultural model is not a hopelessly old-fashioned notion but a radically new idea that is being attacked by the nostalgists of the left who long for the good old days when powerful political figures got all the women they wanted, including servant girls, and the poor did without.  The current liberal fashion for "polyamory" is curious considering how liberals inveigh against Mormon polygamy.  The idea that men and women would mix together in multiple-partner relationships without rich men dominating the process is laughable.

But we already know this.  Since the sexual revolution and the mass entry of upscale women into the workforce, women are reporting less happiness.  Could this be because women don't thrive in the loveless sexual hookup scene?  Could it be that enforcing a cultural norm for women to work at careers is anti-woman?  Could it be that no-fault divorce, supposedly enacted for the benefit of women trapped in abusive, loveless marriages, actually works against the desire of women for permanent loving relationships?

Conservatives make a big deal out of the notion of "civil society," the proliferation of "mediating structures" between government and the individual: family, churches, associations.  But who really breathes life into these civil society institutions; who does the day-to-day grunt work?  I'd say the answer is simple: women.  And when women are dragooned into wage-work it means that there are fewer people to contribute to civil society.  And government gets more powerful.

The idea that bourgeois marriage is old-fashioned is a crock, published by the devotees of big government and politics-with-everything.

Capitalism's Century Five

What will happen when we do the wrap on capitalism's Century Five in 2050?  Could it be, could it possibly be the end of big government?

Century One, from 1550 to 1650, was the century when the Dutch invented Dutch Finance.  They created a funded national debt and made the government's rock-solid bonds the foundation of the credit system.  The Dutch invented all this in their struggle for political and religious independence from the empire of Spain.

Century Two, from 1650 to 1750, was the century when the Dutch exported their financial system to Britain.  Historians disagree on whether the Brits invited William of Orange to be king, or whether his 500-ship invasion fleet flat out invaded the sceptred isle.  But the result was the Bank of England and a funded national debt.  The bad news is that the Brits used their new-found wealth to conquer India and North America, and scaled up the profitable notion of plantation slavery to make fortunes in the millions--and millions of slaves--in the sugar islands of the West Indies.

Century Three, from 1750 to 1850, was the century when capitalism invented cheap cotton textiles for the poor--with techniques stolen from the Bengalis--and railroad transportation for everyone.  It was a revolution, because for the first time the poor could get clean, and could travel around on something other than their feet.  The year 1800 is a watershed.  In industrializing Britain, it began an era of rising expectations.  The poor expected their children, maybe for the first time in history, to be better off than they were.  The bad news is that the French tried to wreck it all with their violent Jacobinism, and the folks migrating off the land to the industrial cities had a pretty rough half-century transitioning from the life on the land to the life in the city.

Century Four, from 1850 to 1950, was the century that started with ocean steamships that let the poor migrate across the world, from the Pale of Settlement to the Lower East Side, from Ireland's potato famine to Boston and New York, from the Mezzogiorno to Little Italys all over the northern United States.  Then the capitalists cut oil prices by 90 percent, steel prices by 66 percent, and motorized and electrified Everyman.  The bad news was that the "shock of the new" inspired a ton of people to believe that capitalism was the anti-Christ.  Two huge global wars were fought to neutralize reactionary movements against the new order of freedom and cooperation: one a nostalgic attempt to return to the communist egalitarianism of hunter-gatherers; the other a nostalgic attempt to return to the blood and soil of kinship and clan identity.

Century Five, from 1950 to 2050 is already half over.  We already know part of what it means.  Capitalism has brought about a communications revolution.  Now you can travel half way around the world in a day with jet travel, and you can communicate and work with anyone and anything with the Internet and computer technology.  We cannot know what the second half century will bring.  Some hope for an utter demolition of the big-government welfare state, a nostalgia for the bureaucratic centralism of the absolute monarchs, to match the demolition of communism and fascism in Century Four.  The bad news is that another movement of nostalgic rejection has arisen to challenge capitalism, the Islamic longing for the caliphate of 700-1500.

Nobody knows how Century Five will turn out.  But if we are going to roll back the injustice of the welfare state we would have to start in 2012 with the decisive rejection of the politics of the social-democratic educated class and its poster boy, the President of the United States, Barack Obama.