George Will on Our Federal Economy

I have sometimes bristled at the arguments presented by Geroge Will, and his dig at Obama seems particularly unneeccessary in his piece, nevertheless, I find myself very sympathetic to his arguments today. A must read in these troubled times.

The most important part of the piece is the linkage between economic regulation, executive power, and the clueless nature of the legislature.  As economic regulation grows, it strengthens the hand of the executive. It does this for two reasons.  First, the bureaucracy is primarily, though not solely, under the thumb of the Executive branch.  Secondly, and more importantly, because when bureacratizers are asked to use economic rationality to regulate means-ends calculations, it is desirable that the ends are as clear as possible, and the branch that can define the ends most clearly is the Executive since the executive speaks with one voice.  The bilout represents a triumph of the executive over de-centered economic rationality – economic decisions whose ends are freely chosen by the individuals who choose them based on the incentive structures they find around them – which portends the destabiliztion of the commercial republic on both of its axes.  The constitutional arrangment of our society that free commerce creates and the arrangement of separating and balancing powers between the institutions of government may find themselves altered so substantially by this “recovery” process, that they will be too far gone to recognize on the other side.

The Gender Gap and Pay…

A story I just read in The Washington Post:

Men with egalitarian attitudes about the role of women in society earn significantly less on average than men who hold more traditional views about women’s place in the world, according to a study being reported today.

It is the first time social scientists have produced evidence that large numbers of men might be victims of gender-related income disparities. The study raises the provocative possibility that a substantial part of the widely discussed gap in income between men and women who do the same work is really a gap between men with a traditional outlook and everyone else.

Later the article says:

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“It could be that traditional men are hypercompetitive salary negotiators — the Donald Trump prototype, perhaps,” Judge said. “It could be on the employer side that, subconsciously, the men who are egalitarian are seen as effete.”

To the authors of the survey and my gentle readers: I can tell you from first-hand knowledge that it is the latter.  I am glad to see statistical support for what I have always known about my own experiences.

The Intellectual Death of Liberalism….

has been greatly exaggerated. The constant drum-beat of gloom against the “moral emptiness” of liberalism has been sounded for quite some time (and I must confess I was an unfortunate participant in the chorus earlier on in my academic life). While it certainly does not culminate in this article in Prospect, the arguments are notably typical.  

The critique goes something like this: Liberalism, in championing pluralism to such an extent, makes it very difficult for people to be free to pursue their own ends because it conditions people to accept that they are their own best judge on what is and is not morally acceptable regardless of how preposterous their moral choices. This gives rise to cynicism, relativism, etc. that poison our values and make us he vapid, dishonorable, and viscous creatures that we are today.  

 

There are two problems with this argument. The first is that it does not acknowledge that liberalism originated itself, as a resistance movement to the stagnation of moral understanding that had formed between 16th-18th Century Europe.  For example, Immanuel Kant’s case for Enlightenment rest on being allowed to push forward in making our moral world more intelligible.  Enforcing a comprehensive moral understanding of an illiberal sort will likely lead to the same future stagnation. When that day comes, we will probably wish we had toleration back.  

Second, the best liberals (Kant, Rawls, Nozick, Locke, Berlin, Mill, etc.) are all interested in moral philosophy. Many of the rest of us fall short of realizing this liberal ideal. However, it is not clear that the philosophy itself is the causal agent. The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our belief in society as a fair system of cooperation, but in our empiricism. The great thinkers listed above all thought seriously about questions of how we come to believe that we know something, and this is where our political culture seems to have simply quit en masse.  

The problem lies in the common belief that, to paraphrase Allan Bloom’s observations of his students, “truth is relative, and everyone is entitled to his or her opinion” is not a distinctly liberal phenomenon, as we see it advanced and countered as far back as Plato’s Republic.  A liberalism with a serious epistemic foundation works better than any particular moral system because it is the least threatened by the new discoveries of our evolving understanding of the world. No system without a serious epistemic foundation works well at all. The argument against liberalism, in this context, boils down to surrendering on truth and just forcing one system on everyone for the sake of coherence and expediency. The author of this piece cites Alisdair MacIntyre approvingly, let us not forget that the only advice we get from MacIntyre at the end of After Virtue, is to “pick a philosophy and jump, and don’t look back.” Or, put another way, it is better to be against truth-tracking in bad faith than it is to be against it in good faith. Good liberals believe that it is better not to be against it at all.  You tell me which sounds like the most morally empty position.

DIA Project: Legal Territory of the United States

Part of my Democracy in America Project:

The United States of America has vast, and somewhat complicated territorial dominion. The United States is comprised of:

• 48 Contiguous States, that run as far south as 24° 33′ N and as far north as 49°23′ 4.1″N. The Contiguous States border Canda to the north and Mexico to the south. The “Gulf Coast States” are also separated by a short boat trip from a significant portion of the islands of the Caribbean. The eastern and western borders of the contiguous United States are bordered by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
• 2 Non-contiguous states, Alaska and Hawaii. Alaska is roughly 500 miles north from the contiguous states, and it contains the Westernmost cities on the North American Continent. Alaska is almost twice the size of the largest single contiguous state (Texas) and larger than all but 18 sovereing nations on its own.  Hawaii, is a series of islands in the central pacific Ocean. There are eight major Hawaiian islands in its archipelago, but there are many more smaller islands in the chain that are sovereign United States territory as well.
• Several major island territories – including Puerto Rico and the United States Virign Islands chain in the Carribean Sea, and the South Pacific Islands of American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana. 
• Several minor island territories – including Baker, Wake, Midway islands and other uninhabited islands and atolls in the South Pacific.
•  Military bases and strategic commands that are sovereing territory on the five major continents, and on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the United States exercises a travel embargo to the rest of the island.
• The United States expresses a right to claim the Antarctic Continent but has not done so. The United States has jointly managed the legal status of Antarctic, primarily for scientific and exploratory purposes.
• The United States is one of two nations to land objects on the surface of the moon, though they have signed treatises promising to make no territorial claims, their landing sites do not overalp with the landing sites of the USSR, indicating that in the era of moon landings, there was a de facto recogniton of different territory. What that might mean today is unclear.  

In covering this territory, the United States has technology to cover distances like never before. Telecommunications, orbital satellite technology, nuclear powered watercraft, highly reliable air travel, and a vast motor infrastructure allow for the massive transport of persons, goods, and information accross its dominion in speedsand variety that were not possible even one decade earlier. 

That’s all I can write for now, more to come. 

Democracy in America Project

I was thinking the other day that it would be hard to get a full sense of the Ameircan political regime, in the way that say Alexis de Tocqueville talks about it, from our current public discourse. I wonder, if we had to update Tocqueville’s observations, what they would look like. I’m going to try and use Tocqueville’s method of describing America as an exercise to try and better understand it myself. I do not claim to speak for Tocqueville were he alive today, nor would I claim to speak autoritatively about America. I mean it only as an exercise in trying to understand better. I’ll try to put up a post on the geography and demography of the United States – either later today or tomorrow.

Ahhhh! (sound of head exploding)

Matt Yglesias already took on one part of this NRO post, but I’d like to take on the first part of it:

Andy and Yuval both explain well that the Bush Doctrine is a multi-faceted policy, not clearly defined, and only intermittently adhered to in any of its particulars. David Gergen — of all people — on CNN pointed out that the phrase is, for the most part, inside DC/foreign policy establishment jargon. It is not used widely in the media, even in more serious discussions of whichever aspect is under scrutiny. So a well read state-level political leader, who followed the Bush Administration foreign policy in, say, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the WSJ, or on ABC news (God help us), would not necessarily have a deep field of references. It was the clearest “gotcha” moment of the interview.

I understand why people would say this out of self interest – but how could anyone possibly believe that?  The “Bush Doctrine” is ambiguous? A Beltway term? So, when your son or daughter comes home from fifth grade to study American History, are we going to tell her that the Monroe Doctrine or the Truman Doctrine, or the Ford Doctrine are subjective and they can answer however they want?  It’s not subjective, she didn’t know what it was. It is not a “gotcha moment” to ask for simple fact recall. In fact, it was not even asked as a fact recall question, she was asked what she thought of the doctrine.

For those who think this is some practice in “Palin-bashing,” here’s what being able to say that some things are coreect and some things are not will get you: Charlie Gibson also asked Palin the following question.

GIBSON: You said recently, in your old church, “Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God.” Are we fighting a holy war?

Palin said that Gibson had misquoted her but he insisted those were her “exact words.” In fact, as has been noted on Volokh Conspiracy, they are not her exact words.

Funny thing is that not many on the left are willing to concede the point on this one either. I think that Governor Palin’s sentiments about Iraq that her actual words indicate have to be a sentiment that every American has to get behind. How could one not hope that everything we have committed into Iraq will be touched by providence? I can see thinking that Iraq is a series of grievous mistakes, and I can see not beleiving in providence. But if you heard someone say, “I don’t know if someone is watching over us and our fellow citizens in Iraq, but I hope they are,” in causual conversation, I highly doubt that you would jump all over them for the comment.

In short, Sarah Palin did not know what the Bush Doctrine was (incidentaly, she does now), but she is also not a member of the Blues Brothers on “a mission from God” either. Shockingly, she is neither omnisicient nor evil incarnate. Less shockingly, our public discussion cannot seem to handle such subtleties.

Voter Ignorance

Am I the only one who finds there something bizarre that there would be an internet discussion on voter ignorance in which people argue with one another about what type of foundational political knowledge citizens have where people would claim that citizens should not feel obligated to have competent levels of knowledge? It just seems weird to me that as they argue about voter ignorance and what it means for democracy, they are in fact mimicing the schlarship that they claim ti is okay to shun!

Google Chrome

I’m writing this post on my first day’s use of Google Chrome. It’s given me reason to use my office computer, and I have to say – I really like it so far.  I can’t wait for the Mac version.  I already like the navigation bar better, and I love the frequently visited startup boxes. Anyone else tried it?

You Know I took the Poison from the Poison Stream…

The Washington Post is up in arms about the truth with an article about falsehoods perpetuated by both campaigns and the EJ Dionne question “Does the Truth Matter Anymore?” Candidates poison the information market for their own gain, embarrssing themselves with such nonsensical logic as Republican Strategist Mr. John Feheery’s analysis in the article:

“The more the New York Times and The Washington Post go after Sarah Palin, the better off she is, because there’s a bigger truth out there and the bigger truths are she’s new, she’s popular in Alaska and she is an insurgent,” Feehery said. “As long as those are out there, these little facts don’t really matter.”

I do regret missing that day in philosphy when we examined the relationship between the varying sizes of facts. Of course, the reason why men and women of great accomplishment are forced to engage in such mind-numbing behvaior every election season (and it would be impossilbe to say that anyone who ran for President in either field was not a person of remarkable accomplishment) is because the competition for elective audience demands it.

No matter that a free and independent mind should rather incur physical pain than say such stupid things without accepting correction and apologizing, the core problem is the Mr. Feehery is, in his own perversley put way, telling the truth about what does and does not work in democratic politics in our age.  What he does for a living works. And before you start thinking up examples of people victimizing others that “work” for the vicitimizer like a sotry about an excellent bak robber or some such thing, you can spare me right now. It seems quite obvious that there is a “pull” in the information market for such lunacy, and Mr. Feehery and his colleagues and oppostie numbers on the Democratic side are as much rushing to fill demand as they are to create it. It is way harder to create demand for something than it is to supply something that people already want.

All the Roadrunning

There are day, like today, when my attempts make a life for myself in academia feel like this:

A million miles our vagabond heels
Clocked up beneath the clouds
They’re counting down to show time
When we do it for real with the crowds
Air miles are owing
But they don’t come for free
And they don’t give you any for pain

But if it’s all for nothing
All the roadrunning’s
Been in vain

The rimshots come down like cannon fire
And thunder off the wall
There’s a man in every corner
And each one is giving his all

This is my fife
This is my drum
So you never will hear me complain

And if it’s all for nothing
All the roadrunning’s
Been in vain

All the roadrunning
All the roadrunning

Well if you’re inclined
To go up on the wall
It can only be fast and high
And those who don’t like the danger
Soon find something different to try
When there’s only a ringin’ in your ears
And an echo down memory lane

But if it’s all for nothing
All the roadrunning’s
Been in vain

All the roadrunning, all the roadrunning
All the roadrunning, all the roadrunning

The show’s packing up
I sit and watch the convoy
Leaving town
There’s no pretending I’m not a fool,
For riding around and around
Like the pictures you keep of your old wall of death
You showed me one time on the plane

But if it’s all for nothing
All the roadrunning’s
Been in vain

A million miles of vagabond sky
Clocked up above the clouds
I’m still your man for the roaming
For as long as there’s roamin’ allowed

There’ll be a rider
And there’ll be a wall
As long as the dreamer remains

And if it’s all for nothing
All the roadrunning’s
Been in vain.