People Who Live to Intimidate

Looking at India from the outside you appreciate the venality and the brutality of politics.



There's the Indian Railways that seems to rate an editorial in the newspaper every couple of days about its failure to improve safety, its failure to invest, its failure to turn a profit. Committee after committee reports and nothing is done. I wonder why the railways only seem to carry passengers. Perhaps the railway bureaucrats aren't interested in freight.



As we drive into the big cities, there seem to be endless important buildings announcing themselves as the Institute for Agricultural Basket Weaving, or some such, and you wonder: can India really afford to be flushing money down the toilet on useless bureaucracy just like in the US? The trouble is that developing countries seem to think that they have to mirror the west to count as serious nations.



Just how serious can serious be? There are wind farms in every state we have visited. I'm sure they are just as useless as the wind farms in the US. But I am sure that their crony wind-farm capitalists have benefited many an Indian politician.



Today, February 28, is a one-day general strike by Indian unions protesting rising prices and violations of the labor laws.



Yesterday there was a piece in the paper about Prime Minister Singh accusing anti-nuclear protesters in Tamil Nadu of getting support from foreign NGOs in the US and Sweden. The protest leaders react with outrage. Oh come on, fellahs. If you don't take money and advice from the anti-nuclear chaps in the west you would be fools. Meanwhile Tamil Nadu has daily electrical blackouts while two newly-constructed nuclear units sit idle. The protest leaders say they are determined to fight for the grievances of the fisher folk near the nuclear plant.



I'm trying to think about what these radical suits want. Right now in the US they are "auctioning" off the house of Wells Fargo Bank CEO. And Debbie Wasserman-Schultz is on the TV every day whacking evil Republicans. Meanwhile the left is protesting "workfare" in the UK as "slavery" and intimidating the corporations that signed up to hire welfare recipients into quitting the program.



What is it about these people? I suppose it's all about the intimidation. If they can intimidate someone, they will. Muslims excluded, of course, because Muslims don't believe in letting western radical suits, or anyone else, into intimidating them.



Intimidation. Government is force, and politics is the threat of force. So anyone in politics is someone that likes to intimidate.

Bad Science Fails Like Bad Business

Our friends in the mainstream media were eager to regale us with stories of the failure of Enron and other overleveraged corporations in the 2001-02 recession.  It just showed, they said, the need for robust government regulation.



Actually, it showed nothing of the sort.  It showed, if anything, that crony capitalist outfits like Enron that seek the favor of the great and the good are a menace.  Enron was also making a big play in carbon offset trading.



Our liberal friends are a lot quieter about corporate corruption when we are talking about bailouts for auto companies.



The point is that, when things go south, and in this vale of tears they often do, then you will find out who are the fakes and who are the real thing.



The current moral meltdown is the FakeGate affair in which global-warming enthusiast Dr. Peter Gleick seems to have obtained internal documents from The Heartland Foundation and maybe faked an additional document to add verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing statement.  (That's what the government employees talked about in The Mikado when they had been ordered to produce an execution).



That's what a lot of folks do when they realize that their hopes and dreams are going up in smoke. That is why J.P. Morgan told the House of Representatives a century ago that the big thing in loaning out money was the character of the person seeking a loan.



Morgan knew, as a veteran of life as well as numerous railroad bankruptcies, that when things get rough, a lot of good people get tempted to cheat.



Let us turn this around.  When you see a lot of cheating going on then you know that things are going wrong.



Everyone makes a mistake.  Everyone misreads the weather forecast.  Anyone can hit an iceberg.  But not everyone shoulders aside the women and children in order to get a seat in a lifeboat.



But we are getting close to Goldfinger's Rule in the climate racket.  Climategate, you may say, was Happenstance.  Fakegate, you may claim, is Coincidence.  But one more warmist-gate means Enemy Action, Mr. Bond.

On the Road to Ooty

To get from Coimbatore in South India up to Ooty, the old hill-station for the Madras Presidency, you climb up a fierce switchback road into the Nilgiri Hills, famous for its tea plantations. The grade is steep, the switchbacks are endless, with some hairpin bends so tight that buses must go into the right lane, in the path of opposing traffic, in order to make the bend. Sometimes there's a truck coming in the opposite direction and it doesn't stop in time to give the bus the full use of both lanes. So everyone toots their horn; someone gets out and directs traffic, and eventually the truck backs up, the bus makes the turn, and the great hustle and bustle of the Indian roads resumes.



And what a bustle it is. There are buses everywhere carrying people from anywhere to everywhere. There are the ubiquitious Indian trucks, three axle jobs, and usually dreadfully underpowered by US standards. But hey, what's the problem, the traffic on the National Highways seldom goes faster than 80 kph. Then there are cars darting in and out: they generally want to pass the slow trucks and buses, but there isn't always room to pass if tuk-tuks and motor-cycles are coming in the opposite direction. No problem, you just toot your horn and expect the motor-cycles to jam over to give you room. In the cities, of course, the motor-cycles form a flood tide of traffic, forever flowing around and in-between the bigger four-wheeled vehicles.



India is on the move; everyone is driving or riding somewhere, and if not they are building something. Construction is ubiquitous and construction materials litter the side of the road.  Advertising appears everywhere; if large diameter pipe is left very long, it soon sports advertising.



Highway construction is ripping swathes through the countryside. Houses are condemned and torn down: sometimes a building only partly intrudes on the right-of-way and is only partly demolished. Culverts and bridges are built right across the existing road and the traffic flows off to the side and around the new concrete structures under construction. When it's all built, each National Highway is a four-lane divided highway, with plenty of at-grade crossings. But it is no longer an upgraded country lane meandering up and down and around, but a real engineered highway with steady grades, embankments and cuttings: that unmistakable mechanical Newtonian look and feel. At the toll plazas one of the many signboards lists the dignitaries exempt from payment.



When we get up to Ooty, after negotiating the hair-pin bends and the trucks and the buses and the cars and the motor-cycles and the vehicles stopped by the side of the road unloading something, we find that the old hill-station is a major tourist destination for Indians. Just the place for a weekend getaway from Bangalore or Mumbai. And when tourist season fades during the monsoon it's time for honeymoons--for yes, Indians like getting married in the rain, as Monsoon Wedding testified a while back.



Our guide tells us that Indians like to have their photos taken with western tourists, and when we go into the Ooty Botanical Gardens we understand what he means. Young Indian men just love to get Marjorie and me into a group photo with them and their pals. Sometimes one of them takes the picture; sometimes the guide does it.



Marjorie spies two twenty-ish girls wearing exactly the same black and white pattern. Are they sisters? No, just friends, and it's time for photos all round again.



This is a glorious time in India. A rising tide is floating all boats, and India is full of its possibilities.

Exploitation, Economic and Political

Exploitation, "naked, shameless, direct, brutal", according to Marx, is the characteristic of the modern capitalism. Compared with the exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions of the old regime. Then he went on to beuild his tortuous analysis of labor value in his Capital, which turned out to be rubbish.

The center of Marx's complaint is the old one of the worker or the peasant. How come that the middle man gets to mark up the labor of the worker? To the piece-worker, the putter-out pays ten cents a piece, and then sells it for twenty, or more. And by the time that the garment reaches the consumer it sells for a dollar or more a piece. Where is the justice in that?

The justice is that the employer or the putter-out is doing a lot of work so that the piece-worker can sell their piece. In the modern workplace, the employer provides the workplace, the tools, heating, cooling, refreshments, and often does all the legwork to make benefits like health care and other insurance easily available. Then he researches the markets, finds buyers, finds investors, finances the work in progress. Then, of course, he takes the risks of profit and loss. So who is exploiting whom?

And what about the politician that is levelling the charge of expoitation? Does not he take a chunk of the full value of the laborer's product? Does not he take his taxes off the top, whether sales, excise, payroll, or income tax, without particularly thinking about the worker's need or worth?

Ah yes, you'll say. But with those taxes, the worker buys civilization, as Justice Holmes wrote a century ago. Excuse me, Mr. Justice, but it is with his wages that the worker buys civilization. It is invidious to single out your particular preference--and a judge lives off taxes, after all--and call that civilization. In fact all governments, civilized and other, impose taxes, starting with the meanest guerrilla group in the mountains. It is the civilized nations that mitigate the brute force of government, naked, etc, with the veil of credit, exchange, capital, universal wealth, and ease.

Our liberal friends have made a nice business out of critiquing the exploitative tendencies in early modern capitalism, and no doubt they are right.  But our task in these latter days is to deal with the problem of big-government exploitation.  And that is about as "naked, shameless, direct, brutal" as you can get.

Temperance is Moderation in All Things, Except Courage

When Aristotle applies his doctrine of the mean to the virtue of courage, he has a problem. The epitome of courage for the Greek polis is the courage of the heavy infantry hoplite solider, and a mean between rashness and cowardice doesn't cut it. The hoplite must have the courage to surrender his life, no matter what. That's just how the shock battle of heavy infantry with shields and spears works.

But once we get away from courage then the full meaning of Aristotle's virtue theory can work. A person with practical wisdom, equipped to live a life of eudaimonia, has learned to live a life of the moderate mean in between excess and defect, in the right way at the right time for the right reason. And right action is directed by the ability to think the right thoughts. Action is preceded by thought, and the temperate man "is so called because he is not pained at the absence of what is pleasant and at his abstinence from it."

The man of practical wisdom knows that "if appetites are stong and violent" they can overcome moderation, so he cultivates moderation and develops the habit of moderation. He knows that the only way to live a happy life is to make sure that "the appetitive element should live according to rational principle" and not the other way around.

Once you get away from the moderate rational principle then you are in danger of succumbing to the appetitive element: self-indulgence. There may be some that are so insensitive to the urges of pleasure, but they "are hardly found," says Aristotle.  So the question of temperance is largely a question of the regulation of self-indulgence, the appetitive urge. And that requires a life-long devotion to a life of moderate rational principle, the practical wisdom of living, doing the right thing for the right reason in the right way at the right time.

But it's worth it, because it all leads to eudaimonia.

If Virtue is Voluntary, So is Vice

Virtuous actions are voluntary, we want to say, for "the end... is what we wish for, the means what we deliberate about and choose". Yet we like to think that people don't actually choose vice, but only happiness: "no one is voluntarily wicked nor involuntarily happy". Aristotle wants to attack this because it obviously threatens his notion that both virtue and vice are choices.

It could be that a man is ignorant of the means of happiness, but it is notable that legislators do not agree. They say ignorance of the law is no excuse. It may be that a man is careless, and thus his slack life ends up in his being unjust or self-indulgent.

But Aristotle says all this is a choice. You can suppose a man is ill involuntarily, but maybe in the past he had the choice, and disobeyed his doctor. So we could say that he threw away his chance to be well. Thus blindness from birth is one thing, but blindness from drunkenness another.

Of course, we inherit some virtue by nature, but the good man adopts the means of virtue voluntarily. Thus virtue consistently practiced becomes a state of character, as one who trains for a contest becomes excellent by training.

Clearly, Aristotle finishes, all our actions are voluntary: we have a choice each time we act. We start in the right direction, but the progress of our state of character is not so obviously voluntary, just as  health is not the result of specific actions. But since we had the power "to act in this way or not in this way" states of character are voluntary.

And that takes us back to the basic position. Virtue, the state of character, is the result of right action in the right way at the right time. And vice is the reverse.

America's Verdict on Obama

When Jonah Goldberg wrote Liberal Fascism back in 2008, liberals blew it off; they weren't interested in engaging its arguments. It wasn't surprising. Liberal Fascism said what conservatives have been saying about liberals for ages. It said that there was a fascistic streak in liberals that goes back to William James and the "moral equivalent of war."

Liberals want to mobilize the nation for great tasks, but not for war. They want to mobilize us into a civilian army to fight the good fight for education, for helping the poor, for health care.  Specifically, they want us to follow their lead and pay for their plans for the welfare state. And anyone that doesn't follow is a rotten egg, expressed more elegantly these days as a racist, sexist, or homophobe.

There is a point to the "moral equivalent of war." From time to time, we the American people need to mobilize to respond to some great national emergency that is not war related: Think Hurricane Katrina. But health care, education, welfare, superannuation, the great liberal programs that are bankrupting the nation, are not national emergencies. They are the normal challenges of life that people come together and solve, generation by generation, in social cooperation. These tasks do not require extraordinary mobilization--as if for war--and they do not get solved well under conditions of compulsion. They are the normal complex interactions of the great panorama of the challenges of life, so they are unlikely to respond well to the one-size-fits-all strategy of war, moral or otherwise.

You could say, a century and a half ago in the middle of the chaotic transition from agricultural society to industrial society, that the emergency required decisive action. But not today. That is why liberals use the language of justice more often than war to justify their extraordinary powers. They say that people are poor because other people are rich, because of greedy bankers and corporate greed--or exploitation or inadequate education or anything that comes to mind.

The big problem, and it gets bigger all the time, is that every time our liberal friends capture an area of social cooperation and place it under the yoke of compulsion they wither the natural instincts and virtues of the American people for unforced, willing and voluntary social cooperation.

In the 19th century, foreign critics noted the extraordinary talent for cooperation in the American people. Whenever Americans saw a need, remarked Tocqueville, they formed an association to tackle it. But the modern, liberal approach is that whenever liberals see a need, they agitate for a government program to solve it. The difference between the old method and the new method is the difference between black and white. But it is a mistake to critique the liberal approach to society with the normal shibboleths of "justice," "corruption," and "abuse of power." The problem is bigger than that. The result of the liberal project, its culture of compulsion and regimentation, of enlisting the whole nation, as if it were an army, in its moral projects, is a vast human tragedy that is tearing our society out by the roots and that withers the tendrils of social nutrition and individual moral growth.

Now of course, we have Charles Murray's latest, Coming Apart, which puts numbers and percentages on the indictment served up by Jonah Goldberg. When we talk about "coming apart" we mean precisely the loss of social capital, the goodwill and willing cooperation, that is the unintended consequence of each new liberal program and each new ratchet of the culture of compulsion.

This year, 2012, Americans are getting a momentous opportunity to vote "yea" or "nay" on the liberal project. Right now, of course, everyone is talking about the weakness of the Republican candidates on the one hand, or the utter cynicism of the Obama FY13 budget on the other. People want the president to be defeated for the right reasons, and they despair of the prospects for a decisive rejection of the president and all his works.

Politics is seldom as clear-cut as that. Just as Al Capone was not convicted of racketeering but income tax evasion, the great liberal project of social regimentation will not be defeated purely on its merits but most likely upon subsidiary issues. Maybe it will be defeated just because people don't like liberals and especially don't like Obama.

But those of us that believe in American exceptionalism have faith that the American people will deliver their verdict on Obama, and it will not be Four More Years.