The Trouble with Big Anything

Everyone is tut-tutting and serve-them-righting about the NCAA penalty dealt out to Penn State, home of the nasty Sandusky child-abuse scandal.



What a monster; how could they let it happen, etc.



But let's get real.  Of course nasty things like that will happen at a big bureaucratic organization.  The only reason we all know about the Penn State case is that it included college football and a legend in his own time, Joe Paterno.  That makes it bait for a national scandal.  But suppose the Jerry Sandusky in the case were not an assistant football coach but just some average Marginalized Studies department professor.  Who would care then?



The fact is that we are in two minds about Bigness.  Conservatives hate Big Government and love a scandal about government waste, fraud and abuse.  But we kinda like the armed forces and their hierarchical military spirit.  Liberals hate Big Business and love to report on, say, Big Oil laying waste to the planet with horrible oil spills.  But they love Big Government and all its caring compassionate programs that help the poor and the marginalized.  At least everyone hates the DMV.



But what about Big University?  Liberals hate the football program; conservatives hate the left-wing indoctrination.  Big Philanthropy?  Conservatives love to hate the liberal foundations like the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.  Big Religion?  Liberals love it when Catholic priests are caught covering up child abuse.



But I wonder if it's time to look at the problem of bigness in general.  The Penn State case shows the problem.

In 1998, a boy’s mother reported to police that Sandusky had showered with her son in a Penn State facility. An investigation began that Penn State officials were eager to see go away...



A janitor saw him in November 2000, but didn’t report it for fear “they’ll get rid of all of us.”...



Paterno and the others “repeatedly concealed critical facts relating to Sandusky’s child abuse from the authorities, the University’s Board of Trustees, the Penn State community, and the public at large.”

Everyone is creeping around, like a moral mouse, looking after Number One, anxious not to rock the boat.



It seems to me that the answer is that we need a lot fewer big hierarchical institutions around.  It's not just that they tend to cover up criminality, but that they are notably fragile and resistant to change.  Over the years they run down delivering less and less for more and more money.  They are a conspiracy against cooperation and adaptation.



I was reading a book about Prussia the other day, H.W. Koch's History of Prussia, and learned that the Prussian state bureaucracy had won for itself tenure and pensions by 1820.  That is eighteen-twenty!



Shades of government bankruptcies in 2012!  All bureaucrats want, in any big organization, in any era, is to get tenure and a pension.  Then that they can do nothing for the next ten, twenty years while they collect their salaries.  And then the glorious moment arrives when they retire and start to collect their pensions!



It is surely our job to make sure that the bureaucrats don't get it.  Because when we have guaranteed tenure and pensions to some special class of people it means that the rest of us are more at risk.  Like right now.

Liberals and Fracking

I was out to dinner with liberal friends last night and got roundly spanked for blogging about blacks that think "we're owed."  I don't know anyone that thinks that, said my black acquaintance.

That's comical, really.  Because the whole point of liberal politics is the idea of "We're Owed" writ large.  That's why we talk about "entitlement" programs.  I'm entitled; we're owed!

But the big takeaway was fracking.  The word has gone out, presumably through the documentary "Gastown," and liberals are all convinced that fracking, the technique of fracturing oil and gas-bearing rock in the neighborhood of a drill hole using water, sand, and a bit of detergent, will contaminate the drinking water supply and end the world as we know it.

Our liberal friends are passionate about this, almost as passionate as they are about "marriage equality," or really, gay marriage.

What is interesting to me, as an engineer that spent 30 years in energy and environmental consulting, is how cocksure professional musicians and professional photographers can be about these technical issues.  It didn't occur to me at the time to make the argument from authority, but I shoulda. You know what?  When it comes to music I absolutely defer to your knowledge and experience.  So how about the environment and the energy biz?  I spent 30 years, man and boy, working on sewers and energy resource questions.  I know a thing or two about cleaning up the environment and about the financial feasibility of intermittent resources like wind turbines.

But really, it's not about the science.  It's about the religion.  It's about the end of the world and original sin and finding redemption from the sins of the world.  It's about "immanentizing the eschaton."  When you don't believe in God any more then you tend to want to create Heaven on earth and not wait for salvation in the next world.

Yes, and those liberals all believe that the oil companies get gigantic subsidies, and make profits in the hundreds of billions of dollars.  Let's check Exxon Mobil.  Market cap. is about $400 billion and the P/E ratio is about 10.  So that means net profits are $40 billion a year.  Gross revenue is about $440 billion per year.  Big, you'll say.  But not obscene.  Apple makes about the same profit on one third of the revenue.

Our liberal friends.  What are we to do with them?  I guess the most sensible thing would be to beat Obama like a drum 55% to 45% in November, take over the Senate, repeal Obamacare, cut spending, reform entitlements, cut tax rates while cutting deductions and loopholes and drill, drill drill.

Liberals got the wrong idea when Obama won in 2008.  They thought it was game, set, and match.

But there is a reason why liberals had to rebrand themselves as "progressives."  Americans really don't like liberals.  They are America's ruling class and they are annoyingly bossy.  A nice win for the Gipper would really quiet our liberal friends up for a decade, and let the rest of us get on with building families, expanding the economy, and repairing the national balance sheet.

Then, a decade or two from now, it will be time for a new generation of liberals, a generation that "knew not Obama" and the really dumb strategic mistakes he made.

Estonia, Spain and the Welfare State

Today they are reporting massive demonstrations against "austerity" in Spain.

The protest was one of over 80 demonstrations called by unions across the county against civil servant pay cuts and tax hikes which drew tens of thousands of people, including police and firefighters wearing their helmets.

It's the basic problem with the welfare state.  It taxes and spends up to the limit in good times and then finds out that the welfare state functionaries and beneficiaries strongly object to the trimming of their benefits in bad times.

That's why there is Paul Krugman and Keynesian economics.  The solution to a debt and spending crisis is not to cut spending, they say.  Oh no.  That would cause "pointless misery." The solution instead is more spending and devaluation.

So it creates "pointless misery" for Estonia to bite the bullet and cut government spending and government employee salaries.  Far better to increase government spending on stimulus and bull through to the future. (Only, of course, in the case of Spain you can't devalue the Euro, so you call on the Germans to pony up.)

I think it is important to understand what is going on here.  Keynesian economics was born in the 1930s when the welfare state first went belly up after the central bank manipulations of the 1920s had created an unsustainable boom.  The Keynesian solution was devaluation and inflation.

But the Keynesians are just tame regime apologists trying to help get the welfare state pitcher out of a jam.  It is very difficult to get people to accept pay cuts--particularly government employees--after an unsustainable boom.  Union leaders an community organizers can get thousands into the streets to demand that the cuts be rescinded.  But if you devalue the currency or inflate it away then you have presented the people with a fait accompli.  Voila!  The politicians are out of a jam, for you can't roll back a devaluation.  Not without "pointless misery."

The real solution, of course, is that a nation's "welfare" should not be run through the government with all the waste, fraud, and abuse that entails.  Government doesn't do flexibility, doesn't do efficiency, doesn't do customer service, doesn't do constant improvement and renewal.  Government does force, and what government employees and beneficiaries want is the money, never mind if the whole country flushes down the toilet.

Moreover there is a great philosophical reason why the welfare state is a bad idea.  It comes out of Habermas' analysis of society as a dual concept, part system and part "lifeworld."  Government is all system.  You bully through a law, and then everyone has to obey the law or pay a penalty.  But humans as social animals live in a lifeworld where people in a community are constantly discussing and evaluating norms and behavior.  The more you build a welfare state the more you dehumanize people by forcing them into a system.  You make them into passive consumers of benefits and passive payers of taxes.  In a truly "social" system everyone would be involved and responsible in the day-to-day business of the lifeworld, giving and receiving and discussing and evaluating and judging--on the day-to-day business of the health of old people, the education of young people, and the relief of the poor.

When social services are returned to the lifeworld then an economic crisis would prompt everyone to pitch in to find a way, somehow, to keep grannie's meds coming, junior's education going, and helping the poor get through the hard times.  That would be a big difference from today's situation where the money goes to the most powerful special interest, whether "banksters," bureaucrats, or beneficiaries.

Why Obama Gets It Wrong

Why does Obama get it wrong?  I don't mean at the political level, the level of not saying anything that riles up the opposition with stupid stuff that says that "You didn't do that."

Actually, the president made a bigger error, as Charles Murray pointed out.  Wrote Murray:

There’s a standard way for Americans to celebrate accomplishment. First, we call an individual onto the stage and say what great things that person has done. Then that person gives a thank-you speech that begins “I couldn’t have done this without…” and a list of people who helped along the way. That’s the way we’ve always done it.

That's the way we recognize success.  We tell the successful one: "you are awesome."  And the successful one replies: "Aw shucks; I couldn't have done it without the janitor."

The bigger error comes out in Barney Frank's little nugget, retailed by Ross Douthat.

In [the liberal] worldview, the government is just the natural expression of our national community, and the place where we all join hands to pursue the common good. Or to borrow a line attributed to Representative Barney Frank, “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.”

Er, no, Barney.  That is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of government.  Let us look at how Alan Page Fiske, author of the Relational Models theory of human sociality puts it.  He says that there are four ways in which humans express themselves as social animals.  There is Communal Sharing.  There is Authority Ranking.  There is Equality Matching.  There is Market Pricing.

If we put it as baldly as possible, we would say that government is Authority Ranking all dolled up as Communal Sharing.  And that is being charitable to government.  Here is what Fiske actually says (PDF) about Authority Ranking.

The Authority Ranking (AR) mod bases sociality on asymmetrical differences... which define how to rank people: by age, gender, caste, seniority, promotion system, achievement on a task or test, contest or combat, passage through a ritual, possession of symbolic paraphernalia, bestowal of fiefdom, position determined by divination or revelation, charismatic performance, religious devotion, election, delegation or appointment by higher authority.

Sounds like the liberal welfare state to me.

Now, of course the United States is a community in the sense of Communal Sharing based "on the perception that a set of persons have something in common--something that makes them socially equivalent in some respect."  Well.  the whole point of the liberal ruling class is that racists, sexists, homophobes, and bitter clingers are not "socially equivalent."  The whole idea is to write them out of polite society.

And we know how Communal Sharing works in practice.  That's because Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel prize for her work on the "commons."  For Communal Sharing to work you have to have a small community with face-to-face relations where people are socially controlled by their need to maintain their reputation in the community as good citizens.  Naming and shaming is the name of the game for defaulters and rewards "You did it!" for the exemplary citizens.

But liberals don't do this with their welfare state.  They divide society into "us" and "them."  "We" are the good guys and "They" are the bad guys.  You are not allowed to name and shame anyone in the liberal ruling class--that is what "civility" is all about.  Nor are you allowed to name and shame anyone that is a liberal client--that is what the race card, class warfare and "blaming the victim" are all about.

The fundamental truth about conservatism is that conservatives have argued since the days of Edmund Burke that a national government cannot be the same as a local council of elders.  You can say that, at its best, your local council of elders can do Communal Sharing and rule by persuasion.  In other words, you can have Communal Sharing in your "little platoon."  But big government is government.  It is not a council but the power base of a ruling class.  It is an armed minority ruling over the people in a defined territory.  Government is force, and force goes beyond humans as social animals to the realm of Newtonian mechanics.  That is what Burke meant by "economists, sophisters, and calculators."

The real problem with presidents who say "You didn't do that" and Barney Franks that say "Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together" is not that they are lying to us about government and community and the individual.

The problem is that they are lying to themselves.

A Gaffe, A Palpable Gaffe!

According to Michael Kinsley, "A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth - some obvious truth he isn't supposed to say."

So it is pretty obvious that the president's gaffe on Friday 13th, "you didn't build that," is a classic gaffe.  Liberals like the president all think exactly what the president said, that everything good was created by liberal government, but it isn't a good idea to say it because most Americans believe in the American Dream, which is an individualist dream not a communal dream.

And now people are having tremendous fun dragging up photos of Steve Jobs with and iPhone, Bill Gates with a PC, Thomas Edison with a light-bulb, and photoshopping in the president yelling "You Didn't Build That!"

Conservatives may wonder why in the world liberals believe such rubbish.  That's easy.

We Americans have two duelling myths.  Conservatives believe in the Invisible Hand myth, that if you build it they will come.  Liberals believe in the Exploitation myth, that without liberals building caring and compassionate government programs we would all be slaves and sweatshop workers.

So when a liberal sees a picture of healthy, happy workers in some office park, they think "We liberals created that" with labor laws, with anti-discrimination laws, with minimum wage laws, and civil rights acts.  It's government to the rescue.

The thinking neo-Marxist disagrees.  He thinks that both big business and big government both carry the seeds of exploitation.  That's what Jewish emigres Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno wrote in the 1940s in The Dialectic of Enlightenment.  Both modern business and modern government are based on "instrumental reason," reason deployed for practical purposes.  "What men want to learn from nature is how to dominate it and other men."  And then there is this: "Enlightenment behaves towards things as a dictator toward men."  This line of thinking further developed by James C. Scott in Seeing Like a State. Governments want to make their people "legible" so they and tax them, conscript them, and control them.

So let's get free of the PollyAnna stuff about caring compassionate government, liberals.  Government is force, domination, tax, control.  It is delusion to think otherwise.

But there is a problem, and it is this.  Violence has gone down since the beginning of the age of the big corporation and the big government.  How can this be when we have big business and big government running around exploiting and dominating everything in sight?  The answer, as developed by lefties like Juergen Habermas, a student of Adorno, is that there is more to the human experience than the clanking mechanisms of instrumental reason.  Humans are social animals; we interact with each other not just in strategic system actions to extract maximum leverage from the rest of the world.  We also live in a lifeworld where we work out the good, the true, and the beautiful together in communicative interaction.

This fact of our social, rather than mechanical and instrumental, nature works itself out in theories of our social interaction, as developed by chaps like Alan Page Fiske.  We relate to each other in part by Communal Sharing, by Authority Ranking, by Equality Matching, and by Market Pricing.  On this view you could say that the dystopia imagined by Horkheimer and Adorno represents a world where everything has shrunk into a mechanical Authority Ranking and Market Pricing.

In fact, though, people hate it when human life is shrunken to just Authority and Markets.  That is why the folks laid off by Bain Capital are so upset.  They look at Romney and Bain as pure calculators that forgot that they were human.  That is why conservatives, ever since Edmund Burke, have championed "civil society" over the instrumental reason of "sophisters, economists and calculators."  And Neuhaus and Berger have championed the "mediating structures" to soften the harshness of the "megastructures" of business and government.

But people like President Obama and Elizabeth Warren don't get it, and that is why they are stumbling around with their mega-gaffes.  They think that their big government is the acme of evolved civilization and compassion.  They think that everything good in our society is built upon their programs, their education, their very fast trains, their green energy, and all the other corrupt government programs that are bankrupting our society.

The really interesting thing to me is that the real innovators, the Rockefellers, the Jay Goulds, the Carnegies, the Henry Fords, the Bill Gateses, the Steve Jobses, the ones that "didn't build it" are not very social or sociable at all.  Their astonishing innovations are the result of their anti-social nature.  They are obsessive people that don't listen and conform to other people and worry about what other people say about them.  They are almost pathologically anti-social.  They drop out of college.  They go off to India.  They are impossible to work for.  Yet they change the world with their genius.

But that makes sense to me, even if it doesn't to liberals.  Human society depends on an eternal battle between the individual and the society.  That makes it almost impossible to determine which is right: the individualist creed that champions the individual creator against the dumb herd, or the communalist creed that works to bring everyone together into consensus.  And without a society, the individual genius would just be one hand clapping.

Why Obama Trashes Businessmen

When President Obama gave his "On your own" speech as Osawatomie, Kansas, conservatives were upset.  When house-flipper Elizabeth Warren told a meeting that people don't create businesses on their own, conservatives sneered.



But when President Obama told business owners that "If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that," conservatives exploded, and pundits opinionated here and here and here and here and here and here.



Now, of course, there is a sense in which the president is right.  There is no business until there is a government protecting property and contracts.



But why does the president think he needs to tell us this?



I will tell you.  The president has to believe that government is the enabling force behind every successful entrepreneur.  Every liberal supporter of big government has to believe that a world without big government run by liberals is a dark, cruel world of unimaginable injustice.  Otherwise what is the point of all those government programs?



I like to say that there are two economic myths competing for the hearts and minds of modern people.  There is the Invisible Hand myth, that says that all you need to do is offer your services to the world and it will reward you.  Then there is the Exploitation myth that says that everyone is screwed unless a powerful and just government comes to your aid and rights the oppression and injustice of the ruling class.



You can see immediately what falls out of these two myths.  On the Invisible Hand view, the need for government, any government, is obviously minimal.  On the Exploitation view, the need for government, and a particular kind of government, is immediate.



Obviously, neither of these myths can be true.  It is just not true that the world is a Pollyanna-land where the lions lie down with the lambs.  On the other hand, it requires tortured logic to insist that the stunning economic growth that has taken place since the dawn of the Invisible Hand myth in the 18th century is proof that the world is imprisoned in a hell of exploitation.



In America, the particular version of the Invisible Hand myth that we celebrate is called The American Dream.  It says that anyone can grow up to be president of the United States.



Here's a modern version of the American Dream. Once upon a time, in 1961, a boy baby was born in America.  His parents loved him very much.  But then he was abandoned by his father, and then his step-father, and then his mother.  So it fell to his grandmother to raise him to adulthood.  But despite all this, the boy, Barack Hussein Obama II, grew up to become the First Black President of the United States.



But notice that the grandmother didn't do it on her own.  Oh no.  She was a vice-president of a bank, a greedy banker, a "bankster."  And banks, as we know, are the darlings of big government, cosseted, and subsidized, and bailed out and given access to the Federal Reserve System's discount window.  So it wasn't Barack Obama that did it on his own.  Oh no.  It was the Federal Reserve System.  And liberal admission officers that admitted him to selective colleges.



The reason that we celebrate the American Dream and people that found successful businesses is not that we ignore the importance of society and a just government.  It is that we know how very hard it is to found and build a successful business.  We want to encourage young people to overcome their fears and accept the risks and the heartaches of trying to build something "of their own."  Liberals have their own version of this.  They call it encouraging "positive self-esteem."



Many years ago the Democrats tried this class warfare game. and they failed miserably.  I seem to remember some pundit explaining why.  The reason is that there are tens of millions of Americans that nurture a great hope that they may one day get successful and rich.  Think Joe the Plumber. They are fools, of course, because probably not one in a hundred will live out his dream.  But remember, the one thing left when Pandora's Box emptied out was hope.



It was said that in Napoleon's army every private carried a marshal's baton in his knapsack, because the Grande Armee was an army that promoted on merit.



But not in Obama's Solyndra America.

Jews and Paulites Knock on GOP Door

Back in March we stolid Romney supporters here in Seattle, Washington, were nearly overwhelmed by the insurgent Ron Paul supporters.  In my precinct caucus we had three Romney supporters and two Paul supporters.  The Romney guys were old 'uns and the Paul supporters were thirtysomethings.



I had a simple message for the Ron Paul supporters.  I said, you are welcome here.  Come into the Republican Party and make it your home.  I meant, of course, that they should come in the GOP and start to rearrange the furniture to make it more comfortable for libertarians like them.



Now I read that Jews in suburban Illinois are moving in battalion strength into the Republican column.  It is not because of Obama and his Israel policy.  It is because the last ten years of Democratic state government has trashed the Illinois economy.  Said one GOP activist:

You have to understand that in this part of the world, as in so many, life is with family. Whether you’re Jewish, Catholic, or Protestant, you don’t want to see you[r] children to grow up in a state without opportunity and move away. What I see is people are realizing that their children will have no economic opportunity here and move. When people think their grandchildren are going to be living in Texas or North Carolina because of failed economic policies, party loyalty evaporates. Here, it’s a family crisis if the grandchildren are more than fifteen minutes away.

 Jews are seeing the death spiral of big government and are open to persuasion.

Jews are slowly beginning to understand that compassion and social justice cannot mean a coerced transfer of the benefits of their labor to someone else. The concepts of tzedakah (charity) and tikkun olam (repairing the world) are moral obligations of the individual, not obligations imposed on the individual by the state.

This is the central argument of modern conservatism.  You can only give charity and repair the world through your own moral actions in civil society.  Government cannot repair the world.  It can only compel obedience.  Compelled charity is not charity.  Healing the wounds of the world with force just opens new wounds.



Of course we know why Jews have been anti-Republican in recent years.  It's the Christianity.  Jews naturally fear that the Christians might turn on them again and scapegoat them, and Democratic politicians know it.  If there is one thing that Democrats know how to do it is to play the race card to keep the blacks home, the class card to keep the workers home, the gender card to keep the feminists home, and the bigotry card to keep the Jews home.



Actually, that class card hasn't been working so good in recent years.  What's the Matter with Kansas, anyway?



But the truth is that the Republican Party has a great big open door.  Anyone can come in, and anyone can make it their home.  The Republican Party may be the stupid party, but it is also the "nice" party, and we are determined to be nice to the new neighbors.  In the last 40 years, we've had Reagan Democrats come and go, but mostly come.  We've had the Religious Right come aboard.  Lately it's been the Tea Party.  Now it's looking like the libertarians and the Jews are next.  Maybe Catholics too.



All I can say is:  Come on in and make the Republican Party your own.