The Two Individualisms

Modern conservatism and modern liberalism both start from the idea of individualism.  But conservatives and libereals had very different ideas about the nature of the individual.  Says Jonah Goldberg in an appreciation of Yuval Levin's "The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine and the Birth of Right and Left":

Paine saw the individual as the irreducible unit of society... For Burke, no man is an island.

Paine's future society would require "tearing down the prejudices, customs and habits of the old order" while Burke believed that "Society is a complex and mysterious ecosystem, and no set of experts or 'sophisters … and calculators' can impose scientific perfection on it."

But we know that the Britain of Burke and of Paine was a Britain of an individualism that had flourished at least since the middle of the 13th century.  We are all individualists now.

The difference then between Right and Left is in the type of individualism.  Conservatives believe in a cooperative individualism, in which people enter society as individuals and cooperate voluntarily in various endeavors, from families and associations and businesses to contribute to the whole.  Liberals believe in individualist atomism, with nothing between the individual and the government.  That's what it means when you want to tear down prejudices and superstitions.  You clear away all the deadwood, and the deadwood is necessarily pre-existing institutions.

Now this is a controversial position, because liberals generally believe that their government safety net solves the problem of the atomistic individual thrown up by unregulated capitalism and alienated from himself and society, whereas the Burkean conservative approach leaves people "on their own."

But I believe that it is liberals that leave people "on their own."  In conservative-land people are free to design cooperative institutions any way they want, and they do.  In liberal-land it is the government that designs the collective, and if your needs get left out, well, too bad.

I am saying that liberals are trying to solve a problem that they themselves have created, and the problem is created by their conception of the individual as oppressed by traditional institutions and therefore needing to be liberated and emancipated by government force.

Of course when you diagnose modern people as alienated and oppressed individual atoms knocked around in a storm-tossed sea then you need to shelter with a government safety net to protect them from the storms of the world.  You have already defined the problem and pre-ordained the solution.

But conservatism is different.  It experiences people as naturally cooperative individuals, atoms that in their natural state combine into social molecules, the "little platoons" of civil society.  Moreover the individual is not just an aimless atom doing its Brownian motion thing, but an active individual agent, that sets forth every day trying to imagine how to contribute some idea or service to society, and then doing something about it.

On this view the great debate between right and left is an argument that begins with imagining humans as cooperative individuals or humans as atomistic individuals.  Obviously the way you imagine the human-scape, the situation of people in the modern world, will determine everything else that you see, experience as a problem, and decide to do.

The conservative idea is that the birth of individualism over two millennia ago with the individualist religions of the Axial Age leads to the birth of social and economic individualism in the breakup of serfdom.  And that leads to the breakout of the industrial revolution in the years before 1800.

Cooperative individualism requires the social atom to be a responsible self, an individual that undertakes to carry the monkey of social responsibility on his back.  It is the responsibility and the privilege of each individual to imagine and to realize how to cooperate with his fellow humans and contribute to the flourishing of society.

Atomistic individualism experiences the social atom to be a helpless self, an individual unable to orient and steer himself in a world of overbearing powers.  With no defense against power in local and beneficial associations, the atomistic individual is like a leaf in the great plazas of the modern city, blown around by the powerful winds that gust between the megastructures of government, corporation, and foundation -- with no human-sized structures to protect him from the icy blast.

Life is better as a responsible, cooperating individual.  Suppose you want to protect from large hospital bills.  Why, you can band together with like-minded individuals and form a beneficial and cooperative association for the sharing of health care risk.

But as an atomistic individual in Liberal-land, you must defer to the ruling elite and its comprehensive health care solution.  What happens if it doesn't cover you and your particular situation?  Too bad.  You call your congressman and wait 20 years. 

This Christmas, Let's Reach Out to Liberals

In this time of good cheer, spare a thought for your liberal friend.



This is not a good time to be a liberal.



No, I am not talking about the fact that it looks like the bullies from GLAAD accidentally ran into a Louisiana buzz-saw.  I am talking about the implosion of the liberal idea.



The Obamacare meltdown is the immediate cause of liberal misery, but that is just the proximate cause.  Crowding up behind the pathetic and serial failures of the Obamacare rollout is the fact that the Obama experience brings into question, at long last, the whole liberal project.



If liberals can't build a website, what's the point?



If liberals can't create a big-government program with at least the pretense of competence and coherence, what's the point?



If liberals can't restore the economy to prosperity, what's the point?



If liberals can't predict the climate, what's the point?



If liberals are just another proud, overbearing, unjust, incompetent ruling class -- like all the ruling classes that came before them -- what's the point of them?



Every ruling class relies to a greater extent than we appreciate on the favor of the gods, the Mandate of Heaven: good harvests, good health, good times, good prospects.



And Barack Obama came in with such promise.  Why Barbara Walters reckoned that "we" all thought Obama was the Messiah.



(I know, that stupidity tells us more about Walters than about Obama).



If we conservatives were liberals we would redouble the efforts of GLAAD, of PETA, of HRC, of the race-baiters, of the academic PC crowd and the George Soros think tanks and we would rout the liberal army and scatter it to the four winds and salt their fields and ban their secular churches and on and on.



But we are conservatives.  And so, this Christmastide, let us each think of a liberal friend and reach out with a compassionate arm.



Let us tell our liberal friends that we feel their pain, and we want to help.  Of course, we'll say, things can't go on as before, with liberals spending the national credit card like there was no tomorrow.



But let it be said that conservatives will stand ready with a friendly word and a helping hand as our liberal friends go through the dark night of the soul in the months and years ahead.



Not because of them, but because of who we are, this Christmastide.

Government Always Screws the Powerless

Back in the day the modern progressive movement assured us that it fought for the common man.  And the working man.  Then it progressed to fighting for women.  For minorities.  For the "traditionally marginalized."  Or even for various sexual minorities, from gays to lesbians.  And now, of course, the New York Times is asking whether we should revise our ideas on polygamy -- sorry, "plural marriage".

And. of course, we have the famous prediction from John B. Judis and Ruiz Teixeira in The Coming Democratic Majority, that Democrats would rule forever on the support of women, minorities, young people, and professionals.

Now there is just one little problem with all this happy talk.  Government is force, and politics is power.  Whatever the rulers say, their program is power, and their behavior reflects that.

Any ruling class has two ideas, and two ideas only.  It is interested in seizing power, and it is interested in maintaining power.  All its promises and blandishments are made in service to those two objectives.

The people, whether they are old crusty geezers, greedy bankers, corporate greed, white racists, male patriarchs, or traditionally marginalized are mere pawns in the ruling class's game of power.

So yeah.  Back in the early modern era the newly rising bourgeoisie expatiated on the wonders of the common man.  But the governments they created were still governments, and the common man suffered mightily in the natural economic cycles of the capitalist age.

In the 19th century governments learned to sell themselves to the rising working class.  They offered them wondrous benefits, to be taken from the evil capitalists.  What it meant in practice was that the ruling class would sequester the savings of the working class and return whatever was left, in pensions, health care, unemployment, disability, after extracting its considerable fee in power and money.

We might ask whether the working class would have done better keeping its own money for its pensions, health care, etc.  Because the ruling class has ended up with a bankrupt system that is failing, and failing right now.  And what is the point, for the working class, of savings and health care that doesn't pay off?

The same is true for the groups that were going to make the Democrats the majority forever.

What about women?  Democrats have promised them a kind of liberation from all the heavy burdens of life: from overbearing husbands to unwanted children.  And, see here, wouldn't it be nice for women to get out of the house and work in the wage economy where the grass is greener, and even have career like men?

Or minorities.  Yep, minorities have lived under disadvantages since the dawn of time.  But the problem for minorities in the modern era is not merely removing disadvantages and exploitations, but learning how to thrive in the industrial and now post-industrial economy.  The politicians have offered the most wonderful shortcuts to this onerous process, but they lie.  The modern economy is founded upon the idea you figure out how to contribute to your fellow men and their needs and then you go do it.  Anything the politicians do to meddle with this process only lengthens it.

Hey, how about those young people?  Let's get one thing clear about young people.  On the one hand, they are highly susceptible to the fashions and fads whizzing around.  On the other hand they are the least powerful.  Why?  Because they haven't had time to organize and make themselves into a group for politicians to fear.

When the politicians tell the young people they care about them, they lie.  Politicians are going to use the young people, that's all.  On the one hand they may be able to fool the young people into serving in their political armies.  If they do that then the young people will suffer the fate of most soldiers and get left by the side of the road to die in some foreign country.  On the other hand they are going to make the young people suffer for the sins of their fathers.  It is the young people that will have to work to pull out of the wars, the famines, the financial crises, and the clear away the accretion of unsustainable privileges.

That's where we are in America in 2013.  We've had a century and more of the promises and blandishments and power and privileges of the ruling educated class.  Like every ruling class its promises and blandishments were mere self-serving apologies for power.  That is what the postmodernists tell us about the previous, bourgeois ruling class.

In the next few years the women, the minorities, and the young are going to find out just how broad and deep have been the lies of the liberal ruling class.  And so they will be looking for change.

But who knows if they will turn to the conservatives for relief?  After all, conservatives don't offer Hope and Change, and a heaven on earth.  Conservatives are People of the Responsible Self.  Conservatives offer people not a relief, a liberation from the cares of the world, but instead an engagement with the world.  For conservatives it is the individual, each individual, that must find out how to socialize with the world and contribute to his or her fellow man.  There is no such thing as a free lunch.

But conservatives have this to encourage them.  We would never had had a chance to earn the confidence of the American people until the liberals and their project of heaven on earth had failed.

After all, who would pass up a chance for heaven on earth for a mere offer to live a life as one of the People of the Responsible Self?

Nobody.  Not until that heaven on earth had been revealed as a hell of power and privilege.

Government Did It

This week there's a story in The Economist about the 13-week-old strike in Greece by university administrators.  The government, which is broke, is trying to reduce the administrator head-count.



Of course, the Greek government is doing it in a sneaky way, but what else is new.



But the strike makes the point.  Workers at government universities are not in the business of delivering services to consumers.  They are in the business of getting their paychecks.



Nor are the students are in the business of paying for an education.  They are trying to game the system to get a cheap degree.



Of course, everything the government does has this flavor.  But usually, the government gets to blame someone else.  You know the drill.  If there's a financial crisis it's all because of greedy bankers.  If gas prices are soaring it's all because of price-gouging oil companies.  If you can't get the health care you want, it's all because of insurance company profits.



But nine times out of ten, it's not the greedy bankers or the oil companies or the insurance companies.  No it's not the greedy corporations.  Financial crisis?  Probably due to government cheap credit.  Soaring oil prices?  Probably due to government restricting oil production.    Health insurance going up with bigger deductibles and exclusions?  Probably due to government micro-management of health care.



In other words, the government did it.



Of course, mixed in with all this is that corporations vigorously lobby for subsidies, carve-outs and exemptions from the politicians.  In exchange for political contributions.  So maybe they deserve to get the blame.



With Obamacare the government is trying to set up the insurance companies to take the blame.  But it's looking like the Obamis may not make the sale.  That's probably because Obama and the Pelosis thought that Obamacare was going to be a glorious success and that the uninsured would be crying hosannas as they signed up for their subsidized care.  So they started out grabbing all the credit for themselves, right up until the whole thing collapsed.



So, as of right now, the American people seem to be clued into the idea that the problem is Obamacare, not the evil insurance companies.



But the Greek experience gives us a hint of what is coming as the various US governments run out of money.  The government workers will go on strike.  The disappointed beneficiaries will take to the streets.



So the prudent man and woman will be planning for this.  They will be figuring that Social Security won't be much of a deal.  That Medicare will dissolve into unworkable regulations and price controls.  That government education will get worse and worse.  That welfare will fail more and more.



What should the prudent man do?  Well, he should do what any 19th century man would do.  He would figure that he'd have to pay for everything himself, from saving for retirement, health care, and hard times, to shelling out for his kids' education.  Yes, and he'll even figure that it's up to him to attend to the relief of the poor.



Many people will rail against the scapegoats offered up by the media, the politicians, and the activists.  But they will be fools.



Because government is just like an army.  It marches its troops around and fills them with propaganda.  But in the end it leaves them, dying, by the side of the road.



That's why the prudent thing to do is to ignore the government's propaganda.



Chances are, when something goes wrong, the government did it.



And, in the liberals' 

Are Conservatives Voucher Addicts?

Michael Lind, founder of the New America Foundation, who styles himself a "radical centrist," thinks that conservatism is a one trick pony.  In Salon he complains that all conservative policy reduces to "vouchers."



He has a point.  We all know that conservatives want vouchers for education, to let parents take government money to the school of their choice.  But that ain't the half of it.

Healthcare? The right wants to replace Medicare and Medicaid with vouchers to let people shop for health insurance or healthcare in a deregulated healthcare marketplace.



Retirement? The right wants to privatize Social Security, replacing it with tax-favored individual contributions to private retirement savings accounts — a de facto voucher system.



The environment? Cap-and-trade, now demonized by conservatives, originated as a pro-market alternative to direct regulation of greenhouse gases.

Conservatives need to do vouchers in order to keep "the billionaires and the populists together in the GOP coalition."  The populists like their Medicare and Social Security, and "can’t afford to send their children to expensive private schools."  So vouchers represent an cynical abandonment of principle in the hard-right libertarian billionaires, a recognition that they need to buy the support of the gap-toothed populists.



We'll leave alone the notion that the conservative movement is run by libertarian billionaires.  After all, most of the billionaires are Democrats, from Bill Gates to Warren Buffet and the Google guys on down.  At least Republicans have the Koch brothers.



But give us a break, Michael Lind.  We want to demolish the whole corrupt, unjust structure of the authoritarian welfare state, so we have to start somewhere.  And for conservatives the way to start is to convert centralized one-size-fits-all bureaucratic administrative systems into subsidies.



Michael Lind may not know it, but conservatives are in two minds about vouchers.  Some policy analysts have warned that school vouchers will allow liberals to dominate the education system without actually running it as a bureaucratic system.  Just as the federal Department of Education bureaucrats can order universities around on the diversity and hate-speech front even though the universities are nominally independent, you can bet that they'd do the same to voucher-funded private schools.



Oh and by the way, when Lind sneers that "So far conservatives haven’t proposed voucherizing the Pentagon", he's full of it.  The Pentagon doesn't build its weapons at government arsenals; nor does it grow its own food. It outsources to eevil defense contractors.  Probably the only reason that government gets anything done at all is that it outsources pretty well all the actual "making" and "doing" to private contractors.



For conservatives vouchers aren't a panacea.  They are just a start, and usually preferable to naked, shameless, direct, brutal government by bureaucratic centralism.



And we have a principled justification for this.  With subsidies, at least you have the form of a market, and you have a system that responds every day to market signals even if the market signals are corrupted by subsidies.  With bureaucratic centralism there is no response to market signals, only to special interests and complete breakdown.



Still, subsidies lead to bubbles, as in real estate and in higher education.



Liberals use subsidies and vouchers as a half-way house too.  Obamacare is an example.  If liberals had their druthers, Obamacare would be a "single-payer" system, a glorious government bureaucratic system funded by taxes.  But liberals know that the American people don't want that.  So they came up with Obamacare and its subsidies: subsidies for the low-income, subsidies for the older participants, subsidies for the "pre-existing condition."



But maybe the eevil Republicans know their vouchers and subsidies better than the Democrats.  Because it looks like the Democrats utterly failed to do the math right on Obamacare.  And Democrats utterly failed to complete the bureaucratic tasks needed to get the whole thing off the ground.



But maybe that has nothing to do with government and subsidies.  Maybe all we are seeing is a ruling class coming to the end of the dynasty and running out of ideas.



But that's the sccusation Michael Lind directs at conservatives: "out of ideas."

Daring to Talk About Injustice

The most obvious thing about Obamacare is that it is unjust.



It is unjust in the way that it forces responsible people to subsidize irresponsible people.



It is unjust in the way that it forces young people to subsidize older people.



It is unjust in the way that it forces everyone to subsidize big business like insurance companies, health providers, and Big Pharma.



It is unjust in the way that it forces liberal ideology about contraception and abortion on the rest of us.



It is unjust in the way that it forces individuals to get with the program while putting off for a year the mandate for employers.



And so on.



And that's just today, as Obamacare gets started.  You can bet money that Obamacare will multiply its injustices in the future as the special interests work their will on the law and its regulations.



Here is a principle to guide us on this.  Any government program, however noble its goal, will end up as a gross injustice, because government is force, the cockpit of power, where the powerful force the powerless to submit to them.



Let's take the great edifices of the welfare state and investigate the injustice in their foundations.



Social Security started as an attempt to relieve the poverty of the aged, at a time when old people were commonly poor and at a time when the age expectancy at birth was about 65 years.



But today seniors are the richest kind, healthy and wealthy, on average.  Why are we forcing young and middle-aged people, in the middle of their great effort to raise families, to support people like me?



I will tell you what Social Security is:  it is generational injustice.



I will tell you what generational justice looks like.  It looks like a private savings system where people retire when they can afford to.  What does that look like?  It means that you can retire when you have created enough jobs for young people with your savings to yield a decent retirement income.  The government's role in such a system would be to help, e.g., manual workers that really can't work past about 45 to 50 years-old.



Ditto Medicare.  It encourages senior citizens to shop around from doctor to doctor looking for the magic pill to put off the natural ageing process, and it culminates in heroic end-of-life care that makes end of life a nightmare for millions of the aged and their children.  We expect working people to pay for this?



Welfare is a different kind of injustice, because it discriminates against the "deserving poor" and rewards the scam artist that has learned how to play the benefits game.  Back in the 19th century the charities all agreed that it was monstrous for the idle poor to make a higher income that the industrious poor.  But now we have enacted precisely that program, and demolished the low-income family into the bargain.



We all know how liberal politics works.  It is all "because inequality."  It used to be that the left justified increased government power with "because exploitation."  But that argument has worn a little thin except in the most extravagant circles.  So now liberals argue that their big government plans are justified "because inequality."



And that is what President Obama was telling us in his inequality speech on December 4, 2013.  We need a higher minimum wage, more education spending, pro-union laws, etc., "because inequality."



Conservatives must get out there with a new message.  We must cut government spending "because injustice," because all government programs end up as a gross and indecent injustice.



The conservative politician that can sell "because injustice" to the American people will be the next Ronald Reagan.

Raise the Minimum Wage, Mr. President?

For about a year now, our "progressive" friends have been amping up a campaign to raise the minimum wage to $15.00 per hour.  Now President Obama is joining the chorus.  It's all part of the liberal war on "inequality."



This, of course, is shocking to me, because I thought that the science on the minimum wage was settled.  Simply put, the minimum wage does three things:

1. It locks young, inexperienced people out of the job market.


2. It helps institutionalize above-market union wages.


3. It drives business into the informal sector.

That's what I wrote just out of the top of my head.  So what is the received notion, courtesy of Wikipedia?  Well, the answer is: it's complicated.  There are all kinds of dueling studies showing that the minimum wage does, or does not help.



But one effect that Wikipedia highlights is that increasing the minimum wage probably increases the wages of people already employed that have wages less than or near the newly legislated minimum wage.  And, it speculates, this would propagate upwards as employers more or less maintain the differentials between unskilled and skilled workers.



Of course, the problem is that the minimum wage is just one government intervention in the labor market.  Welfare -- in its many manifestations -- is another.  Welfare allows people to retreat from the labor market unless or until wages rates increased to make it worth while to get a job instead of reposing on benefits.  So you could say that, if you have a welfare system a minimum wage is superfluous since workers won't work for "chump change" if they can use welfare as a backup.



And there are other, secondary effects.  The various regulations and taxes on labor encourage marginal workers and employers to desert the formal sector and work "off the books."  What is the cost of that?  It's a good question.



The truth is that the hoary interventions of the welfare state, from minimum wage to licensing to credentialism to restrictions on firing for cause, will always be with us.  Whether or not they work to "help people" they certainly encourage the marginal workers that respond to identity politics and look for leaders to "fight for the people against the powerful."



Right now we have liberals all agreeing that we must "do something" about inequality.  It could not be, of course, that a century of liberal economic intervention that has brought about today's inequality.  It must be that the rich are exploiting the poor.  So more government intervention is needed to bring the GINI coefficient down.



Hayek spoke about this years ago.  Modern interventionism is built upon the fallacy that you can treat the economy as if it were a simple mechanical contraption.  To think that you can direct the economy from Washington DC is what he called "The Fatal Conceit."



And anyway, Democrats are going to need something to rally the troops in 2014 after the debacle of Obamacare.  What better than to box the Republicans into proving their lack of compassion over the minimum wage?  Who could, in all conscience, oppose raising the wages of the lowest paid?



The truth is that the lowest paid are caught in a dreadful quicksand.  What was advertised as a safety net has turned out to be a poverty trap.  But as long as activists can get attention and politicians can get elected promising free stuff, so long will we have a minimum wage.