Category: ideological culture

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ideological culture too much government U.S. Constitution

The 14th Amendment Escape Clause?

Just as Tea Party representatives begin to bring the Constitution back into vogue, primarily to curb the power and spending of Congress, an innovative interpretation of the 14th Amendment floats around the capital, finding enthusiastic supporters amongst advocates of never-ending debt accumulation.

You see, Congress has limited the debt, by law, since 1917. And has raised that limit umpteen times (ten times this past decade). Now that Tea Party Republicans are using the debt limit to negotiate cuts in spending, the pro-spending forces are becoming frantic.

And clever.

Some of them now argue that Section Four of the 14th Amendment would allow the president to raise the debt limit without Congressional permission. After all, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.”

At first blush this makes some sense, until one realizes that the 1917 law is, in fact, “the authorization” mentioned in the very clause — at which point the argument collapses faster than the integrity of politicians in closed session.

Still, the idea of the Executive Branch interposing between Congress and the people — like “state nullification” interposed, in James Madison’s very words, between the federal government and the people — is worth thinking about. And Congress could reinstate the president’s power to “impound” funds designated by Congress that he judges not authorized by the Constitution.

But you won’t find pro-spending forces advocating that.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture national politics & policies

Desperate Times

“War is the health of the state.”

A generation after Randolph Bourne coined this maxim, followers of John Maynard Keynes — the architect of peacetime over-spending by governments — pushed their master’s notions to their illogical conclusion, saying that “war gets a country out an economic slump.” Why? How? You see, only in wartime does government spend so much money, command so many resources.

But War Keynesianism makes little sense. Wars are actually quite bad for the economy — if economy is understood as “people in general.” And though we often hear that “World War II got us out of the Great Depression,” it’s worth noting that times were tight during the war, and that after VE and VJ Days, when the U.S. government pulled back on spending, Keynesian economists feared the country would spiral back into depression. To their surprise, after a short period of adjustment, the economy took off.

Indeed, not only does War Keynesianism make no sense “in theory,” the facts disprove it, as economic historian Robert Higgs has ably and repeatedly demonstrated. And yet, he recently lamented that the truth is just not getting out there: Intellectuals keep pushing the silly doctrine. Sad.

It’s easy to see why, though. Big governments are spinning out of control, and the intellectual case for them is as bankrupt as their own financials. Insider intellectuals are desperate.

War is the ultimate desperate measure.

Today the U.S. is at war in five different countries.*

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan (drone attacks), Yemen (drone attacks)

Categories
ideological culture

Continental Divide

Today’s ideological impasse is not well understood.

To be a modern “liberal” or “progressive” means generally to favor governmental ways of accomplishing things over private ways, especially over voluntary economic transactions.

Programs such as Arizona’s “Clean Elections” law, discussed yesterday — like similar ideas elsewhere — are designed to make “things better” by preventing certain types of voluntary behavior and distributing taxpayer money (forcefully extracted money, mind you) to people who play by certain established rules.

This seems like “justice” and “fairness” to progressives. It seems more like tyranny and bullying and grand theft to me.

The biggest division — the ideological analog of a continental divide — may be the very picture we have of government. Whatever good intent there is, I see government as Force Institutionalized. So, of course I want it limited, by constitutions and whatnot, its scope reduced so that voluntary (non-governmental) interactions can take center stage in our social life.

I believe that paper constitutions are not enough, though, and that government must be checked by Joe and Jill Citizen, who have to live under it, pay taxes to support it, and in good conscience assent (or at least adapt) to its presence in their lives.

Progressives prefer not to look at the “naked force” aspect of government, and see only what they think it can do “for us.” I worry what it will do “to us.” As Tom Paine once wrote, “It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from his government.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture initiative, referendum, and recall

What’s Next, Democracy?

Not all votes are democratic, for — as Stalin pointed out — it’s not who votes that counts, but who counts the votes.

Same for “town halls” and public discussions: Politicians regularly hold meetings with constituents the main point of which is to make sure that nothing too challenging gets aired.

This being the case, you might guess my reservations about “deliberative polling” in the “What’s Next California” vein.

This weekend three hundred “randomly selected” Californians gathered in Torrance to undergo what looks to be a three-part process:

  1. Submit to polling on the major issues facing the crisis-ridden state.
  2. Gather to discuss the issues, with fact-sheets in hand, and lecturers to listen to and answer questions.
  3. Submit to polling at the end of the session, to see how many of the participants’ ideas have changed.

Project founder James Fishkin is obviously interested in the initiative process, but just as obviously interested in seeing it lean more towards a “progressive” direction. Of the three opinions on the program featured at Zócalo Public Square, I lean towards Tim Cavanaugh’s: “By combining polling with top-down instruction from a panel of ‘experts,’ deliberative pollsters hope to determine how voting would change if voters’ opinions could be forced into compliance with establishmentarian thinking. . . .”

Athenian-style public deliberation? Not really. The experts aren’t polled, so it’s obvious that they aren’t expected to modify their opinions.

Besides, in a real democracy, the people would do their own research and bring along their own experts.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture

Are Canada a Thug Nation?

Has Canada crossed the line? Was the post-hockey rioting in Vancouver the last straw? Should we toss Canada in a cell and throw away the key?

Al Capone once famously claimed he didn’t “even know what street Canada is on.” But I think we know that, kidding aside, Canada is a big and populous place, having somewhere around 34 or 35 million people, almost as many as Binghamton.

At any time, some of these millions are behaving well, others badly. With perhaps a few exceptions that we can debate in psychology class, every individual human being is responsible primarily for his own conduct, not that of anyone else.

So why does a New York Times story, “Hockey Hangover Turns Into Riot Embarrassment,” report that after Canadian thugs went on a rampage when their team lost a hockey game, “a nation that takes pride in its reputation for peaceful coexistence wrestled with questions about possible flaws in the national character”?

First of all, “the nation” didn’t fret about this. Certain people did.

Second, thugs who use sports and team rivalries — or trade agreements or any other grievance — to rationalize random destruction are nothing new in the world. Journalist Bill Buford published a visceral account of the British soccer-thug scene. Read Among the Thugs and you’ll know that the conduct of the rampaging rioters has nothing to do with the “national character” of either most fans or the little old lady down the street.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture

Fingernail Adjustment

The oldest method of fraud is the classic merchant’s trick of “putting finger to the scale,” in days before pre-packaging. Buy a pound of grain? Watch the seller’s hands, make sure they’re clear of the measurement device . . .

Some climate scientists might have been engaging in similar rigging of measurement, in this case of the sea’s much-prophesied rise, as FoxNews.com reports:

The University of Colorado’s Sea Level Research Group decided in May to add 0.3 millimeters — or about the thickness of a fingernail — every year to its actual measurements of sea levels, sparking criticism from experts who called it an attempt to exaggerate the effects of global warming.

So, instead of putting a finger on the scales, they’ve put a fingernail’s worth of bias to the data.

The scientists say they have to offset for other factors in the land-sea ratios, and, for all I know, they are correct. But in the context of the “global warming” debate it doesn’t look so good, especially when what we hear from climate change alarmists includes scant talk of complex, offsetting factors. Indeed, in that light, the repeated fingernail addition looks like a piling onto the data, to make the evidence match the prophecy.

Ideally, scientists would not ever dumb down their opinions — or skew their forecasts — to the point where we become suspicious of every complexity they add to their models.

But, as we have learned, we don’t live in an ideal world.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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free trade & free markets ideological culture

Auto Bailouts & Obama Bombast

I never expected a Washington Post writer to so soundly assail a presidential stream of pro-bailout nonsense.

In a “Fact Checker” column entitled “President Obama’s phony accounting on the auto industry bailout,” Glenn Kessler concludes that a “virtually every claim” by the president in recent comments about the auto industry “needs an asterisk, just like the fine print in that too-good-to-be-true car loan.”

President Barack Obama says General Motors will rehire all workers laid off during the recession. But he’s referring to only a sliver of the 68,000 employees General Motors has dropped from its work force since 2006.

Obama says Chrysler has repaid “every dime” it got from taxpayers “during my presidency” — years ahead of schedule. But he omits four billion forked over to Chrysler during the last month of the Bush presidency! So . . . Chrysler has repaid every dime except four billion dollars. (That’s 40 billion dimes, by the way.)

And so forth. Kessler leaves the job of analyzing the wisdom of shoveling billions of taxpayer dollars into the coffers of failing firms to others. So he doesn’t observe that capital forcibly rerouted into “creating jobs” in foundering enterprises cannot be turned to more productive uses in the more successful enterprises from which the capital was grabbed. This is another fact Obama neglects.

It’s not the 2008 presidential campaign any more. Maybe the left-leaning press will no longer automatically bail out Obama when he distorts the truth?

Let’s see where we are in mid-2012.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies

World Policeman on the Take?

The United States of America is at war in Afghanistan and Libya and has nearly 50,000 troops remaining in Iraq. We have 702 military bases in 63 countries around the world.

We’ve become the world’s policeman.

This mission comes with a hefty price tag — most importantly, in the lives of our soldiers. Secondarily, but not inconsequentially, in dollars. Last year, we spent $685 billion for our worldwide presence, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. And now we’re adding Libya to the bill.

So, how do we pay for all this policing?

Over the weekend, in a visit to Iraq, U.S. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher suggested, “We would hope that some consideration be given to repaying the United States some of the megadollars we have spent here in the last eight years.”

We can hope, but Sean Hannity went a misplaced step further: “We have every right to go in there [into Iraq and Kuwait] and, frankly, take all their oil and make them pay for the liberation.”

Heavens! Rescuing someone doesn’t give us the right to take others’ money or oil or anything else.

Now, were a liberated nation to choose to repay us, that’d be nice. Kuwait did actually pay more of the financial cost of the Gulf War than we did.

But face it: Policing the world is just not cost-effective. Making it pay by turning a liberation crusade into an excuse for looting? That’s not police activity.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture

Save Herds, Save Hunting

Ideas of local control and popular government are perennially revived on both the right and the left. But we don’t often enough export those ideas, especially to areas of endeavor like wildlife preservation.

Considering the sorry state of so much wildlife, especially in Africa, you’d think decentralization and citizen control might more often be trotted out.

Terry Anderson and Shawn Regan, writing for the Hoover Institution’s Defining Ideas, argue that devolving hunting rights down to the village level in Africa would almost certainly help preserve wildlife stocks. It’s worked pretty well in Zimbabwe, while Kenya, which prohibited hunting instead of managing it, saw “its population of wild animals [decline] between 60 and 70 percent.”

The usual wildlife policy advocated in the West might as well be called wildlife colonialism. It combines a heavy dose of moralism with a heavy-handed, top-down authoritarianism — the last thing we want to encourage in African governments for other matters. And it doesn’t work for preservation. With it, local communities have no stake in wildlife management, so wildlife degrades through poaching and habitat encroachment.

Far better to provide people in Africa — in villages and towns and in the stretches between them — incentives to keep stocks of elephants and lions and apes and monkeys and what-have-you healthy.

Hunters kill animals, yes — but, with the right incentives, can help save whole species. As Anderson and Regan put it, “if it pays, it stays.”

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture

The Ideology of Anti-Ideology

Politics is becoming politicized. Ideology ideologized. There is disagreement in the land. Rumbles! Portents! Where will it all end?

In the minds of those with infinite faith in their infinite wisdom to hammer out a better world by thwocking the rest of us into meek serfs of their edict-spewing will, it’s supposed to end with their unchallenged ascendancy over us. Why not? After all, they’re enacting not any ideology but only Scientific Truth. Anyone who opposes this Scientific Truth on the grounds of (different) political principles is being unscientifically Ideological.

It’s obvious that we can dispute the exact meaning and proper role of ideology — political ideas and programs — in human affairs. But the ideologues of interventionism are being coy and obfuscatory when they decry criticisms for being “ideological.”

The latest manifestation of the syndrome comes to us courtesy of a nominee to the Federal Reserve Board, who says his nomination is being thwarted on — yes — ideological grounds. He won a Nobel! He’s studied labor markets! Analysis of unemployment is “crucial to conducting monetary policy”! And: “Skilled analytical thinking should not be drowned out by mistaken, ideologically driven views that more is always better or less is always better”!

Hasn’t the Fed proved umpteen times already that its skilled analytical manipulation of economic life is perfect, infallible, and un-blundering? Couldn’t it benefit from the services of yet another smug, credential-wielding seer?

What? You doubt it! What are you, some kind of ideologue?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.