Category: Leftism – Statism – Democracy

An Embarrassment of Ignoramuses

This reminds me of the multitude of lemming-like politicians and celebrities who have joined the “crusade” against global warming. (It would be a lot cooler if they would just close their mouths.)

Will those multitudes be embarrassed a few years from now when the scientific “consensus” turns against them? Not at all. They’ll have by then joined other ill-conceived “crusades” against other imaginary ills, or ones that cannot be cured by government. Why? For the sake of having government tell the rest of us how to live our lives.

And so it goes in the never-never land of the fashionable doom-sayer.

Related posts:
“The Worriers” (13 Jun 2004)
“More about the Worrying Classes” (17 Jun 2004)
“‘Warmism’: The Myth of Anthropogenic Global Warming” (23 Aug 2007)
“Re: Climate ‘Science’” (19 Sep 2007)
“More Evidence against Anthropogenic Global Warming” (25 Sep 2007)
“Yet More Evidence against Anthropogenic Global Warming” (04 Oct 2007)
“Global Warming, Close to Home” (22 Dec 2007)
“You Know…” (02 Jan 2008)
“Global Warming, Close to Home (II)” (06 Jan 2008)

Liberal Fascism

There’s an excellent post on the subject, here. (Inspired by Jonah Goldberg and his recently published book, Liberal Fascism.) [UPDATE (02/11/08): See also this, by Thomas Sowell.]

Related posts at Liberty Corner include:
“Calling a Nazi a Nazi” (12 Mar 2006)
“Things to Come” (27 Jun 2007)
“FDR and Fascism” (30 Sep 2007)
“A Political Compass: Locating the United States” (13 Nov 2007)
“The Modern Presidency: A Tour of American History since 1900” (01 Dec 2007)
“Intellectuals and Capitalism” (15 Jan 2008)
“Political Correctness” (29 Jan 2008)
“The People’s Romance” (30 Jan 2008)
“Fascism” (30 Jan 2008)

Fascism

David N. Mayer (MayerBlog) parses “fascism.” He uses the term

in its broadest sense, as a political philosophy holding among its essential precepts the claims that individuals have no inherent rights, and that their interests are subordinate to, and therefore may be sacrificed for the sake of, the presumed collective good, whatever it’s called – “society,” “the race,” “the state,” the “Volk,” “the nation,” “the people,” “the proletariat,” “the common good,” or “the public interest.” Purists may object that what I’m really calling “fascism” would be more properly termed collectivism, and that my use of the term fascism is not only historically incorrect but also deliberately provocative – and to a great extent, they’d be right. In defending my use of the term, however, I’d note that as originally coined by Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator of 1930s Italy, the term referred to the fasces, the bundle of rods wrapped around an axe carried by the lictors who guarded government officials in ancient Rome, where it symbolized the sovereign authority of the state. In this original sense of the term, fascism thus is roughly the equivalent of “statism,” the form of collectivism in which the entity known as “the state” holds the highest political authority in society…. I have an additional justification for using the term fascism. Notwithstanding the arguments of political scientists – who would distinguish fascism from other collectivist –isms such as communism, socialism, or national socialism (Nazism) – these distinctions are really irrelevant because all these forms of collectivism are equally pernicious to, and destructive of, individual rights and freedom. Leftists like to use the terms fascism or fascist as pejoratives because they naively believe that socialism is somehow less evil than collectivism of “the right” – that the murder of millions of people killed by Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union, by Mao in Red China, or by Pol Pot in communist Cambodia somehow was less evil than the murder of millions of people killed by Hitler’s regime in Nazi Germany or Mussolini’s regime in fascist Italy. Leftists have no legitimate claim on the truth, and neither do they have any monopoly on use of the terms fascism or fascist as pejoratives.

Mayer, in a typically long post at his excellent blog, goes on to tackle the

“Four Fascisms” of 2008 … : (1) Eco-Fascism, the tyranny of radical environmentalists, including the global-warming hoax and other myths propagated by “green” activists as a rationale for imposing their agenda on us by force; (2) Nanny-State Fascism, the tyranny of the health police, who seek to turn everyone into wards of the state, including the movement pushing for “universal” health care – that is, government monopolization of the health care industry (what used to be called, and still is, socialized medicine); (3) Demopublican/ Replicrat Fascism, the tyranny of the two-party political system in the United States, particularly dangerous in 2008 as an election year; and last, (4) Islamo-Fascism, the danger of militant, fundamentalist Islam to the United States and the rest of the civilized world.

Go there and read. All of it. You many not agree with Mayer in every detail (I don’t), but he aims at the right targets and hits them hard.

Related posts:
“FDR and Fascism” (20 Sep 2007)
“A Political Compass: Locating the United States” (13 Nov 2007)
“The Modern Presidency: A Tour of American History since 1900” (01 Dec 2007)

The People’s Romance

The preceding post is about the “libertarian” Left (LL) and its flirtation with state-imposed political correctness. The LL, while claiming to be anti-statist, wants all of us to behave in certain ways — ways that the LL deems acceptable, of course. The LL’s attitude reminds me of Daniel Klein’s essay, “The People’s Romance: Why People Love Government (as Much as They Do).” Here are some relevant excerpts of that essay:

Government creates common, effectively permanent institutions, such as the streets and roads, utility grids, the postal service, and the school system. In doing so, it determines and enforces the setting for an encompassing shared experience—or at least the myth of such experience. The business of politics creates an unfolding series of battles and dramas whose outcomes few can dismiss as unimportant. National and international news media invite citizens to envision themselves as part of an encompassing coordination of sentiments—whether the focal point is election-day results, the latest effort in the war on drugs, or emergency relief to hurricane victims — and encourage a corresponding regard for the state as a romantic force. I call the yearning for encompassing coordination of sentiment The People’s Romance (henceforth TPR)….

TPR helps us to understand how authoritarians and totalitarians think. If TPR is a principal value, with each person’s well-being thought to depend on everyone else’s proper participation, then it authorizes a kind of joint, though not necessarily absolute, ownership of everyone by everyone, which means, of course, by the government. One person’s conspicuous opting out of the romance really does damage the others’ interests….

TPR lives off coercion—which not only serves as a means of clamping down on discoordination, but also gives context for the sentiment coordination to be achieved….

[N]ested within the conventional view that government is not a mammoth apparatus of coercion is the tenet that society is an organization to which we belong. Either on the view that we constitute and control the government (“we are the government”) or on the view that by deciding to live in the polity we choose voluntarily to abide by the government’s rules (“no one is forcing you to stay here”), the social democrat holds that taxation and interventions such as a minimum wage law are not coercive. The government-rule structure, as they see it, is a matter of “social contract” persisting through time and binding on the complete collection of citizens. The implication is that the whole of society is a club, a collectively owned property, administered by the government….

Members of the LL would hotly dispute the idea that “society is an organization to which we belong” and “a club, a collectively owned property, administered by the government.” Yet, at the same time, they seem to endorse state action that denies liberty in the name of liberty. Liberty is all right, in their view, as long as it produces outcomes of which they approve.

“Orwellian” and “doublethink” come to mind.

Political Correctness

“Political correctness” (or “politically correct,” as an adjectival phrase) refers to

language, ideas, policies, or behavior seen as seeking to minimize offense to racial, cultural, or other identity groups.

PCness exists at three connected levels: the individual, voluntary associations, and state action (which draws on and influences the other two).

1. At the individual level, PCness is an exaggerated case of good manners. A PC person refrains from speaking or behaving in ways that might offend or seem to denigrate an “identity group,” even at the expense of stereotyping and patronizing members of such groups (e.g., singling out for special attention, heaping fulsome praise).

2. At the next level, we find voluntary associations (e.g., churches, charities, political parties, academic faculties), whose members, because they share — or profess to share — certain ideas about “equality” and “social justice,” feel bound by those ideas to adopt language, ideas, policies, and behavior that stereotype, patronize, and give special treatment to certain “identity groups.” Some voluntary associations are organized solely for the purpose of seeking legislative and judicial enactment of special treatment, under the guise of “equal protection.”

3. This brings us to the “highest” level: state action. Here, individuals, members of voluntary associations, and government officials (armed with the power of the state) seek to advance the cause of special treatment through legislative and judicial processes, so that such treatment becomes a legal norm, even if it is not a social one.

4. Finally, state action is taken as a moral command by those who are easily led and eager-to-please, thus reinforcing PCness and legitimating its expansion at all three levels.

That PCness is a widespread phenomenon proves nothing about its rightness and a lot about human nature and the coercive power of the state. In spite of that, some libertarians, who (understandably) are anxious to distance themselves from Ron Paul and the Rockwell crowd, have become apologists for PCness. Will Wilkinson, for example, suggests that

most PC episodes mocked and derided by the right are not state impositions. They are generally episodes of the voluntary social enforcement of relatively newly established moral/cultural norms.

Wilkinson grossly simplifies the complex dynamics of PCness, which I sketch above. His so-called “newly established … norms” are, in fact, norms that have been embraced by insular élites (e.g., academics and think-tank denizens like Wilksinson) and then foisted upon “the masses” by the élites in charge of government and government-controlled institutions (e.g., tax-funded universities). Thus it is that proposals to allow same-sex marriage fare poorly when they are submitted to voters. Similarly, the “right” to an abortion, even 35 years after Roe v. Wade, remains far from universally accepted and meets greater popular resistance with the passage of time.

Roderick Long is another “libertarian” who endorses PCness:

Another issue that inflames many libertarians against political correctness is the issue of speech codes on campuses. Yes, many speech codes are daft. But should people really enjoy exactly the same freedom of speech on university property that they would rightfully enjoy on their own property? Why, exactly?

If the answer is that the purposes of a university are best served by an atmosphere of free exchange of ideas — is there no validity to the claim that certain kinds of speech might tend, through an intimidating effect, to undermine just such an atmosphere?…

At my university, several white fraternity members were recently disciplined for dressing up, some in Klan costumes and others in blackface, and enacting a mock lynching. Is the university guilty of violating their freedom of expression? I can’t see that it is. Certainly those students have a natural right to dress up as they please and engage in whatever playacting they like, so long as they conduct themselves peacefully. But there is no natural right to be a student at Auburn University.

Long’s argument is clever, but fallacious. The purposes of a university have nothing to do with the case. Speech is speech.* Long, a member of Auburn’s faculty, is rightly disgusted by the actions of the fraternity members he mentions, but disgust does not excuse the suppression of speech by a State university. It is true that there is no “natural right” to be a student at Auburn, but there is, likewise, no “natural right” not to be offended.

Long describes himself as a “left-libertarian market anarchist” (whatever that is). Interestingly, he also writes for LewRockwell.com, which is intertwined with Rockwell’s Ludwig von Mises Institute. It is ironic that Lew Rockwell, the Mises Institute, and those who affiliate with them are in bad odor with a long list of bloggers who characterize themselves as libertarians of one kind or another (e.g., here). Their displeasure centers on Ron Paul, his notorious newsletters (thought to have been written or co-written by Rockwell), Paul’s supporters at the Institute, and (for good measure) the Institute itself.

In an earlier post, I noted my agreement with David Friedman’s view of the affray:

There are a lot of different things going on in libertarian reactions to Ron Paul in general and the quotes from the Ron Paul newsletters in particular. One of them, I think, is a culture clash between different sorts of libertarians….

Loosely speaking, I think the clash can be described as between people who see non-PC speech as a positive virtue and those who see it as a fault–or, if you prefer, between people who approve of offending liberal sensibilities (“liberal” in the modern sense of the term) and those who share enough of those sensibilities to prefer not to offend them. The former group see the latter as wimps, the latter see the former as boors.

I added that “a bunch of moralist scolds have leaped at the opportunity to preach their respective, often contradictory, and sometimes wacky visions of libertarian purity.” I now see that there’s more to it. Here is Steven Horwitz, for example:

Yes, legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 involved some interference with private property and the right of association, but it also did away with a great deal of state-sponsored discrimination and was, in my view, a net gain for liberty.

Well, some parts of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, together with its progeny — the Civil Rights Acts of 1968 and 1991 — did advance liberty, but many parts did not. A principled libertarian would acknowledge that, and parse the Acts into their libertarian and anti-libertarian components. A moral scold who really, really wants the state to impose his attitudes on others would presume — as Horwitz does — to weigh legitimate gains (e.g., voting rights) against unconscionable losses (e.g., property rights and the right of association). But presumptuousness comes naturally to Horwitz because he stands high above reality, in his ivory tower.

Will Wilkinson is sympatico with Horwitz:

Government attempts to guarantee the worth of our liberties by recognizing positive rights to a minimum income or certain services like health care often (but not always) undermine the framework of market and civil institutions most likely to enhance liberty over the long run, and should be limited. But this is really an empirical question about what really does maximize individuals’ chances of formulating and realizing meaningful projects and lives.

Within this framework, racism, sexism, etc., which strongly limit the useful exercise of liberty are clear evils. Now, I am ambivalent about whether the state ought to step in and do anything about it.

Wilkinson, like Horwitz, is quite willing to submit to the state (or have others do so), where state action passes some kind of cost-benefit test. Wilkinson, unlike Horwitz, seems to ignore the fact that the state has tried already to do something about racism, sexism, etc., in the Civil Rights Acts. To the extent that balancing tests are relevant to the question of liberty, the Civil Rights Acts have been costly (both economically and socially) and, in the end, both futile and inimical to the comity of the races and sexes. Moreover, as both Horwitz and Wilkinson fail to acknowledge, state action is a blunt instrument, in that it penalizes many for the acts of the (relatively) few.

In any event, what more could the state do than it has done already? Well, there is always “hate crime” legislation, which (as Nat Hentoff points out) is tantamount to “thought crime” legislation. Perhaps that would satisfy Horwitz, Wilkinson, and their brethren on the “libertarian” Left. And, if that doesn’t do the trick, there is always Cass Sunstein’s proposal for policing thought on the internet. Sunstein, at least, doesn’t pretend to be a libertarian.

O brave new world that hath such philosophers in’t!
__________
* Except when it really isn’t speech; for example: sit-ins (trespass), child pornography (sexual exploitation of minors), and divulging military secrets (treason, in fact if not in name).

Highways and Conservatives

A true conservative — one who favors limited government and private solutions to so-called social problems — does not support tax-funded highways, even when those highways are crowded. But Ross Douthat and Jonah Goldberg do, thereby revealing themselves as big-government “conservatives.”

Jonah Goldberg, as you probably know, is the author of Liberal Fascism. In his stance on the matter of highways. he reveals himself as a neoconservative, big-government, twenty-first century fascist.

The answer to the problem of crowded highways isn’t to build more of them at taxpayers’ expense — in the style of Hitler and Mussolini — it is to let the private sector work its magic. Absent government control of highways and the taxes that support highways, more efficient modes of transportation would be offered by private carriers and manufacturers of transportation systems; employers would finally get serious about telecommuting; and some commuters might even opt for simpler lives or forms of employment that don’t require commuting.

In sum, the market and lifestyle distortions caused by tax-funded highways would be diminished, if not removed entirely. A pox on “highway fascism.”

UPDATE (01/25/08): In a related development, Below the Beltway passes along some good news for taxpayers:

The federal government will not fund the Metro extension to Dulles International Airport without drastic changes, officials said yesterday, effectively scuttling a $5 billion project planned for more than 40 years and widely considered crucial to the region’s economic future.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters and Federal Transit Administration chief James S. Simpson stunned Virginia politicians at a meeting on Capitol Hill yesterday when they outlined what Simpson called “an extraordinarily large set of challenges” that disqualifies the project from receiving $900 million in federal money. Without that, the project would die.

“Federal money” is money taken from taxpayers across the United States.

Related post: “Traffic-Congestion Hysteria” (09 May 2005)

Poland: Where the "Bad News" is Good

Guest post:

These days when, as a conservative, even the “good news” is bad, it’s nice to hear some good “bad news.” By that, I mean “bad” to the socialist-minded media. I am speaking of Poland, a veritable recusant country in the hyper-liberal European Union. When the European Court of Human Rights recently ruled against France for barring a lesbian woman from adopting a child, Polish politicians took the lead in denouncing the decision. Apparently 90% of Poles oppose adoptions by alternative lifestylers.

Last spring, Warsaw played host to the World Congress of Families and defiantly opposed EU pressure for “same-sex marriages” and abortion. Poland has repeatedly stymied efforts to introduce homosexual propaganda as being subversive of public morals, especially as regards children. Currently Poland prohibits abortion in all but a few cases, despite political and economic penalties leavied by the EU. And while this is this not perfect, it is a far cry from the drive-through abortion practices of most countries. Fortunately there has been an ongoing effort (though momentarily defeated) to close even that contradictory loophole (permitting “eugenic abortions”) by religious conservatives.

No doubt Poland’s unusually strong social conservatism has much to do with its pugnacious Catholic heritage and legacy of sucessful non-violent resistance to totalitarian occupiers (both Nazis and Communists). One more bit of “bad news” for Euro-leftists is the tiny island nation of Malta, famed for its heroic resistance to both Ottoman Turkish and German sieges. Today it faces a new, more subtle political siege against its pro-life, pro family government (see related item).

Religion and the Inculcation of Values

Apropos the preceding post and “Religion and the Inculcation of Morality,” I offer these thoughts by Christopher Dawson:

[T]he Liberal movement, with its humanitarian idealism and its belief in the law of nature and the rights of man, owes its origin to an irregular union between the humanist tradition and a religious ideal that was inspired by Christian moral values, though not by Christian faith…. [T]he whole development of liberalism and humanitarianism, which has been of such immense importance in the history of the modern world, derived its spiritual impetus from the Christian tradition that it attempted to replace, and when that tradition disappears this spiritual impetus is lost, and liberalism in its turn is replaced by the crudity and amoral ideology of the totalitarian state.

“Europe in Eclipse” (1954), compiled in
The Dynamics of World History

UPDATE (01/19/08): Relatedly, Mark Steyn writes today:

…Jonah Goldberg has a brilliant new book out called Liberal Fascism, which I hope to address at length in the weeks ahead. I note, however, that American liberals, not surprisingly, don’t care for the title. As it happens, the phrase is H.G. Wells’s, and he meant it approvingly. Unity [Mitford]’s dreamboat Fuhrer described himself as “a man of the left.”… Even when they’re not in thrall to the personality dictators, a big chunk of Western elites have a strange yen for the sterner ways of distant cultures, from Hillary Clinton’s Hallmark sentimentalization (“It Takes A Village,” etc.) of a tribal existence that’s truly nasty, brutish and short to Germaine Greer’s more explicit defence of “female genital mutilation.” Late in life, Miss Greer has finally found a form of patriarchal oppression that gets her groove back as much as National Socialism did Unity Mitford’s.

If you’re unlucky, it’s not just the elites who fall for ideologically exotic suitors. It would seem to me, given how easily the Continent embraced all the most idiotic “isms” three-quarters of a century ago, that it will surely take up some equally unlovely ones as it faces its perfect storm of an aging native population, a surging Muslim immigrant population, and an unsustainable welfare state…

A Western nation voluntarily embracing sharia? Sounds silly. But so does Unity Mitford. Liberal democracy is squaresville and predictable, small-scale and unheroic, deeply unglamorous compared to the alternatives. And kind of boring. Until it’s gone.

Intellectuals and Capitalism

Why is “capitalism” a dirty word in academia?

Andrew Norton notes that disaffected intellectuals since Rousseau have been attacking capitalism for its failure to meet ‘true human needs.’(26) The claim is unfounded, so what is it about capitalism that so upsets them?

Joseph Schumpeter offered part of the answer. He observed that capitalism has brought into being an educated class that has no responsibility for practical affairs, and that this class can only make a mark by criticising the system that feeds them.(27) Intellectuals attack capitalism because that is how they sell books and build careers.

More recently, Robert Nozick has noted that intellectuals spend their childhoods excelling at school, where they occupy the top positions in the hierarchy, only to find later in life that their market value is much lower than they believe they are worth. Seeing ‘mere traders’ enjoying higher pay than them is unbearable, and it generates irreconcilable disaffection with the market system.(28)

But the best explanation for the intellectuals’ distaste for capitalism was offered by Friedrich Hayek in The Fatal Conceit.(29) Hayek understood that capitalism offends intellectual pride, while socialism flatters it. Humans like to believe they can design better systems than those that tradition or evolution have bequeathed. We distrust evolved systems, like markets, which seem to work without intelligent direction according to laws and dynamics that no one fully understands.

Nobody planned the global capitalist system, nobody runs it, and nobody really comprehends it. This particularly offends intellectuals, for capitalism renders them redundant. It gets on perfectly well without them. It does not need them to make it run, to coordinate it, or to redesign it. The intellectual critics of capitalism believe they know what is good for us, but millions of people interacting in the marketplace keep rebuffing them. This, ultimately, is why they believe capitalism is ‘bad for the soul’: it fulfils human needs without first seeking their moral approval.

“Why Capitalism Is Good for You,” by Peter Saunders

Related posts:
“Lefty Profs” (21 Feb 2006)
“Why So Few Free-Market Economists?” (12 Oct 2006)
“Academic Bias” (22 Oct 2007)

Drinking and Voting

Is it necessary to drink heavily before voting for a Democrat? The answer seems to be “yes,” based on the results of the 2004 presidential election:

Sources: Share of popular vote, by State, derived from this page at Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections. Index of alcohol consumption (total of beer, wine, and spirits) in 2005, by State, derived from “Per capita ethanol consumption for States, census regions, and the United States, 1970–2005” at the website of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism of the National Institutes of Health.

The four most bibulous (not Bible-reading) jurisdictions are Delaware (index of 2.59), Nevada (2.83), the District of Columbia (3.05), and New Hampshire (3.26). New Hampshirites should change their motto, “Live Free or Die,” to “Live Hard and Die Cold.”

France, Happiness, and Socialism

What price happiness? French President Nicolas Sarkozy is seeking an answer to the eternal question — so that happiness can be included in measurements of French economic growth.

That’s the lede of an AP story, “French Use Happiness As Economic Measure” (January 10, 2008). The story continues:

Sarkozy said he asked U.S. economist Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the 2001 Nobel economics prize and a critic of free market economists, and Armatya Sen of India, who won the 1998 Nobel prize for work on developing countries, to lead the analysis in France….

Richard Layard, a professor at the London School of Economics and author of the 2005 book “Happiness: Lessons from a New Science,” said Sarkozy may be seeking recognition for policies, popular in Europe, that promote well-being but don’t show up in the GDP statistics….

Jean-Philippe Cotis, the former OECD chief economist who took over as head of France’s statistics office Insee two months ago, said Wednesday that a measure of happiness would complement GDP by taking into account factors such as leisure time — something France has a lot of.

France’s unemployment rate is stubbornly high, and when French people do work they spend less time on the job — 35.9 hours per week compared with the EU average of 37.4.

In other words, if you don’t have the political clout (or stomach) to repeal France’s state-imposed limit on the length of the workweek (35 hours), then you justify it by “proving” that it makes the French happier. (Pourquoi pas?)

And who better to do the job than Stiglitz and Sen, socialists both? Layard’s endorsement of the effort is a dead giveaway, for Layard is a leading proponent of the politics of envy and leveling.

A Misdirected Apology

American Thinker Blog notes that Columbia University professors are apologizing to Ahmadinejad for the “insulting remarks” (i.e., factual statements) aimed at the Iranian nut-case by Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger, on September 24.

Would the same Leftist grovelers think to apologize to conservative academics whom they have barred from or driven out of Columbia? I don’t think so.

What is it with Leftists and anti-American regimes? The question answers itself.

It’s Happening in Britain…

…and if it’s happening there, it can happen here. What? The suppression of politically incorrect speech by the state — not just a tax-funded university, but the central government itself.

Wolf Howling has the story. It’s about a British blogger, Lionheart, who lays it on the line here, and links to his “offending” posts.

P.S. A good subtitle for this post is “Cowering before Islam.” Someone who is not cowering before Islam, even though his government would like to is Geert Wilders of the Netherlands. (Thanks, again, to Wolf Howling.)

P.P.S. I should have mentioned Canada, of course. Cases in point, the “human rights” complaints against Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn.

Culture Watch: Adolescent Marxism

Guest post:

UK environmentalist Paul Dickinson says in an interview:

School didn’t agree with me at all so I left at 17. Having done one year of politics A-level [high school graduation exam course] I decided I was a Marxist.

Ideologically precocious fellow. It’s not clear if Dickinson ever graduated from his teenage Communist views. Perhaps another interview?

An FDR Reader

Thanks to John Ray for bringing my attention to these items:

“How FDR Made the Depression Worse,” by Robert Higgs (Feb 1995)
“Tough Questions for Defenders of the New Deal,” by Jim Powell (06 Nov 2003)
“The Real Deal,” by Amity Shlaes (25 Jun 2007)

Related posts at Liberty Corner include:

“Getting it Perfect” (04 May 2004)
“The Economic Consequences of Liberty” and an addendum, “The Destruction of Income and Wealth by the State” (01 Jan 2005)
“Calling a Nazi a Nazi” (12 Mar 2006)
“Things to Come” (27 Jun 2007)
“FDR and Fascism” (30 Sep 2007)
“A Political Compass: Locating the United States” (13 Nov 2007)
“The Modern Presidency: A Tour of American History since 1900” (01 Dec 2007)

Our descent into statism didn’t begin with FDR. (His cousin Teddy got the ball rolling downhill.) But FDR compounded an economic crisis, then exploited it to put us firmly on the path to the nanny state. The rest, as they say, is history.

Thus we now have a “compassionate conservative” as president, and several “Republican” candidates for president who would have been comfortable as New Deal Democrats. Calvin Coolidge must be spinning in his grave at hypersonic speed.

I Am Happy to Report…

…that I am not a “liberal” (i.e., a statist).

Maverick Philosopher answers “no” to every one of the 23 questions asked by Dennis Prager in “Are You a Liberal?” As do I.

That makes me — most decidedly — an”un-liberal.”

Season of Our Discontent

Guest post:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
—W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

These lines from Yeats’s apocalyptic poem come to me as I read Citizens, Simon Schama’s definitive study of the French Revolution.

As Schama makes clear, many of the crises that erupted into open sedition under Louis XVI were due more to changing perceptions than actual problems. France of the late 18th century was hardly worse off than any other country, but its national fiber had been undermined by decades of muckraking journalism and excessive criticism of the government (sometimes lewd and pornographic in nature), coupled with a cynical mood in philosophy and morals. Now compare that with the level of obstructionism among certain elements in this country today, not only on the left but increasingly on the far right. Nor is it surprising that the two extremes will frequently combine against the middle, often for no other reason than exploitative publicity seeking rather than hard principles.

The danger is that when you have people who insist there is no chance of political reform, only collapse and radical change, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. In the France of the 1770s and ‘80s there were similar challenges to reform on the part of entrenched vested interests as well as the ideological rebels. Schama makes the daring observation that the revolution originated at the top — from disaffected and self-seeking aristocrats who long had an axe to grind with the crown, who wanted to use the discontent of the lower orders for their own ends. As so often happens in revolutions, that discontent grew out of control and the mob turned on its masters. We know how that happens on the left. But it can also happen when desperate conservatives foolishly attempt to dabble in the volatile mix of crisis politics and heated populism. In 1933 Adolf Hitler exploited “useful idiots” on the right to gain his electoral victory.

Many of the grievances against the French system under Louis XVI were legitimate. But every time the king attempted genuine reform, he was thwarted and eventually blamed for the failure of others. His enemies weren’t interested in making the existing order better. Of course, the biggest challenge for the French monarchy was that (unlike England or the United States) it lacked “voter confidence” because it was wedded to a clumsy and unpopular absolutism. In our own time, the problem is that extremists across the spectrum would undermine the representative, moderate nature of our institutions, resulting in similar levels of disaffection. While no system is perfect, violent polemics exaggerate society’s difficulties while distracting people from long-term, responsible solutions.

History Lessons

The following is adapted from an introduction that I wrote almost three years ago for “The Modern Presidency: A Tour of American History since 1900,” in its original incarnation.

Chief among the lessons of American history since 1900 is the price we have paid for allowing government to become so powerful. Most Americans today take for granted a degree of government involvement in their lives that would have shocked the Americans of 1900. The growth of governmental power has undermined the voluntary social institutions upon which civil society depends for orderly evolution: family, church, club, and community. The results are evident in the incidence of crime, broken homes, and drug use; in the resort to sex, violence, sensationalism, and banality as modes of entertainment; and generally in the social fragmentation and alienation that beset Americans — in spite of their prosperity.

The other edge of the governmental sword is interference in economic affairs through taxation and regulation. Such interference, which has grown exponentially since the early 1900s, has blunted Americans’ incentives to work hard, invent, innovate, and create new businesses. The result is that Americans — as prosperous as they are — are far less prosperous than they would be had they not ceded so much economic power to government.

Because of the growth of governmental power, much of the freedom that attends Americans’ prosperity is largely illusory: Americans actually have less freedom than they used to have — and much less freedom than envisioned by the founding generation that fought for America’s independence and wrote its Constitution. I am referring not to the imagined excesses of the current administration, which is vigorously and constitutionally defending American citizens against foreign predators. I am referring to such real things as:

  • the diminution of free speech in the name of campaign-finance “reform”
  • the denial of property rights, the right to work, and freedom of association for the sake of racial and sexual “equality”
  • the seizure of private property for private use in the name of “economic development”
  • the interference of government in almost every aspect of commerce, from deciding what may and may not be produced to how it must be produced, advertised, and sold — all to ensure that we do not make mistakes from which we can learn and profit
  • exorbitant taxation at every level of government, which denies those persons who have earned money lawfully the right to decide how to use it lawfully and gives that money, instead, to parasites in and out of government.

Those are the kinds of abuses of governmental power that Americans have acquiesced in — and even clamored for. It is those abuses that should outrage politicians and pundits — and the masses who swallow their distortions and their socialistic agenda.

For a detailed analysis, rich with links to supporting posts and articles, see “A Political Compass: Locating the United States.”

Dig This

The trailer for Indoctrinate U, a film about the suppression of speech on today’s campuses.

Academia has been quick to validate the film’s message. This is from the producers of Indoctrinate U:

Due to a threatened lawsuit from a major taxpayer-funded university, the Indoctrinate U homepage has been taken down temporarily. On The Fence Films LLC is deciding how best to proceed, and we will not be commenting on anything until after our final response has been executed.

Don’t worry, though, this will not derail the film.

One can only hope.

A Political Compass: Locating the United States

This post builds on “A Political Compass” and its predecessor, “The Inevitability of the Communitarian State, or What’s a Libertarian to Do?” I apply the concept of the political compass to assess, harshly but realistically, our present location. Most of the links herein point to supporting posts at Liberty Corner.

Introduction

The left-right, liberal-conservative taxonomies of the political spectrum are inadequate because they are linear and lacking in subtlety. The political spectrum is more usefully thought of as a compass, with anarchy, libertarianism, communitarianism, and statism as its four main directions.

In the history of the United States, the compass’s needle has swung from a point near libertarianism, through communitarianism, and toward statism.

To change the metaphor, the tide of communitarianism — which began to swell around the turn of the twentieth century — rose inexorably to engulf the United States in the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II. The tide has continued to rise, slowly and silently engulfing us in statism.

But let us begin with anarchy, the point of the compass that, thankfully, we have not visited.

Anarchy

According to anarchists (or anarcho-libertarians, as I call them), an individual’s freedom of action should be limited only by (a) voluntary observance of social norms and (b) contracts (enforced by third parties) that bind the members of a group to observe certain restraints and to pay certain penalties for failing to observe those restraints. Who keeps the third parties honest? Who arbitrates inter-group disputes in cases where the different groups clearly have different norms, interests, or objectives? What happens when a person or faction within a group or a faction outside any group attains superior force and decides to employ that force in the service of its norms, interests, or objectives. (See this and this for more in that vein.)

Anarchy, in other words, boils down to “might makes right,” even though its adherents would like it to be otherwise.

We in the United States have been spared anarchy. Our founding experience, in fact, held the promise of libertarianism.

Libertarianism

Given the inconsistency of anarchy with liberty (for liberty cannot thrive where might makes right), we turn to the only political arrangement that (if it is nurtured) can assure liberty, namely, minarchy.

Rights and liberty, it must be understood, are not Platonic abstractions; they are, rather, social phenomena. They are the best “deal” we can make with those around us — the set of compromises that define acceptable behavior, which is the boundary of liberty. Those compromises are not made by a philosopher-king but through an evolving consensus about harms — a consensus that flows from reason, experience, persuasion, and necessity.

Minarchism is true libertarianism because it provides a minimal state for the protection of the lives, liberty, and property of those who adhere to it; a state that otherwise remains neutral with respect to its adherents’ affairs; a state that does not distort the wisdom embedded in tradition, that is, in voluntarily evolved social norms; a state that is nevertheless sufficiently powerful to protect its willing adherents‘ interests from predators, within and without.

Minarchy, unlike anarchy, is possible, given sufficient luck and vigilance. As I wrote here,

[t]here must…be an overarching, non-market institution which enables markets to operate efficiently, that is, to reach outcomes that are seen as beneficial by all those willingly operate within markets. The necessary supervening institution is the minimal state (a minarchy) that is vested with enough authority to protect market participants from force and fraud, but not so much authority so as to enable its interference with market outcomes.

Only a wise (and rare) élite can establish such a state. The existence of such an élite — and its success in establishing a lasting minarchy — depends on serendipity, determination, and (yes) even force. That we, in the United States, came close (for a time) to having such a minarchy was due to historical accident (luck). We had just about the right élite at just about the right time, and the élite‘s wisdom managed to prevail for a while.

The dichotomy between anarcho-capitalism and minarchy is a false one. The true dichotomy is between minarchy and warlordism (which follows from anarchy).

That we have moved on to something worse than minarchy is not proof of the superiority of anarcho-capitalism. It is, rather, proof that our luck ran out.

For the 100-plus years between the ratification of the Constitution and the rise of the first Roosevelt, we had something close to minarchy here in the United States: a “night watchman” state of limited powers, standing guard over a collection of quasi-independent States. The people of those States (all of them, since the Civil War) were free — in the world of reality that lies beyond the ken of anarchists — to choose the most amenable State and locality in which to make the best possible “deal” for themselves.

We had nothing to fear but…that the minimal state would exceed its charter and descend into…

Communitiarianism

Communitarianism is the regulation by the state of private institutions for the purpose of producing certain outcomes desired by controlling élites (e.g., income redistribution, “protection” from learning by our mistakes, “protection” from things deemed harmful by the worrying classes, and “social (or cosmic) justice“). Such outcomes, contrary to their stated purposes, are unwise, inefficient, and harmful to their intended beneficiaries.

Communitarianism is the stage that we passed through as our “luck ran out.” Which is to say, our vigilance faltered and we succumbed to the ruinous despotism of democracy: the voter–enabled substitution of state-imposed and state-endorsed behavioral norms for socially evolved ones — always in the name of “liberality” or “progress.”

The communitarian state simply is too seductive. It co-opts its citizens through progressive corruption: more spending and regulation, to curry favor with certain voting blocs, higher taxes to fund more spending and to perpetuate the regulatory mechanisms of the state; still more taxation, spending, and regulation; and so on.

Each voting bloc insists on sustaining its benefits, and increasing them at every opportunity, for one of three reasons. Many voters actually believe that the largesse of the communitarian state is free to them, and some of them are right (but only for the short run). Other voters know better, but they grab what they can get because others will grab it if they don’t. Then there are those voters (and well-heeled political contributors) who exude noblesse oblige toward the “less fortunate” and “oppressed.” Such voters (and contributors), who now are predominant among the very-to-super rich, view the paying of taxes as a sacred duty (even a privilege), and consider the state a massive charitable and social-leveling organization.

Whatever the motivation for the communitarian state, those who vote for it and those who enable it through their political contributions are profoundly irrational. This irrational, communitarian urge began to dominate American politics with the rise of the first Roosevelt. Our descent into full-blown communitarianism was hastened by the Great Depression, a government-made and government-prolonged tragedy, exploited (then and now) by the proponents of communitarianism and statism.

Statism

We were, for decades, poised on the brink of the abyss of statism, which is outright state control of most social and economic institutions (e.g., medicine, notably but far from exclusively). I have concluded that we have gone over the brink and slid, silently and docilely, into the abyss.

Statism may be reached either as an extension of communitarianism or via post-statist anarchy or near-anarchy, as in Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, and Mao’s China. We have come to statism via communitarianism, which leads inevitably to statism because the appetite for largesse is insatiable, as is the desire (in certain circles) to foster “social (or cosmic) justice.”

I was once optimistic that our transition to all-out statism would lead, in turn, to overthrow of statism:

[S]tatism is an easier target for reform than communitarianism. The high price of statism becomes obvious to more voters as more facets of economic and personal behavior are controlled by the state. In other words, statism’s inherent weakness is that it creates more enemies than communitarianism.

That weakness becomes libertarians’ opportunity. Persistent, reasoned eloquence in the cause of liberty may, at last, slow the rise of statism and hasten its rollback. And who knows, perhaps libertarianism will gain adherents as the rollback gains momentum.

My optimism has vanished, as I have come to understand that politicians their enablers (voters and contributors) are profoundly irrational. They prefer statism to liberty, regardless of what they say. They (most of them) mean to be benign, but statism is not benign. Statism may seem benign — as it does to Europeans, for example — but it is dehumanizing, impoverishing, and — at bottom — destructive of the social fabric upon which liberty depends.

Conclusion

Our statism is better-disguised than Europe’s, but it is there, in the insidious, voter-supported machinery of government that has caused us to be so heavily regulated and legislated by so many federal, State, and local agencies. Try to think of an aspect of your life — what you can do, what you can buy, what you can afford to buy, the income you earn as an employer or employee, and so on — that is not dictated by government, either directly or through taxation and regulation. As you think about your life, consider these things:

  • how zoning and building codes affect the cost, location, and specifications of your dwelling
  • how licensing and zoning affect the numbers and types of businesses that offer the goods and services you seek
  • the availability (or non-availability) to you of beneficial drugs because of testing mandates that result in more death and illness, not less
  • limitations on the numbers and types of doctors and other health-care providers from which you can choose
  • where you may smoke (even if the venue is private property)
  • whether or not you may own and carry a firearm with which to defend yourself
  • the security of your property from arbitrary seizure by government
  • the provision of myriad government “social services” (e.g, bike trails and nature preserves for yuppies, hippies, and tree-huggers) for which you have no need but for which you are nevertheless taxed because such services have voting constituencies and politicians who benefit from catering to those constituencies
  • relatedly, the provision of so-called federal money to your State and local governments, which money comes from taxes imposed by the federal government, over which you have even less control than you do of your State and local governments
  • the number, location, and characteristics of highways (which often are built as pork-barrel projects), none of which monitor or restrict the of entry or incompetent, drunk, or cell-phone-using drivers (as could be the case with private highways for selective users who are willing to pay the price to be able to drive sanely and safely)
  • the failure of government to defend you adequately against enemies and likely enemies, foreign and domestic, so that it may fund “social services” and cosset criminals
  • the number of public-utility providers who can serve you, and the rates that they may charge you
  • the persons whom you (or your employer) may hire, fire, and promote — almost regardless of their credentials and performance, and certainly regardless of how they affect your performance (or your employer’s ability to continue your employment)
  • the benefits that you (or your employer) must provide employees, regardless of the effect of such mandates on your ability (or that of your employer) to start or stay in business
  • how much you may contribute to a political campaign, and what may be said on the air about an upcoming election
  • the provision of “government” funding to political campaigns
  • the provision of your tax dollars to “scholars” who scoff at your morality and propound schemes to further regulate and impoverish you
  • whether, how, and where your children must be schooled

The list could go on and on. But you get the idea — I hope.

If you believe in the necessity of the things I have listed, and believe that you are better off because of them, you haven’t been paying attention — or you are an enabler of statism.

A bit of taxation here and a bit of regulation there, and before you know it you are living under the thumb of the state.