Mar
10
Charles Kesler, “The Tea Party Spirit”
The opening of this op-ed is awesome: as a whole, it is supportive of the “tea parties” we have currently (I’m not as supportive, as will be clear below; I despise the conclusion of the article). For starters, on what we are willing to consider “law:”
But it isn’t the “reform” part of the Democrats’ health care bill (if they ever agree on one) that strikes me as most perverse. It’s calling this voluminous monstrosity a bill. Can you have a bill, a single law, that is almost 3,000 pages long? In the old days, that would have constituted a whole code of laws. When our founders thought about law, they often thought along the lines of John Locke, who described law as a community’s “settled standing rules, indifferent, and the same to all parties,” emphasizing that to be legitimate a statute must be “received and allowed by common consent to be the standard of right and wrong, and the common measure to decide all controversies” between citizens.
For the most part, I’m like “yeah!” reading that. But I think some laws and policies do have to be complex, and where Dr. Kesler and I start splitting ways is here:
You could read this leviathan until your eyeballs popped out and still not find any “settled, standing rules” or a meaning that is “indifferent, and the same to all parties.”
In fact, that’s the point of such promiscuous laws. They operate not by setting up fences to protect each man’s liberty. They start not from equal rights but from equal (and often unequal) privileges, the favors or benefits that government may bestow on or withhold from its clients. The whole point is to empower government officials, usually unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats, to bless or curse your petitions as they see fit, guided, of course, by their expertness in a law so vast, so intricate, and so capricious that it could justify a hundred different outcomes in the same case. Faster than one might think, a government of equal laws turns into a regime of arbitrary privileges.
A “privilege” is literally a private law. When law ceases to be a common “standard of right and wrong” and a “common measure to decide all controversies,” then the rule of law ceases to be republican and becomes despotic. Freedom itself ceases to be a right and becomes a gift, or the fruit of a corrupt bargain, because in such degraded regimes those who are close to and connected with the ruling class have special privileges.
Again, I’m pretty much agreed. I think there’s a host of issues you can bring up at this point that start complicating the argument, though. As discussed previously in this blog:
- Ranting at bureaucrats is easy, and forgetting that bureaucrats sometimes know issues and the law way better than any given party is also easy. Our elected government does operate at a distance from us for a reason: once they’re elected, we can threaten them by saying we won’t vote for them again. But there’s a lot left up to their discretion, so that the creation and implementation of the law are not dependent on the more fickle parts of the popular will. The ones that are unelected are not inherently corrupt and evil; Kesler’s case sounds strong because it is implicit that “we the people” have set this up, but we’re more than willing to take the good (entitlements!) and curse at the bad like we didn’t cause it (bureaucrats that dole out entitlements).
- When you really think about “arbitrary privileges,” and look at a chart like the US federal budget FY 2009, the big question is: does Kesler assume we’re all united as Americans? (short answer: yes) Does he assume this unity even as certain interest groups use the rhetoric of unity to get their way? (yes)
And that’s the deep problem with “The Tea Party Spirit” as currently constituted. Kesler’s polemic ends with this:
Today’s Tea Party movement sees a similar threat of despotism – of monopoly control of health care, corrupting bailouts, massive indebtedness, and the eclipse of constitutional rights – in the Obama Administration’s policies. The Tea Party patriots may mistake the President’s motives when they compare him to King George. But they are right to suspect in the very nature of modern liberalism and the modern state something hostile to the consent of the governed and to constitutional liberty.
No, Dr. Kesler, they’re not patriots. Some are white supremacists; some believe the US government killed its own citizens on 9/11; some believe the President isn’t a citizen; nearly all of them do not compare the President to King George, but compare the current President and President Bush to Hitler; they believe government spending is a cardinal sin, except when it comes to Medicare, when they will happily hold up signs saying the government should keep their hands off “their” Medicare. All of them are more than willing to engage or cover for extremism. I’m not saying they’re all evil or hypocrites, they’re not. But they’re not motivated by patriotism, because patriotism assumes you can see your fellow citizens as human beings that you don’t shout at, but show some respect to.
Bureaucracy exists because to a degree, it is an instantiation of the law and our values. It is not the worst thing in the world: we may pay colleges and schools too much, but we do get some educated, thoughtful people out of it. If we didn’t pay too much, we may not even get that. I don’t like health care reform one bit. I do think the bureaucracy it creates is dangerous. But that doesn’t mean this world of bailouts (which can be said to have saved our banking system), debt (um, we’re going through a recession), and some vague charges about a lack of constitutional rights is “despotic.” The Tea Partiers are moral actors, not just political ones: there are consequences for indulging their hate, however useful one might feel it is to blocking bad policy.
Mar
8
Links, 3/8/10
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- Megan McArdle, “Don’t Blame Credit Default Swaps for This Greek Tragedy” – from the article: You see this sort of folk mythology among market watchers very frequently. They note that there are financial instruments which convey negative information about the soundness of the underlying institution. Furthermore, they quickly realize that just before institutions fail, there is often quite a lot of activity in those sorts of financial instruments. Therefore, if you could only eliminate the instruments, you could also eliminate the failures!Unfortunately, there is always some official around to make the case to gullible journalists that his institution’s failure is the result of exotic financial predation, rather than his own mismanagement.
- Steven Strogatz, “Finding your Roots” (h/t Josh) – from the article: Complex numbers are magnificent, the pinnacle of number systems. They enjoy all the same properties as real numbers — you can add and subtract them, multiply and divide them — but they are better than real numbers because they always have roots. You can take the square root or cube root or any root of a complex number and the result will still be a complex number. Better yet, a grand statement called The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra says that the roots of any polynomial are always complex numbers. In that sense they’re the end of the quest, the holy grail. They are the culmination of the journey that began with 1.
- Michael Yon, “Of Concern” (h/t Josh) – allegations that the Spanish are running a base very poorly in Afghanistan have to be taken seriously. Do click the link to find out more; there’s too much to explain in this space.
- Jay Cost attempts to count House Democrats re: health care reform. It’s about as much fun as it looks, I’d imagine.
Mar
6
Links, 3/6/10
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- Robert Kagan, “Bipartisan Spring” – from the article: On Afghanistan, Iraq, and increasingly on Iran, Republicans have held their fire and offered public support for the president’s decisions. This is partly because Obama has moved closer to their positions. But it is also because Republicans are committed to success in Iraq and Afghanistan, genuinely fear a nuclear Iran, and for the most part are willing to abjure playing politics with those issues. They are so far proving a more loyal opposition in this regard than were many Democrats during Bush’s second term.
- Mark Bauerlein, “A PMLA Exchange, Graff Once More” – from the article: I’ve heard the argument made before, once on a panel arranged by Donald Lazere in which one panelist said (if I remember correctly) in response to a young man who claimed he was bullied for his conservatism, “Oh please — the Right wing controls every other part of our society, and now they want to control the college classroom, too! Gimme a break.” It was a perfect case of a high-handed and dismissive professor claiming that he was the victim. (Donald nodded to me to reply, but I just shook my head in dismay — a mistake.)
- Megan McArdle, “Students Protest University Cutbacks, Reality” – from the article: But while I’m sympathetic to students finding it harder to attend college, I’m not sure what they think is supposed to happen. There’s no money. This is not some question of reallocating resources from bad uses to good–everything is being cut because their institutions are under serious financial duress. I want to add something else: if you’re in the liberal arts and worried about making sure you get a solid education, there are plenty of us online who clearly know what we’re doing who will recommend books and exercises and a program of learning. I’m not saying you don’t need to work with professors: you should, and the university should make the liberal arts a priority when it has money. But your education isn’t about the money you put into it. It isn’t even about the number of pages read. And yet the difference between the educated and someone who’s looked at a lot of books or even written a lot is stunning, esp. in this day and age where the loudest voices are some of the crudest.
- You can say the Pentagon shooter was crazy and unhinged and shouldn’t be considered representative of many conservatives. Fine, and I definitely agree. But to say that the views he professed are left-wing instead of right-wing, to imply that no one on the Right “thinks” the same way he did, is dishonest based on what we know now. LGF is exactly correct on the issue, and Pajamas Media should be ashamed. Yes, in response to Zombie, we should play the political blame game. Conservatism is not extremism and certainly not about giving cover for extremism like the right-wing blogosphere is doing. Ask yourself what the argumentation is meant to accomplish, and you realize people will play games with other people’s lives for partisan ends. Conservatism is not passivity, but the whole reason why one moves toward tradition is so that the lives of others are not taken for granted (similarly: one moves away from tradition when there is far more than can be done). I agree I don’t like that some progressives will use anything to slander or libel conservatives. But that doesn’t mean you just turn a blind eye to the clear increase of extremist rhetoric and actions in the ranks. We’re learning the hard way that the 1st Amendment in some ways is disconnected from reality. You are responsible for what you say, and no amount of earthly declarations of free speech can change that.
Mar
3
- “Obama angers union officials with remarks in support of R.I. teacher firings” (wapo) – from the President’s remarks: “If a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, if it doesn’t show signs of improvement, then there’s got to be a sense of accountability,” he said. “And that’s what happened in Rhode Island last week at a chronically troubled school, when just 7 percent of 11th-graders passed state math tests — 7 percent.”
- Jonah Goldberg, “Big business is, simply, vampiric” – from the op-ed: It’s worth remembering that Obama was the preferred candidate of Wall Street, and the industry gave to Democrats by a 2-1 margin at the beginning of last year. The top business donor to Democrats in 2008 was Goldman Sachs, and nearly 75 cents out of every dollar of Goldman’s political donations from 2006 to 2008 went to Democrats. Few can gainsay the investment, given how well Goldman Sachs has done under the Obama administration. It’s not just Wall Street. Obama led in fundraising from most big business sectors, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Aside from the desire to back the winner, and the cultural liberalness of East and West Coast plutocrats, why did Obama get so much support from precisely the constituency he demonizes? Because it was good business. A host of big corporations bet that the much-vaunted Obama era would materialize. For instance, nearly 30 major corporations and environmental groups invested in Obama’s promise to force the American economy into a new cap-and-trade system via the United States Climate Action Partnership (CAP).
- Britain Grapples with Debt of Greek Proportions (nytimes, h/t Josh) – from the article: Consider Sheridan King, a sales manager who is struggling to pay off his £32,000 ($47,075) in nonmortgage debt. Far from thinking about going shopping, his first priority is keeping clear of his creditors. And even though his variable mortgage of about £100,000 carries a very low rate, interest costs are already chewing up a substantial portion of his pay, and he is deeply worried about the future.
- Joshua Foust, “The Next Battles for Marjah” (h/t Josh) – from the op-ed: Marja’s agricultural base relies primarily on opium, and any new counternarcotics policies will wreak havoc; arresting or killing the drug traffickers will ultimately be the same as attacking local farmers. The timing of the offensive could not be more damaging: opium is planted in the winter and harvested in the spring, which means those who planted last year cannot recoup their investment. In Helmand, opium is the only way farmers can acquire credit: they take out small loans, called salaam, from narcotics smugglers or Taliban officials, often in units of poppy seed, and pay back that loan in opium paste after harvest. If they cannot harvest their opium, they are in danger of defaulting on their loan — a very dangerous proposition.
- Ario has a poem up that I’m still scratching my head over. Take a look: “Mystery”
Mar
2
Links, 3/2/10
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- Megan McArdle, “What to do about Long-Term Unemployment?” – from the article: The result: long term unemployment. What is the government supposed to do about that? Let’s do some math: by generous estimates from non-White House sources, the $787 billion stimulus has created (or saved!) something under 2 million jobs. Currently, there are 11-12 million people unemployed. Soaking up half that would require three more huge stimuluses, even if you assume that returns are linear and do not diminish with more money spent. Yet even then, we would not guarantee that we helped the long term unemployed; we might just as easily boost employment for people who aren’t finding it particularly hard to get a new job.
- LGF, “Paranoid Delusion of the Week” – from the “paranoid delusion” rightfully being mocked: Team Obama’s anti-anti-missile initiatives are not simply acts of unilateral disarmament of the sort to be expected from an Alinsky acolyte. They seem to fit an increasingly obvious and worrying pattern of official U.S. submission to Islam and the theo-political-legal program the latter’s authorities call Shariah.
- Mark Bauerlein, “Advice to Faculty: Become Watchdogs” – from the article: Faculty members need to remember that teachers and students are the centers of the college. Administrators are secondary, and their job is to assist teachers in their teaching and students in their learning. The more administrators position their work independently of that mission, the more they will continue the dilation, and the more they will pass on financial pressures to adjunctization, larger class sizes, and tuition jumps.
- “Judge Grants Asylum to German Home Schoolers” (nytimes, h/t Josh) – from the article: Describing home-schoolers as a distinct group of people who have a “principled opposition to government policy,” he ruled that the Romeikes would face persecution both because of their religious beliefs and because they were “members of a particular social group,” two standards for granting asylum.