My Cunning Plan

Most conservatives are happy to belabor liberals with the transcendent truth of conservatives thinkers from Burke to Sowell. You know the schtick: conservatives use reason and liberals use emotion.

But I have a cunning plan.  I want to belabor liberals with with the transcendent truth of liberal ideas.

Just today my "seeing like a state" take on ObamaCare and the welfare state was linked by RealClearPolitics.com.  It uses the notions developed by Marxist professor James C. Scott in Seeing Like a State.  The idea is that modern states try to simplify complex social structures into uniform centralized rationalized plans--not because the old social structures are backward but because they are impenetrable to the bureaucrat and the tax collector.  And we couldn't have that!

So whatever liberals think they are doing with ObamaCare they are just acting like governments always act.  They want to know what the people are doing (in case they might want to mount a head of rebellion) and they want to control whatever they do.  It's not that liberals are evil or wrongheaded.  It's just that when you get in charge of government you start to "see like a state" and then act like a state.

That's what the whole idea of limited government is about.

I'm also working on liberal moral psychology professor Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind.   He's concerned with the "problem" liberals have trying to understand conservatives and communicate with people that don't think like liberals.  But in doing so he unravels the whole moral case for the welfare state because he says that the basis of human sociality is the group and the moral persuasion the group can bring to bear on free riders.  He inadvertently exposes the welfare state as a theme park, a Disneyland, for freeloaders.

Then there are the Frankfurt School chappies, Horkheimer and Adorno.  They show in Dialectic of Enlightenment that bourgeois capitalism and big government are two sides of the same coin.  They both privilege reason, one as the basis of the economy and one as the basis of government.  But reason is instrumental; you use it as a tool.  People use reason to dominate nature and other humans.  By the time you get to Adorno's student Habermas, we are talking about "strategic" instrumental reason and "systems" on the one hand and communicative discourse and the "lifeworld" on the other.  You can see that "system" is the world of money and power while "lifeworld" is the world of discourse and civil society, Burke's "little platoons."

In Jonathan Haidt we get the idea that human reason first evolved as a way of rationalizing and excusing our naughty behavior to our fellow humans--just like kids do when they are caught lying.  That's a tricky concept.  Reason as a way to squirrel out of a tight spot?

The really important thing, I believe, is to adjudicate the two Big Ideas of the modern era.  Is it more correct to view the relations of our society as Adam Smith's Invisible Hand where people thrive so long as they serve others with goods and services?  Or should we think of the Marxian Exploitation narrative where the labor of the working class is alienated because exploited by the employers and driven by necessity.

The view you take is important.  If you think that, by and large, everyone benefits who puts a shoulder to the wheel, then you won't think that extraordinary government power is needed to regulate the economy.  If you believe that exploitation is everywhere then you will believe that government needs to be run by people like you that see the problem and can apply its power to liberating the people from exploitation.  Today "inequality" serves this function.  Liberals believe in inequality and believe that this justifies their redistributive economic policies.

Maybe it's time to revise the two concepts.  The Invisible Hand applies when free people interact in a free market.  Exploitation applies whenever big government is flat-footing around taxing and regulating good honest labor and playing favorites with subsidies and crony capitalism for its supporters.

In my view, when you assemble these notions together you get the idea that it takes government to give society genuine exploitation.  Humans are social animals--"ultrasocial" according to Jonathan Haidt--and really care what other people think about them.  Therefore we have the means in our genes and in our culture to curb exploiters and freeloaders.  It takes government and a ruling class to gin up genuine large-scale exploitation.  Without government people would just decide not to deal with exploiters and defaulters, and the exploiters and defaulters would soon get with the program.

Once we have decided on all this, that to get real exploitation and oppression you need big government, then we can apply good conservative principles about limited government and civil society--from Burke, from Hayek, from Sowell, from Novak, and lately from Lawrence Cahoone (another liberal professor)--and get on with the job of making America the last best hope of freedom on earth, the beacon, the magnet, for all those who must have freedom.

Jonathan Haidt and the Liberals' Problem

In a well-regarded book published this year, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Jonathan Haidt has challenged his liberal friends.

We humans, he argues, are wired to make instinctive moral judgments, and he has identified a moral matrix with 6 different axes, including Care/harm, Liberty/oppression, Fairness/cheating, Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation, that differentiates out our moral instincts.  He and his associates have developed a bunch of survey questions to identify where people score on these 6 moral axes at YourMorals.org.  Conservatives score about equally on each of the six axes, implying that conservatives value each of these moral axes as of equal importance.

But liberals don't.  They rate Care/harm of overwhelming importance, Liberty/oppression pretty highly, Fairness/cheating moderately, and Loyalty/betrayal, Authority/subversion, and Sanctity/degradation hardly at all.  So liberals have a problem in talking to the American people when they believe in such a limited range of moral concerns, whereas conservatives cover the waterfront.  That's what Haidt concludes.

But wait a minute!  Liberals do too believe in Sanctity/degradation: that is what environmentalism and climate change are all about.  They tell us that we are morally defective for eating too much, that corporations are evil for polluting too much; people that disagree with liberals on climate change are called "deniers" or at very least anti-social people that won't sign onto the "consensus."  Liberals do too believe in Authority/subversion.  They believe in the authority of political "idealists" and activists, and in the authority of educated experts to make the rules for the rest of us to live by.  And liberals certainly believe in Loyalty/betrayal.  They made a big deal about forcing liberals to declare their loyalty during the McCarthy era, for sure.  But try and get a job in Hollywood or in the academy if you show that you belong to the conservative team.  Liberals think that entertainment and education should be limited to members of the liberal team.

The whole point of liberalism is to change the rules on Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity.  Liberals don't like loyalty for families, tribes, nations.  They want us to be loyal to the idea of humanity in general.  They don't like the authority of kings, warrior landowners, clerics, and the old-fashioned WASPy "pillars of the community."  They want to substitute the authority of people like themselves: educated, evolved, and open-minded.  They don't want Sanctity founded of the love of God but on the love for the planet.  And they are pretty Calvinistic about all this.  Either you are a member of the liberal Elect or you will roast in secular Hell.  James Piereson called this "Punitive Liberalism" back in 2004.

According to this doctrine, America had been responsible for numerous crimes and misdeeds through its history for which it deserved punishment and chastisement. White Americans had enslaved blacks and committed genocide against Native Americans. They had oppressed women and tyrannized minority groups, such as the Japanese who had been interned in camps during World War II. They had been harsh and unfeeling toward the poor. By our greed, we had despoiled the environment and were consuming a disproportionate share of the world's wealth and resources. We had coddled dictators abroad and violated human rights out of our irrational fear of communism.

It's pretty obvious to me that in this indictment liberals thought they were calling Americans to a new moral order with different parameters for measuring Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity.  The only reason that liberals don't score well on those axes in Haidt survey questions must be that he's not trying to measure them.

Jonathan Haidt is not a fool.  He understands that our moral instincts are there for a reason.  They help us function successfully as social animals.  The groups in which we live are social and cultural artifacts that allow us to work together as teams and provide the means to control free-loading.  Here is what he writes about this.

Everybody loves social capital.  Whether you're left, right, or center, who could fail to see the value of being able to trust and rely upon others?  But now let's broaden our focus... and let's think about a school, a commune, a corporation, or even a whole nation that wants to improve moral behavior...  To achieve almost any moral vision, you'd probably want high levels of social capital...

This social or moral capital refers to 

the degree to which a community possesses interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, and technologies that mesh well with evolved psychological mechanisms and thereby enable the community to suppress or regulate selfishness and make cooperation possible.

This is what conservatives, as Haidt realizes, have been talking about every since Burke and the "little platoons."

Of course, when it comes to the solutions chapter of The Righteous Mind Jonathan Haidt jumps immediately to politics, confirming the liberal belief in control of corporations and regulation, and admitting that the libertarians have a point in declaring the miracle of the market and that social conservatives have a point that you "don't usually help the bees by destroying the hive."

The problem is that Haidt doesn't see the basic problem of liberalism.  In advancing its cause of caring and its fight against oppression and its revaluation of the values of Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity, it enforces its world view with the brute force of government.  We are to care for the poor with our taxes.  We are to fight oppression with government set-asides and subsidies.  And we must destroy the mediating organizations that don't get with the program.  Moreover, we are not to task the poor with any social responsibility.  Here in Seattle we have just enacted a plastic bag ban in grocery stores.  You must pay 5 cents for each paper bag so we will reduce the blight and litter of plastic bags.  Only, of course, people that pay with EBT, the electronic food stamps, are exempt.

That's a tiny example of a gigantic problem.  Whenever liberals legislate some big new reform, they always exempt themselves and their clients from paying the costs of the program.

There is a word for this.  It is called freeloading.

That is the Liberal Problem.  At the very heart of their political program is the promotion and expansion and encouragement of freeloading.  When people give, it is because they are forced to give in their taxes.  When they receive it is because they are entitled to a benefit by right.  This sort of thing does not build community.  It destroys it.

Yet the social scientists tell us that the basic problem for all social animals is the need to find a way to curb the free rider problem, and inspire each other to give rather than to receive.

Will Micro-tasking Take Over the World

President Obama and his acolytes are making a big deal about "outsourcing", the evil Republican plan to help evil corporations send all American jobs offshore.

But perhaps an even bigger threat is "microtasking", the on-line movement for people to do small tasks for corporations over the Internet for cash.  After all, argues Jonathan V. Last, it could detach corporations from the people that do the work.

Because while it’s true that the new world of anonymous, mass, remote freelancing may be a perfect distillation of a textbook labor market, it’s also a radical change in Americans’ understanding of the social compact between business and the citizenry. And it’s not clear that this change is for the good...

Because they are perpetual and, in a certain sense, unaccountable, modern corporations have a different set of interests than flesh-and-blood people, and a very different relationship with the people’s voice--government--than old-fashioned sole proprietorships or partnerships... [T]he corporation by design has only an interest in its own survival and profitability: It will concern itself with government insofar as it can enlist the government in helping it make money. On every other question, the corporation is, by definition, indifferent.

So global freelancing will take over the world, right?

Well, not exactly.  We turn to liberal Jonathan Haidt and his The Righteous Mind.  He writes about how instinctively humans color every action with moral judgment, and how profoundly "groupish" we are.

Humans love to belong to "teams", according to Haidt, from families to tribes to religions, and we do our best work when we work as part of a team.  The most notable kind of team is the military squad, and it turns out that parade-ground drilling helps form the bond of the band of brothers, the critical bonding between soldiers that prompts them to sacrifice for each other.  Rhythmic dancing is similar to rhythmic marching; it helps promote a "groupish" feeling.

A corporation, Haidt reminds us, is just such a group.  Loosed upon the world two hundred years ago, it turned out to be a "winning formula."

It let people place themselves in a new kind of boat within which they could divide labor, suppress free riding, and take on gigantic tasks with the potential of gigantic rewards...

It is possible to build a corporation staffed entirely by Homo economicus... But this approach (sometimes called transactional leadership) has its limits...

In contrast, an organization that takes advantage of our hivish [i.e. groupish] nature can activate pride, loyalty, and enthusiasm among its employees and then monitor them less closely. This approach to leadership (sometimes called transformational leadership) generates more social capital--the bonds of trust that help employees get more work done at a lower cost than employees at other firms... Unlike Homo economicus, they are truly team players.

 Maybe we should stop worrying about whether "outsourcing" and "offshoring" will end the world as we know it.  Markets are wonderful, and capitalism has given us enormous wealth.  But almost everyone navigates the capitalist ocean in a boat with a crew of other humans.  It's likely that capitalism wouldn't work at all unless its workers worked in the modern teams we call corporations.  Just as soldiers since time immemorial have been organized in the 150-man unit called a "company."

Where's Romney?

Things feel a little flat on the presidential campaign front, and Republicans are beginning to fret.  Where's Romney?  How come he hasn't hit ObamaCare out of the ball-park?  How come he hasn't wrapped Obama in ObamaTax?  How come he got photographed riding a jet-ski?



Here's what I think.  I think that Mitt Romney spent the entire Fourth of July week strategizing.  And that's a good thing.  Starting from now we will start to see what Romney and his people think they need to do to prepare for the Republican National Convention in Tampa, August 27-30, 2012.



The first thing out of the box appears to be a decision to go after the president on his Bain outsourcing message.



Meanwhile everyone is offering their advice.  Here's Pat Caddell writing about "trust" and "taxes."  Here's Hugh Hewitt's chappie Clark Judge writing about the "battle of the agendas phase" of the campaign.  And there are a ton of people declaring that Romney has screwed up.  Totally.



In my view, this campaign offers Republicans an extraordinary opportunity to talk to the American people about some basic facts of life.



On taxes, I'd talk about the choice.  OK, Mr. President, so you want the rich to pay a little more.  Let's agree that we want to use the money of the rich for a good societal purpose.  Now, the question is: will the rich contribute more by creating new jobs (since almost all of "the rich" apart from liberal trustafarians are business owners) or by paying more in taxes?  What do you think, America?



On trust, the question is how to call the Barack Obama untruthful without calling the President of the United States a liar.  It's a delicate question that I am happy to leave to the professionals.



But the bigger question, I feel, is to make politics bigger.  The fact is that politics seldom gets beyond "what have you done for me lately?"  People support candidates that they expect to turn around and reward them.  That's why Social Security is a success.  Most people think that they benefit.  That's why ObamaCare is in trouble.  Most people think that they are going to get screwed.  It all adds up to Springtime for Freeloaders.



Our liberal friends are the worst at this.  They claim to be working for the good of all, but when it comes to the hustings it's all about class warfare and the race card and we care about you because we spend money on you.



What I want is a move away from the clientism of welfare-state politics towards a "culture of involvement."  In my America we won't need big government because every person in America will be engaged civically in contributing their time and money to the solving of social problems large and small.  It would be a society that is less governmental and more social.



Meanwhile we have an election ahead, a sluggish economy, and a president doing his best to divide us. I just hope that Mitt Romney came up with a good plan from his Fourth of July recess.



I am not talking about a "plan" for the economy.  We know what is needed there: tax cuts, spending cuts, regulation cuts, and sound money.  I am talking about a "plan" to persuade the American people to vote out President Obama, the worst president in history.

The Real Blunder of the Sixties

The sensible Robert Samuelson has a piece out today about the economic blunder of the 1960s.  He writes:

Until the 1960s, Americans generally believed in low inflation and balanced budgets. President John Kennedy shared the consensus but was persuaded to change his mind. His economic advisers argued that, through deficit spending and modest increases in inflation, government could raise economic growth, lower unemployment and smooth business cycles.



None of this proved true; all of it led to grief.

OK.  It's true, as far as it goes.  Although there have always been advocates of "cheap money" and there always will be. Sometimes they get the ear of politicians, and sometimes they don't.



It is true that, by giving itself permission to borrow and print money, America's ruling elite basically exempted itself from rules of prudence.  It swept away an important political excuse, as in "Gee fellas, I'd love to spend more money on your pet program but it would involve deficit spending, and that would be wrong."



But the real blunder is the whole idea that major social functions should be performed by government.  It is just not true that there is a need for a compulsory program of national retirement savings.  Most people are pretty prudent; once they get their kids raised they start to save for retirement.



That goes for health care and education, too.  Women are passionately engaged in health care for their family, and drive family spending to budget for health care.  Ditto education.  If the government weren't delivering health care and education then people would do it on their own, like the middle class did before the invention of the welfare state.



Of course, all these social functions would be different if government didn't do them.  They would involve a lot more personal involvement.  People would volunteer at hospitals and schools and give money to them; they would help their relatives with hospital bills and school fees; they would belong to fraternal organizations that provided social benefits to their members.  That is what middle-class people used to do.



But the ruling elite decided that they wanted to run all these social functions.  They would use government and the tax system to organize and fund it all, and they would use university experts to plan and structure the programs.  And when they got in a jam they would borrow a little money.  When they got into a recession they would print a little money.



That is what Keynesianism is all about.  It is all about the welfare state pitcher trying to get out of a jam.  A little spit, a little scuff, and he should be able to throw a strike and make that last out.



The trouble is that, after a century of spit-balls and scuffing, the Keynesian ball is such a mess that today's pitchers can't deliver that crucial out.



Ten years ago Robert D. Putnam set our liberal friends tut-tutting with his Bowling Alone.  He mourned that America was hollowing out because people weren't "joining" any more.  Of course liberals completely missed the point.  Humans join organizations not because they like joining up but because social organizations help them to live and thrive and help them when they need help.  But with the welfare state and its bureaucratic provision of all the social functions there is no point in joining organizations for mutual benefit.  It's a waste of time as you merely end up duplicating a function that the government provides for "free".  You might as well just stay home and sit in front of the TV.



The truth is that our liberal ruling class has created a monster.  The more that it taxes and spends the less that people feel responsible for getting out and making a difference, and the more people demand "free stuff" like everyone else.



The bottom line with blunders is that it costs a bundle to set a blunder right.  Usually the cost can be counted both in money and in heartache.  Back in the 1980s Ronald Reagan gave us a chance to correct the blunder after the stagflation of the 1970s, but liberals refused to reform their welfare state and their "free stuff" subsidies.  Today, the politics of President Obama amounts to "free stuff" politics on steroids.



So now we have to go through the horrors of 1979-82 all over again.  Only this time it is hurting a lot more than back in the early days of the Reagan revolution.  That is because we are in a bigger hole this time.



Will liberals learn their lesson this time?  We can but hope.  Here is an idea. Eight years of a Republican in the White House and a Republican Congress would go a long way to changing their minds.

Keep On Higgsing

The discovery of the Higgs boson is a great achievement for physics.  Whether the discovery is the Higgs boson or a Higgs-like boson is besides the point.  The characteristics of the products of proton-proton collisions at the energy levels in the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva will doubtless expose anomalies that will partly confirm and partly challenge current theory.



Of course, at the layman's level, with its metaphors of "particles" and "zoo," we really don't have a clue what is going on.  After all, we are dealing with a micro world where there are no particles.  There are quanta of energy and some of the quanta have mass, whatever that is.  The whole thing is a morass of mathematics and the particles and fields are just convenient metaphors.  Everything is a question of probabilities until there is an observable event. The Higgs boson is associated with the Higgs field and is supposed to explain why some quanta have mass and others don't.



In my layman's view, all the narrative around physics is the same as Plato conjuring up his cosmology in the Timaeus.  It takes current knowledge and recklessly extends it towards an explanation of the eternal mystery of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."



But all science ever seems to do is unfold even deeper mysteries.  Today, as we wrap up the Standard Model of 20th century physics, we already have a mystery waiting in the wings.  As one physicist put it:

"Even if we find out that this is indeed, to the best of our ability to measure, the Standard Model Higgs boson, there are all these other questions that are unanswered. One of the first questions is: What composes the dark matter in the universe? There's no room in the Standard Model of the universe to make up the dark matter, so we have to look at other candidate alternatives."

So we are at the same position as we were over a century ago when the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887 revealed that the speed of light always checked out the same.  According to the best physics at the time, it ought to be different, depending on its orientation to the "ether."   If the speed of light is the same in all directions, what does it mean?  A man who was then 8 years old came up with the shocking answer.



Every time we make a big breakthrough in physics, we pretty soon find that there is another mystery confronting us.  That is why philosophy has abandoned "foundationalism."  We don't know the basic building blocks of the universe.  All we know is that we have science that checks out at observable energies.  Knowledge is good until it gets updated with something new and improved.



Meanwhile the physicists need to come up with a rationale to keep their big toys going and maybe come up with a reason for something bigger and better.  I wonder what they will propose.

Why Liberals Like ObamaCare

Last week I picked up a copy of James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State on my way from Seattle to Ashland, Oregon.  It had been on my Amazon Wish List and so when I went into Powell's I was looking for it.



But how had it got on my Wish List?  I checked and I see it's because I read a piece by Jonah Goldberg back in April.  Now that I have read it, I can say that, like Jonah, Seeing Like a State has "left a lasting impression on me."



Let's have Jonah tell the story.

If there were one thing I could impress upon people about the nature of the state, it’s that governments by their very nature want to make their citizens “legible.”...



The premodern state was “blind” to its subjects. But the modern state was determined first to see them, and then organize them.

Sound familiar?  This legibility project involved a host of efforts, from mandatory surnames to changing land tenure from communal to freehold.  Why?  Because a person with a surname is easier to find.  A freehold is easier to tax than a village with a word-of-mouth understanding of who owns what and why.



At a basic level, the state need to be able to "see" its subjects in order to tax them and conscript them.  An Asian state with rice cultivation needs to identify and control the people working in the paddy fields.  A modern industrial state needs to know all about its economy so that it knows how much it can spend on buying peoples' votes, or how much national debt it can afford.



There is no end to this.  The state pretty soon decides it needs to run the education system so it can generate productive workers--and also make sure that they learn the right history.  It decides that it needs to vaccinate to control infectious diseases and know who has and who hasn't been vaccinated.  From there, it decides it needs to provide basic health care to keep its workforce (and possible soldiers) strong and healthy.



Pretty soon you get to Obamacare where the government wants to monitor and control everything about healthcare.  Here's what is in store for doctors under ObamaCare according to Daniel Henninger.

[It's the] Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS), lodged in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid.



Here's the Centers' own description of what PQRS does: "The program provides an incentive payment to practices with eligible professionals (identified on claims by their individual National Provider Identifier [NPI] and Tax Identification Number [TIN]) who satisfactorily report data on quality measures for covered Physician Fee Schedule (PFS) services furnished to Medicare Part B Fee-for-Service (FFS)."

See what is going on?  The physicians will be required to report their activities to the government so the government can figure out what is going on in healthcare--make it "legible"--and control it.



It is exactly as Scott writes in Seeing Like a State.  In Scott's view, the way this government imperative works in the modern state is that it wants to reduce everything to a rational system, like mass production in the industrial corporation.  Only, of course, these days the huge bureaucratic corporation is going out of style.  People talk of rapid-response, flexibility, print-on-demand, etc.  And there is F.A. Hayek who argued that big bureaucracy was inherently flawed because it could not know as much as thousands of workers or millions of consumers.



If the government is not to be all-seeing and all-powerful, then we need to restrict its right to know everything about us.  Our liberal friends talk a lot about "privacy," but they usually restrict it to sexual and political matters.  They don't want the government to know what they are doing in the bedroom or in the activist group.



But liberals don't care about privacy in economic matters.  That's why they support massive centralized systems to control pensions, healthcare, education, and welfare.  That's because liberals are the modern ruling class and that makes them "see like a state."



When conservatives call for strengthening civil society they are calling for reducing the legibility and visibility of individual citizens.  That's why Berger and Neuhaus wrote about "mediating structures" to shelter individuals from the "megastructures."   All they are proposing is to restore the protections that village communes and medieval guilds used to provide.  But the modern state did away with the old mediating structures precisely because they prevented the central government from knowing about individuals and controlling them.



Of course, the horse has left the barn on that, centuries ago.  But it is clear that individuals need to be protected from the power of the state.  What other way is there than a civil society that restricts the visibility of the individual to the state and restricts state control?



We also need to see that the market reduces the need for the state to make the individual visible and legible, because the market economy is a system where economic actors produce and serve and buy and sell.  We don't need to see inside the head of a trader, and we don't need to see inside the boundaries of a corporation.  We just need to be able to trust them.  In the market economy it is perfectly OK to have companies and corporations that throw a veil over many of their internal activities.  But certain facts need to be public, such as income, equity, debt, etc.



Back in the Soviet Union they pretty well destroyed the Russian peasant world in a crazed effort to make it organized and visible and to tax it with grain seizures to pay for its forced industrialization.  But many social activities just cannot flourish if they are organized like a bureaucracy and simplified down to one-size-fits-all.



If we learned anything from the Soviet Union it is that an individual that is completely visible to the state is an individual that is completely in the power of the state.



Conservatives have the answer, of course.  It is that the government welfare state should be broken up and returned to civil society institutions.  Government really shouldn't do anything unless it absolutely requires force: national defense and internal policing.  And when it sticks to that it doesn't need complete visibility and legibility, to know everything about every single individual.



The problem is how to persuade the American people, especially those hooked on "free stuff."  Which is just about all of us.