Our Bull-session President

We all know the guy that thinks he's so clever when he interjects this kind of remark in an all-night student bull-session:

You mentioned the Navy, for example, and that we have fewer ships than we did in 1916. Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military's changed. We have these things called aircraft carriers, where planes land on them. We have these ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines.

Only it's a little disconcerting to realize that the guy grew up to become president.  Now, of course, liberals and conservatives are busily fact-checking each other on whether in fact the US Armed Forces do indeed have less in the way of horses and bayonets than in 1916.  We may indeed have more bayonets than in 1916.



Anyway, I seem to remember seeing photo circa 2002 of a bearded special-forces guy in Afghanistan riding on a horse.  I found the photo oddly reassuring.  What I want in our armed forces is adaptability and resourcefulness.  If a horse is what you need in Afghanistan, then go do it.



I also once knew a guy who'd started in the US Army before World War II as a horse groom and ended up as a flight instructor on B-52s.  Only in America!  He once told a story about the difficulty of mid-air refueling a jet-powered B-52 when the tanker was a piston-powered C-97.  The C-97 would fly flat out and the B-52 would be on the edge of a stall. One time his B-52 stalled and fell 2,000 before it recovered.  (Note that as the B-52 takes on fuel its stall speed will go up.)



Enough of the war stories.  The problem with the president's remark, apart from its rudeness and snarkiness, is its lack of content.  What Americans want to know, Mr. President, is what kind of navy you think we need, and how you propose to pay for it.



I'd say that a great global trading nation needs a good blue-water navy to keep the pirates in port and the tin-horn dictators in their palaces.  What do you think, Mr. President?

The Bonfire of the Entitlements

Never mind about last night's foreign policy debate, the one that wanted to be an economic policy debates.  Never mind about Mitt's Five Point Plan on the economy.  What I want to know is how we can avoid the inevitable bonfire of the entitlements.



Want to know what the gay marriage debate is about?  It's about those spousal Social Security benefits. Want to know what Obamacare is about?  It's about burying fee-for-service Medicare in an administrative quagmire.



In a way, President Obama has a point.  The expansion of Medicare to include drugs was done as a straight increase in benefits without any attempt to finance it with new taxes or any fig leaf of "trust funds."  It's an outrage.  How could President Bush do such a thing.



You can see trajectory of the welfare state's descent into pure power politics by retelling its story.  In the 1930s FDR carefully packaged Social Security as an "earned" benefit: you put your money into the "trust fund" and you take it out when you need it.  In the 1960s LBJ passed Medicare with only a partial attempt to fund it with proper actuarial probity.  So Medicare will eat up its "trust fund" before Social Security.  But in the Medicare Part D expansion, the Republican president and Congress merely passed a new spending entitlement (and also some Republican friendly health spending accounts).  No trust funds, no taxes.



So the ship of state is on course for the rocks.  Inflation, default, haircuts, and riots in the streets.



The problem with the entitlement state is that politics is purely a predatory activity.  You sign up for loot in exchange for your vote.  The administrative state is not a community, it is a patronage state with hungry clients clamoring for their next handout.



Back in the 19th century, before the working class learned from the educated middle class that it could get loot from the state, the ordinary people of the industrial states were busily creating civil-society communities, from churches to fraternal societies, that socialized risk in true community.  You belonged to a mutual-aid society on the understanding that you gave and you received.



The Progressives of 1900 could have built on this model and strengthened it.  But instead they nationalized the mutual-aid movement and converted the communities of self-help into client groups of the political system.  The transaction is no longer that you give to receive, but that you vote to receive.



The choice in 2012 is between a ratification of the universal administrative state -- its Obamacare to universalize healthcare as an administrative structure and its Frank-Dodd to throw the banking industry into the care of the state -- or a half-hearted attempt to rein in the health-care entitlement with a repeal of Obamacare and a reform of Medicare.



Nowhere on the horizon is any suggestion of reforming the entitlement state and returning pensions, healthcare, welfare, and education to civil society where it belongs.  How could there be?  Nobody in America, not one person, is going to agree to cuts in their entitlements until the day after the government runs out of money and the rioters have left the nation in ruins.

Foreign Policy Reality

Ever since Vietnam, Democrats have had to be dragged kicking and screaming into standing up for US interests in the world.  In their heart of hearts they really believe the neo-Marxist, anti-colonialist, rich-get-richer while the poor get poorer view of the world.



There is of course a vein of truth in the anti-colonialist world view.  The west, armed with its science, its politics, and its religion, has swept all before it during the last 500 years.  You either signed up or you got buried.  The problem for non-western societies was ably summed up by a Chinese Christain in David Aikman's book Jesus in Beijing. Let's look at his words in full.

One of the things we were asked to look into was what accounted for the success, in fact the pre-eminence of the West all over the world... We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don't have any doubt about this.

Let us look at Barack Obama's "reset" foreign policy and Cairo speech and "apology tour" in the light of this testament.  Because right now the Christian western idea is facing a challenge from Muslims in the Middle East.



It misses the point to talk about Muslim terrorists as crazy "extremists."  The Islamists understand, and rightly, that they are facing a do-or-die moment.  Either they push back against the power of western Christian capitalist democracy or they will be swallowed up into the western orbit.  This has happened time and time again over the last 500 years.  Some countries, like India, have pushed back and made a practical accommodation with the western way.  Some countries, like Russia and China, have gone through hell.  Many nations have been obliterated: think native Americans.



Some nations have made a heroic stand against the west: Plains Indians and their Ghost Shirt movement, the Chinese and their Boxer Rebellion.  And of course there is the course of the Indian national movement that began with the Great Rebellion of 1857 and ended with independence 90 years later.



Sometimes the barbarians at the edge of empire swarm into the empire and take it over.  That happened in Europe during the first millennium with the Sack of Rome and with the Mongol invasions of the 13th century.  China has repeatedly been invaded from the north.



But willy-nilly, the job of a US president is to push back against threats to US power and the Pax Americana.  President Obama pretends that he has done that: Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.  Unfortunately the Benghazi killings remind us that Al Qaeda is definitely alive.  What is needed is not just stunts like the bin Laden operation and the drone operations but a cultural offensive, to show and to prove, in bin Laden's apt catchphrase, that the US is the strong horse and Islam is the weak horse.



Terrorism is, of course, an admission of weakness; it is military and cultural force hiding in the weeds and jumping out occasionally to create a spectacular diversion.  But it needs to be opposed calmly and firmly.



Meanwhile, the Muslim exodus from the Middle East to western Europe and to the US is going to transform Islam, just as the industrial age has transformed the native peoples of Europe and the US.  Anyone can explode bombs, but governments and businesses are driven by the need to perform, and the ability to deliver for their subject peoples.



When I voted for President Obama in 2008 it was primarily to force the Democratic establishment to face the reality of the post 9/11 world.  The result has been most satisfactory.  The illusions of the liberal faithful have been well and truly demolished, as Guantanamo lives and Bush's Patriot Act continues.  And Obama's foreign policy has been utter confusion as its anti-colonialist dream hits realpolitik reality.



It's up to Mitt Romney tonight to signal a return to reality, and begin the long, slow repair to the US strategic stance in the world.

Why We Need Intuitions AND Concepts

OK, says Kant in the first Critique.  You could say that appearances that we get from our senses chunked together with intuitions are all there is.  Just as Hume suggests with his "associationism."  That's the point of his setup before the Transcendental Deduction:

Appearances might very well be so constituted that the understanding should not find them to be in accordance with the conditions of its unity.  And everything might lie in such confusion that, e.g., in the succession of appearances nothing would offer itself that would furnish a rule of synthesis and thus answer to the concept of cause and effect, so that this concept therefore would be entirely empty, nugatory, and without significance.  Appearances would nonetheless offer objects to our intuition, for intuition by no means requires the functions of thinking. (B123/A90)

Sorry to punch all that out, but it's important.  Kant here is making Hume's argument.  Hey, maybe our mind just gathers up appearances in a bundle and reads the patterns therein.  So maybe we just note the patterns and say, wow, there's a pattern here!  First the sun rose yesterday, and then it rose today!  Maybe there's a pattern here.  No need for analysis; no need for thinking; no need for concepts.

But Kant cannot accept this.  When we "cognize" an object, he claims, we do more than make a reactive burp in response to sense impressions.  And  so he lurches into the Transcendental Deduction to prove that we synthesize our bundle of intuitions using the forms of intuition in space and time and concepts derived from the categories, and then we unify the synthesis into a judgment about an object in an act of apperception, of a self-conscious validity claim.

Kant calls this objective validity, which is a bit of a push, since he's talking about a "valid" cognizing of a unity of synthesized intuitions with the help of the concepts of the understanding into a unified "object."  The notion of "objective validity" is obtained by calling things by the conveniently right names.

For us, the interesting thing about Kant's argument is its foreshadowing of the modern approach to reality.  Kant is claiming that we are not really passive consumers of appearances, but purposeful actors.  We take the stuff coming in over the transom and organize it in our minds in a strategic effort to understand and judge what is going on out there in the tough and challenging world.  We process our sense data and then construct in our minds a picture of what we have seen.  We "think" what we see and advance our claim of what we have seen and what we judge we have seen.

Forget Hume, Kant says.  I offer you a whole new world of active, purposeful "cognizing."

Kant's Best Shot: "Objective Reality"

In the Transcendental Deduction, Kant hauls out his big gun against Hume's "associationism:" he calls it "objective reality."  The idea is that if you run your lumber through Kant's three-stage lumber mill, inserting raw logs of sense impressions into the circular saw that slices the sense impressions through the forms of intuition, and then you assemble the manifold of resulting log intuitions into the synthesis of a stacked pallet, then you can judge the resulting stack of Grade A two-by-fours as a "necessary unit of the apperception in the synthesis of intuitions."

Why is this objective?  Because writes Kant, "[the] transcendental unity of apperception is that unity through which all of the manifold given in an intuition is united in the concept of the object.  It is called objective on that account[.]"(§18, B140)  Get it?  Since the thinker has united his manifold of sense impressions into a unified single object, he now has an objective reality.  The "subjective unity of  consciousness"  (Hume's association) is merely a "determination of inner sense" without the uniting into a single object.

So while we have merely a bundle of sense impressions we don't have a unified object, and therefore no objective reality.

What Kant seems to be trying to argue is that an objectively valid judgement is one that makes a claim, an assertoric judgment, as "this body is heavy."  This is a claim that can be agreed to or denied by others.  The statement that "bodies and heaviness seem to go together," i.e., a weaker claim than Kant's phrase "If I carry a body I feel a pressure of weight" comes closer to the Humean idea of a bundle of impressions.

But really, it seems to be much more sensible to accept Hume's skepticism that you can never really apply objective criteria to a truth claim about an association, and move to modern neo-pragmatism and say that look, the science is settled on this, at least a low velocities, so we know, from our concepts of the understanding, that bodies are heavy and bodies of gold are really heavy.  Until someone proves us wrong.

Romney's Plan vs. Obama's Plan

People have been complaining that the President Obama of the presidential debates doesn't seem to "have a plan."  We all know that Governor Romney has a five point plan: energy, job training, expanded trade (but penalize Chinese cheating), cut deficit, reduce taxes on middle class.  We know that because he keeps telling us.  But what about Obama's plan?



Come on guys, of course Obama has a plan.  It is to ask the rich to "pay a little more" and to expand training and teachers.  That's what he keeps telling us.  He's still gaga over green energy, but he seems to have experienced a "come to Jesus" moment on fossil fuel, at least for now.



Really, there is not much to choose between the two, excepting on taxes.  Obama wants the rich to pay a little more; Romney says he wants to keep the top 5 percent paying 60 percent of the total (is that income tax only or income tax plus payroll taxes?).



It's what they are not saying that matters.  What they are not saying up front at the debates is that it's doubtful that Obama would reduce spending from the current level at 22 to 24 percent of GDP.  Romney's plan is to cut federal spending back to 20 percent of GDP.  That means, according to some, that he'll cut everything to the bone except Social Security, Medicare, and Defense.  Makes sense to me.



As a Republican partisan I'd like to think that Romney will achieve his spending goal.  But as a betting man I'd guess that the federal government will get out of its jam through a combination of inflation, debt default, financial repression, and open confiscation.  Why?  Because that's what governments do.



The bottom line, if you are an individual American, is that in the next few years it's going to be really difficult to hang onto your money, either in real wages or investment income or in real capital appreciation.  Because while you are trying to live your life and keep a little aside for a rainy day the government is going to be trying to fill in a gigantic hole in its finances.  One way another, the government front-end loader is going to take a chunk out of your little pile and dump it into the hole.

"Thoughts without content are empty"

It's one of the most quoted zingers in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

Thoughts without content are empty.  Intuitions without concepts are blind.

OK.  So what is the chap talking about?  Kant's whole game is to deal with the David Hume challenge, his so-called "associationism."  On this view we humans are more or less passive consumers of a bundle of sense impressions of the real world.  Kant's strategy is to turn this on its head.  No we don't associate sense impressions with the real world.  We take formless sense impressions, view them with the forms of intuition about space and time, synthesize them with intuitions, and then own them as ours by applying the pure concepts of the understanding to our intuitions and finally applying judgments.

The experts call this the "togetherness principle."  You need both concepts and intuitions to achieve useful judgments about the world as it appears to you.   Kant repeats his famous apothegm several times:

• "[N]either concepts without intuition corresponding to them in some way nor intuition without concepts can yield a cognition."
• "Thus pure intuition contains merely the form under which something is intuited, and pure concept only the form of thinking of an object in general."
• "Without sensibility no object would be given to us, and without understanding none would be thought."
• "The understanding is not capable of intuiting anything, and the senses are not capable of thinking anything."

All along, Kant is arguing for the importance of both intuition and concepts in full human cognition.  Thus, Kant might have made things clearer had he written:

Thoughts without sensible content cannot apply to the real world; intuitions without rational concepts cannot be used for judgment.

For all its famous difficulty.  Kant's Critique does have its moments.