A Letter to Charles Murray

Dear Mr. Murray:

It's 20 years since the frenzy over your Bell Curve and so I decided to write you a letter, to express my thanks to you for your life's work. You stopped a number of rhetorical bullets over The Bell Curve, and people like me need to tell you that we appreciate and honor your sacrifice.

Who can forget your Losing Ground, the 1984 book that led to welfare reform in 1996? It is something to have been the intellectual spotlight that forced President Bill Clinton to sorta, kinda, maybe "end welfare as we know it" in the runup to the presidential election in 1996.

My takeaway on Losing Ground is to say that the liberals confidently instrumented their Great Society legislation with studies and social science research that would confirm their "elite wisdom." But when the results came in and pronounced the failure of their policies, they said nothing and did nothing.  So liberalism, ever since, has simply been a power game, with the ruling class paying the rank and file in the Benefits Brigade for their support, and riling them up crude appeals to race, class, and gender.

I read The Bell Curve and thought it good, but unexceptionable. Of course IQ is important in an age when wealth doesn't come in broad rich acres but right between the ears. I read your warning about a cognitive elite but didn't really pay much attention, not then.

I liked your Human Accomplishment and its disquieting reminder that in creative endeavors all the rewards go to the winners. It tells me that much of the angst and distemper in our liberal friends can be attributed to the fact their culture of creative individualism is bound to disappoint most of its believers. How much better is the conservative/libertarian culture of what I call "responsible individualism" in which almost everyone can participate and be a modest winner.

I think that your Coming Apart is the finest of your books and the best revenge on your critics. Hey kids, let's look at White America and see how it's doing! My takeaway is that you say that the top 25 percent, the cognitive elite, is doing fine. (Hey, why wouldn't it, since the elite has used its power to make America in its own image!) The middle 40 percent are doing so-so, but the folks in Fishtown are in real trouble; the women don't marry and the men don't work.

After reading Natalie Scholl's Bell Curve 20-year interview on the AEI-ideas site I am inspired to look more closely into your "valued places" idea and I will get a copy of your In Our Hands. But I must say that I flinch from the idea of a guaranteed income. In my view this confirms the current system whereby the ruling class gets to use the entire government fisc to buy the votes of the voters.

I like to divide the American people in three.  There are the People of the Creative Self who believe in illuminating society with their creative and expressionistic individualism. There are the People of the Responsible Self, who believe in serving society through individual responsibility and service. Finally there is the residue of the peasantry, the People of the Under Self, who used to live by attaching themselves to a landed squire and now attach to a political boss,  a union boss, a cacique, a community organizer. The point of your "valued places" I reckon, is that the women that don't marry and the men that don't work get resocialized into useful "valued places" as the followers of some powerful patron. My faith is that we can, we must, do that without the powerful patron being the government. Alternatively, of course, we can return to the 19th century and socialize the People of the Under Self into the middle class with enthusiastic churches and fraternal associations.

Thank you, Charles Murray, for your honest and intelligent witness in a life of worthy human accomplishment. There are many, like me, that honor you and your work.

Sincerely,

Christopher Chantrill

The Administrative State Doesn't Work. Because Hayek

You are a liberal cringing right now at the Keystone Kops routine at the Obama administration over Ebola. It wasn't supposed to be like this. The oceans were supposed to be receding and the planet healing.

Because government is the name of things we do together.

But there's another narrative about government. Start with Charles Dickens and the Circumlocution Office. It was staffed with Barnacles and Stiltstockings, and its motto was "How Not to Do It."

Sound familiar?

I've always understood who the Barnacles were. But now I understand the Stiltstockings. They are the useless spokesmen mouthing stupid platitudes to stupid media.

Then there was Ludwig von Mises. In 1920 he published an article "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth." He argued that socialism couldn't work because it couldn't compute prices. It wouldn't know what things cost. Then Mises wrote his Socialism. Then he wrote his Human Action.

Along came F.A. Hayek. He wrote in The Road to Serfdom that the administrator in any government program could not know enough to compete with the collective wisdom of millions of consumers and producers in the marketplace.

Of course the inability of the socialist managers to know enough is the least of their problems. The main problem is that government always ends up serving the needs of its cronies rather than the public interest. Because that's how political power works; it's who you know not what you know.

Today there's a charming piece by John Daniel Davidson, "Ebola and the Failure of the Administrative State." It's about liberal faith in the administrative state.  For some reason there's a lot of incompetence and lack of preparedness in the federal government's response to the Ebola scare.

Who could have seen that coming?

Back in the late 19th century, Davidson reminds us, liberals like Woodrow Wilson were extolling the efficiency of the administrative state. Said the future president:

Administration is everywhere putting its hands to new undertakings. The utility, cheapness, and success of the government’s postal service, for instance, point towards the early establishment of governmental control of the telegraph system. Or, even if our government is not to follow the lead of the governments of Europe in buying or building both telegraph and railroad lines, no one can doubt that in some way it must make itself master of masterful corporations.

The trouble is that liberals have followed Wilson's naive faith in administration for over a century. Without thinking. Without questioning.

And we know why. Liberals have always assumed that the administrators and managers would be people like them. Educated, evolved. Rational. Open to new ideas.

Except that for some reason liberals haven't been open to the ideas of Mises and Hayek. How could that be?

Could it be that, despite their education and evolution, despite their rationality and openness to new ideas, they just could not bring themselves to consider ideas that brought their whole administrative state movement into question?

And we have not brought into the equation the rational ideas of Buchanan and Tullock in The Calculus of Consent. They argue that the way that a legislature works is that a minority that wants to spend government money just bribes enough additional legislators to get a majority. The result is a majority that plunders the minority, as in Obamacare and its Louisiana Purchase and Cornhusker Kickback, simple legislative deals to buy the votes of senators to get the final votes to pass Obamacare.

Nobody can know what the administrative state failures in the Obama era will cost the Democratic Party. Maybe a little; maybe a lot.

But remember this. The liberal apology for liberal power rests on the superior qualities of liberals: their education, their reliance on science and expertise, their openness. Yet liberals have ignored the conservative and libertarian critique of the liberal administrative state for nearly a century.

Who then are the educated ones, the curious ones, the rational ones? Because if liberals can't show themselves as educated, evolved, and rational, then they are just an ordinary ruling class: proud, cruel, corrupt, unjust, wasteful. Just like all the other ruling classes on the waste heap of history.

If that is true then maybe it's time we found ourselves a new ruling class, one that really was educated, evolved, rational, and open to new ideas.

Oh, and maybe the new ruling class would start out with the idea that the power of the ruling class ought to be limited. As in limited government.

Every Ruling Class is Unjust

Every ruling class thinks of itself as God's gift to humanity: We must be the best and the brightest because, look, we got elected to run the country.

Back in the day, dead white males in Europe used to talk about the "white man's burden" to civilize the natives. And Brits talked about bringing the rule of law to India. Today we call them all colonial oppressors.

Our ruling class of educated liberals has a similar view of itself, as an enlightened and evolved elite that is bringing peace and social justice to white racists, sexists, bigots, and homophobes.

The problem is that this kind of self-congratulatory propaganda blinds the ruling class to the ugly truth. The ugly truth is that all ruling classes cut corners, reward their supporters, harass their opponents, and generally use their power to maintain themselves in power.

There is a word for this: injustice.

And it doesn't even have to involve political power. You can commit injustice with cultural power too. Here's a story about a minor government minister in Britain having to grovel because he made the unpardonable suggestion that maybe disabled people should be exempt from the minimum wage laws. How dare he suggest that disabled people should be exploited in such a way!

Yesterday we had Political Marxism which made a thought-crime out of opposing the left's political and economic agenda. You must hate working people if you don't support the welfare state. But in the 1950s lesser lights in the Frankfurt School like Herbert Marcuse had the brilliant idea of extending the totalitarian method to cultural questions. Cultural Marxism says that if you don't support gay marriage you must hate gays. If you don't support free contraception you must hate women.

You can understand why the Cultural Marxists and the social justice warriors keep returning to the well, seeking out the offended and getting offended on behalf of the offended. It's so cool! It works so well! And it provides an endless opportunity for "activism," which is the praxis taught in today's secular seminaries offering Black, Women's, Hispanic Studies, etc.

But I think that they are creating a movement of rejection to oppose them.

The one thing that a society must do is stop the hotheads from getting riled up and attacking their neighbors, as in Hatfields and McCoys. The way society has done this is by abolishing the feud. You gotta problem with your neighbor? Go to court. Some young punk beat you up and robbed you? Call a policeman. Otherwise people will form local defense associations and take the law into their own hands.

But the left has developed a cunning exception to the doctrine of the government's monopoly on violence. They call it the "demonstration" or the "peaceful protest." They don't fool me. The average lefty rent-a-mob is in fact a show of force. It says: meet our non-negotiable demands or else.

The "permanent campaign" is another problem. Also President Obama's constant demonization of Republicans. President Clinton did this in a more cunning way by complaining about Republican opposition to his bi-partisan balanced budgets.

How did we get here?  In my view it started with the election of Ronald Reagan. For our liberal ruling class this was a jab in the solar plexus. How could such a thing happen? It was compounded by the Republican Congress of 1994. Talk about turning back the clock! Then there was the squeak-through-the-Supreme-Court election of 2000.  What Democrats and liberals learned from all that is that they had to pull out all the stops and fight twice as hard as the Republicans, or their inevitable victory of progressive liberalism would be wrecked on the shore of racism, sexism, bigotry and homophobia.

Maybe they'll succeed.  Maybe their culture war will vanquish the conservative middle class of career and marriage and children. Maybe their opponents will cower under rocks forever.

But my guess is that the liberal dynasty will crumble into ruin. Partly the failure will issue from the welfare state running out of money. But partly it will issue from the reign of injustice that every pompous ruling class creates. All political power ends in abuse and corruption.  All political power creates its own opposition, its head of rebellion. Liberals can't see this, because they are blinded by the klieg lights set up by their willing accomplices in the media to showcase their ideas and boost their leaders.

Liberals can't see the cruelty of demonizing small business people that don't want to cater gay weddings; they can't see the corruption of their green energy caper; they can't see the injustice of siccing the IRS on conservative grass-roots groups; they can't see the waste of big government programs. They are deluded by their narcissistic self-regard.

But the rest of America is not deluded. And in the end it will rise up against liberal injustice and end the power of the liberal dynasty of the educated elite.

Austerity? What Austerity?

The Paul Krugmans of the world keep telling us that the global slowdown is due to "austerity," meaning government spending cuts and tax increases.

Only one problem, writes Brian Westbury in The Wall Street Journal.  In Europe governments are spending more of GDP than they did at the height of the Crash of 2008.

Euro area government spending was 49.8% in 2013 versus 46.7% in 2006... France spent 57.1% of GDP in 2013 versus 56.7% in 2009, at the peak of the crisis.

Then there's quantitative easing.

The Fed's monetary base (currency in circulation and reserve balances) has grown 28.8% per year since QE started... But M2 [the actual money that you and I use], the measure Milton Friedman told us to watch, has grown just 6.7% this year. 

Then there's Janet Yellen, Chairwoman of the Federal Reserve Board. In 2008, as president of the San Francisco Fed, she argued that

As Japan found during its quantitative easing program, increasing the size of the monetary base above levels needed to provide ample liquidity to the banking system had no discernible economic effects. 

So why would the doughty Janet be following this policy that she rejected in 2008? The truth is, according to Reinhart and Rogoff in This Time is Different, it takes about ten years to recover from a full scale financial meltdown like the Crash of 2008.  All the froth about "austerity" and quantitative easing misses the point. After a big crash we are all poorer than we were and we all need to get to work to repair the damage to our fortunes.

In my view the purpose of quantitative easing and zero interest rates are to keep the federal government's interest rate expense down. If you go to usfederalbudget.us's interest page you will see that if you bump interest rates up to 5% then the federal government has to pay nearly $1 trillion a year in net interest instead of the $250 billion right now. That would add $750 billion to the annual deficit, and would require the government to start implementing spending cuts.

Look. The whole point of Keynesianism is that the modern welfare-state government keeps getting itself in a jam. Its supporters naturally demand a continuance of their accustomed handouts, as regime supporters have done since the dawn of time, and the government obliges. It must oblige until the Mongols sweep into Northern China from the Asian steppe, because no ruling class can survive the rebellion of its supporters. Keynesianism was developed to provide an intellectual shine to this bankrupt policy.

In just this one thing we see the bankruptcy of the welfare-state paradigm. It must chain the whole economy to the needs of its supporters. In the case of the Obama Democrats this means wholesale financial repression on the mom-and-pop savers in order to keep the entitlements and the crony capitalist handouts going.

The one thing the Obama Democrats cannot countenance is reform, to reverse the "ratchet" of increased government spending on their supporters.

This cannot end well.

Should GOP Worry About Gender Gap?

Everybody wants the GOP to worry about the gender gap, the fact that more women vote for Democrats than Republicans.

So, the worriers say, the GOP should "reach out" to women with women-friendly policies.

The same applies to the Hispanic vote and the black vote.

National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru takes a look at the problem. Democrats, he writes look at the gender gap and "conclude that they need to hit “women’s issues” hard both to raise their percentage of female votes and to boost female turnout."

Republicans, he adds, look at the gender gap and "conclude that they have a problem with women that they desperately need to address."

But couldn't the oppose be true? Shouldn't Democrats conclude they have a desperate problem with men and Republicans that they need to hit "men's issues" hard?

The simple fact, Ponnuru writes, is that since about 1980 women have trended Democratic because

Polling has for many years consistently found that women are more supportive than men of social-welfare spending, economic regulation, and gun control, and less supportive of military action.

The point is that the Republican Party is the party for people, men and women, that believe in less social-welfare spending, less economic regulation, less gun control and more concern for the enemy without (Commies and Islamists) than the enemy within (racists, sexists, homophobes).

Thus, it makes complete sense that single women vote Democratic and married women vote Republican.  Because when you get right down to it, all women need a protector, women's liberation and feminism be damned. That protector is either a man or a government. Period.

The point is that a Republican can still win in 2016, gender gap or not. All that need happen is that more men and women switch their vote and vote Republican.

As I understand it there are two basic strategies for winning elections. You can run on issues that appeal to your base and split the opposition. Or you can ignore the bases and appeal to the independents in the middle.

In 2012, it is said, the Democrats went for the base and the Republicans went for the independents. The Democrats riled up their base with class warfare (Romney as uncaring rich guy) and gender warfare (GOP war on women). They backed it up with Catalist, their Big Data turnout machine. Republicans assumed the base would turn out and tried to appeal to independents. You know how that turned out.

Apart from Catalist, the Democratic strategy also put the GOP in the uncomfortable position of responding to the question of "when did you stop beating your wife?"

So what should the GOP do? Look, politics is division. You want to unify and enthuse your supporters -- with "base" issues -- and you want to divide and demoralize the opposition -- with "wedge" issues. Then, as a second tier priority, you worry about independents.

So much for tactics. Now let's think about strategy.

I think the GOP should start making a small-government pitch on the basis that big government is dangerous and risky. It should push back on the idea that big government creates security and safety. Just look at the last ten years. The big government mortgage policy nearly crashed the world economy. Millions of people can't find jobs and they are increasing the deficit by relying on government benefits. Government dependency makes people unable to adapt to life challenges. And all the focus on domestic issues means that government takes its eye of the ball on foreign policy. Isn't that the first job of government? Keeping Us Safe?

Put it this way. Every entitlement recipient believes that they deserve their benefit. But what about all the others? Why not spread the idea that increaseing the roll of social-welfare recipients means that the government may run out of money and leave the really deserving current recipients in the lurch? It's all very well to expand Medicaid. But what about the folks already on Medicaid that need it for their health care? Every time you add a new program you are putting the existing beneficiaries at risk.

Social welfare makes people dependent. That's risky. Economic regulation favors existing interests and squeezes people without an in to the rich and the powerful. That's unjust. Guns are the woman's equalizer in a dangerous world. The military is there to Keep Us Safe.

It's the truth. Government riles people up to believe in its promises, but in the end it leaves people hungry, sick, and dying by the side of the road. Hey, think about Mao and his Long March of 6,000 miles from southeast China all the way to the west and then the north. Mao, they say, didn't actually march. He was carried in a litter. How many of the original soldiers that started out on the Long March in October 1934 from the red base actually made it a year and 6,000 miles later to the northern border close to the Soviet Union?

Ultimately what makes the world go round is work and family and skills and the determination to find a way to be useful to other humans. People that sit back and rely on a powerful patron get shafted.

Guess what side the GOP is on?

Why I Say "Politics is Division"

I keep saying this: Politics is division, and government is force. And really, it's true.

If you are mad about something, you form a political movement, and that political movement is almost bound to be based on the idea that society is holding you down. We need health care, education, climate research, but the eevil insurance companies, dead white males, oil companies are holding back the future. So we must join together against these enemies, and create a government program to defeat the enemies and force society to spend more money on us: for our health care, our education, our planet.

Isn't that the way it always works?

Last weekend, I read a piece by John Hawkins, who's always writing articles like "five reasons why liberalism stinks." But this time he has a list that knocks it out of the ballpark -- because it makes my point.

Liberalism is an ideology of tribalism and hatred. It works incessantly to undermine anything that truly brings America together -- like Christianity, the culture and love of country -- so it can try to rebind people together as liberal drones. Relatively minor differences of opinion between liberals and those who disagree with them are habitually elevated to encourage hatred.

For example, there’s no logical, rational reason that…

• If you oppose illegal immigration, you must hate Hispanics.
• If you oppose Affirmative Action, you must hate blacks.
• If you oppose free birth control, you must hate women.
• If you’re concerned about radical Islam, you must hate all Muslims.
• If you oppose gay marriage, you must hate gays.

Yet, liberalism promotes those lies incessantly to keep people at each other’s throats. 

 The point is that if you want to raise a political issue then you must get people all riled up about it. Otherwise nobody will pay attention, and nothing will change.

Now, my point is that politics and government is the way that humans protect themselves against predators. Period. Everything else is mission creep and leads to injustice.

So if you want to assemble people into a political group it stands to reason that you must convince them that they are under threat.

Thus racism, sexism, classism, homophobia. Workers! The bosses are out to get you!  Women! The Republicans are running a "war on women!" Blacks! The white "system" is out to get your "gentle giants!" And so on.

Liberals understand that this is an outrage, because they are really sensitive when someone tries to do the division thing on them. Liberals really object when someone accuses them of being "unpatriotic."

Our liberal friends from time to time like to accuse the government of whipping up nationalistic fervor and turning the minds of young men when they recruit them for the armed forces.

So national leaders rile up the citizens when they want to fight a foreign war, and they accuse their opponents of being "unpatriotic." That's just the same as liberals calling their opponents "haters." It's about riling up your supporters into a tribal frenzy so you can win the next war or election.

But I'd go a little further, if you don't mind too much.

I think that all politics, all government, involves recruiting people into a political army, riling them up with rage and martial spirit, and then marching them off to war.

But, as liberals so cogently argued after World War I, what's the point of it all, especially for the front-line soldier that gets chewed up and spat out by the military or political machine? The fact is that the individual soldier is cannon fodder for the politicians and the generals. If he dies, most probably from hunger and sickness, too bad. The movement or the nation must prevail!

Which is to say that in all wars the individual foot-soldier gets screwed, whether we are talking about the trenches in WWI, the strikes against capital, the various social justice wars that liberals are for ever ginning up on behalf of women, minorities, gays, working stiffs.

That is why conservatives want to dial back the politics and limit government. We don't think that Americans should be at perpetual war with each other. We believe that the more government you have the more conflict you have, and the closer you will get to real civil war.

That, of course, is the argument that Rene Girard makes in Violence and the Sacred. It is all too easy for arguments and feuds within society to dial up to all-out violence. And once it starts, how do you stop it? (Read the book to find out.)

Liberals just know that they are on the side of the angels, and that the "activism" they practice is all in the cause of peace and justice.

But politics is division. The whole point of "activism" may be to mobilize a group of activists to fight for peace and justice. But the historians tell us that once you have started a war you find yourself riding the whirlwind. The war never ends up where you thought it would. In 1914 the German and Austrian emperors had no idea that four years later they would be out of a job and their empires broken up.

So it is with all the tawdry liberal "wars" on racism, sexism, bigotry and homophobia. There is no telling where it will all end up.

All we know is that it will all end up really different from what the liberal activists confidently predicted.

Cause and Effect is All in the MInd

David Hume's Big Idea in his Treatise on Human Nature is to convince us that our reliance on Cause and Effect is all in the mind. It's not a relation built on reason, but from the force or "vivacity" of an idea prompted by a succession of perceptions.

Before Hume, the "causal maxim" reads thus: Whatever exists must have a cause or ground for its existence.

In 1.3.14.35 Hume presents this maxim as follows. A cause is

an object precedent and contiguous to another, and where all the objects resembling the former are plac'd in a like relation of priority and contiguity to those objects, that resemble the latter[.]

And so it goes backwards from cause to cause, turtles all the way down. That's no good, says Hume, because you can't prove it. There is no "metaphysical necessity" that causes go on forever. In fact, we might note, there's a creation problem in there somewhere. Is there a First Cause, or do causes go on forever?

All we can say, says Hume, is that the mind prompts us to believe in cause and effect. A cause is

An object precedent and contiguous to another, and so united with it in the imagination, that the idea of one determines the mind to form the idea of the other, and the impression of the one to form a more lively idea of the other[.]

So it's the imagination and, following a lively idea, the mind that make the connection between cause and effect.

We can understand better what is going on if we think of the problems that Google's self-driving car must solve. Google Car is an entity programmed by humans to navigate without human intervention in the world. It uses cameras to provide it with a constant supply of images of the world "out there," and it must resolve the successive images into something useful.  What is useful is to call patterns that seem to persist from frame to frame "objects" and keep track of them, assuming that these "objects" are entities out in the world that Google Car needs to understand and deal with. For instance, Google Car might interpret a certain seemingly persistent image as a "traffic cone" and another as a "flagman." It makes sense to classify these persistent images as objects. Google Car needs to respond in one way to a supposed "traffic cone" and in another way to a supposed "flagman."

All Hume is saying is that we must restate the causal maxim into something like this: "Whatever perception the imagination decides is an object the imagination also deems it to have a cause or ground for its existence."

Explain what Hume is doing in 1.3.14.35 and then restate the causal maxim making use of Hume's understanding of necessity.