A case for looking at the trees and the forest.

It’s well known that men are preponderantly stronger than women, that whites are preponderantly smarter than blacks, and that pre-pubescent girls are preponderanly closer to their final height than are pre-pubescent boys.

There are many exceptions, of course. And the exceptions in the first two cases have been seized upon to advance an egalitarian agenda: Women and blacks are “underrepresented” in military officer ranks, STEM disciplines, the executive positions, etc., so there should be discriminatory efforts to bring more women and blacks into those occupations and positions.

The data are those women and blacks who have been and are capable of performing on equal terms with their peers in the officer ranks, STEM disciplines, and so on. The statistical relationships are the facts cited in the opening paragraph.

Because of the statistical relationships, the discriminatory effort to recruit women and blacks into occupations and positions for which they are preponderantly underqualified means the standards of performance in those occupations and positions will fall (and in some cases already have fallen). And in some cases (e.g., police, firefighting, armed forces) the lowere standards of performance generally endanger the public.

Discrimination on the basis of measured and demonstrated aptitude and ability is good. Discrimination on the bases of sex and race (whether pro or con a particular sex or race) is bad.

If “activists” with an “inclusive” agenda would just recognize the facts of life and shut up, everyone would be better off — including those women and blacks who (too often) are being set up for failure because they don’t have what it takes to succeed in a particular occupation or position.

It’s Bret Stephens’s turn to be a target.

This is the sixth in a series of recycled posts about David Brooks (mostly) and Bret Stephens (once), house “conservatives” at The New York Times. The original posts were published from 2009 through 2019. But I have detected no change in the dynamic duo’s faux conservatism since I stopped wasting pixels on them.

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Bret Stephens, one of the tame “conservatives” at The New York Times, wasted ink and newsprint (as usual) on a column titled “Why Aren’t Democrats Walking Away With the Mid-Terms?“.

Stephens touched on a thesis that has been enunciated by many. I will come to it by way of Arnold Kling — an unusually sensible economist (e.g., he calls standard macroeconomics “hydraulic economics” and derides the implicit assumption that the economy is single unit — a big GDP factory). Kling has written a book (now in second edition) called The Three Languages of Politics: Talking Across the Political Divide. Here are some relevant passages:

In politics, I claim that progressives, conservatives, and libertarians are like tribes speaking different languages. The language that resonates with one tribe does not connect with the others. As a result, political discussions do not lead to agreement. Instead, most political commentary serves to increase polarization. The points that people make do not open the minds of people on the other side. They serve to close the minds of the people on one’s own side.

Which political language do you speak? Of course, your own views are carefully nuanced, and you would never limit yourself to speaking in a limited language. So think of one of your favorite political commentators, an insightful individual with whom you generally agree. Which of the following statements would that commentator most likely make?

(P) [Progressive] My heroes are people who have stood up for the underprivileged. The people I cannot stand are the people who are indifferent to the oppression of women, minorities, and the poor.

(C) [Conservative] My heroes are people who have stood up for Western values. The people I cannot stand are the people who are indifferent to the assault on the moral virtues and traditions that are the foundation for our civilization.

(L) [Libertarian] My heroes are people who have stood up for individual rights. The people I cannot stand are the people who are indifferent to government taking away people’s ability to make their own choices….

I call this the three-axes model of political communication. A progressive will communicate along the oppressor-oppressed axis, framing issues in terms of the (P) dichotomy. A conservative will communicate along the civilization-barbarism axis, framing issues in terms of the (C) dichotomy. A libertarian will communicate along the liberty-coercion axis, framing issues in terms of the (L) dichotomy….

I do not believe that the three-axes model serves to explain or to describe the different political ideologies. I am not trying to say that political beliefs are caused by one’s choice of axis. Nor am I saying that people think exclusively in terms of their preferred axis. What I am saying is that when we communicate about issues, we tend to fall back on one of the three axes. By doing so, we engage in political tribalism. We signal to members of our tribe that we agree with them, and we enhance our status in the tribe. However, even though it appears that we are arguing against people from other tribes, those people pay no heed to what we say. It is as if we are speaking a foreign language….

The three axes allow each tribe to assert moral superiority. The progressive asserts moral superiority by denouncing oppression and accusing others of failing to do so. The conservative asserts moral superiority by denouncing barbarism and accusing others of failing to do so. The libertarian asserts moral superiority by denouncing coercion and accusing others of failing to do so….

In 2016, Donald Trump surprised many people— including me— by emerging as a powerful political force and prevailing in the presidential election. Trump’s success confounded many analytical frameworks that had worked well in the past, and the three-axes model is not particularly helpful, either.

Progressives certainly viewed Trump through the oppressor-oppressed axis, seeing his pronouncements and his supporters as tinged with racism and threats toward other victim classes. Libertarians viewed Trump through the liberty-coercion axis, seeing him as authoritarian and a danger to liberty.

Conservatives, however, were divided. One faction, represented by a number of writers at the conservative publication National Review, viewed Trump negatively along the civilization-barbarism axis. They saw Trump as scornful of important traditional institutions, including civil discourse, the U.S. Constitution, the Republican Party, and the principle of free trade.

The other conservative faction saw Trump’s opponent in the general election, Hillary Clinton, as a greater threat to civilization. Writing under the pseudonym, Publius Decius Mus, an essayist on the Claremont Institute website described voting against Clinton as analogous to the passengers on one of the planes hijacked on 9/ 11 who managed to storm the cockpit and keep the hijackers from hitting their intended target.

In my view, Trump opened up a new axis. He accomplished that by appealing to people who differ from those with whom I am most acquainted. Some have termed this new axis populist versus elite, or outsider versus insider….

Perhaps the main dividing line is best described in terms of cosmopolitanism. The sections of the country that most strongly supported Hillary Clinton were large cities located along the coasts, where affluent people are used to engaging with foreign cultures, either locally or by traveling abroad. The sections of the country that most strongly supported Donald Trump were rural and small-town areas located away from the coast, where interaction with foreign cultures is much less frequent.

To describe the cosmopolitan outlook, recall the expression “bourgeois bohemians,” coined by journalist David Brooks almost two decades ago. Brooks was describing a cosmopolitan elite, one that enjoys foreign travel and celebrates cultural diversity. The Bobos, as Brooks dubbed them, probably feel more comfortable in Prague than in Peoria.

As I see it, Donald Trump’s supporters were the anti-Bobos. They distrusted foreign people and cultures. But above all, they distrusted and resented the Bobos, and the feeling was mutual. Thus, the axis that I believe best fits the Trump phenomenon is Bobo versus anti-Bobo.

I think this is right. Bret Stephens is a Bobo who believes that “the real threat of the Trump presidency [wasn’t] economic or political catastrophe. It [was] moral and institutional corrosion — the debasement of our discourse and the fracturing of our civic bonds.”

Stephens seems not to understand that — in the view of anti-Bobos — civic bonds were fractured long ago by the Bobos who championed school busing, affirmative action, and all that followed under the heading of identity politics, succeeded by “open borders”, gender fluidity, and Big-Tech censorship of conservative voices.

The anti-Bobos of the North were taken for granted as reliable Democrat voters, largely ignored (by both parties), and then sneered at by Democrats. Hillary Clinton’s characterization of the anti-Bobos (of all regions) as “deplorables” was merely confirmatory, and probably enabled Trump’s victory in 2016 by putting him over the top in Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Trump’s genius was (and still is) the ability to speak the language of anti-Bobos and make them feel as if they are valued.

It is unclear to me what “deeper threat [Trump’s] presidency represents”, as Stephens puts it. Trump is not divisive; Bobo policies — shared by “establishment” politicians of both parties — are divisive. Stephens and his ilk (of all parties) simply want the anti-Bobos to shut up, get back in the fold, and accept the crumbs that fall from the Bobos’ table. The “deeper threat”, in other words, is an end to the Bobos’ long reign of error in Washington.

Stephens’s Bobo-ism is fully on display in the final paragraph of his op-ed, where he writes that “The tragedy of Pittsburgh [the synagogue shooting] illustrates, among other things, that the president cannot unite us, even in our grief.” What I saw was an immediate attack on Trump for having created an “atmosphere of hate” (shades of Dallas 1963). Trump’s personal behavior — which reflects his long-standing pro-Jewish sympathies — was exemplary, as was the behavior of Rabbi Myers, who welcomed Trump.

How, precisely, was Trump supposed to “unite us” when there are tens of millions of Americans — goaded on by the mainstream media — who despise him for the sheer enjoyment of it?

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If you’d like to comment on this post, you may address an email to the Germanic nickname for Friedrich followed by the surname of the 1974 Nobel laureate in economics followed by the 3rd and 4th digits of his birth year followed by the usual typographic symbol followed by gmail.com .

From its illegitimate birth to its approaching old-age crisis.

Throughout this post, when I refer to Social Security I mean the program of old-age benefits and tax “contributions” provided for in the Social Security Act of 1935. A key element of this discussion is the Social Security trust fund, which I render thus for consistency througout the post. Comments on this post may be sent to the following email address: the Germanic nickname for Friedrich followed by the last name of the 1974 Nobel laureate in economics followed by the 3rd and 4th digits of his birth year followed by the usual typographic symbol followed by gmail.com .

THE UNCONSTITUTIONALITY OF SOCIAL SECURITY

The Social Security Administration tries to whitewash the unconstitutionality of the old-age provisions of the Social Security Act (links added):

Three Social Security cases made their way to the Supreme Court during its October 1936 term. One challenged the old-age insurance program (Helvering v. Davis)….

George P. Davis was a minor stockholder in the Edison Electric Illuminating Company. Edison, like every industrial employer in the nation, was readying itself to start paying the employers’ share of the payroll tax in January 1937. Mr. Davis objected to this arguing that by making this expenditure Edison was robbing him of part of his equity, so he sued Edison to prevent their compliance with the Social Security Act. The government intervened on Edison’s behalf and the Commissioner of the IRS ([Guy] Helvering) took on the lawsuit.

The attorneys for Davis argued that the payroll tax was a new type of tax not listed in the Constitution’s tally of taxes, and so it was unconstitutional….

On May 24, 1937 the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the three cases. Justice Cardozo wrote the majority opinion [Helvering v. Davis]….

Mirroring the situation in Congress when the legislation was considered, the old-age insurance program met relatively little disagreement. The Court ruled 7 to 2 in support of the old-age insurance program….

Justice Cardozo wrote the opinion[] in Helvering v. Davis…. [He] made clear the Court’s view on the scope of the government’s spending authority: “There have been statesman in our history who have stood for other views…. We will not resurrect the contest. It is now settled by decision. The conception of the spending power advocated by Hamilton … has prevailed over that of Madison….”

[He] extended the reasoning [in upholding the unemployment-insurance program] to the old-age insurance program: “The purge of nation-wide calamity that began in 1929 has taught us many lessons…. Spreading from state to state, unemployment is an ill not particular but general, which may be checked, if Congress so determines, by the resources of the nation…. But the ill is all one or at least not greatly different whether men are thrown out of work because there is no longer work to do or because the disabilities of age make them incapable of doing it. Rescue becomes necessary irrespective of the cause. The hope behind this statute is to save men and women from the rigors of the poor house as well as from the haunting fear that such a lot awaits them when journey’s end is near.”

It is no coincidence that the Supreme Court reversed its record of opposition to the New Deal when faced with the certainty that Congress would approve Roosevelt’s court-packing plan and dilute the authority of the sitting justices. As SSA tells it:

Despite the intense controversy the court-packing plan provoked, and the divided loyalties it produced even among the President’s supporters, the legislation appeared headed for passage, when the Court itself made a sudden shift that took the wind out of the President’s sails. In March 1937, in a pivotal case, Justice Roberts unexpectedly changed his allegiance from the conservatives to the liberals, shifting the balance on the Court from 5-4 against to 5-4 in favor of most New Deal legislation. In the March case Justice Roberts voted to uphold a minimum wage law in Washington state just like the one he had earlier found to be unconstitutional in New York state. Two weeks later he voted to uphold the National Labor Relations Act, and in May he voted to uphold the Social Security Act. This sudden change in the Court’s center of gravity meant that the pressure on the New Deal’s supporters lessened and they felt free to oppose the President’s plan. This sudden switch by Justice Roberts was forever after referred to as “the switch in time that saved nine.”

In the end, the Court decided wrongly to legalize Social Security by invoking Hamilton’s supposedly looser view of the powers vested in Congress, and by improperly interpreting the “general welfare” clause. In its slipperiness and lack of constitutional grounding, Justice Cardozo’s opinion foreshadowed Justice Blackmun’s opinion in Roe v. Wade.

Regarding the general welfare, Madison — the “Father of the Constitution” — had this to say in Federalist No. 41:

Some who have denied the necessity of the power of taxation [to the Federal government] have grounded a very fierce attack against the Constitution, on the language on which it is defined. It has been urged and echoed that the power to “lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts, and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States” amounts to an unlimited commission to exercise every power which may be alleged to be necessary for the common defense or general welfare. No stronger proof could be given of the distress under which these writers labor for objections, than their stooping to such a misconstruction….

For what purpose could the enumeration of particular powers be inserted, if these and all others were meant to be included in the preceding general power? Nothing is more natural or more common than first to use a general phrase, and then to explain and qualify by an enumeration of the particulars. But the idea of an enumeration of particulars which neither explain nor qualify the general meaning, and can have no other effect than to confound and mislead, is an absurdity … what would have been thought of that assembly, if, attaching themselves to these general expressions and disregarding the specifications which limit their import, they had exercised an unlimited power of providing for the general welfare?…

Was Hamilton of a different mind? Apparently not:

The Federalist Papers are one of our soundest guides to what the Constitution actually means. And in No. 84, Alexander Hamilton indirectly confirmed Madison’s point.

Hamilton argued that a bill of rights, which many were clamoring for, would be not only “unnecessary,” but “dangerous.” Since the federal government was given only a few specific powers, there was no need to add prohibitions: it was implicitly prohibited by the listed powers. If a proposed law — a relief act, for instance — wasn’t covered by any of these powers, it was ipso facto unconstitutional.

Adding a bill of rights, said Hamilton, would only confuse matters. It would imply, in many people’s minds, that the federal government was entitled to do anything it wasn’t positively forbidden to do, whereas the principle of the Constitution was that the federal government is forbidden to do anything it isn’t positively authorized to do.

Hamilton too posed some rhetorical questions: “For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why, for instance, should it be said, that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed?” Such a provision “would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretence for claiming that power” — that is, a power to regulate the press, short of actually shutting it down.

We now suffer from the sort of confusion Hamilton foresaw. But what interests me about his argument, for today’s purpose, is that he implicitly agreed with Madison about the narrow meaning of “general welfare.”

After all, if the phrase covered every power the federal government might choose to claim under it, the “general welfare” might be invoked to justify government control of the press for the sake of national security in time of war. For that matter, press control might be justified under “common defense.” Come to think of it, the broad reading of “general welfare” would logically include “common defense,” and to speak of “the common defense and general welfare of the United States” would be superfluous, since defense is presumably essential to the general welfare.

So Madison, Hamilton, and — more important — the people they were trying to persuade agreed: the Constitution conferred only a few specific powers on the federal government, all others being denied to it (as the Tenth Amendment would make plain).

(For more on the general welfare, see “The Constitution: Myths and Realities”.)

Unlike the “right” to an abortion, the Court’s decision upholding Social Security is so far in the past and has created so much dependency among the populace that it will never be undone. Nor is it likely that Social Security’s old-age benefit will ever be privatized, even in part. But hope springs eternal, and so I address privatization later in this post.

BUT ISN’T SOCIAL SECURITY A KIND OF “SOCIAL INSURANCE”?

I put quotation marks around “social insurance” because it isn’t insurance. What is it? Just another set of programs designed to redistribute income, mainly from those who’ve earned more to those who’ve earned less (or nothing). “Social insurance” is a trickle-down transfer-payment scheme, wherein some of the money reaches its intended targets after passing through the sticky fingers of the overpaid bureaucrats who live in and around Washington, D.C.

What’s the difference between “social insurance” and real insurance?

Consider Social Security. Unlike an automobile accident, retirement is not an undesirable event that might occur; it is a desirable event toward which almost everyone strives. Social Security is merely a government-imposed substitute for the prudent act of saving toward one’s retirement and then drawing on the accumulated nest-egg to finance that retirement. The usual excuse for Social Security is that a lot of people, especially low-income persons, can’t or won’t save enough to maintain some (arbitrary) standard of living during retirement. In other words, Social Security isn’t insurance against an unpredictable event, it’s a mechanism for subsidizing low-income and imprudent persons at the expense of their opposites.

The same analysis applies to Medicare, Medicaid, and other forms of federal and State “social insurance”. The risk pools are huge and ill-defined. The premiums are either nominal (Medicare) or non-existent (Medicaid and other programs). All such programs are nothing more than non-contractual “promises” to pay certain amounts for certain events, regardless of the probability of those events and their associated costs.

Even programs that mimic insurance — unemployment benefits and workers’ compensation, for example — are really subsidies because of their all-encompassing nature and the forcible extraction of “premiums” from employers (and, indirectly, employees). Those who are at risk for unemployment and on-the-job injuries have no say in the matter of how much insurance they wish to purchase and how much they are willing to pay for it. Unemployment “insurance” is an especially weird kind of “insurance,” in that the benefits expand and contract according to the whims of government actors.

Enough said about “social insurance” as insurance. It simply isn’t insurance.

Health insurance, despite heavy regulation and the distortions produced by tax breaks, retains some of the characteristics of true insurance. But the point of Medicare (as modified by Obamacare) isn’t insurance, it’s tantamount to universal, government-controlled health care for persons over 65. (And, combined with Medicaid the size of the program strongly affects the provision of and insurance coverage for persons under 65.) Medicare forces Americans to buy or subsidize “insurance” that covers events that aren’t health risks; for example: so-called preventive care, the use of contraceptives, abortion, various kinds of maternity and pediatric care, and the coverage of “children” up to the age of 26.

What about mandatory coverage of pre-existing conditions? Here’s Greg Mankiw on the subject:

A large part of the motivation of the Affordable Care Act [Obamacare]is to provide insurance to those with pre-existing conditions. Under the law, insurance is offered to everyone at a price based on overall community risk, not the risk estimated by the insurance company based on a person’s particular characteristics. That has been deemed “fair” by advocates of the law.

I wonder whether advocates of this view are concerned with other insurance markets.  Teenage drivers pay a lot more for auto insurance. The old pay a lot more for life insurance.  Life insurance companies require health screening before granting a policy. Is this a problem, or the natural and desirable functioning of markets?

The answer to Mankiw’s question is that advocates of Obamacare weren’t really trying to insure anyone, they were trying (with some success) to ram socialized medicine down the throats of Americans.

Scott Gallipo, writing at The American [Pseudo-] Conservative. In a patent attempt to defend Obamacare, Gallipo begs real conservatives to “Stop Comparing Health Insurance to Car Insurance”. Gallipo’s “argument” is fatally confused; for example:

It’s helpful to step back and remind ourselves why we ask doctors to perform “preventative maintenance” on our bodies. If diseases are caught early, they’re often cheaper to treat or cure. If we stay in good physical shape, we reduce the chances of developing many diseases in the first place. When we preventatively maintain our cars, however, we are merely forestalling problems that we would have to pay out-of-pocket for anyway. If you don’t change your oil, your car insurance plan isn’t going to cover the cost of fixing a seized engine.

Gallipo is trying to distinguish preventive health care from preventive auto care, but he fails to do so. For one thing, he wrongly asserts that preventive maintenance forestalls problems that would have to be paid for out-of-pocket. Not necessarily. That’s why warranties (insurance) and their costs are baked into the price of new autos. And that’s why many auto buyers obtain extended warranties. As it happens, I once bought a mechanical-breakdown insurance from GEICO instead of buying the manufacturer’s extended warranty. It was additional coverage under my auto policy, and it commanded an additional premium.

More fundamentally, Gallipo makes some heroic assumptions about preventive care. Yes, routine tests will sometimes result in the detection and treatment of conditions that would otherwise be detected at a later stage. But the cost of checkups and lab tests, when ordered wholesale by doctors because they’re “free”, far exceeds the benefits. (See this, for example.)

Most fundamentally, Gallipo begs the question. In his (incorrect) view, preventive “care” on a massive scale is a “good thing”. Therefore, it should be covered by insurance. But the massive overuse of “free” checkups and lab tests has nothing to do with insurance, and everything to do with the nationalization of health care. Those “free” checkups and tests will not be paid for by risk-related premiums; they will be paid for by taxpayers and the millions of Americans whose Medicare “premiums” are really taxes exacted to help support an open-ended national health-care plan.

THE PONZI SCHEME UNRAVELS

Social Security is now running in the red; that is, benefits and expenses exceed payroll taxes collected. It is being kept afloat by the Social Security trust fund, which holds U.S. government debt from which full benefits will continue to be paid until the trust fund is depleted around 2034. When the trust fund is depleted, benefits (by law) are supposed to be cut to a level supportable by current revneues. If nothing is done before 2034 to adjust benefits or payroll taxes Social Security beneficiaries would be facing a permanent drop of about 21 percent in their benefit checks.

In any event, like a Ponzi scheme, Social Security rewarded early entrants, who were paid artificially high “returns” from the “contributions” made by later entrants.

But the inevitable happened. The number of late entrants has become too few to pay the taxes required to support earlier entrants in the style to which they have become accustomed. Congress, as is its wont, is relying on the trust fund to cover the deficit, rather than face up to the difficult political choice of cutting benefits or raising taxes.

I quote from an op-ed piece in The Washington Post (July 31, 2001), by Olivia Mitchell and Thomas R. Saving:

When Social Security ran annual surpluses in the past, it enabled other parts of government to spend more. The trust fund measures how much the government has borrowed from Social Security over the years, just as your credit card balance indicates how much you have borrowed. The only way to get the money to pay off your credit balance is to earn more, spend less or take out a loan. Likewise, the only way for the government to redeem trust fund IOUs is to raise taxes, cut spending or borrow….

We are surprised that this perspective on the trust fund is controversial. The commission’s interim report quotes credible sources — the Congressional Budget Office, the General Accounting Office and the Congressional Research Service — supporting the view that the trust fund is an asset to Social Security but a liability to the rest of the government. The Clinton administration’s fiscal year 2000 budget indicated a similar perspective:

“These [trust fund] balances are available to finance future benefit payments and other trust fund expenditures — but only in a bookkeeping sense. . . . They do not consist of real economic assets that can be drawn down in the future to fund benefits. Instead, they are claims on the Treasury that, when redeemed, will have to be financed by raising taxes, borrowing from the public, or reducing benefits or other expenditures. The existence of large trust fund balances, therefore, does not, by itself, have any impact on the Government’s ability to pay benefits.”…

[T]he nation has only three ways to redeem trust fund bonds: raising taxes, cutting spending or increasing government borrowing. If there is some alternative source of funds, no one has yet suggested it….

Nevertheless, the trust fund has some true believers, among them Paul Krugman, who made this effort to rebut the commission’s position:

The Social Security system has been running surpluses since 1983, when the payroll tax was increased in order to build up a trust fund out of which future benefits could be paid. These surpluses could have been invested in stocks or corporate bonds, but it seemed safer and less problematic to buy U.S. government debt instead. The system now has $1.2 trillion in its rapidly growing trust fund. But the commission says that the government bonds in that trust fund aren’t real assets….

Every dollar that the Social Security system puts in government bonds — as opposed to investing in other assets, such as corporate bonds — is a dollar that the federal government doesn’t have to borrow from other sources. If the Social Security trust fund hadn’t used its accumulated surpluses to buy $1.2 trillion in government bonds, the government would have had to borrow those funds elsewhere. And instead of crediting the trust fund with $65 billion in interest this year, the government would have had to cough up at least that much extra in actual, cash interest payments to private bondholders. So the trust fund makes a real contribution to the federal budget. Doesn’t that make it a real asset?…

No. Here’s why: As Krugman admits, the government didn’t invest Social Security surpluses in stocks and corporate bonds, it squandered the surpluses. The surpluses simply fed Washington’s big-spending addiction. If the surpluses had been invested in real assets, even conservative ones like investment-grade corporate bonds, the trust fund would represent real claims on the economy. But it doesn’t represent such claims. It represents nothing more than government debt incurred for spending more than it received in taxes. The Social Security trust fund is exactly offset by indebtedness incurred by the rest of the federal government.

ANOTHER LOOK AT THE MYTHICAL TRUST FUND AND RELATED MATTERS

Notwithstanding what I have just said, many of those who wish to preserve Social Security as they know and love it will insist that the Social Security trust fund is real. The usual argument goes like this: Yes, the trust fund holds government bonds. But if government bonds are a real asset to private investors, they must be a real asset to the trust fund. Wrong.

If the Social Security Administration (SSA) had invested net Social Security receipts in stocks, corporate bonds, and private mortgages — or if it had stashed the receipts in many, many passbook savings accounts, à la W.C. Fields — the trust fund could be a real asset. Why? Because SSA would have simply done for individuals what they could have done for themselves, namely, held their savings in the form of claims on real assets (business equipment, homes, and automobiles, for instance) and the future income produced by those assets.

But the problem is bigger than SSA’s failure to invest forced savings in claims on real assets. SSA is just a branch of the U.S. government. Even if SSA had wanted to take its net receipts to the bank, it couldn’t have. A robber would have intercepted SSA on the way to the bank, taken the money, and blown it on booze. Actually, what happened was that the rest of the U.S. government grabbed SSA’s net receipts and blew them on this welfare program, that regulatory effort, and other “public services”. Unlike the typical thief, the U.S. government then handed SSA a bunch of IOUs.

Now, tell me where the real asset is. It’s not to be found in the creation of government programs or even in the physical assets employed by government in those programs. For, the economic benefits that sometimes flow from government activities are far more than offset by the economic disbenefits of government activities.

But what about all those private investors who hold government bonds? Aren’t they holding real assets? Well, they’re holding financial assets, which give them the ability to buy real things. Let’s take Citizen Kane as an example. Suppose he has scrimped and saved $1 million. He could place that amount in some combination of stocks, corporate bonds, mortgages, and savings accounts, but instead he chooses to buy government bonds. Now, Citizen Kane has already done his bit for the creation of real assets merely by saving $1 million in the first place. That is, through the magic of macroeconomics, the $1 million that he forbore to spend on this bauble, that bangle, and another bead enabled the creation of $1 million in real capital (plant, equipment, business software, etc.), which fosters economic growth.

Thus, in the first approximation, where Citizen Kane actually puts his $1 million is less important than the fact the he has saved (not consumed) $1 million, so that others (businesses, to be precise) can direct $1 million worth of resources into the creation of capital. If he chooses to put the $1 million in government bonds, that’s his lookout. Those bonds have a market value, which will fluctuate just like the market value of all financial assets. But the marketability of the bonds simply means that he can claim his share of the wealth that was created when he saved $1 million in the first place.

Government bonds held by government entities, on the other hand, can’t even pretend to be claims on real assets. They’re nothing but pieces of paper whose value can be realized only through taxation. Well, government can tax us without going through the charade of creating government bonds. Thus the bonds held by the SSA amount to nothing more than a superfluous excuse to raise our taxes. The power to tax is a real asset only to those who are net recipients of the taxes that are collected. By the same token, the power to tax is a real liability to those who are net payers of the taxes that are collected. Asset = liability = zero.

So much for those “real assets” in the Social Security trust fund.

But I’m not through discussing the shell game that goes by the exalted name of “public finance.” There’s a lot more to it than the mythical Social Security trust fund.

Government spending, however it is financed, is a way of commandeering resources that otherwise would flow to private consumption and investment (i.e., capital formation). To the extent that government activities fail to pay their own way by yielding goods and services of equivalent value — and they don’t (otherwise they would be provided by the private sector) — the resources used by government are simply wasted — thrown down a rat hole. And worse, they drag down the economy.

Government nevertheless goes through the charade of taxing and borrowing to finance its activities, instead of simply sending goon squads to impress those resources into government service. To the extent that it borrows and that borrowing is underwritten by the Fed, there is more money in circulation than there would be if the government financied its follies through taxation. At the same time, the total output of real goods and services (including capital assets) is reduced as government commandeers resources. The result, of course, is inflationary.

THE CASE FOR PRIVATIZATION

The trust fund is mythical and can’t be salvaged. Social Security is a drag on the economy, pure and simple. Complete privatization (i.e., abolition) of Social Security is a political non-starter but the only economically sensible option:

• It would increase incentives to work and invest, thus boosting employment in the short run and economic growth in the long run.

• Armed with greater prosperity, we could do a better job (privately and publicly) of helping the aged, their survivors, and the disabled who are truly in need.

But when the idea of privatization was floated by President G.W. Bush, the wagons were circled around the golden calf. E.J. Dionne Jr., writing in The Washington Post, opined that

The big cost of privatization comes from allowing individuals to keep a share of the Social Security taxes they now pay into the system and use it for private investment accounts. This reduces the amount of money available to pay current beneficiaries. Since Bush has promised the retired and those near retirement that their benefits won’t be cut, he needs to find cash somewhere. The only options are to raid the rest of the budget, to raise taxes or to borrow big time….

[During the 2000 presidential campaign] Gore … challenged Bush on his numbers. “He has promised a trillion dollars out of the Social Security trust fund for young working adults to invest and save on their own, but he’s promised seniors that their Social Security benefits will not be cut and he’s promised the same trillion dollars to them,” Gore said at that third presidential debate. “Which one of those promises will you keep and which will you break, Governor?”

… Bush is about to offer an easy answer to Gore’s challenge: More borrowing….

… Last week The Post’s Jonathan Weisman reported that Republicans were considering moving the costs of social security reform “off-budget” so that, on paper at least, they wouldn’t inflate the deficit. And Joshua B. Bolten, the director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, let the cat out of the bag over the weekend in an interview with Richard W. Stevenson of the New York Times. “The president does support personal accounts, which need not add over all to the cost of the program but could in the short run require additional borrowing to finance the transition,” Bolten said. “I believe there’s a strong case that this approach not only makes sense as a matter of savings policy, but is also fiscally prudent.”

A huge new borrowing — “from hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars over a decade,” as Stevenson notes — is suddenly “fiscally prudent” in the administration’s eyes….

Dionne betrays such stupendous misunderstanding of the issue that the only way to deal with his ignorance is to explain the whole megillah, step-by-step:

1. The cost of Social Security is the cost of the benefits paid out, not the payroll taxes or borrowing required to finance those benefits. There are two basic issues: how much to pay in benefits and how to finance those benefits.

2. Assuming, for the moment, that benefits will be paid to future retirees (today’s workers) in accordance with the present formula for computing benefits — which today’s workers believe is a “promise” they have been made — something must “give” when payroll taxes no longer cover benefits.

3. No matter how you slice it, someone will pay for those future benefits. The question is: who and when? There are three conventional ways to do it:

• Raise future workers’ payroll taxes by enough to cover benefits.

• Borrow enough to cover benefits, thus shifting the immediate burden from future workers to willing lenders, who are also the “future generations” that “bear the burden” of the debt. The cost of borrowing (i.e., interest) raises the cost of the program a bit, but interest is also income to those who lend money to the government. In other words, borrowing — on balance — doesn’t create a burden, it merely shifts it, voluntarily. (Unless the Fed monetizes government deficits, which involuntarily shifts the burden by contributing to inflation.)

• Raise taxes and borrow, in combination.

4. There’s an “unconventional” way to deal with the Social Security deficit: Invest payroll taxes in real assets (i.e., stocks, corporate bonds, mortgage-backed securities). Why? Because money invested in real assets yields a real return that’s far higher than the phony “return” today’s workers will receive on their payroll taxes (a tax on future workers isn’t a real return on investment). There are three ways to “privatize” Social Security by investing in real assets:

• Abolish Social Security and make individuals responsible for their retirement (perhaps with a minimal “safety net” funded by general revenues).

• Let the government do it, through a “blind trust” run by an independent agency.

• Let individuals do it, through mandatory private accounts.

5. I assume that the first option is off the table, for now, even though Social Security (like so many other government programs and activities) is unconstitutional. Given the large sums of money involved, the second and third options would yield about the same result, on average. I’ll continue by outlining the third option, which is the proposal that drew the ire of E.J. Dionne and so many other anti-privatization leftists.

6. Workers would invest some (or all) of their payroll taxes in real assets (investments in the private sector). Those same workers would receive lower Social Security benefits when they retire. The precise tradeoff would depend on the age at which a worker opens a private account and how much the worker has already paid into Social Security. Workers who are over a certain age — say 50 or 55 — when privatization begins wouldn’t be allowed to drop out, but would receive the Social Security benefits they expect to receive.

That leads to a series of questions and answers:

• Q: What happens when the shift of payroll taxes to private accounts results in a deficit, that is, when payroll tax receipts are less than benefit payments? A: The government borrows to make up the difference, just as it does now but on a smaller scale.

• Q: What happens to the money invested in private accounts? A: It would belong to the workers who invested it. They’d receive smaller payments from “regular” Social Security, but those smaller payments would be more than made up for by the income they’d receive from their private accounts. (The mix of allowable investments would range from mostly stocks for younger workers to only investment-grade corporate bonds for older workers.)

• Q: When does it all end? A: It would depend on how much workers are allowed to invest in private accounts and how much those private accounts earn. If workers were allowed to invest all of their payroll taxes in private accounts, and if all workers elected to do so, Social Security — as we know it — would wither away. Every worker would have his or her own source of retirement income. That income would come from earnings on real assets, not from taxes paid by those who are then working. And that income would exceed what the retiree would have received in Social Security benefits — even for private accounts invested “safely” in investment-grade corporate bonds..

Nay-sayers like Dionne are simply unable to grasp the notion that by diverting payroll taxes to real investments, with real returns, no one would be made worse off, and many would be better off. They’re hung up on the borrowing that must take place in the initial stage of privatization, and they overlook the return on that borrowing, namely, higher income for future retirees and lower payroll taxes on future workers.

They also overlook (or fear) the fact that the money which flows to real investments wouldn’t flow to the U.S. Treasury. (Privatization should be privatization.) That change (amounting to trillions of dollars in lost government revenue) would make it harder for the government to do stupid things.

In sum, the privatization of Social Security, in whole or in part, would have five beneficial effects:

• Future retirees would be more self-sufficient, thus reducing the burden on future taxpayers.

• The economy would grow more rapidly because of the increase in investments in stocks, etc.

• Future taxpayers would therefore find it easier to bear the remaining burden of Social Security and other government programs.

• More Americans — perhaps the vast majority of them — would acquire a stake in a robust private sector.

• There would, accordingly, be less support for government programs and less money available to fund them.

CODA

Privatization is wishful thinking on my part. Timothy Taylor offers a more realistic view:

Congress is unlikely to take action before the Social Security funding crisis is upon us [around 2034]. After all, the previous time that the Social Security trust fund was about to run out of money, in the early 1980s, Congress waited until the last minute and then appointed a commission … to propose a solution. [Douglas] Arnold [in this book] points out that there are special rules in the federal budget process which require that any changes to Social Security will need to get 60 votes in the US Senate–that is, the changes cannot be made by a simple majority as part of the budget process. Thus, both parties will likely need to sign off.

When Congress decide[s] to show its bravery by appointing another commission in about 2034, what choices will at that point be on the table?

There is a subgroup in both parties that would like to make relatively substantive changes to Social Security. On the Republican side, there is a group that is eager to transform much or all of Social Security into a set of individual retirement accounts, where the federal government would top up the accounts for those with low incomes. For example, if a proposal along these lines had been implemented about 15 years ago, so that holders of these retirement accounts could have benefited from the long run-up in the stock market since about 2010, a lot of people would be feeling a lot better about their retirements just now. But individual accounts would also create a need for a snake’s nest of rules about how such accounts could be invested, if one could use them as collateral for loans, if people would be allowed to dip into them for “worthy” purposes like house down-payments or college tuition for their children or paying legal settlements–and so on and so on.

Most Democrats are resolutely against altering Social Security in this way, but a certain subset of Democrats would like to see the benefits of the system substantially expanded. Because Social Security payments are linked to the taxes a person (or a spouse) paid into a system during a working, those who didn’t pay much into the system can end up in deep poverty when they are older. Of course, when a system is already on a track for a financial crash, a substantial addition to the benefits it would pay out would make the financial crunch worse….

… What is likely to happen [when the trust fund is depleted around 2034]?

Well, it would presumably be political suicide for politicians if Social Security benefit rates declined. Thus, while one can imagine longer-term changes in benefits, like a slow phase-in of a later retirement age, or changes in the details of how benefits are calculated. Over a few decades, these can make a big difference. But in the moment of the crisis in 2034 it’s unlikely that current benefits will be cut in any meaningful way.

On the tax side, a number of current Republicans have staked out ground that they will not support an increase in payroll taxes. Again, one can imagine policies that might have the effect of a slow phase-in of higher taxes–say, increasing the income taxes that those with high incomes might pay on Social Security benefit–but in the moment of crisis in 2034, a jagged upward jump in taxes for the system also seems unlikely….

[A] plausible prediction for 2034 is that Social Security will be “fixed” by turning to general fund tax revenues–rather than the payroll tax–as a source of funding. I suspect this would be done with a lot of strong statements about how it was only a temporary change, but it’s the kind of temporary change that can easily become permanent. As Arnold points out, this outcome is plausible–and would also represent a major change to the operation of Social Security:

Policymakers have had good reasons for not using general funds to subsidize Social Security. President [Franklin]Roosevelt argued that a tight link between taxes and benefits served two important ends. It would protect Social Security from hostile actors — “No damn politician can ever scrap my Social Security program” — but it would also protect the program from unreasonable expansion. Legislators could not expand the program unless they were also willing to increase taxes.

This tight link has worked for nearly a century. The program’s detractors have never found a way to dismantle Social Security because workers earn their benefits by paying a dedicated tax [which was never invested and no longer covers their benefits]. But neither have the program’s champions been able to expand benefits since 1972 because legislators have been unwilling to increase taxes.

Everyone would be better off if Social Security were abolished and replaced by means-tested welfare and self-reliance. But that’s no longer the American way.

From ashes to ashes.

American Revolution — 1775-1783. The Colonies became sovereign States, bound by a compact (the Articles of Confederation) in which each State clearly retained its sovereignty. Those sovereign States, bound by a common language and culture, successfully banded together to defeat a stronger enemy.

Drafting and ratification of the U.S. Constitution — 1787-1790. The States, relying on the hopes of the Framers, entered into a compact which created a national government that, inevitably, would subsume the power and authority of the States.

Nullification Crisis — 1832-1833. An attempt by South Carolina to reject an unconstitutional act of Congress was stifled by a threat of military intervention by the national government. This set the stage for…

Civil War and Texas v. White — 1861-1865 and 1869. Regardless of the motivation for secession, the Southern States acted legally in seceding. Mr. Lincoln’s romantic (if not power-hungry) quest for perpetual union led not only to the bloodiest conflict ever likely to be fought on American soil, but may have deterred any future attempt to secede. The majority opinion in Texas v. White essentially ruled that might makes right when it converted a military victory into an (invalid) holding against the constitutionality of secession.

The assassination of William McKinley — 1901. This elevated Theodore Roosevelt to the presidency. Roosevelt’s extra-constitutional activism    became the exemplar for most of the presidents who followed him — especially (though not exclusively) the Democrats.

Ratification of the 16th and 17th Amendments to the Constitution, and creation of the Federal Reserve system — 1913. The amendments enabled the national income tax and wrested control of U.S. Senate seats from State legislatures, thus ensuring the aggrandizement of the national government and the subjugation of the States. The creation of the Fed gave the national government yet another tool for exercising central control of the economy — a tool that has often been used with disastrous results for Americans.

The stock-market crash of 1929. The Fed’s policies contributed to the crash and helped turn what would have been a transitory financial crisis into the Great Depression. This one-off series of events set the stage for an unprecedented power grab by the national government — the New Deal — which was aided by several spineless Supreme Court rulings. Thus empowered, the national government has spent most of the past 80 years enlarging on the New Deal, with additional help from the Supreme Court along the way.

The assassination of John F. Kennedy — 1963. This assassination, like that of McKinley, led to the elevation of a hyper-active politician whose twin legacies were the expansion of the New Deal and the eventual demise of the ultimate guarantee of America’s security: military supremacy and the will to use it. Kennedy’s assassination also marked a cultural turning point that I have addressed elsewhere.

The Vietnam War — 1965-1973. The Korean War was a warmup for this one. The losing strategy of gradualism, and a (predictable) loss dictated by the media and academe was followed, as day follows night, by a wave of unilateral disarmament. Reagan’s rearmament and a quick (but incomplete) victory in the Gulf War merely set the stage for the next wave of unilateral disarmament, which was reversed, briefly, by the shock of 9/11. The wars that followed in Iraq and Afghanistan were fought with the same vacillation and vituperation (from media and academe) as the Vietnam War. Unilateral disarmament continues, even as Russia and China become militarily stronger and bolder in their international gestures.

The demise of economic and social liberty in the United States — 1901 to the present (and beyond). This is the predictable result of the growth of the national government’s power. But that power, which is focused on the suppression of the American people, will matter not one whit when the U.S. is surrounded by and effectively dictated to by the great powers to its east and west.

As the world turns: from Colonies to colonies.

David Brooks misunderstands life.

This is the fifth in a series of recycled posts about David Brooks (mostly) and Bret Stephens (once), house “conservatives” at The New York Times. The original posts were published from 2009 through 2019. But I have detected no change in the dynamic duo’s faux conservatism since I stopped wasting pixels on them.

David Brooks evidently enjoys playing useful idiot to the left. His column “Baseball or Soccer?” is another case in point.Here are the opening paragraphs of Brooks’s blathering, accompanied by my comments (in boldface and bracketed):

Baseball is a team sport, but it is basically an accumulation of individual activities. [So is soccer, and so is any team sport. For example, the ball is kicked by only one member of a team, not by the team as a whole.] Throwing a strike, hitting a line drive or fielding a grounder is primarily an individual achievement. [This short list omits the many ways in which baseball involves teamwork; for example: every pitch involves coordination between pitcher and catcher, and fielders either position themselves according to the pitch that’s coming or are able to anticipate the likely direction of a batted ball; the double play is an excellent and more obvious example of teamwork; so is the pickoff play, from pitcher to baseman or catcher to baseman; the hit-and-run play is another obvious example of teamwork; on a fly to the outfield, where two fielders are in position to make the catch, the catch is made by the fielder in better position for a throw or with the better throwing arm.] The team that performs the most individual tasks well will probably win the game. [Teamwork consists of the performance of individual tasks, in soccer as well as in baseball.]

… Soccer, as Simon Critchley pointed out recently in The New York Review of Books, is a game about occupying and controlling space. [So is American football. And so what?] ….

As Critchley writes, “Soccer is a collective game, a team game, and everyone has to play the part which has been assigned to [him], which means [he has] to understand it spatially, positionally and intelligently and make it effective.” [Hmm… Sounds like every other team sport, except that none of them — soccer included, is “collective” .All of them — soccer included — involve cooperative endeavors of various kinds. The success of those cooperative endeavors depends very much on the skills that individuals bring to them. The real difference between soccer and baseball is that baseball demands a greater range of individual skills, and is played in such a way that some of those skills are on prominent display.] ….

Most of us spend our days thinking we are playing baseball, but we are really playing soccer. [To the extent that any of us think such things, those who think they are playing baseball, rather than soccer, are correct. See the preceding comment.]

At this point, Brooks shifts gears. I’ll quote some relevant passages, then comment at length:

We think we individually choose what career path to take, whom to socialize with, what views to hold. But, in fact, those decisions are shaped by the networks of people around us more than we dare recognize.

This influence happens through at least three avenues. First there is contagion. People absorb memes, ideas and behaviors from each other the way they catch a cold…. The overall environment influences what we think of as normal behavior without being much aware of it. Then there is the structure of your network. There is by now a vast body of research on how differently people behave depending on the structure of the social networks. People with vast numbers of acquaintances have more job opportunities than people with fewer but deeper friendships. Most organizations have structural holes, gaps between two departments or disciplines. If you happen to be in an undeveloped structural hole where you can link two departments, your career is likely to take off.

Innovation is hugely shaped by the structure of an industry at any moment. Individuals in Silicon Valley are creative now because of the fluid structure of failure and recovery….

Finally, there is the power of the extended mind. There is also a developed body of research on how much our very consciousness is shaped by the people around us. Let me simplify it with a classic observation: Each close friend you have brings out a version of yourself that you could not bring out on your own. When your close friend dies, you are not only losing the friend, you are losing the version of your personality that he or she elicited.

Brooks has gone from teamwork — which he gets wrong — to socialization and luck. As with Brooks’s (failed) baseball-soccer analogy, the point is to belittle individual effort by making it seem inconsequential, or less consequential than the “masses” believe it to be.

You may have noticed that Brooks is re-running Obama’s big lie: “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that.  Somebody else made that happen.” As I wrote here,

… Obama is trying, not so subtly, to denigrate those who are successful in business (e.g., Mitt Romney [his political opponent at the time]) and to make a case for redistributionism. The latter rests on Obama’s (barely concealed) premise that the fruits of a collective enterprise should be shared on some basis other than market valuations of individual contributions….

It is (or should be) obvious that Obama’s agenda is the advancement of collectivist statism. I will credit Obama for the sincerity of his belief in collectivist statism, but his sincerity only underscores and how dangerous he is….

Well, yes, everyone is strongly influenced by what has gone before, and by the social and economic milieu in which one finds oneself. Where does that leave us? Here:

• Social and economic milieu are products of individual acts, including acts that occur in the context of cooperative efforts.

• It is up to the individual to make the most (or least) of his social and economic inheritance and milieu.

• Those who make the most (or least) of their background and situation are rightly revered or despised for their individual efforts. Consider, for example, Washington and Lincoln, on the one hand, and Hitler and Stalin, on the other hand.

• Beneficial cooperation arises from the voluntary choices of individuals. Destructive “cooperation” (collectivism)  — the imposition of rules through superior force (usually government) — usually thwarts the individual initiative and ingenuity that underlie scientific and economic progress.

Brooks ends with this:

Once we acknowledge that, in life, we are playing soccer, not baseball, a few things become clear. First, awareness of the landscape of reality is the highest form of wisdom. It’s not raw computational power that matters most; it’s having a sensitive attunement to the widest environment, feeling where the flow of events is going. Genius is in practice perceiving more than the conscious reasoning. [A false distinction between baseball and soccer, followed by false dichotomies.]

Second, predictive models [of what?] will be less useful [than what?]. Baseball is wonderful for sabermetricians. In each at bat there is a limited [but huge] range of possible outcomes. Activities like soccer are not as easily renderable statistically, because the relevant spatial structures are harder to quantify. [B.S. “Sabermetrics” is coming to soccer.] Even the estimable statistician Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight gave Brazil a 65 percent chance of beating Germany. [An “estimable statistician” would know that such a statement is meaningless; see the discussion of probability here.]

Finally, Critchley notes that soccer is like a 90-minute anxiety dream — one of those frustrating dreams when you’re trying to get somewhere but something is always in the way. This is yet another way soccer is like life. [If you seek a metaphor for life, try blowing a fastball past a fastball hitter; try punching the ball to right when you’re behind in the count; try stealing second, only to have the batter walked intentionally; try to preserve your team’s win with a leaping catch and a throw to home plate; etc., etc., etc.]

The foregoing parade of non sequitur, psychobabble, and outright error simply proves that Brooks doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I hereby demote him from “useful idiot” to plain old “idiot”.

---

Other posts in this series:

• Columnist, Heal Thyself

• Our Miss Brooks

• Miss Brooks’s “Grand Bargain”

• David Brooks, Useful Idiot for the Left

Some commentary, my review, and a list of related posts.

I was reminded of my review of Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society by a post at the New Neo, “[Victor Davis Hanson] on Why the ‘Masses’ Detest the ‘Elites’”. It’s short, so I’ll simply reproduce it.

They have good reason:

…[T]here was a third catalyst that explained the mutual animosity in the pre-Trump years. The masses increasingly could not see any reason for elite status other than expertise in navigating the system for lucrative compensation.

In short, money and education certification were no longer synonymous with any sense of competency or expertise. Just the opposite often became true. Those who thought up some of the most destructive, crackpot, and dangerous policies in American history were precisely those who were degreed and well-off and careful to ensure they were never subject to the destructive consequences of their own pernicious ideologies.

Thomas Sowell wrote an entire book related to that topic quite some time ago, entitled Intellectuals and Society.

That led me to the archives of my old blog, where I searched on “Intellectuals and Society”. My review of the book popped up, and so did “‘Intellectuals and Society’ in Brief”, which appeared a year after my review. The writer whom I quote is far more scathing than VDH.

From Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog:

[I]t was one of Papa’s guests, at the dinner party yesterday, who said: “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach; those who can’t teach teach the teachers; and those who cant’ teach the teachers go into politics.”…

…What his sentence means isn’t that incompetent people have found their place in the sun, but that nothing is harder or more unfair than human reality: humans live in a world where it’s words and not deeds that have power, where the ultimate skill is mastery of language. This is a terrible thing because basically we are primates who’ve been programmed to eat, sleep, reproduce, conquer and make our territory safe, and the ones who are most gifted at that, the most animal types among us, always get screwed by the others, the fine talkers, despite these latter being incapable of defending their own garden or bringing a rabbit home for dinner or procreating properly. Humans live in a world where the weak are dominant. This is a terrible insult to our animal nature, a sort of perversion or a deep contradiction.

Finally, my long review of Sowell’s book. Because of its length, I won’t use block quotations. Here it is:

Thomas Sowell‘s Intellectuals and Society is a rewarding and annoying book.

The book is rewarding because it adds to the thick catalog of left-wing sins that Sowell has compiled and explicated in his long career as a public intellectual. When Sowell criticizes the anti-gun, soft-on-crime, peace-at-any-price, tax-spend-and-regulate crowd, he does it by rubbing their noses in the facts and figures about the messes that have been created by the policies they have promoted.

Having said that, I must also note the ways in which Intellectuals and Society annoys me, namely, that it is verbose and coy about the particular brand of intellectualism that it attacks.

VERBOSITY

Regarding verbosity, here is a randomly chosen example, from page 114:

Abstract people are above all equal, though flesh-and-blood people are remote from any such condition or ideal. Inequalities of income, power, prestige, health, and other things have long preoccupied intellectuals, both as things to explain and things to correct. The time and effort devoted to these inequalities might suggest that equality is so common or so automatic that its absence requires an explanation. Many intellectuals have approached equality in much the same spirit as Rousseau approached freedom: “Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.” To much of the modern intelligentsia, man is regarded as having been born equal but as having become mysteriously everywhere unequal.

Which means:

The notion of equality propounded by left-wing intellectuals bears no relation to the reality of the human condition. But the false ideal of equality enables leftists to advance the notion that disparities of income, power, prestige, and health (among other things) are injustices that call out for correction.

There are other ways of saying the same thing — all of them equally concise and therefore easier for the reader to grasp. Dozens, if not hundreds, of other passages in Intellectuals cry out for the same kind of ruthless editing. With that done, the book would be more compelling, because the facts and figures that make Sowell’s case against leftist intellectuals would stand out more sharply.

THE TRUE SUBJECTS OF THE BOOK

This brings me to the “intellectuals” who are the subject of the book. Sowell’s definition of intellectuals is so broad that it includes him and others of his ilk:

Here “intellectuals” refers to an occupational category, people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas — writers, academics, and the like. Most of us do not think of brain surgeons or engineers as intellectuals, despite the demanding mental training that each goes through, and virtually no one regards even the most brilliant and successful financial wizard as an intellectual.

At the core of the notion of an intellectual is the dealer in ideas, as such — not the personal application of ideas, as engineers apply complex scientific principles to create physical structures or mechanisms. A policy wonk whose work might be analogized as “social engineering,” will seldom personally administer the schemes that he or she creates or advocates. That is left to bureaucrats, politicians, social workers, the police or whoever else might be directly in charge of carry out the ideas of the policy wonk. (Intellectuals and Society, pp. 2-3)

Sowell’s definition encompasses thinkers who devoted much (or all) of their careers to combating the kinds of statist policies advanced by the left-wingers who are the real targets of Intellectuals and Soceity. Sowell even mentions two anti-statist intellectuals — Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman — in the first chapter of his book, in a context which suggests that they are among his targets. But Sowell later invokes Hayek, Friedman, and other conservative intellectuals as he confronts left-wing ideas and their consequences.

There can be no doubt that Sowell’s fire is directed at left-wing academicians and pundits — and their enablers in political-bureaucratic-media complex — for the many good reasons documented in the book. A truth-in-packaging law for book titles — a left-wing idea if ever there was one — would require the renaming of Intellectuals and Society to Left-Wing Intellectuals and the Dire Consequences of their Ideas.

My aim is not to quibble with Sowell’s title, but to lament his lack of clarity about which set of intellectuals he is attacking, and why that set of intellectuals deserves reproach, whereas Hayek, Friedman, and company do not. Surely the author of Intellectuals and Society — who is, by his own definition, an intellectual — does not mean to denigrate his decades of research and writing in the service of liberty. (This is not to say that conservatives and self-styled libertarians are above reproach; they are not, as I show elsewhere in this blog. But left-wing “intellectuals” deserve a special place in hell for their contributions to the destruction of the social fabric and demise of liberty, which Sowell so thoroughly documents.)

THE LEFT AND ITS ILLUSIONS

Now for the meat of Intellectuals and Society. And beneath an over-abundance of dressing, there is plenty of meat. Sowell draws on his own work and that of many distinguished philosophers and scholars as he puts the lie to left-wing ideas and policies. Thus we find the likes of Gary Becker, William F. Buckley Jr., Edmund Burke, Richard Epstein, Friedman, Hayek, Eric Hoffer, Paul Johnson, Jean-Francois Revel, Adam Smith, and James Q. Wilson pitted against left-wing stars of the past and present, including Louis D. Brandeis, Noam Chomsky, the Clintons, Herbert Croly, John Dewey, Walter Duranty, Ronald Dworkin, Paul Ehrlich, William Godwin, Edward Kennedy, Paul Krugman, Harold Laski, Roscoe Pound, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., George Bernard Shaw, the Webbs, and H.G. Wells.

Because of the timing of the book’s publication, Barack Obama makes only a cameo appearance as a senator who opposed the surge in Iraq:

[Obama] said in January 2007 that the impending surge was a “mistake that I and others will actively oppose in the days to come.” He called the projected surge a “reckless escalation,” and introduced legislation to begin removal of American troops from Iraq no later than May 1, 2007…. Another 20,000 troops [Obama said] “will not in any imaginable way be able to accomplish any new progress.” (p. 268)

Intellectuals and Society does not directly address the “highlights” of Obama’s presidency to date: “stimulus” spending, Obamacare, and new financial regulations. But they are merely new manifestations of old policies that — among others — the book amply discredits.

But I am getting ahead of myself. The hunt for left-wing error begins in earnest with “Knowledge and Notions”, Chapter 2 of Intellectuals and Society. There, Sowell highlights some leading tendencies of left-wingers. There are the experts in particular fields who act as if their expertise gives them license to expound on any and all subjects. Appositely, Sowell quotes Roy Harrod on John Maynard Keynes:

He held forth on a great range of topics, on some of which he was thoroughly expert, but on others of which he may have derived his views from the few pages of a book at which he had happened to glance. The air of authority was the same in both cases. (p. 12)

Sowell then turns to the matter of centralized, expert knowledge vs. decentralized knowledge, and how the former can never substitute for the latter when it comes to making personal and business decisions — left-wing dogma to the contrary. Here, Sowell echoes Hayek’s Nobel Prize lecture, “The Pretence of Knowledge.”

The final pages of Chapter 2 are devoted to a critique of rationalism. This is the habit of mind, usually found on the left, by which intellectuals superimpose their views of what “ought to be” on decades and centuries of human striving, and pronounce the results of that striving “irrational.” (A recent case in point is Judge Vaughn Walker’s fatuous decision in Perry v. Schwarzenegger.)

Chapter 4, which is out of place, continues in the same vein as Chapter 2. That is, it exposes more systemic errors of the left-wing view of the world. The sequence opens with a reprise of the theme of Sowell’s earlier book, A Conflict of Visions, which is followed by a departure from the studied neutrality of that book:

Th[e] vision of society … in which there are many “problems” to be “solved” by applying the ideas of morally anointed intellectual elites is by no means the only vision, however much that vision may be prevalent among today’s intellectuals. A conflicting vision has co-existed for centuries — a vision in which the inherent flaws of human beings are the fundamental problem and social contrivances are simply imperfect means of trying to cope with that problem…. (p. 77)

[That conflicting] vision is a sort of zero-based vision of the world and of human beings, taking none of the benefits of civilization for granted. It does not assume that we can begin with what we already have and simply tack on improvement, without being concerned at every step with whether these innovations jeopardize the very processes and principles on which our existing level of well-being rests…. Above all, it does not assume that untried theories stand on the same footing as institutions and practices whose very existence demonstrate their ability to survive in the world of reality…. (p. 79)

If you happen to believe in free markets, judicial restraint, traditional values and other features of the [constrained] vision, then you are just someone who believes in free markets, judicial restraint and traditional values. There is no personal exaltation resulting from those beliefs. But to be for “social justice” and “saving the environment,” or to be “anti-war” is more than just a set of beliefs about empirical facts. This [unconstrained] vision puts you on a higher moral plane as someone concerned and compassionate, someone who is for peace in the world, a defender of the downtrodden, and someone who wants to preserve the beauty of nature and save the planet from being polluted by others less caring. In short, one vision makes you somebody special and the other vision does not. These visions are not symmetrical…. (pp. 79-80)

That is to say, adherents of the constrained vision (conservatives) put great stock in what works, and change it only for the sake of improving it, and not for the sake of changing it because it doesn’t comport with their a priori views of how the world “ought to be”. By contrast, adherents of the unconstrained vision (the left) are wedded to the rhetoric of “ought to be” and its close relation, the Nirvana fallacy. They judge existing arrangements against unattainable standards of perfection (invented by themselves), and proclaim themselves to be on the side of all that is good. The adherents of the constrained vision point out, quite rightly, that the left’s proposals are inherently flawed because they fail to take into account the ways in which human nature produces unintended consequences.

Sowell has more to say about the unconstrained vision; briefly, it invents “rights” (to a “living wage”, “decent housing”, “affordable health care”, and so on) that cause “compassionate” politicians to impose obligations on third parties (i.e., hapless taxpayers). This legalized theft — for that is what it is — is committed with scant regard for the good that taxpayers would do with their own money; for example:

• Save it in the form of bank deposits, bonds, and stocks so that businesses may be formed, expand, and adopt more productive technology, thus creating jobs and fueling economic growth.

• Help private charities and members of their immediate families, who are no less worthy of such help than complete strangers (unless, of course, you are an omniscient leftist who thinks otherwise).

But such considerations are beneath the left, whose mission is to “do good”, and damn the consequences.

On that note, I return to Sowell’s dissection of left-wing rhetoric. Here are some other incisive passages from Chapters 4:

That some people [the left] should imagine that they are particularly in favor of progress is not only another example of self-flattery but also of an evasion of the work of trying to show, with evidence and analysis, where and why their particular proposed changes would produce better end results than other people’s proposed changes. Instead, [those other people] have been dismissed … as “apologists for the status quo.” (pp. 101-2)

If the real purpose of social crusades is to make the less fortunate better off, then the actual consequences of such policies as wage control become central and require investigation…. But if the real purpose of social crusades is to proclaim oneself to be on the side of the angels, then such investigations have a low priority…. The revealed preference of many, if not most, of the intelligentsia has been to be on the side of the angels. (pp. 104-5)

…William Godwin’s notion that the young “are a sort of raw material put into our hands” remains, after two centuries, a powerful temptation to classroom indoctrination in schools and colleges…. This indoctrination can start as early as elementary school, where students are encouraged or required to write about controversial issues…. More fundamentally, the indoctrination process habituates them to taking sides on weighty and complex issues after hearing just one side of those issues…. In colleges and universities, whole academic departments are devoted to particular prepackaged conclusions — whether on race, the environment or other subjects…. Few, if any, of these “studies” include conflicting visions and conflicting evidence, as educational rather than ideological criteria might require. (pp. 108-9)

While logic and evidence are ideal criteria for the work of intellectuals, there are many ways in which much of what is said and done by intellectuals has less to do with principles than with attitudes…. During the earlier [“progressive”] era [of the early 1900s], when farmers and workers were the special focus of solicitude, no one paid much attention to how what was done for the benefit of those groups might adversely affect minorities or others. Likewise, in a later era, little attention was paid by “progressive” intellectuals to how affirmative action for minorities or women might adversely affect others. There is no principle that accounts for such collective mood swings. There are simply reasons du jour, much like the adolescent fads that are compulsive badges of identity for a time and afterwards considered passé…. (pp. 110-12)

…Anyone who suggests that individuals — or worse yet, groups — are unequal is written off intellectually and denounced morally as biased and bigoted toward those considered less than equal. Yet the empirical case for equality ranges from feeble to non-existent…. Does anyone seriously believe that whites in general play professional basketball as well as blacks? [For readers new to Sowell: He is black.] How then can one explain the predominance of blacks in this lucrative occupation, which offers fame as well as fortune? For most of the period of black predominance in professional basketball, the owners of the teams have all been white, as have most of the coaches. Then by what mechanism could blacks have contrived to deny access to professional basketball to whites of equal ability in that sport? (p. 114)

Thus armed against the essential fallacies of left-wing intellectualism, the reader is treated to dissections of left-wing error with respect to economics (Chapter 3), the media and academia (Chapter 5), the law (Chapter 6), and war (Chapters 7 and 8).

THE LEFT AND ECONOMICS

Chapter 3 (“Intellectuals and Economics”) is a sustained litany of the left’s obdurate insistence on the truth of economic fallacies. If there were a Nobel Prize for Economic Illiteracy, it would be awarded to left-wing academics (some of them economists) and pundits, as a group.

One of the left’s favorite preoccupations is “income distribution”:

Although such discussions have been phrased in terms of people, the actual empirical evidence cited has been about what has been happening over time in statistical categories — and that turns out to be the direct opposite of what has happened over time to flesh-and-blood human beings…. [I]n terms of people, the incomes of those particular taxpayers who were in the bottom 20 percent in income in 1996 rose 91 percent by 2005, while the incomes of those particular taxpeayers who were in the top 20 percent in 1996 rose by only 10 percent by 2005 — and those in the top 5 percent and top one percent actually declined. (p. 37)

The left’s systematic misunderstanding of economics rises to astounding heights on many other issues:

• High interest rates — “immoral,” even though they reflect the risk of lending to borrowers who are likely to default.

• Capitalism — “exploitative,” even though it has brought workers to much higher standards of living than under socialism and communism.

• Competition — “chaotic,” because shallow thinkers cannot conceive of progress without central planning and control (though they are ready enough to concede man’s superior mental capacity to the chaotic thing known as evolution).

• Government intervention — “essential and beneficial,” despite generations of evidence to the contrary (which is ignored by wishful thinkers on the left).

• Business — “economically dominant,” despite the rise and fall of many a business empire, and the fact that business is at the mercy of consumers, not the other way around. (See “capitalism” and “competition.”)

• Recessions and depressions — “the result of capitalist excesses,” even though — normal business cycles aside, government intervention (so cherished by the left) has caused or exacerbated several recessions (including the present one) and the Great Depression.

(In the foregoing list, I have violated the letter, but not the spirit, of Sowell’s commentary on economic subjects.)

THE LEFT, THE MEDIA, AND ACADEMIA

The title of Chapter 5 is “Optional Reality in the Media and Academia”. The subtitle of the entire book could well have been “The Left and Optional Reality”, for in Chapter 5 and elsewhere Sowell exposes leftism and left-wing intellectuals as unconnected with reality. There is a preferred leftist version of the world — which changes from time to time and drags devoted leftists in its wake. From that preferred vision, leftists concoct their view of reality.

As Sowell reminds us in Chapter 5, the left’s concocted view of reality has included:

• air-brushing the brutality of totalitarian regimes then being held up as leftist ideals (e.g. the USSR, Communist China, Cuba)

• suppressing data that would show affirmative action to be counterproductive

• depicting gun ownership as an unmitigated evil

• trying to pin poverty among blacks on “racism,” when it predominates among the families of single, black mothers who have been lured into a cycle of dependency on welfare

• portraying homosexuals as “victims,” except when they happen to be priest of the despised Catholic religion

• giving publicity and credibility to trumped-up charges of rape and arson, when the victims are black or the alleged perpetrators are “privileged” whites

• exaggerating the incidence of poverty in the United States

• demonizing the left’s enemies by attributing to them evil deeds that they didn’t commit

• coining euphemisms to promote pet causes (e.g., bums as homeless persons, swamps as wetlands, trolleys as light rail, liberalism as progressivism)

• justifying all of the foregoing (and more) on the ground that truth is subjective

• portraying Americans as barbaric, in the face of true barbarism among cultures currently in favor with leftists

• exaggerating the importance of isolated events, for the sake of promoting the left’s agenda, while ignoring the great advances that have resulted from the hum-drum, daily work of millions of “average” Americans.

The point of all of this deception and self-deception is simple and straightforward: it is to make the case (first to oneself and then to the public) for the left’s vision of how the world should be run. In the left’s Alice-in-Wonderland world of reality, the vision precedes and shapes the facts, not the other way around.

THE LEFT AND THE LAW

Nowhere is the left’s upside-down world more evident than in the development and application of law, which is the subject of Chapter 6 (“Intellectuals and the Law”). As Sowell observes,

There can be no dependable framework of law where judges are free to impose as law their own individual notions of what is fair, compassionate or in accord with social justice. Whatever the merits or demerits of particular judges’ conceptions of these terms, they cannot be known in advance to others, or uniform from one judge to another, so that they re not law in the full sense of rules known in advance to those subject to those rules….

By the second half of the twentieth century, the view of law as something to be deliberately shaped according to the spirit of the times, as interpreted by intellectual elites, became more common in the leading law schools and among judges. Professor Ronald Dworkin of Oxford University epitomized this approach when he dismissed the systemic evolution of the law as a “silly faith,” — systemic processes being equated with chaos, as they have been among those who promoted central economic planning rather than the systemic interactions of markets. In both cases, the preference has been for an elite to impose its vision, overriding if necessary the views of the masses of their fellow citizens…. (pp. 157-160)

The left’s approach to the law is, in a word, rationalistic. That is, it would uproot tradition — which embodies the wisdom of experience — simply because it is tradition, and replace it with reductionist constructs that have been tested only in the minds of left-wing intellectuals. The left’s insight into human nature, and all that it entails, is profoundly shallow, to coin an apt oxymoron.

Sowell documents many of the ways in which the left has tortured the Constitution, so that it no longer serves its intended, minimalist role of preserving the liberty that had been won by the War of Independence. The story of how the Constitution — the supreme law of the land — became, in the hands of the left, a weapon in their war against liberty is too depressing (and long) to recount in detail. I will say, simply, that Sowell has the story down pat:

• disregard for the original meaning of the Constitution (and, thus, disregard for the rule of law)

• judicial interpretation of the Constitution in ways intended to reach outcomes favored by the left, even when those outcomes clearly ran contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution

• the expansion of the power of the federal government, in the service of those outcomes, to a point where there is nothing beyond its dictatorial reach, and no one is secure in the right to the peaceful enjoyment of life, liberty, and property.

It is not only that government now enjoys unlimited reach, but that it has failed in its duty to curb the reach of the predators among us:

As noted in Chapter 2, a retired New York police commissioner who tried to tell a gathering of judges of the dangerous potential of some of their rulings was literally laughed at by the judges and lawyers present. In short, theory trumped experience….

[A]fter many years of rising crime rates had built up sufficient public outrage to force a change in policy, rates of imprisonment rose — and crime rates began falling for the first time in years. [Leftist intellectuals] lamented the rising prison population in the country and, when they acknowledged the declining crime rate at all, confessed themselves baffled by it, as if it were a strange coincidence that crime was declining as more criminals were taken off the streets….

In light of the fact that a wholly disproportionate amount of crime is committed by a relatively small segment of the population, it is hardly surprising that putting a small fraction of the total population behind bars has led to substantial reductions in the crime rate….

…The very mention of “Victorian” ideas about society in general, or crime control in particular, is virtually guaranteed to evoke a sneer from the intelligentsia. The fact that the Victorian era was one of a decades-long decline in alcoholism, crime and social pathology in general … carries virtually no weight among the intelligentsia, and such facts remain largely unknown among those in the general public who depend on either the media or academia for information.

Thus are the wages of leftist idealism and the left’s rationalistic dismissal of traditional ways and mores.

THE LEFT AND WAR

Sowell rolls out the heavy guns in Chapter 7 (“Intellectuals and War”) and Chapter 8 (“Intellectuals and War: Repeating History”). A good way to summarize the lessons of these chapters is to say that the left’s attitudes toward war resemble the ebbing and flowing of an emotional tide. War is good, in the abstract, when it is a distant memory and the one in the offing presents an opportunity to “do good” — “the war to end all war” and all that.

Then comes a war and its aftermath, both of which are far messier than intellectuals had expected them to be, given that their minds run to abstraction. A reflexive anti-war posture then sets in, and becomes a sign of membership in the leftist coalition, much as a fraternity pin dangling from a watch chain used to be a sign of membership in this or that exclusive circle. Given the left’s dominance in the various mass media, anti-war propaganda soon dominates and colors the public’s view of war.

Anti-war sentiment — inflamed by the left — might have kept the U.S. out of WWII, with disastrous results, had it not been for the Hitler’s decision to attack the USSR  and Japan’s miscalculated attack on Pearl Harbor. The former event was more important to left than the latter, which caused non-intellectual isolationists to awaken from their slumber.

A generation later, anti-war propaganda disguised as journalism helped to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in Vietnam. What was shaping up as a successful military campaign collapsed under the weight of the media’s overwrought and erroneous depiction of the Tet offensive as a Vietcong victory, the bombing of North Vietnam as “barbaric” (where the Tet offensive was given a “heroic cast”), and the deaths of American soldiers as somehow “in vain”, though many more deaths a generation earlier had not been in vain. (What a difference there was between Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite and his sycophants.)

Were it not for the determined leadership of Ronald Reagan, the left’s anti-war and anti-preparedness rhetoric — combined with a generous dose of fear-mongering — would have derailed the defense buildup in the 1980s, to which the collapse of the Soviet Union should be attributed. The left, of course, refuses to go along with the truth, preferring instead to credit the feckless Mikhail Gorbachev.

Only the 9/11 attacks helped to reverse the Clinton defense build-down of the 1990s. It has often been said, and said truly, that Clinton balanced the budget on the back of defense. But the 9/11 attacks might not have occurred had it not been for the “wall” of separation between foreign intelligence and domestic law-enforcement that was erected and maintained under Clinton’s Justice Department.

Only the determined leadership of George W. Bush (say whatever else you want to about him) brought about a reversal of fortune in the Iraq war, over the vocal and obstructive voices of the left — among which one must number the person who occupied the White House at the time of this review.

Then there is the constant campaign of leaks — originated through leftist media outlets — that compromise defense plans, intelligence operations, and anti-terrorist activities. That campaign meshes well with the left’s resolute determination to treat terrorists as criminal suspects, even when they are able to evade civilian justice because the evidence against them is too sensitive to be divulged in civilian courts.

Members of the armed forces are useful to the media mainly as a weapon with which to beat the anti-war, anti-defense drum. Aside from the occasional token remembrance of their sacrifices, they are mainly portrayed by the media as “victims” (because of war wounds), suicidal (though less so than the population at large), and violent (though less so than civilians of the same demographic group).

The beat goes on, relentlessly. In the meantime, America’s enemies and potential enemies take heart.

Americans now face a far more serious budget-balancing exercise, as the nation’s tax-payers face the looming mountain of debt arising from the accrual of “commitments,” past and present known as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and their expansion through CHIP, the Medicare prescription drug program, and Obamacare. Instead of confronting the real problem, politicians will duck it — for a while — by cutting other programs and raising taxes. Defense will (and does) carry a disproportionate share of the burden.

Will the U.S. be prepared for the next Pearl Harbor, the one that is far more devastating than the 9/11 attacks? In light of history and the way in which politics is played, the answer is “no”. And the next time, the U.S. will not have months and years in which to mobilize for a counter-attack. The next time, the enemy — whoever it is — will strike directly at America’s energy, telecommunications, and transportation networks with devastating blows that cripple the economy and spread fear and chaos throughout the land. (Here, I should remind the left that a sudden defeat would deprive its members of the opportunity to do what they do well when their leaders signal approval of a war: writing propaganda pieces for the home front, making propaganda films (often thinly disguised as entertainment), and commandeering the economy to  plan wartime production, set price controls, and establishing ration quotas.)

Shouldn’t the nation be preparing assiduously against such a contingency, and spending what it takes to prevent it, to work around it, and to recover from it quickly? You would think so, but — thanks largely to the left-wing agenda of bread and circuses — the necessary steps will not be taken. And the left will be out in front of the opposition to preparedness, shouting that the nation cannot afford more defense spending when it faces critical social “obligations.”

On that note, I close this portion of the review with an apt quotation that I am fond of deploying:

It is customary in democratic countries to deplore expenditure on armaments as conflicting with the requirements of the social services. There is a tendency to forget that the most important social service that a government can do for its people is to keep them alive and free. (Marshall of the Royal Air Force Sir John Cotesworth Slessor, Strategy for the West, p. 75)

BAD IDEAS HAVE BAD CONSEQUENCES

The title of this final portion of a long review sums up the thesis of Intellectuals and Society. Sowell’s eponymous concluding Chapter 9 is not consistently on target, but it has its moments; for example:

The general public contributes to the income of intellectuals in a variety of ways involuntarily as taxpayers who support schools, colleges, and various other institutions and programs subsidizing intellectual and artistic endeavors. Other occupations requiring great mental ability — engineers, for example — have a vast spontaneous market for their end products…. But that is seldom true of people whose end products are ideas. There is neither a large nor a prominent role for them to play in society, unless they create it for themselves. (pp. 286-7)

*     *     *

While the British public did not follow the specific prescriptions of Bertrand Russell to disband British military forces on the eve of the Second World War, that is very different from saying that the steady drumbeat of anti-military preparedness rhetoric among the intelligentsia in general did not imped the buildup of a military deterrence or defense to offset Hitler’s rearming of Germany (p. 288)

In international issues of war and peace, the intelligentsia often say that war should be “a last resort.”… War should of course be “a last resort” — but last in terms of preference, rather than last in the sense of hoping against hope while dangers and provocations accumulate unanswered, while wishful thinking or illusory agreements substitute for serious military preparedness — or, if necessary, military action. As Franklin D. Roosevelt said in 1941, “if you hold your fire until you see the whites of his eyes, you will never know what hit you.” The repeated irresolution of France during the 1930s, and on into the period known as the “phony war” that ended in its sudden collapse in 1940, gave the world a painful example of how caution can be carried to the point where it becomes dangerous (pp. 289-90)

*     *     *

The period from the 1960s to the 1980s was perhaps the high tide of the influence of the intelligentsia in the United State. Though the ideas of the intelligentsia still remain the prevailing ideas, their overwhelming dominance ideologically has been reduced somewhat by counter-attacks from various quarters….

Nevertheless, any announcement of the demise of the [leftist intellectualism] would be very premature, if not sheer wishful thinking, in view of [its] continuing dominance … in the educational system, television and in motion pictures that deal with social or political issues. In short, the intellectuals’ vision of the world — as it is and as it should be — remains the dominant vision. Not since the days of the divine rights of kings has there been such a presumption of a right to direct others and constrain their decisions, largely through expanded powers of government. Everything from economic central planning to environmentalism epitomizes the belief that third parties know best and should be empowered to over-ride the decisions of others. This includes preventing children from growing up with the values taught them by their parent if more “advanced” values are preferred by those who teach in the schools and colleges. (pp. 291-92)

*     *     *

Unlike engineers, physicians, or scientists, the intelligentsia face no serious constraint or sanction based on empirical verification. NOne bould be sued for malpractice, for example, for having contributed to the hysteria over the insecticide DDT, which led to its banning in many countries around the world, costing the lives of literally millions of people through a resurgence of malaria. (pp. 296-7)

*     *     *

One of the things intellectuals have been doing for a long time is loosening the bonds that hold a society together. They have sought to replace the groups into which people have sorted themselves with groupings created and imposed by the intelligentsia. Ties of family, religion, and patriotism, for example, hav long been treated as suspect or detrimental by the intelligentsia, and new ties that intellectuals have created, such as class — and more recently “gender” — have been projected as either more real or more important. (p. 303)

*     *     *

Under the influence of the intelligentsia, we have become a society that rewards people with admiration for violating its own norms and for fragmenting that society into jarring segments. In addition to explicit  denigrations of their own society for its history or current shortcomings, intellectuals often set up standards for their society which no society of human beings has ever met or is ever likely to meet.

Calling those standards “social justice” enables intellectuals to engage in endless complaints about the particular ways in which society fails to meet their arbitrary criteria, along with a parade of groups entitled to a sense of grievance, exemplified in the “race, class and gender” formula…. (p. 305)

I remind you that Sowell (and I) are, in the main, talking about the left — especially its elites. These are the so-called intellectuals and technocrats who dominate the media, academia, left-wing think tanks, and the upper layers of government bureaucracies. The smugness, sameness, and other-worldliness of their views is depressingly predictable.

The left advances its agenda in many ways, for example, by demonizing its opponents as “mean” and even “fascistic” (look in the mirror, bub); appealing to envy (stuck on “soak the rich”, with the connivance of some of the guilt-ridden “rich”); sanctifying an ever-growing list of “victimized” groups (various protected “minorities”); and taking a slice at a time (e.g., Social Security set the stage for Medicare which set it for Obamacare).

The left’s essential agenda  is the repudiation of ordered liberty of the kind that arises from evolved social norms, and the replacement of that liberty by sugar-coated oppression. The bread and circuses of imperial Rome have nothing on Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, Obamacare, and the many other forms of personal and corporate welfare that are draining America of its wealth and élan. All of that “welfare” has been bought at the price of economic and social liberty (which are indivisible).

Leftists like to say that there is a difference between opposition and disloyalty. But, in the case of the left, opposition arises from a fundamental kind of disloyalty. For, at bottom, the left pursues its agenda because  it hates the idea of what America used to stand for: liberty with responsibility, strength against foreign and domestic enemies.

Most leftists are simply shallow-minded trend-followers, who believe in the power of government to do things that are “good”, “fair”, or “compassionate”, with no regard for the costs and consequences of those things. Shallow leftists know not what they do. But they do it. And their shallowness does not excuse them for having been accessories to the diminution of  America. A rabid dog may not know that it is rabid, but its bite is no less lethal for that.

The leaders of the left — the office-holders, pundits, and intelligentsia — usually pay lip-service to “goodness”, “fairness”, and “compassion”. But their lip-service fails to conceal their brutal betrayal of liberty. Their subtle and not-so-subtle treason is despicable almost beyond words. But not quite.

---

On that note, I draw your attention to some related posts at this blog:

• 1963: The Year Zero

• America’s Mega-Depression

• Analytical and Scientific Arrogance

• The Bad News about Economic Growth

• CO2 Fail

• Critical Race Theory: Where It Really Leads

• The Culture War

• How to View Defense Spending

• The Human Conceit

• Is Taxation Slavery?

• Is the Police State Here?

• Leftism as Crypto-Fascism

• Leftism in America

• The Left-”Libertarian” Axis

• “Liberalism” and Sovereignty

• Modeling Is Not Science

• Natural Rights, Liberty, the Golden Rule, and Leviathan

• On Liberty

• Open Borders?

• Peak Civilization

• Political Ideologies

• The Slippery Slope from Liberty to Tyranny

• Social Norms and Liberty

• What Happened to America?

• Where Will It All End?

• Where Will It All End?

• “White Privilege”

• Whither (Wither) America?

Lenin would have loved him.

This is the fourth in a series of recycled posts about David Brooks (mostly) and Bret Stephens (once), house “conservatives” at The New York Times. The original posts were published from 2009 through 2019. But I have detected no change in the dynamic duo’s faux conservatism since I stopped wasting pixels on them.

As it turns out, “useful idiot” didn’t originate with Lenin. Whatever the source, the term fits David Brooks to a T:

In political jargon, a useful idiot is a derogatory term for a person perceived as propagandizing for a cause without fully comprehending the cause’s goals, and who is cynically used by the cause’s leaders. The term was originally used during the Cold War to describe non-communists regarded as susceptible to communist propaganda and manipulation.

I offer here two examples of Brooks’s useful idiocy.

The first example is Brooks’s column, “The Role of Uncle Sam”, which I quote in relevant part:

[T]he federal [government’s] role [in the economy] has historically been sharply limited. The man who initiated that role, Alexander Hamilton, was a nationalist. His primary goal was to enhance national power and eminence, not to make individuals rich or equal….

But this Hamiltonian approach has been largely abandoned. The abandonment came in three phases. First, the progressive era. The progressives were right to increase regulations to protect workers and consumers. But the late progressives had excessive faith in the power of government planners to rationalize national life. This was antithetical to the Hamiltonian tradition, which was much more skeptical about how much we can know and much more respectful toward the complexity of the world.

Second, the New Deal. Franklin Roosevelt was right to energetically respond to the Depression. But the New Deal’s dictum — that people don’t eat in the long run; they eat every day — was eventually corrosive. Politicians since have paid less attention to long-term structures and more to how many jobs they “create” in a specific month. Americans have been corrupted by the allure of debt, sacrificing future development for the sake of present spending and tax cuts.

Third, the Great Society. Lyndon Johnson was right to use government to do more to protect Americans from the vicissitudes of capitalism. But he made a series of open-ended promises, especially on health care. He tried to bind voters to the Democratic Party with a web of middle-class subsidies.

In each case, a good impulse was taken to excess. A government that was energetic and limited was turned into one that is omnidirectional and fiscally unsustainable. A government that was trusted and oriented around long-term visions is now distrusted because it tries to pander to the voters’ every momentary desire. A government that devoted its resources toward future innovation and development now devotes its resources to health care for the middle-class elderly….

In his engrossing new book, “Our Divided Political Heart,” E.J. Dionne, my NPR pundit partner, argues that the Hamiltonian and Jacksonian traditions formed part of a balanced consensus, which has been destroyed by the radical individualists of today’s Republican Party. But that balanced governing philosophy was destroyed gradually over the 20th century, before the Tea Party was even in utero. As government excessively overreached, Republicans became excessively antigovernment.

We’re not going back to the 19th-century governing philosophy of Hamilton, Clay and Lincoln. But that tradition offers guidance. The question is not whether government is inherently good or evil, but what government does.

Brooks begins by assuming that the Hamiltonian approach to government is the correct one: An assertion that Madison and Jefferson would refute.

Beyond that, Brooks ignores the evidence of his own analysis, which is that each aggrandizement of governmental power (economic and social) — beginning with Hamilton’s nationalism — fostered subsequent expansions of governmental power. It is a combination of ratchet effects and slippery slopes. The status quo is a baseline from which retreat is nigh impossible because of vested interests; the only possible next step, therefore, is an expansion of government to serve the newest “compelling need.”

Dionne’s so-called consensus never was a consensus. Consider, for example, the relative narrowness of FDR’s and LBJ’s “mandates,” which were in fact  60-40 splits. The fact of the matter is that the rules of the political game — as they have evolved through utter disregard of the real Constitution and the wishes of large segments of the populace — simply have allowed the accretion of power in Washington, even when there has been a “consensus” to diminish that power. I am, of course, thinking of the election of presidents like Harding, Coolidge, and Reagan by margins as great as those bestowed on FDR and LBJ.

If “government excessively overreached” — as Brooks admits — how could it be that “Republicans became excessively antigovernment”? It would seem that their (largely imagined) excessiveness is necessary and proper.

Nor should the “antigovernment” label be allowed to pass without comment. There is a difference between being “antigovernment” (i.e., anarchistic) and “pro-limited-government” (i.e., Madisonian and Jeffersonian rather than Hamiltonian). The “antigovernment” label is a cynical libel routinely deployed by the forces of big government in an effort to discredit those who are bold enough to point out that the expansion of governmental power has undermined social comity and prosperity. (The most cynical of efforts to discredit the opponents of big government occurred in the aftermath of Timothy McVeigh’s atrocious act in Oklahoma City. McVeigh was an antigovernment terrorist. And so it became the theme-of-the-month among the NPR crowd that everyone who is for less government is “antigovernment” and, by extension, a kind of terrorist.)

Brooks wants a limited government, but only if it is limited to a Hamiltonian scope. But the instant that government is allowed to exceed its brief, as it was when Hamilton’s “nationalism” became the central government’s leitmotif, the proverbial genie comes out of the bottle. It can only be stuffed back into the bottle by getting government completely out of the business of trying (in any way) to help business (except to protect it from domestic and foreign predators, of course).

Markets respond quite nicely to real needs, thank you. On the other hand, powerful governments (Hamiltonian and worse) respond to the capricious and costly commands of those who govern.

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Now, for the second example.

In “Obama Rejects Obamaism”, Brooks writes:

When the president unveiled the second half of his stimulus it became clear that this package has nothing to do with helping people right away or averting a double dip. This is a campaign marker, not a jobs bill….

This wasn’t a speech to get something done. This was the sort of speech that sounded better when Ted Kennedy was delivering it. The result is that we will get neither short-term stimulus nor long-term debt reduction anytime soon, and I’m a sap for thinking it was possible.

Yes, I’m a sap. I believed Obama when he said he wanted to move beyond the stale ideological debates that have paralyzed this country. I always believe that Obama is on the verge of breaking out of the conventional categories and embracing one of the many bipartisan reform packages that are floating around….

Being a sap, I still believe that the president’s soul would like to do something about the country’s structural problems. I keep thinking he’s a few weeks away from proposing serious tax reform and entitlement reform. But each time he gets close, he rips the football away.

No s***, Sherlock. Being a bit smarter than Charlie Brown isn’t exactly a mark of distinction.

Welcome to the party David, even if it took you three years to get here.

Oh, but wait…

The White House has decided to wage the campaign as fighting liberals. I guess I understand the choice, but I still believe in the governing style Obama talked about in 2008. I may be the last one. I’m a sap.

Fool David once, Obama’s to blame. Fool David twice, David’s to blame. Fool David thrice (at least), and you know that David’s no sap — he’s a useful idiot.

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Other posts in the series:

• Columnist, Heal Thyself

• Our Miss Brooks

• Miss Brooks’s “Grand Bargain”

• Baseball or Soccer?

I’ve got ’em (“liberals”) on my list.

The idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone,
All centuries but this and every country but his own. — W.S. Gilbert, The Mikado

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Don Boudreaux of Cafe Hayek writes about liberalism:

One of the great tenets of liberalism — the true sort of liberalism, not the dirigiste ignorance that today, in English-speaking countries, flatters itself unjustifiably with that term — is that no human being is less worthy just because he or she is outside of a particular group. Any randomly chosen stranger from Cairo or Cancun has as much claim on my sympathies and my respect and my regard as does any randomly chosen person from Charlottesville or Chicago.

Boudreaux is correct in saying that what is now called “liberalism” is not liberalism; it is a virulent strain of statism. Boudreaux’s strain of old-fashioned or “classical” liberalism is nowadays called libertarianism. But Boudreaux is one of those holdouts who insists that he is a liberal. There is much error in libertarianism but it is on the side of the angels by comparison with the modern, left-statist jumble of dogmas that goes by the names “liberalism” and “progressivism”.

Returning to Boudreaux’s post: He also states a (truly) liberal value, namely, that respect for others should not depend on where they happen to live. But it is prudent to put more trust in those who have proven their affection and support for you, than it is to trust those not-so-close to you — whether they live next door, in the inner city, or in Timbuktu.

And that is where Boudreaux, most self-styled libertarians, and all pacifists go off the rails. As Boudreaux says later in the same post:

[L]iberalism rejects the notion that there is anything much special or compelling about political relationships. It is tribalistic, atavistic, to regard those who look more like you to be more worthy of your regard than are those who look less like you. It is tribalistic, atavistic, to regard those who speak your native tongue to be more worthy of your affection and concern than are those whose native tongues differ from yours.

For the true liberal, the human race is the human race.  The struggle is to cast off as much as possible primitive sentiments about “us” being different from “them.”

The problem with such sentiments is the implication that we have nothing more to fear from people of foreign lands than we have to fear from our own friends and neighbors. Yet, as Boudreaux himself acknowledges,

[t]he liberal is fully aware that such sentiments [about “us” being different from “them”] are rooted in humans’ evolved psychology, and so are not easily cast off.  But the liberal does his or her best to rise above those atavistic sentiments,

Yes, the Boudreaux-like liberal does strive to rise above such sentiments, but not everyone else makes the same effort, as Boudreaux admits. Therein lies the problem.

Americans, as a mostly undifferentiated mass (the “woke” excepted), are disdained and hated by many foreigners. (Aside: Conservative Americans, whether “deplorable” or not, are hated as a mostly undifferentiated mass by leftists, who are extreme tribalists.) The disdain and hatred arise from a variety of sources, ranging from pseudo-intellectual snobbery to nationalistic rivalry to anti-Western fanaticism.

Leftists like to deploy the slogan “We’re all in this together” to justify their economically and socially destructive schemes. But when it comes to defense against foreign aggression — to which leftists are either indifferent or opposed — Americans truly are “all in this together”.

The Framers of the Constitution, being both smart and realistic, “did ordain and establish” a new form of government “in Order to . . . provide for the common defence” (and a few other things). That is to say, the Framers recognized the importance of establishing the United States as a sovereign state for limited and specified purposes, while preserving the sovereignty of the several States and their inhabitants for all other purposes.

If Americans do not mutually defend themselves through the sovereign state which was established for that purpose, who will do so? That is the question which liberals (both true and false) often fail to ask. Instead, they tend to propound internationalism for its own sake. It is a mindless internationalism, one that disdains America’s sovereignty and the defense thereof.

One manifestation of mindless internationalism is “transnationalism”:

“Transnationalism” challenges the traditional American understanding that (in the summary, which I slightly adapt, of Duke law professor Curtis A. Bradley) “international and domestic law are distinct, [the United States] determines for itself [through its political branches] when and to what extent international law is incorporated into its legal system, and the status of international law in the domestic system is determined by domestic law.”Transnationalists aim in particular to use American courts to import international law to override the policies adopted through the processes of representative government. [Ed Whelan, “Harold Koh’s Transnationalism“, National Review (The Corner), April 6, 2009]

Mindless internationalism equates sovereignty with  jingoism, protectionism, militarism, and other deplorable “isms”. It ignores or denies the hard reality that Americans and their legitimate overseas interests are threatened by nationalistic rivalries and anti-Western fanaticism. “Transnationalism” is just a “soft” form of aggression; it would erode American values from the inside out, though American leftists hardly need any help from their foreign allies.

In the real world of powerful international rivals and determined, resourceful fanatics, the benefits afforded Americans by our (somewhat eroded) constitutional contract — most notably the enjoyment of civil liberties, the blessings of  free markets, and the protection of a common defense — are inseparable from and dependent upon the sovereignty of the United States.  To cede that sovereignty for the sake of mindless internationalism is to risk the complete loss of the benefits promised by the Constitution.

Excuses, excuses.

I won’t repeat very much of what is found in these two articles about so-called white privilege. They almost adequately address the phenomenon of superior life outcomes, on average, among whites relative to blacks. What are the causes, according to the writers? This is from the second article:

Geographic determinism, personal responsibility, family structure, and culture work [together] to explain differences in outcomes. Recall Raj Chetty, whose research found a correlation between neighbourhoods and economic mobility. His study turned up only one other local characteristic that rivalled social capital in boosting social mobility: two-parent households. However, it isn’t enough just to live in a two-parent household. If you grow up amid intact families, the American Dream is alive and well. Indeed, the proliferation of intact families in a neighbourhood serves to increase social capital.

Furthermore, the social capital which underpins geographic determinism is ultimately a consequence of the culture of a neighbourhood. These values influence the decisions made by those living in the neighbourhood. These decisions then feed into family structure, ultimately reinforcing the neighbourhood’s culture while preserving social capital.

All of this is to say, each of these factors are connected. On their own, they can only explain part of why group outcomes differ. But together, they paint a clearer picture than the one drawn by the adherents of white privilege.

These factors are less thrilling than blaming a specific racial group. If we want to feel the satisfaction of directing blame while enhancing in-group solidarity, then invoking white privilege is not a bad strategy. “White privilege” gives you a simple answer and a clear enemy. But if we truly want to understand and mitigate group differences, then taking a closer look at the data is a far better approach.

Here and throughout the two articles, however, the writers fail to name and discuss the basic determinant of differential outcomes between blacks and whites, on average. It is the crucial determinant which underlies those that they list. That determinant, of course, is the wide and persistent white-black intelligence gap.

Greater intelligence means, among many things, higher income (and thus the ability to accumulate greater wealth), a willingness to defer gratification and to strive toward long-term objectives (by saving and acquiring education, for example), and a less-violent disposition (and thus a lower propensity to commit crimes that result in long-term incarceration, sustained loss of income, and family dissolution).

The intelligence gap can be called a privilege only if the superior ability of blacks, on average, to jump higher and sprint faster than whites can be called a privilege. I am waiting in vain to hear about black-athletic privilege, which has produced a multitude of black multi-millionaires. (I am also waiting in vain to hear about Askhkenazi Jew privilege and East Asian privilege, inasmuch as members of both groups, on average, are more intelligent and thus, on average, more highly compensated than non-Ashkenazi whites.)

An essential fact of life is that every human being is unique in his set of physical and mental endowments. It is a matter of personal responsibility to make the most of one’s endowments. Blaming one’s failures on others may, somehow, be satisfying (though it has never been my style). And it may even result in the tearing down of others (e.g., affirmative action, which has penalized millions of better-qualified whites; a massive tax burden, borne disproportionately by whites, to support mostly futile attempts to lift up blacks through welfare, preferences for minority business owners and borrowers, Head Start, etc.).

But the effect of such schemes has been to harm blacks in many ways; for example, by depriving them of jobs that might have been created for them with wasted tax dollars, by putting them in jobs and college majors that they couldn’t handle, and by teaching them personal irresponsibility. Those are the wages of “black privilege”, which actually exists.

Weeping Willie tells it like it wasn’t.

Once upon a time, The New York Times has published a review of Bill Clinton’s memoir, My Life. Should discerning readers have swallowed Weeping Willie’s barrage of self-serving takes on his presidency?

Let’s start with the Jones case, which led to Clinton’s impeachment. According to the reviewer, Clinton

takes the whip to [among others] the Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously in 1997 that Paula Jones’s sexual harassment case against him could go forward while he was in office. He called that one of the most politically naive and damaging court decisions in years.

Of course, he would place himself above the course of justice. You know, the person who holds the presidency is only holding a job temporarily. He’s not indispensible; in fact, he’s rather easily replaced. It was Clinton’s fault that he was sued for sexual harassment. If he couldn’t defend the suit and do his job at the same time, he had two options: resign the presidency or step down temporarily under the provisions of Amendment XXV of the Constitution.

Then there’s this compelling bit about terrorism:

Mr. Clinton defends his record on terrorism, arguing that he pressed the allies for more of a focus on counterterrorism and citing speeches in which he called terror “the enemy of our generation.”

He also notes that in 1996 he signed two directives on terrorism and appointed Richard A. Clarke to be the administration’s terrorism coordinator.

That’s telling ’em, boy. But I guess bin Laden wasn’t listening to Bill’s speeches or reading his directives. Osama damn sure wasn’t impressed by Dick Clarke.

Whitewater? Oh, that:

[Clinton] explained the sudden appearance of Mrs. Clinton’s legal billing records in the White House residence as the product merely of sloppy record-keeping in Arkansas.

Huh?

Finally, we come to the “new, new, new” Clinton:

Mr. Clinton closes the book with a short meditation on the lessons he has learned about accepting personal responsibility, letting go of anger and granting forgiveness. He said that in the many black churches he had visited he had heard funerals referred to as “homegoings.”

“We’re all going home,” he wrote, “and I want to be ready.”

Well, he ain’t ready yet, as these snippets from the review attest:

[the] autobiography … is by turns painfully candid about his personal flaws and gleefully vindictive about what he calls the hypocrisy of his enemies…. The book’s length gives the former president plenty of room to settle scores, and he does so with his customary elan…. He reserved special venom for Kenneth W. Starr….

Of course he did. Starr’s determined effort to uphold the rule of law finally resulted in a small measure of justice when Clinton was disbarred by the State of Arkansas and the U.S. Supreme Court. Such was Clinton’s “legacy” in 2004.

Fast forward to recent years, when stories began to emerge about Clinton’s post-presidential flights on Jeffrey Epstein’s “Lolita Express” personal jet. There are a lot of stories (and photos) out there. This one is especially tantalizing, inasmuch as it includes a photo of Clinton having his neck massaged by Epstein’s principal accuser.

Some legacy.

How to give away the farm on health care.

This is the third in a series of recycled posts about David Brooks (mostly) and Bret Stephens (once), house “conservatives” at The New York Times. The original posts were published from 2009 through 2019. But I have detected no change in the dynamic duo’s faux conservatism since I stopped wasting pixels on them.

Back in 2011, during an impasse in Congress about government spending on health care, the useful idiot known as David Brooks — The New York Times‘s idea of a conservative — wrote this:

Imagine you’re a member of Congress. You have your own preferred way to reduce debt. If you’re a Democrat, it probably involves protecting Medicare and raising taxes. If you’re a Republican, it probably involves cutting spending, reforming Medicare and keeping taxes low.

Your plan is going nowhere. There just aren’t the votes. Meanwhile, the debt ceiling is fast approaching and a national catastrophe could be just weeks away.

At the last minute, two bipartisan approaches heave into view. In the Senate, the “Gang of Six” produces one Grand Bargain. Meanwhile, President Obama and John Boehner, the House speaker, have been quietly working on another. They suddenly seem close to a deal.

There’s a lot you don’t know about these two Grand Bargains….

You are being asked to support a foggy approach, not a specific plan. You are being asked to do this even though you have no faith in the other party and limited faith in the leadership of your own. You are being asked to risk your political life for an approach that bears little resemblance to what you would ideally prefer.

Do you do this? I think you do….

You do it because while the Grand Bargains won’t solve most of our fiscal problems. They will produce some incremental progress. We won’t fundamentally address the debt until we control health care inflation….

Both Grand Bargains produce real fiscal progress. They aim for $3 trillion or $4 trillion in debt reduction. Boehner and Obama have talked about raising the Medicare eligibility age and reducing Social Security benefit increases. The White House is offering big cuts in exchange for some revenue increases, or small cuts in exchange for few or none. The Gang of Six has a less-compelling blend of cuts, but it would repeal the Class Act, a health care Ponzi scheme. It would force committees across Congress to cut spending, and it would introduce an enforcement mechanism if they don’t. Sure there’s chicanery, but compared with any recent real-life budget, from Republican or Democratic administrations, these approaches are models of fiscal rectitude.

You do it because both bargains would boost growth. The tax code really is a travesty and a drag on the country’s economic dynamism. Any serious effort to simplify the code, strip out tax expenditures and reduce rates would have significant positive effects — even if it raised some tax revenues along the way….

Miss Brooks, as usual, was full of hot air.

First, no “grand bargain” in Congress ever leads to an actual spending reduction, as opposed to cutting the rate of growth in government spending.

Second, with respect to “health care inflation”, government is the problem, not the solution. There are two key reasons for rising health-care prices, aside from research and innovation that yields expensive but effective drugs, procedures, and equipment. They are (a) the tax break that enables employers to subsidize employees’ health plans and (b) the subsidization of old folks’ health care via Medicare, Medicaid, and (indirectly) Social Security. Those two interventions result in the overuse of health-care products and services. (There’s a 25-year old but still valid RAND study on the subject.) A far better system — if one insists on government involvement — would be to provide means-tested vouchers that can be redeemed for a  limited menu of vital medical products and services (e.g., critical surgeries, cardiovascular medications, chemotherapy). That’s it — no more Medicare, Medicaid, or their expansion via Obamacare.

Second, with respect to “tax expenditures” — there ain’t no such thing. Any action that results in higher taxes is a tax increase, no matter what Miss Brooks and his fellow Democrats choose to call it. And tax increases are growth inhibitors, not growth stimulators.

So much for the wisdom of The New York Times‘s pet “conservative”.

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Other posts in this series:

• Columnist, Heal Thyself

• Our Miss Brooks

• David Brooks, Useful Idiot for the Left

• Baseball or Soccer?

Politicians memoirs as sleep aids.

It was expected that Richard Nixon would rake in millions for his printed and televised memoirs. Mr. Nixon wanted the government to turn over the documents he compiled while an employee of the taxpayers, so that he could refer to them in writing his memoirs.

Henry Kissinger wanted the same deal. In fact, it was reported that he removed from the State Department the stenographic records of thousands of phone conversations he had while Secretary of State. Dr. K. claimed that those were personal documents. If that’s so, he should have refunded a good chunk of his government salary, to compensate taxpayers for the thousands of hours that he spent on personal phone calls.

There’s something to be said for allowing ex-presidents and other high officials access to their records so that they can tell us how great they were: Memoirs are a boon to insomniacs. Sleeping-pill manufacturers should have sued Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, and many others of their ilk for unfair competition. (JFK’s memoir wouldn’t have been soporofic, regardless of who wrote it for him.)

Many Americans were eager to read Nixon’s version of his presidency. I was among them, mainly because I wanted to see if Nixon would say that he was Deep Throat*. I’m serious. Can you recall another politician who reveled in misery like Mr. Nixon? Remember the “Checkers speech“; the 1960 election that Nixon lost to JFK, but probably could have won by contesting the Illinois results (enough votes turned up in Chicago to swing the outcome)**; the lashing-out at the press after losing the California governor’s race in 1962; and the sweaty, lying performance during the Watergate affair. Why couldn’t the person who as a boy signed a letter to his mother “Your good dog, Richard” have become a man who satisfied his need to grovel by blowing the whistle on himself?

Gerald Ford also wrote a memoir. (Buy it and throw away your Sominex.) Jerry would have been a good guy to have a beer with. I even voted for him. But I draw the line at self-inflicted boredom. Rather than read Ford’s memoir, I would watch grass grow.

As for Kissinger’s version of events, one should keep in mind Voltaire’s remark that “History is the lie agreed upon.”

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* In 2003, long after I published the original piece on which from which this post is drawn, Deep Throat was revealed as Mark Felt, then Deputy Director of the FBI. In 1972, following the break-in by White House operatives at Democrat headquarters in the Watergate Hotel and Office Building on Virginia Avenue in Washington, D.C. Felt fed inside information to Bob Woodward, who with Carl Bernstein wrote the series of articles in The Washington Post that led to congressional hearings into the Watergate affair, and Nixon’s eventual resignation on August 9, 1974. Felt’s secret meetings with Bob Woodward were held in the parking garage of an office building at 1401 Wilson Boulevard in Arlington, Virginia. At the time, I worked at 1401 Wilson Boulevard.

** In fact, even if Nixon had won Illinois, JFK would still have led Nixon in electoral votes: 276-246. Another 15 electoral votes were cast for Senator Harry Byrd by Virginia’s electors. Even if those electors had switched to Nixon, the tally would have been 276-261. It’s possible that if Nixon had won Illinois, enough Kennedy voters in the West would have stayed home to swing New Mexico or Nevada to Nixon. Kennedy won both States narrowly, and a Nixon victory in either State, coupled with a win in Illinois, would have made him the winner. Maybe.

The Google paradigm.

Do you remember James Damore. He was the author of the now-notorious 10-page memo about Google’s ideological echo chamber — a memo that got him fired.

The point of the memo is the bias inherent in Google’s diversity policies, which ignore some basic (and well-known) facts about differences in men’s and women’s brains, bodies, and interests. Google fired Damore for “perpetuating stereotypes”, when it is Google that perpetuates anti-factual stereotypes.

I am writing about Google’s firing of Damore for daring to speak the truth because it is of a piece with the left’s political modus operandi:

• Fixate on an objective, regardless of its lack of feasibility (e.g. proportional representation of various demographic groups — but not Asians or Jews — in STEM fields), lack of validity (e.g., the demonstrated inaccuracy of climate models that lean heavily on the effects of atmospheric CO2); or consequences (e.g., high failure rates among under-qualified “minorities”, lower standards that affect the quality of output and even endanger lives, the futile use of expensive “renewable” energy sources in place of carbon-based fuels).

• Insist that attainment of the objective will advance liberty, equality, fraternity, or prosperity.

• Demand punishment for those who question the objective, thereby suppressing liberty; fostering false equality; engendering resentments that undermine fraternity; and diminishing prosperity.

What happened to James Damore is what happens where leftists control the machinery of the state. (Be mindful that Hitler was a leftist, as I explain and document in “Leftism in America“.) I turn to Jean-François Revel’s Last Exit to Utopia: The Survival of Socialism in a Post-Soviet Era, with the proviso that his references to communism and socialism apply equally to leftism generally, whether it is called progressivism, liberalism, or liberal democracy:

[T]he abominations of actual socialism are characterized as deviations, or treasonous perversions of “true” Communism….

But this account of redemption through good intentions is undermined by an impartial and, above all, comprehensive exploration of socialist literature. Already among the most authentic sources of socialist thought, among the earliest doctrinarians, are found justifications for ethnic cleansing and genocide, along with the totalitarian state, all of which were held up as legitimate and even necessary weapons for the success and preservation of the revolution….

What all totalitarian regimes have in common is that they are “ideocracies”: dictatorships of ideas…. [T]he rulers, convinced that they possess the absolute truth and are guiding the course of history for all humanity, believe they have the right to destroy dissidents (real or potential), races, classes, professional or cultural categories — anyone and everyone they see as obstacles, or capable one day of being obstacles, to the supreme design….

… [Ideocracy] strives to suppress — and it must in order to survive — all thinking that is opposed to or outside the official party line, not only in politics and economics, but in every domain: philosophy, arts and literature, and even science.[pp. 94-100, passim]

The left’s supreme design includes the suppression of straight, white males who aren’t leftists; the elevation of females, blacks, Hispanics, other persons of color (but not Asians), and gender-confused persons, regardless of their inherent or actual abilities; the suppression of statements by anyone who questions the foregoing orthodoxies; the extinction of property and associative rights; and dirigisme on a scale that would be the envy of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao — despite its demonstrably destructive effects.

Enthralled by big, burly government.

This is the second in a series of recycled posts about David Brooks (mostly) and Bret Stephens (once), house “conservatives” at The New York Times. The original posts were published from 2009 through 2019. But I have detected no change in the dynamic duo’s faux conservatism since I stopped wasting pixels on them.

Some time back, lawprof bloggerTom Smith referred to the NYT columnist and pseudo-conservative David Brooks as “prissy little Miss Brooks”. (This was perhaps a reference to a classic radio and TV show about a teacher who had more cojones than David Brooks.)

Miss Brooks cringed when she contemplated an America without government, in the aftermath of a victorious Tea Party movement. Miss Brooks, it seems, is besotted with the manliness of limited-but-energetic governments

that used aggressive [emphasis added] federal power to promote growth and social mobility. George Washington used industrial policy, trade policy and federal research dollars to build a manufacturing economy alongside the agricultural one. The Whig Party used federal dollars to promote a development project called the American System.

Abraham Lincoln supported state-sponsored banks to encourage development, lavish infrastructure projects, increased spending on public education. Franklin Roosevelt provided basic security so people were freer to move and dare. The Republican sponsors of welfare reform increased regulations and government spending — demanding work in exchange for dollars.

Throughout American history, in other words, there have been leaders who regarded government like fire — a useful tool when used judiciously and a dangerous menace when it gets out of control. They didn’t build their political philosophy on whether government was big or not. Government is a means, not an end. They built their philosophy on making America virtuous, dynamic and great. They supported government action when it furthered those ends and opposed it when it didn’t.

I am surprised that Miss Brooks was able to recover from her swoon and finish writing the column in question. I am less surprised that Miss Brooks omitted to mention Thomas “Louisiana Purchase” Jefferson and Theodore “I Can Do Whatever I Please” Roosevelt, given that Jefferson was an effete Francophile and Roosevelt was a squeaky-voiced nutcase.

Other than that, there are only two problems with Brooks’s prescription for beneficent government: The first is the impossibility of electing only those leaders who know how to use government power judiciously. The second problem is the assumption that the things wrought by Washington, Lincoln, et al. were judicious uses of government power.

As to the first problem, all I can do is note the number of times that a majority of Americans has been convinced of the goodness of a candidate, only to be disappointed — when not outraged — by his performance in office. Take LBJ, Nixon, Carter, G.H.W. Bush, Clinton, G.W. Bush, Obama, and Biden — please take them! — not to mention myriad Congress-critters and State and local office-holders.

The second problem is a problem for reasons that are evidently beyond Miss Brooks’s comprehension:

• Government action isn’t cost-less. It absorbs resources that the private sector could have put to use.

• Government officials, despite their (occasional) great deeds, are not gifted with superior knowledge about how to put those resources to use.

• Private firms — when not shielded from competition and failure by governments — put resources to uses that satisfy the actual needs of consumers, as opposed to the whims (however high-minded) of politicians.

• Private firms — when not shielded from competition and failure by government — use resources more efficiently than government.

In short, Miss Brooks, Washington may have been a great man for having led a rag-tag army to victory over the British, and Lincoln may have been a great man for having waged war on an independent nation and (incidentally) freeing slaves, but neither man — and certainly no other man or collection of men exercising the arbitrary power of government — was or ever will be equal to the task of simulating the irreproducibly complex set of signals and decisions that are embedded in free markets.

In the end, Miss Brooks works herself into hysterics at the prospect of less government:

The social fabric is fraying. Human capital is being squandered. Society is segmenting. The labor markets are ill. Wages are lagging. Inequality is increasing. The nation is overconsuming and underinnovating. China and India are surging. Not all of these challenges can be addressed by the spontaneous healing powers of the market.

The social fabric is fraying precisely because government has pushed social institutions aside and made millions of Americans its dependents. Society is segmenting for the same reason, and also because millions of Americans are fed up with government and its dominance of their lives. Labor markets are ill because of various government actions that have throttled economic growth. The nation is overconsuming (i.e., underinvesting) and underinnovating because of the aforesaid government-caused economic malaise. That China and India are surging economically isn’t the real problem; the real problem is that they are also emboldened militarily because of feckless presidents since Ronald Reagan (Donald Trump excepted).

None of these “challenges” would be challenges were it not for governmental interference in private social institutions and markets. As Ronald Reagan said in his first inaugural address, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Amen.

So, Miss Brooks, I advise you to take two Valium and read Friedrich Hayek’s Nobel Prize lecture, “The Pretence of Knowledge”. Then pass it on to your politician friends.

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Other posts in this series:

• Columnist, Heal Thyself

• Miss Brooks’s “Grand Bargain”

• David Brooks, Useful Idiot for the Left

• Baseball or Soccer?

David Brooks misunderstands economics.

This is the first in a series of recycled posts about David Brooks (mostly) and Bret Stephens (once), house “conservatives” at The New York Times. The original posts were published from 2009 through 2019. But I have detected no change in the dynamic duo’s faux conservatism since I stopped wasting pixels on them.

David Brooks’s column, “The Protocol Society,” is a typical Brooksian muddle in which Brooks attributes evolutionary changes in economic behavior to the “discoveries” of contemporary economists.

Despite Brooks, there is nothing new (of value) under the sun of economic analysis. The practitioners of today who draw on sociology and psychology are simply returning to the roots of economics — the description of human behavior — which can be found in Adam Smith and his successors, well into the 20th century. This “old school” of literary economics didn’t give way to the “new school” of mathematical economics until after WWII, when Paul Samuelson led the profession down the dead-end street of convoluted, abstract theorizing.

The difference between the old-old school and the new-old school is that the moderns rely less on introspection and casual observation and more on data collection, “laboratory” experiments, statistical analysis, and the research findings of sociologists and psychologists. That this is not an unalloyed blessing can be seen in the “accomplishments” of a leading member of the new-old school, one Richard Thaler, whom Brooks omits to mention. Thaler’s specialty, which has been dubbed “behavioral economics”, focuses on the psychology of decision-making and how it leads individuals to make what Thaler believes are sub-optimal and even unwise choices. From there, Thaler and his collaborator, Cass Sunstein, have ventured into normative policy recommendations, which they dub “libertarian (or soft) paternalism”.

Needless to say, actual libertarians (and others) find much to criticize in Thaler’s normative prescriptions, which carve out a role for government in “nudging” people in directions that “wise men” like Thaler and Sunstein would like to seem them nudged.  For much more about the fallacies and dangers of “libertarian paternalism”, see this post.

In any event, Brooks writes as if there were a real difference between economic activity in the 19th century and economic activity in the 21st century. As if, for example, there wasn’t a lot of brainpower and organizational skill involved in the “second industrial revolution” of the last third of the 19th century. As if, to take another example, the “protocols” of the modern food court didn’t have their counterparts in the market squares of yore. As if, to take a final example, the manufacture of steel, autos, and other durable goods didn’t (and doesn’t) involve massive capital investments (many of which were made possible by patented processes and machinery), so that the average cost of making each unit declines markedly as the rate of output rises. It is as if the 21st century simply arrived, bright and shining, with no connection to the past.

On the whole, Brooks is onto something, which is that economists are getting back in touch with the realities of human behavior. However, he is guilty of a gross attribution error. He writes as if there were something new in economic behavior because economists are now better able to describe it. The same attribution error is found among teenagers (of every era), who believe that sex didn’t exist until they discovered it.

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Other posts in this series:

• Our Miss Brooks

• Miss Brooks’s “Grand Bargain”

• David Brooks, Useful Idiot for the Left

• Baseball or Soccer?

Useless advice from pundits.

I’m digging deep into the archives for this one because it involves Bret Stephens, now a house “conservative” for The New York Times. I’m gearing up to run a series about David Brooks, the other “conservative” on the payroll of the Times, and will throw in another piece by Stephens just to round out the series.

Back in 2004, when Stephens was writing at OpinionJournal, in“What Is a Cabinet For?“ (link lost), he captured the “conventional wisdom” about G.W. Bush’s cabinet appointments:

“Now that Condoleezza Rice has been nominated to be the next secretary of state,” The New York Times editorializes, “the whole world seems to be noticing that George Bush is stuffing his second-term cabinet with yes men and women. It’s worrisome. . . .” David Gergen, former wise man of Public Broadcasting, frets that Mr. Bush is “closing down dissent and centralizing power in a few hands.” Andrew Sullivan, in his column for the London Times, bemoans the cast of “flunkies” and “servants rather than peers” around the president. “Fierce loyalty is a prerequisite for serving Bush,” writes the disapproving Mr. Sullivan.

Allow me to speak from experience in the matter of appointing lieutenants. A leader must be confident that he and his lieutenants have common goals. A leader expects his lieutenants to give thoughtful, candid advice, but to give it privately and not leak it to the press in an effort to embarrass the leader or to shape policy. Sharing common goals and giving candid advice privately, isn’t a sign of blind obedience in a lieutenant, it’s a sign of loyalty, in the best sense of the word. The alternative to the good kind of loyalty is disfunction and disarray — but perhaps that’s what the pundits want.

Experience delivers the best proof of loyalty. That’s why good leaders tend to select lieutenants whom they have worked with and know to be trustworthy. Bush wasn’t- the first leader to select his lieutenants from a trusted, inner circle. Nor would he be the last.

But all of this is lost on reporters and pundits who have never managed anything bigger than an editorial column or a book-length assemblage of them.

Not in a good place, I fear.

When the dust settles on the devastation of America’s economic might and social fabric, under the onslaught of “green” policies and wokeism, what will be left?

The optimist will say that America has been through a lot in its history, and has survived more or less intact.

The realist will reply that the worst of what America went through in the past occurred when it had no foreign enemies who were strong enough to exploit its weaknesses.

This is no longer true. Russia, despite the intransigence of Ukraine, and China have been playing the long game and are ready to pounce on America when the time is right. In doing so, they will have the aid of Iran and North Korea, two of America’s implacable enemies, and the nuclear arsenals they they are assuredly building.

If the Democrats stay in power — and that seems more likely now than it did a few months ago — the day of reckoning will come within a decade. America’s surrender, in the form of military and economic concessions, will be sugar-coated as the inevitable result of historical processes (shades of Marx), and papered-over with treaties and declarations of friendship.

Americans will be poorer, more divided than ever, but alive — physically, not spiritually. Long-standing traditions and institutions — academic freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, an independent judiciary, a Congress with real power, etc., etc., etc. — will survive in name only. “Benign” bureaucratic governance, under the guidance of leftist elites, will thrive. Historical revisionism, re-education, and thought control will come to the fore. And all will be for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

Thus cometh 1984.

Prescriptive science is an oxymoron.

I ended “How to View Defense Spending” on this note:

It is customary in democratic countries to deplore expenditures on armaments as conflicting with the requirements of the social services. There is a tendency to forget that the most important social service that a government can do for its people is to keep them alive and free.

Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir John Slessor, Strategy for the West

Sir John’s observation about defense being the most important social service is long-forgotten and honored in the breach.

Not only that, but the purveyors of “science-based” analysis who strive to disprove the need for defense spending are traitors to science.

I begin with this statement of principle:

[S]cientific research must be uncorrupted by self-interested motivations. That is, in scientific research one must be focused on what the answer to a research question is, not on what the researcher wishes the answer to be. This principle and the detached scrutiny of research in terms of empirical and logical criteria (the principle of organized skepticism) aims to prevent biasing scientific research toward the desired aims of any group, be they small or large in number or influence.

It is one thing to say, as a scientist or analyst who draws on science, that a certain option (a policy, a system, a tactic) is probably better than the alternatives, when judged against a specific criterion (most effective for a given cost, more effective against a certain kind of enemy force). It is quite another thing to say that the option is the one that the decision-maker should adopt. The scientist or analyst is looking at a small slice of the world; the decision-maker has to take into account things that the scientist or analyst did not (and often could not) take into account (economic consequences, political feasibility, compatibility with other existing systems and policies).

That’s not to say that decision-makers are unbiased (far from it), but that it is wrong (unethical) to give them biased results to begin with. It is equally wrong (unethical) for a scientist or analyst to deliver biased findings to a biased decision-maker kowing that that the decision-maker wants biased findings. But both kinds of unethical behavior are rampant in the un-hallowed corridors of power in our nation’s capital. I know because I was there for a long time and saw a lot of it.

A classic case of “scientific” analsyis in the service of a desired policy outcome is the pseudo-science that feeds the hysteria surrounding the increase in “global” temperature in the latter part of the 20th century. The temperature increase, which has pretty much played out, coincided with with the rise in atmospheric CO2, which continues to rise regardless of changes in the direction of “global” temperature and man-made CO2 emissions. I have much much more to say (here) about the hysteria and the pseudo-science upon which it is based.

But a more appropriate case study for the purpose of this post isan event to which I was somewhat close: the treatment of the Navy’s proposal, made in the early 1980s, for an expansion to what was conveniently characterized as the 600-ship Navy. (The expansion would have involved personnel, logistics systems, ancillary war-fighting systems, stockpiles of parts and ammunition, and aircraft of many kinds — all in addition to a 25-percent increase in the number of ships in active service.)

The usual suspects, of an ilk I profiled here, wasted no time in making the 600-ship Navy seem like a bad idea. Of the many studies and memos on the subject, two by the Congressional Budget Office stand out a exemplars of slanted analysis by innuendo: “Building a 600-Ship Navy: Costs, Timing, and Alternative Approaches” (March 1982), and “Future Budget Requirements for the 600-Ship Navy: Preliminary Analysis” (April 1985). What did the “whiz kids” at CBO have to say about the 600-ship Navy? Here are excerpts of the concluding sections:

The Administration’s five-year shipbuilding plan, containing 133 new construction ships and estimated to cost over $80 billion in fiscal year 1983 dollars, is more ambitious than previous programs submitted to the Congress in the past few years. It does not, however, contain enough ships to realize the Navy’s announced force level goals for an expanded Navy. In addition, this plan—as has been the case with so many previous plans—has most of its ships programmed in the later out-years. Over half of the 133 new construction ships are programmed for the last two years of the five-year plan. Achievement of the Navy’s expanded force level goals would require adhering to the out-year building plans and continued high levels of construction in the years beyond fiscal year 1987. [1982 report, pp. 71-72]

Even the budget increases estimated here would be difficult to achieve if history is a guide. Since the end of World War II, the Navy has never sustained real increases in its budget for more than five consecutive years. The sustained 15-year expansion required to achieve and sustain the Navy’s present plans would result in a historic change in budget trends. [1985 report, p. 26]

The bias against the 600-ship Navy drips from the pages. The “argument” goes like this: If it hasn’t been done, it can’t be done and, therefore, shouldn’t be attempted. Why not? Because the analysts at CBO were of a breed that emerged in the 1960s, when Robert Strange McNamara and his minions used simplistic analysis (“tablesmanship”) to play “gotcha” with the military services:

We [I was one of the minions] did it because we were encouraged to do it, though not in so many words. And we got away with it, not because we were better analysts — most of our work was simplistic stuff — but because we usually had the last word. (Only an impassioned personal intercession by a service chief might persuade McNamara to go against SA [the Systems Analysis office run by Alain Enthoven] — and the key word is “might.”) The irony of the whole process was that McNamara, in effect, substituted “civilian judgment” for oft-scorned “military judgment.” McNamara revealed his preference for “civilian judgment” by elevating Enthoven and SA a level in the hierarchy, 1965, even though (or perhaps because) the services and JCS had been open in their disdain of SA and its snotty young civilians.

In the case of the 600-ship Navy, civilian analysts did their best to derail it by sending the barely disguised message that it was “unaffordable”. I was reminded of this “insight” by a colleague of long-standing who recently proclaimed that “any half-decent cost model would show a 600-ship Navy was unsustainable into this century.” How could a cost model show such a thing when the sustainability (affordability) of defense is a matter of political will, not arithmetic?

Defense spending fluctuates as function of perceived necessity and political convenience (e.g., a preference for “social services” that erode self-reliance). Consider, for example, this graph:

Derived from estimates available at this page at usgovernmentspending.com.

What was “unaffordable” before World War II suddenly became affordable. And so it has gone throughout the history of the republic. Affordability (or sustainability) is a political issue, not a line drawn in the sand by a smart-ass analyst who gives no thought to the consequences of spending too little on defense.

Which brings me back to CBO’s “Building a 600-Ship Navy: Costs, Timing, and Alternative Approaches“, which crystallized opposition to the 600-ship Navy. The tome includes an estimate of the long-run, annual obligational authority (outlays to be incurred) to sustain a 600-ship Navy (of the Navy’s design). The estimate was about 20-percent higher (in constant dollars) than the FY 1982 Navy budget. (See Options I and II in Figure 2, p. 50.) The long-run would have begun around FY 1994, following several years of higher spending associated with the buildup of forces.

In what sense was the additional 20 percent “unaffordable”?

I don’t have a historical breakdown of the Department of Defense (DoD) budget by service, but I found values for all DoD spending on military programs at Office of Management and Budget Historical Tables. Drawing on Tables 5.2 and 10.1, I constructed constant-dollar indices of DoD’s obligational authority:

There was no inherent reason that defense spending couldn’t have remained on the trajectory from 1982 through 1985; that is, more than 20 percent higher (in constant dollars) than the 1982 level. The slowdown of the late 1980s was a reflection of improved relations between the U.S. and USSR. Those improved relations had much to do with the Reagan defense buildup, of which the goal of attaining a 600-ship Navy was an integral part.

The Reagan buildup helped to convince Soviet leaders (Gorbachev in particular) that trying to keep pace with the U.S. was futile and (actually) unaffordable by the USSR, given the USSR’s weak economy. The rest — the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the USSR — is history. The buildup, in other words, sowed the seeds of its own demise. But that couldn’t have been predicted with certainty in the early-to-middle 1980s.

Yes, defense spending receded after that end of the Cold War, but that was a deliberate response to the end of the Cold War and lack of other serious threats, not a historical necessity. It was certainly not on the table in the early 1980s, when the 600-ship Navy was being pushed. Had the Cold War not thawed and ended, there is no reason that U.S. defense spending couldn’t have continued to rise beyond the level it reached at the peak of the Reagan buildup.

In fact, after the bulge caused by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, “peacetime” (constant-dollar) defense spending in 2020 reached 133 percent of the 1982 level. But even then, defense spending as a percentage of GDP was significantly lower in 2020 (4.5 percent) than it was in 1985 (6.5 percent).

In sum, the 600-ship Navy was eminently affordable — all that was required to afford it was political will, which the smart-ass analysts at CBO (and elsewhere) were bent on subverting.

John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy from 1981 to 1987, was rightly incensed that analysts — some of them on his payroll as civilian employees and contractors — were, in effect, undermining a deliberate strategy of pressing against a key Soviet weakness — the unsustainability of its defense strategy. There was much lamentation at the time about Lehman’s “war” on the offending parties. One of them was the think-tank for which I then worked. I can now admit openly that I was sympathetic to Lehman and offended by the arrogance of analysts who believed that it was their job to suggest that spending more on defense was “unaffordable”.

To understand my disdain for the smart-asses, I will take you back another 20 years. When I was a neophyte analyst, I was handed a pile of required reading material. One of the items was was Methods of Operations Research, by Philip M. Morse and George E. Kimball. Morse, in the early months of America’s involvement in World War II, founded the civilian operations-research organization from which my think-tank evolved. Kimball was a leading member of that organization. Their book is notable not just as a compendium of analytical methods that were applied, with much success, to the war effort. It is also introspective — and properly humble — about the power and role of analysis.

Two passages, in particular, have stuck with me for the nearly 60 years since I first read the book. Here is one of them:

[S]uccessful application of operations research usually results in improvements by factors of 3 or 10 or more…. In our first study of any operation we are looking for these large factors of possible improvement…. They can be discovered if the [variables] are given only one significant figure, … any greater accuracy simply adds unessential detail.

One might term this type of thinking “hemibel thinking.” A bel is defined as a unit in a logarithmic scale corresponding to a factor of 10. Consequently a hemibel corresponds to a factor of the square root of 10, or approximately 3. [p. 38]

Morse and Kimball — two brilliant scientists and analysts, who worked with actual data (pardon the redundancy) about combat operations — counseled against making too much of quantitative estimates given the uncertainties inherent in combat. But, as I have seen over the years, analysts eager to “prove” something nevertheless make a huge deal out of minuscule differences in quantitative estimates — estimates based not on actual combat operations but on theoretical values derived from models of systems and operations yet to see the light of day. (I also saw, and still see, too much “analysis” about soft subjects, such as domestic politics and international relations. The amount of snake oil emitted by “analysts” — sometimes called scholars, journalists, pundits, and commentators — would fill the Great Lakes. Their perceptions of reality have an uncanny way of supporting their unabashed decrees about policy.)

The second memorable passage from Methods of Operations Research goes directly to the point of this post:

Operations research done separately from an administrator in charge of operations becomes an empty exercise. [p. 10].

In the case of CBO and other opponents of the 600-ship Navy, substitute “cost estimate” for “operations research”, “responsible defense official” for “administrator in charge”, and “strategy” for “operations”. The principle is the same: The CBO and its ilk knew the price of the 600-ship Navy, but had no inkling of its value.

Too many scientists and analysts want to make policy. On the evidence of my close association with scientists and analysts over the years — including a stint as an unsparing reviewer of their products — I would say that they should learn to think clearly before they inflict their views on others. But too many of them — even those with Ph.D.s in STEM disciplines — are incapable of thinking clearly, and more than capable of slanting their work to support their biases. Leading examples are Michael Mann, James Hansen (more here), and their co-conspirators in the catastrophic-anthropogenic-global-warming scam.

This story has a coda. In the same year that the CBO and others (including some analysts from my own organization) were trying to sabotage the 600-ship Navy, I was telling an admiral, in so many words, that he was a fool to believe that analysis could prove what he wanted to prove. I was banished from his sight for my honesty. And I have never regretted it.

Memories now almost eight decades old.

From my “Reveries“:

I remember my grandmother’s house in a small, lakeside village about 90 miles north of where I grew up. Her modest, two-story bungalow sat on a deep lot that backed up to open fields where doves cooed as I awoke on sunny, summer mornings to the smell of bacon frying. My favorite room was the kitchen, with its massive wood-fired range and huge, round, oak table, around which my grandmother, parents, and various aunts and uncles would sit after a meal, retelling and embellishing tales from the past.

I remember them all as if it were yesterday, even though they are long gone. There was my beloved Grandma, of course, the matriarch and mother of ten, seven sons and three daughters. (She survived Grandpa, who was buried on the day of my birth, by 36 years.) One of the daughters served in the WAC during World War II; six of the sons also saw active duty during the war (the seventh had servied before the war).

A few of the children were absent from our holiday gatherings because of family obligations and distance. Aunt Isabelle had her own brood of nine to care for; Aunt Helen, who didn’t wed until age 36, had seven step-children under her roof; Uncle Charles had departed for the sunny South soon after war’s end. Uncle Louis was missing because at the age of 40 he was killed in a road accident while on active duty in the Coast Guard.

Of the more-or-less regular holiday visitors there was Uncle Joe, the eldest son and another career Coast Guardsman, who among family would unbend from his Chief Petty Officer’s demeanor; Uncle Lawrence, the joker and story-teller; Uncle Chet, another raconteur (and the handsomest of a handsome lot); Uncle George, quieter than Lawrence and Chet, but good with the quip; and the “baby” (born when Grandma was 42) — Uncle Fred, taciturn to a fault and a bachelor until he was 42. My father (Pop), who rounded out the adult male contingent, was closer to his brothers-in-law than he was to his many half-siblings.

The women, in addition to Grandma: my mother (Mom) the eighth child and youngest of the three girls; Uncle Joe’s Mary, a flapper in her day; Uncle Lawrence’s Christine, the scold; Uncle Chet’s Mary, the jolly one; and Uncle George’s Peg, a schoolteacher who knew how to let her hair down — just enough.

Starting with Uncle Louis, all but Mom left this earth in the years spanning 1947 to 2004, with Grandma and Aunt Isabelle making it to the age of 96. Mom held out until 2015, when she succumbed seven months short of her 100th birthday.

Here’s to the departed:

Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom and Charley,
The weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer, the fighter?
All, all, are sleeping on the hill.

One passed in a fever,
One was burned in a mine,
One was killed in a brawl,
One died in a jail,
One fell from a bridge toiling for children and wife —
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.

From The Hill, by Edgar Lee Masters (1869-1930)

* * *

Time, you old gipsy man,
Will you not stay,
Put up your caravan
Just for one day?….

Last week in Babylon,
Last night in Rome,
Morning and in the crush
Under Paul’s dome;
Under Paul’s dial
You tighten your rein —
Only a moment, and off once again;
Off to some city
Now blind in the womb,
Off to another
Ere that’s in the tomb.

From Time, You Old Gipsy Man, by Ralph Hodgson (1871-1962)

Dissecting an anarcho-capitalist’s ravings about national defense.

“But Wouldn’t Warlords Take Over?” is the title of a piece by Robert Murphy at the Mises Economics Blog. Murphy says:

… In a system of anarcho-capitalism or the free-market order, wouldn’t society degenerate into constant battles between private warlords?”…

For the warlord objection to work, the statist [or minarchist] would need to argue that a given community would remain lawful under a government, but that the same community would break down into continuous warfare if all legal and military services were privatized….

Now that we’ve focused the issue, I think there are strong reasons to suppose that civil war would be much less likely in a region dominated by private defense and judicial agencies, rather than by a monopoly [s]tate. Private agencies own the assets at their disposal, whereas politicians (especially in democracies) merely exercise temporary control over the [s]tate’’s military equipment. Bill Clinton was perfectly willing to fire off dozens of cruise missiles when the Lewinsky scandal was picking up steam. Now regardless of one’s beliefs about Clinton’’s motivations, clearly Slick Willie would have been less likely to launch such an attack if he had been the CEO of a private defense agency that could have sold the missiles on the open market for $569,000 each.

Aside from this brief excursion into Clinton’s use or misuse of national-defense assets, Murphy’s argument is focused in the issue of intra-societal violence; viz: “civil war would be much less likely in a region dominated by private defense and judicial agencies, rather than by a monopoly [s]tate. ”

Returning to Murphy:

We can see this principle [of the profligate use of force] in the case of the United States. In the 1860s, would large scale combat have broken out on anywhere near the same scale if, instead of the two factions controlling hundreds of thousands of conscripts, all military commanders had to hire voluntary mercenaries and pay them a market wage for their services?

Murphy concedes that there might have been combat. He’s merely quibbling about its scale. He continues:

I can imagine a reader generally endorsing the above analysis, yet still resisting my conclusion.  He or she might say something like this:  “In a state of nature, people initially have different views of justice.  Under market anarchy, different consumers would patronize dozens of defense agencies, each of which attempts to use its forces to implement incompatible codes of law.  Now it’s true that these professional gangs might generally avoid conflict out of prudence, but the equilibrium would still be precarious.”

“To avoid this outcome,” my critic could elaborate, “citizens put aside their petty differences and agree to support a single, monopoly agency, which then has the power to crush all challengers to its authority.  This admittedly raises the new problem of controlling the Leviathan, but at least it solves the problem of ceaseless domestic warfare.”

There are several problems with this possible approach. First, it assumes that the danger of private warlords is worse than the threat posed by a tyrannical central government. Second, there is the inconvenient fact that no such voluntary formation of a [s]tate ever occurred. Even those citizens who, say, supported the ratification of the U.S. Constitution were never given the option of living in market anarchy; instead they had to choose between government under the Articles of Confederation or government under the Constitution.

Murphy sets up a quasi-straw man — the voluntary formation of a state — then proceeds to blow it down. Big deal. That doesn’t prove that the danger of warlords is less than the threat posed by a central government, which is what Murphy implies. Non sequitur. Moreover, many citizens did support the ratification of the Constitution, and those who didn’t had the option of going over the Blue Ridge (or west of the Mississippi for good measure). Back to Murphy:

But for our purposes, the most interesting problem with this objection is that, were it an accurate description, it would be unnecessary for such a people to form a government. If, by hypothesis, the vast majority of people — —although they have different conceptions of justice — can all agree that it is wrong to use violence to settle their honest disputes, then market forces would lead to peace among the private police agencies.

Murphy’s hypothesis is his undoing. He assumes that if the vast majority of people agree that it’s wrong to use violence to settle disputes, then that won’t happen. Do the vast majority of people believe that it’s wrong to use violence to settle disputes? Perhaps, but it doesn’t take a vast majority to inject violence into a society; it takes only a relatively small number of renegades, who may be then be able to coerce others into condoning or supporting their criminal activities. There’s more:

Yes, it is perfectly true that people have vastly different opinions concerning particular legal issues. Some people favor capital punishment, some consider abortion to be murder, and there would be no consensus on how many guilty people should go free to avoid the false conviction of one innocent defendant. Nonetheless, if the contract theory of government is correct, the vast majority of individuals can agree that they should settle these issues not through force, but rather through an orderly procedure (such as is provided by periodic elections).

Well, Murphy now admits that there’s something to the voluntary formation of a state. But, like most anarcho-capitalists, he doesn’t want to admit to the legitimacy of an institution that he didn’t contract for. Tough. But that still doesn’t have anything to do with the superiority of private defense agencies over state-controlled police forces and courts. Nevertheless, Murphy plows on:

But if this does indeed describe a particular population, why would we expect such virtuous people, as consumers, to patronize defense agencies that routinely used force against weak opponents? Why wouldn’t the vast bulk of reasonable customers patronize defense agencies that had interlocking arbitration agreements, and submitted their legitimate disputes to reputable, disinterested arbitrators? Why wouldn’t the private, voluntary legal framework function as an orderly mechanism to settle matters of “public policy”?

That’s a lot of hypotheticals piled on top of one another. What Murphy doesn’t entertain is the possibility that a small but very rich cabal could create a dominant defense agency that simply refuses to recognize other defense agencies, except as enemies. In other words, there’s nothing in Murphy’s loose logic to prove that warlords wouldn’t arise. In fact, he soon gives away the game:

Imagine a bustling city, such as New York, that is initially a free market paradise. Is it really plausible that over time rival gangs would constantly grow, and eventually terrorize the general public? Remember, these would be admittedly criminal organizations; unlike the city government of New York, there would be no ideological support for these gangs.

We must consider that in such an environment, the law-abiding majority would have all sorts of mechanisms at their [sic] disposal, beyond physical confrontation. Once private judges had ruled against a particular rogue agency, the private banks could freeze its assets (up to the amount of fines levied by the arbitrators). In addition, the private utility companies could shut down electricity and water to the agency’’s headquarters, in accordance with standard provisions in their contracts.

Pardon me while I laugh at the notion that lack of “ideological support” for the gangs of New York would make it impossible for gangs to grow and terrorize the general public. That’s precisely what has happened at various times during the history of New York (and other cities), even though the “law-abiding majority [had] all sorts of mechanisms at [its] disposal”. Murphy insists on hewing to the assumption that the existence of a law-abiding majority somehow prevents the rise a powerful, law-breaking minorities, capable of terrorizing the general public. Wait a minute; now he admits the converse:

Of course, it is theoretically possible that a rogue agency could overcome these obstacles, either through intimidation or division of the spoils, and take over enough banks, power companies, grocery stores, etc. that only full-scale military assault would conquer it. But the point is, from an initial position of market anarchy, these would-be rulers would have to start from scratch. In contrast, under even a limited government, the machinery of mass subjugation is ready and waiting to be seized.

Huh? It’s certainly more than theoretically possible for a “rogue agency” to wreak havoc. A “rogue agency” is nothing more than a fancy term for a street gang, the Mafia, or al Qaeda cells operating in the U.S. A “rogue agency” run by and on behalf of rich and powerful criminals — for their own purposes — would somehow be preferable to police forces and courts operated by a limited government that is accountable to the general public, rich and poor alike? I don’t think so.

However much the American state engages in “mass subjugation” — and it does, to a degree — it is also held in check by its accountability to the general public under American law and tradition. A “rogue agency”, by definition, would be unbound by law and tradition. (Here I must admit that the CIA and FBI have, in recent years, become rogue agencies, though (thus far) for the accomplishment of a particular objective: to discredit Donald Trump and to deny him (or remove him from) the presidency.)

Anyone can conjure a Utopia, as Murphy has. But no one can guarantee that it will work. Murphy certainly hasn’t made the case that his Utopia would work.

In any event, by focusing on intra-societal violence Murphy ignores completely two crucial questions: (1) Can an anarchistic society effectively defend itself against an outside force? (2) Can it do so better than a society in which the state has a monopoly on the use of force with respect to outside entities? Murphy implies that the answer to both questions is “yes,” though he fails to explore those questions. Here is my brief answer: The cost of mounting a credible defense of the United States from foreign enemies probably would support only one supplier; that is, national defense is a natural monopoly. The American state — given its accountability to the general public — should be that supplier. (With the proviso that the leftward lurch in America’s governance is halted and reversed.)

To revert to Murphy’s example of Clinton’s profligate use of expensive missiles, the CEO of a private defense agency might well have an incentive to fire missiles at a bogus target. He might want to demonstrate his “toughness” in order to allay his shareholders’ doubts about it, or to attract new clients. Murphy’s example suggests only that the state may be wasteful in its expenditure of conscripted dollars. Murphy’s example does not show that the state is necessarily any less effective than would be a private defense agency or defense agencies. In matters of life and death, a wasteful state is preferable to an efficient private defense agency (if there could be such a thing).

A wasteful, accountable, American state is certainly preferable to an efficient, private, defense agency in possession of the same military might. Hitler and Stalin, in effect, ran private defense agencies (because Hitler and Stalin weren’t accountable to voters), and look where that landed the Germans and Russians. Talk about subjugation.

So the answer is “yes”. Warlords would take over in an anarcho-capitalist dream world in which there is no state to keep them in check.