E.J. Dionne's Mistake about Conservatives

Liberals say the darnedest things.  Like humans everywhere they regard their own approach to human social relations as the correct one, and the approach of others, particularly American conservatives, as mad or bad.

Thus E.J. Dionne's lament that "Conservatives used to care about community.  What happened?" is a classic case of "us" and "them."  He assumes that because conservatives don't agree with the liberal agenda of the moment, including the mammoth ObamaCare and the bureaucratic corporate regulation of Sarbanes-Oxley and Dodd-Frank, that conservatives are mad individualists that care nothing about human community.

Of course this is rubbish.  Conservatives do too believe in community.  It's just that conservatives believe in different forms and different arrangements of community than liberals.  Most obviously, conservatives believe that the big-government approach to community beloved by liberals is profoundly anti-community.  That's because government is force.  The whole point of human social relations, conservatives believe, is to avoid use of force except in extreme cases.  Yet the liberal solution to almost any social problem is to create a government program, i.e. use force.

It is perhaps helpful to analyze this in the context of "relational models theory," a framework for categorizing human "sociality" first published by sociologist Alan Page Fiske in the early 1990s.  The theory is simple(pdf).  People relate to each other in just four ways.  There is the Community Sharing model,  where people interact as though their group was an undifferentiated unit.  There is Authority Ranking, the assumption that people interact based on an understanding of an authority hierarchy.  There is Equality Matching, in which people try to achieve a balance of giving and taking.  Then there is Market Pricing, where people interact on the basis not of straight giving and taking, but a more precise reckoning of ratios, i.e., market prices. Market Pricing is no more or no less social than the other models.  Success and achievement in the market economy are no more or less social than altruistic caring in a Community Sharing or Equality Matching context.

You can see that the differences between liberals and conservatives arise out of different world-views that value the four models differently and implement their values in different ways.  For instance conservatives believe in the authority of fathers, mothers, and mediating structures like churches and associations.  Liberals believe in the authority of activists and "idealists."  Conservatives believe in the Invisible Hand to govern the working out of Market Pricing.  Liberals believe that Market Pricing is inherently exploitative unless minutely controlled by by a strong Authority Ranking government regulatory apparatus.  E.J. Dionne thinks that access to affordable health care is well-nigh impossible for many unless the government dictates universal rules of access.  Conservatives think that most people can afford to buy their own health insurance and charitable organizations can fill in most of the gaps.

We can thus interpret the great battle between socialism and capitalism over the last two centuries as an argument about the extent to which Market Pricing is a beneficial and useful model for basing social relationships among humans, the social animals.  Today's conservatives believe that Adam Smith's Invisible Hand doctrine is true, that in normal social interactions of an economic nature people satisfy their individual needs by serving the needs of others.  Today's liberals believe Marx's dictum that capitalist interactions are inherently exploitative because the capitalist always and everywhere denies the laborer the full value of his labor.

There are other disagreements.  Liberals seem to think that Community Sharing and Equality Matching relationships should usually be implemented in Authority Ranking government programs.  Conservatives believe that, where possible, we should do Community Sharing and Equality Matching in ways that avoid the hard power of government and use the soft power of civil society associations.

These arguments and conflicts about human society are, and should be, eternal.  But let us close with a word from Alan Page Fiske on "the inherent sociability of homo sapiens."

The most striking characteristic of Homo sapiens is our sociality. Social relations pervade every aspect of human life and these relationships are far more extensive, complex, and diverse (within and across societies) than those of any other species. And for survival and reproduction we are far more dependent on our social relationships and our cultures than any other animal.

In the coming weeks I am going to try and analyze this basic human social trait against the metric of government, to evaluate human social relationships directed by the social emotions against human social relations directed by governmental force.  Because I think that it is essential to understand that government is a limit case of human sociality.  For most things, government should be the red handle locked in a glass cabinet: "In Emergency, break glass."

E.J. Dionne and his liberal friends won't like it.  But that's too bad.

How to Un-stimulate Your Economy

Our good liberal friend Paul Krugman travels the world plugging the benefits of Keynesian stimulus.  Of course he does.  He's a liberal and liberals believe in bigger government.  Increase the good things that government is doing and society will be the better for it.  QED.



But the science--leaving aside the magic tricks of John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s--is pretty clear on this, and a new report pulls some recent findings together.  The findings are collected in the final report of the 2020 Tax Commission at www.2020tax.org.  Here are the results in bullet points from Alistair Heath:

• "[E]very one per cent of GDP rise in government spending reduces private consumption and private investment by 1.9 per cent". Furceri and Sousa, 2011.
  
  
  


• "[E]very one per cent rise in tax as a share of GDP is associated with a 0.14-0.27 per cent fall in GDP". Johannson et al, 2008.
  
  
  


• "[O]ptimal public spending share of GDP [is] 30 per cent." Mutascu & Milos, 2009.

Really, this is not rocket science.  Of course government spending is wasteful and reduces prosperity.  It takes money away from some people and gives it to other people.



There is a grain of truth in the Keynesian stimulus cargo cult, and it is this.  In the middle of a financial panic there will be some enterprises with healthy business models that are temporarily embarrassed.  If you lend them money it will help them get over a rough patch.  That is what J.P. Morgan did in the 1907 crash.



Good for J.P. Morgan.  He bailed out corporate America with his own money.  But that is not what Keynesian stimulators do.  They hand out our money to their friends.  They give it to states to stop teacher layoffs.  They give it to their green energy cronies so they can develop uneconomic green products.  They stiff creditors of auto companies so they can give money to overpaid union members.  That is not stimulus; it is politics as usual.



It is telling that these days our liberal friends need an attack dog like Paul Krugman to push the argument for bigger government.  A generation ago liberals had good old sheepdog Paul Samuelson plugging away at his Newsweek column and John Kenneth Galbraith with his pompous best-sellers that told liberals that their brain-dead conventional wisdom was the epitome of intelligent commentary on the other guys' brain-dead conventional wisdom.  Now they need a sharper message and tighter message discipline.



But like the Fram entitlement guy used to say.  You can pay me now, or you can pay me later.

When Eros Means Man-Boy Love

I have to admit that I can't really get my arms around the idea that the noblest form of erotic love is the love of an older man for a beautiful boy.  But Socrates and his pals at the Symposium seem to think it's the most natural thing in the world.

The only question, for young Phaedrus, is what is honorable or dishonorable in man-boy love, or whether, for Pausanias, there are two kinds of eros, the common or the heavenly. The common is the one for those that care only about "completing the sexual act" and like women as well as boys.  Whereas the heavenly version...

For Eryximachus the doctor eros suffuses everything, even in the business of the physician and his patient, for "the physician's task is to effect a mutual reconciliation and establish mutual love between the most basic bodily elements."

And then there is Aristophanes, with a Platonic "likely story" about humans as "completely round, with back and sides in a circle; they had four hands each, as many legs as hands".  Plus two faces, two sets of sex organs, etc., until Zeus decided to cut humans in two.  Thus cut in half, humans wanted to reunite with their lost half, and that is how you get love.

Then Agathon goes off into ecstasies about the beauty of the erotic god, his youth and delicacy.  "Love fills us with togetherness and drains all of our divisiveness away." Mildness, kindness, "comrade and savior".  Everyone should follow love.

I suppose the problem for us 21st century moderns is our attachment to the ideal of romantic love.  In that, at least, we can understand Aristophanes and Agathon.  But the curious way in which man-boy love is experienced by Greek aristocrats as a preparation for valor, and a way to socialize boys into manhood:  t's just as weird as what comes next: Plato's insistence that the highest form of love is philosophy, the love of wisdom.

Today's philosophers don't seem to be much in love with wisdom.  They just love to chop logic.

Think of Private Equity as Healthcare for Business

I've been thinking.  At least I hope I have.  I've been thinking about how to explain private equity to the American people.



After all, until Mitt Romney came along I should imagine that the average American voter had never thought about private equity before.  In campaign-speak, therefore, the Obamis are trying to define it for the American people before Mitt Romney does.  They want us to think of a vampire sucking the blood out of good union jobs at good wages.



The vampire metaphor probably does have application in some cases.  After all, there are bad apples everywhere--even in left-wing politics.



But I propose a new metaphor.  Think of private equity as healthcare for business.



Let's think about health care for a moment.  There are two key times of life when you really need health care.  You need it at birth, and you need it in your last months on earth.  Health care at birth is the reason that women now have a longer life expectancy than men: they no longer die in childbirth.  And healthcare is the reason that we don't have half of babies dying in their first year of life.



Why, that's just like private equity!  One of its key contributions is to help start-up companies, providing start-up capital and management advice.



In healthcare, obstetric and pediatric care is pretty straightforward.  Where things get messy is with the diseases of aging: geriatric care.  When you get sick, you look for the healthcare system to save you from early death and from serious disability, and that might mean surgery, cutting out a cancerous growth, or reaming out your coronary arteries or putting in a stent.  Guess what.  Very often, there's nothing the doctor can do for you.  He may order an expensive operation but you might still die anyway.



Here's a shocking fact.  When you get a doctor to operate on you, you pay him whether he fixes you up or not. He doesn't suggest an equity deal where he gets a cut on every extra month of life he's given you.  Talk about greed!



Just like aging humans, aging corporations are often a mess.  They may be paying their employees too much; they may be paying their executives too much.  They probably got into debt to tide them over a couple of rough patches.  Now they are really in trouble. and they can't get any more money from the bank.  Enter the leveraged-buyout guys.  They come in with new money, new management, new ideas, and try to save something from the wreck.  Like the doctor doing surgery, they want to get paid for their expertise.  Like anyone doing a high-risk business deal, they want a big payout if they succeed.



It's a pity that the Obama administration wants to teach the ordinary American voter that private equity stinks.  But you can understand why.  Almost everyone in the Democratic coalition is sitting on some sort of government benefit, whether the benefit of union intimidation or subsidy or straight out pay-for-play.  The politicians and the activists promised them lifetime security and told them they had a moral right to that security.  But now the money is running out, and the rest of the American people are getting a little restless about, e.g., paying government workers 45 percent more than private sector workers.  The only way they can keep the money going for a while is with demagoguery.



The Obamis can do this because the Democratic faithful still believe.  They believe what their leaders taught them, that they have a moral right to their handouts and their benefits.  And President Obama believes that too.  He believes in "spreading the wealth" through government programs.



In the end, of course, the whole Democratic political power will collapse into ruin, as every other empire has done.



But for ordinary people that aren't plugged into the national Democratic machine things are different.  What's wrong with the private-equity guys helping the start-up you work for?  What's wrong with a leveraged buyout when your employer is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy?



Not everyone gets a lifetime government job with tenure and lifetime benefits.

The Souls of Living Things

We moderns may think of the universe as as an unimaginable vastness, with a few rocky planets sporting a curious kind of fuzz.  But Plato in the Timaeus sees the universe as a single Living Thing "that contains within itself all living things, mortal and immortal."

Plato wanted the human living thing to have both a mortal and an immortal soul, with the immortal soul containing divineness, and the mortal part the other things, "those dreadful but necessary disturbances" such as pleasure, pain, boldness, fear, "expectation easily led astray" and "fused with unreasoning sense perception and all-venturing lust."  The immortal soul resides in the head and the mortal part in the trunk, with the neck as an isthmus to keep the two types of soul safely apart.

The mortal part of the soul, safely confined to the trunk of the body, comes in two flavors.  The part "that exhibits manliness and spirit" the gods settled in the upper trunk between the midriff and the head "so that it might listen to reason" and restrain the appetitive part.  The appetitive part they put between the midriff and the navel, tied down "like a beast, a wild one."  Plants were also created by the gods, but these living things on the ground only have souls of the appetitive kind, like the human mortal soul situated between the midriff and the navel.  The plant soul is passive, and cannot "discern and reflect upon any of its own characteristics."

Plato comes up with all kinds of inventive explanations of the the body's organs.  The lungs, for instance, are there to cool the heart.  The liver is there to receive the "force of the thoughts sent down from the mind" to help tame the wild beast below.

Natural death from old age, according to Plato, comes about in this way.  Firelike triangles (actually tetrahedrons) cut up food and send nourishment all through the body.  But as the body ages, the triangles lose their ability to cut up the food and are "destroyed by the invaders from outside."  Eventually the "interlocking bonds of the triangles around the marrow can no longer hold on" and "they let the bonds of the soul go."  The soul is then released in a natural way, and finds it pleasant to take flight."  If this comes naturally, and not through disease, it can provide a "pleasant, not a painful death."

Of course, your basic human is a man.  Women only come into existence when "male-born humans who lived lives of cowardice or injustice" are "reborn as women."  Animals are descended from less than perfect men.  Birds, for instance, are descended from simpleminded men, and land animals came from men "who had no tincture of philosophy" and followed the mortal soul in their chest rather than the immortal soul in their head.  Water animals came from the most stupid and ignorant men of all!

It's easy to sneer at the natural and biological sciences of the ancients.  But mankind demands an answer to our questions, and the ancient philosophers did the best they could.  No doubt future generations will sneer at our foolish notions of the nature of life, the universe, and everything.

Welcome to the Julia Crow Era

Nietzsche was the guy that gave resentment a fancy name: ressentiment.  When people are angry because history has passed them by, it's not just resentment.  It's something more.



In the US we saw it in the Jim Crow era.  The Southern whites had lost the Civil War, and they had lost the profits of slave-grown cotton plantations.  They visited their ressentiment on the black freedmen to keep them subservient and prevent them from using their numbers to end the era of white domination in the post-war South.  The Jim Crow era only finally came to an end in the 1950s and 1960s when the federal government--led by liberals--broke the back of white racial domination in the US South.



Perhaps it is more compelling to describe the Jim Crow era in the language of modern psychobabble.  The white Southerners in the late 19th century were in denial about the fact that the glory years of ante-bellum slave plantations were gone forever.  So they vented their rage and their disappointment upon the people they used to own and exploit.  You could even say that they projected their own faults--developed during the lazy hazy days of life presiding over the plantation--upon their former slaves.



So now we have the liberal welfare state hitting the wall.  Do the liberals turn upon themselves, find a scapegoat, and move on to a politics that acknowledges the truth of the conservative and economic critique of big-government liberalism?  No, they do not.  Instead they write "hate speech" laws to make criticism of liberals a crime.  They demonize private capital firms that try to clear the arteries of failing unionized firms hooked on government subsidy and intimidation.  They erect a crony capitalism to reward their friends.  They respond to government failure with more government programs.  They call people that oppose them "extremists" while they send their union and Occupy goons out to intimidate them.



I've thought of a name for this twilight era of liberalism.  I call it the Julia Crow era, after the faceless woman in the Obama campaign's "Life of Julia."



It took the best part of a century to beat back the ressentiment of the Jim Crow era.  The old white Southern elite was well entrenched and taught the poor whites to fear the black hordes that threatened to engulf them.  It took face-to-face federal power to put a stop to the Jim Crow era and defeat it.



Let us hope that the Julia Crow era will not last as long.  The best way out would be for liberals to admit to themselves that their day is over, that their ideas have been exploded, that their top-down big government welfare state is unjust.  But I am not that optimistic.  History is littered with the wreckage of dog-in-the-manger elites that refused to give up their grip on political power until forced to.



In the 1950s, America decided that it was nobler, better than the meanness and the injustice of Jim Crow.  Let us hope that by 2050 we will have also put the Julia Crow era behind us and reasserted our faith in American exceptionalism, America as the last best hope of mankind on earth, the lodestar, the inspiration of those who must have freedom.

The Liberal Con

Everyone in the political elite knows that "entitlements" are really welfare.  So when middle-class voters talk about having "earned" their benefits, well, here's the New York Times:

Anecdotes about citizens’ demanding that government “keep its hands off Medicare” are Exhibit A in the prosecution’s case. In July 2009, for example, President Obama informed an audience that he had received a letter from a woman who wrote, “I don’t want government-run health care, I don’t want socialized medicine, and don’t touch my Medicare.” Such demands, wrote Timothy Noah at Slate, reflect a politics of “infantile denial.”

Except, writes William Voegeli, it was the liberals and Democrats that taught Americans to believe that Social Security and Medicare were just like an insurance policy.  You put your money in so you can take it out later.

Central to liberalism at high tide was a rhetorical effort to establish the untruth that Americans receiving social-insurance benefits were getting back nothing beyond what they had already paid for...

Vincent M. Miles, one of the inaugural members of the Social Security board, explained the basis of this right in a 1936 speech: The program’s old-age benefits “are best understood if we compare them to insurance.” The monthly checks from the government are “like the installments on annuities from an insurance company.” And, “like an insurance-company policy, the worker’s old-age benefit from the government must be paid for in advance. Instead of weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly premiums, however, the government collects weekly or monthly payments which are called ‘taxes.’”

Of course, this was a lie, a liberal "con."  Social Security has never been run like an insurance policy.  It has always been run like a welfare program.  Taxes have been arbitrarily set based on the overall immediate payout needs, and benefits have always been skewed to provide a basic benefit to the low-paid and the contributor that has only paid in for a few years.  Medicare is worse, because it is not an actuarial program based on simple mortality, but on the future demand for health care and the demands of the health care practitioners.

Yet now our liberal friends are sneering at the simple-minded people that bought the "con."

Nothing remarkable here.  Confidence artists have always regarded their "marks" with disdain, and rightly so.  Because you can only get taken in by a confidence man if you want the something-for-nothing that the confidence man offers.

But that doesn't change the fact that liberals lied about their welfare state entitlement programs.  They lied because that was the only way that they could get proud and independent Americans to buy into their programs, and get Americans to exchange their birthright for a mess of pottage.