Category: Thinkers: Famous and Infamous

Remembering an Unsung Hero

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution posts about “The Man Who Killed the Draft“:

The influence of Milton Friedman in ending conscription is well-known. But an economist named William Meckling arguably played a larger role, read the story.

Here’s some of the story, as told in 1999 by David Henderson:

If you are an American male under age 44, take a moment of silence to thank William H. Meckling, who died last year at age 76. Even though you probably haven’t heard of him, he has had a profound effect on your life. What he did was help to end military conscription in the United States.

Between 1948 and 1973, here’s what you knew if you were a healthy male born in the U.S.A.: the government could pluck you out of almost any activity you were pursuing, cut your hair, and send you anywhere in the world….

Bill Meckling didn’t think that was right….He had been drafted into the army in World War II and witnessed the government’s incredibly wasteful use of manpower when it could pay below-market wages. He tucked that lesson away and would use it 25 years later.

Meckling went on to become an economist. In 1962 [sic] he was named the first dean of the University of Rochester’s new business school, where he continued until 1983….

When the [President’s Commission on an All-Volunteer Force] was created, in 1969, the members were not unanimous on ending the draft. In his recent coauthored book, Two Lucky People, Mr. Friedman writes that 5 of the 15 commissioners — including himself, Mr. Greenspan, and Mr. Wallis — were against the draft to begin with. Five members were undecided, and 5 were prodraft. Yet when the commission’s report came out less than a year later and became a paperback book, all 15 members favored ending the draft.

What happened in between? That’s where Bill Meckling comes in.

Meckling was chosen as executive director of the commission. As soon as he started his work, he got a nasty surprise: he had thought that everyone involved was opposed to the draft and that his job would be narrower than it turned out to be. “I thought that I was hired to estimate supply curves,” he joked in a 1979 speech; he neither intended nor desired to get into a debate over conscription. But Meckling quickly adjusted to his new position. He hired some economists (who estimated those supply curves) as well as some historians; members of both groups wrote papers making a strong historical and philosophical case against the draft. The commission’s work was done in less than a year, under budget and ahead of schedule. Three years later, the draft was dead….

…Many of you who have made or are now making your fortunes would not have done so if the draft had been in the way. Consider Bill Gates, who in 1975 dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft: during the draft years, young men like him who left college risked being certified as prime military meat. Computer programmers and other IT workers, who often do their best work relatively early in life, regularly drop out of college now because high-paying, interesting jobs beckon. If we still had the draft — even a peacetime draft — many wouldn’t have that chance.

People often wonder why today’s 20-somethings have such entrepreneurial spirit. One reason, I believe, is that a whole generation has grown up without the draft looming over its head. For that I thank, among others, Martin Anderson, Milton Friedman, W. Allen Wallis, and William H. Meckling. Bless them all.

When I left graduate school in 1963 and went to work for a defense think-tank in the D.C. area, Bill Meckling headed the division to which I was assigned. Bill didn’t leave the think-tank to become dean of the B-school at Rochester until 1964 or 1965. Anyway, the rest of the story is right about Bill and his role in ending the draft. Some of the economists and historians who worked on the staff of the commission were seconded from the defense think-tank where I worked. In fact, the staff was housed in the same building, though in separate quarters. The intellectual and physical proximity of the commisstion’s staff to the think-tank was no coincidence; the University of Rochester had held the contract to oversee the think-tank since 1968.

In 1983, as Bill was nearing retirement as dean of Rochester’s B-school, the university’s oversight of the think-tank was under fire from then-Secretary of the Navy John Lehman. (That’s another story.) Rochester’s president thought it prudent to review the think-tank’s management practices. Bill was a member of the university’s review team. One of his tasks was to interview me about quality control (I was responsible for reviewing the think-tank’s formal research publications). It was the last time I saw Bill Meckling — an economist who truly advanced the cause of liberty in America.

Andrew Sullivan, Nailed

About a month ago I had my say about Andrew Sullivan and his gay-marriage litmus test for politicians, which led him to switch his allegiance from Bush to Kerry. Here’s a sample:

…Like many other bloggers, I long sensed that Sullivan eventually would change his colors because he has been monomaniacal about the recognition of homosexual marriage. He kept harping on it in post after post, day after day, week after week. It got so boring that I took Sullivan’s blog off my blogroll and quit reading it….

He seems to have put his sexual orientation above all else. He’s really a one-issue voter. Sure, he has rationalized his change of mind, but his change of mind can be traced, I think, to his preoccupation with gay marriage as a political litmus test….

Today John Weidner at Random Jottings nails Sullivan to the floor:

…Poor Sullivan’s in knots again. I wish he would just say he supports Kerry because of gay marriage. But no, he has to cover up by trying to actually make a case for Kerry, and against Bush. (He was for him before he was against him.)

If Osama bin Laden was in favor of gay marriage, Sullivan would face an difficult choice: Whether to go the whole enchilada and wear a black-turban, or to fudge a bit with a white one.

Hyperbolic, yes. But Weidner makes my point far more dramatically than I was able to make it.

A Left-Winger Grasps at Libertarian Straws, and Misses

Kos is all excited because he stumbled onto a Cato Institute paper that purports to show the advantages of divided government: lower spending and less chance of going to war. I guess it’s the war part that Kos has latched onto. Surely he’s not for less government spending, and surely he favors divided government (Kerry in the White House, Republicans in Congress) only as a way station toward undivided, all-Democrat government.

Be that as it may, I long ago debunked the Cato paper in question, as well as a later, more detailed analysis along the same lines. My take:

There is a very strong — almost perfect — relationship between real nondefense spending and the unemployment rate for the years 1969 through 2001, that is, from the Nixon-Ford administration through the years of Carter, Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton. Using a linear regression with five pairs of observations, one pair for each administration, I find that the percentage change in real nondefense spending is a linear function of the change in the unemployment rate….

[equation here]

In words, the work of the New Deal and Fair Deal had been capped by the enactment of the Great Society in the Kennedy-Johnson era. The war over domestic spending was finished, and the big spenders had won. Real nondefense spending continued to grow, but more systematically than it had from 1933 to 1969. From 1969 through 2001, each administration (abetted or led by Congress, of course) increased real nondefense spending according to an implicit formula that reflects the outcome of political-bureaucratic bargaining. It enabled the beast to grow, but at a rate that wouldn’t invoke images of a new New Deal or Great Society.

Divided government certainly hampered the ability of Republican administrations (Nixon-Ford, Reagan, Bush I) to strangle the beast, had they wanted to. But it’s not clear that they wanted to very badly. Nixon was, above all, a pragmatist. Moreover, he was preoccupied by foreign affairs (including the extrication of the U.S. from Vietnam), and then by Watergate. Ford was only a caretaker president, and too “nice” into the bargain. Reagan talked a good game, but he had to swallow increases in nondefense spending as the price of his defense buildup. Bush I simply lacked the will and the power to strangle the beast.

Bureaucratic politics also enters the picture. It’s hard to strangle a domestic agency once it has been established. Most domestic agencies have vocal and influential constituencies, in Congress and amongst the populace. Then there are the presidential appointees who run the bureaucracies. Even Republican appointees usually come to feel “ownership” of the bureaucracies they’re tapped to lead.

What happened before 1969?

The beast — a creature of the New Deal — grew prodigiously through 1940, when preparations for war, and war itself, brought an end to the Great Depression. Real nondefense spending grew by a factor of 3.6 during 1933-40. If the relationship for 1969-2001 had been in effect then, real nondefense spending would have increased by only 10 percent.

Truman and the Democrats in control of Congress were still under the spell of their Depression-inspired belief in the efficacy of big government and counter-cyclical fiscal policy. The post-war recession helped their cause, because most Americans feared a return of the Great Depression, which was still a vivid memory. Real nondefense spending increased 2.8 times during the Truman years. If the relationship for 1969-2001 had been in effect, real nondefense spending would have increased by only 20 percent.

The excesses of the Truman years caused a backlash against “big government” that the popular Eisenhower was able to exploit, to a degree, in spite of divided government. Even though the unemployment rate more than doubled during Ike’s presidency, real domestic spending went up by only 9 percent. That increase would have been 28 percent if the relationship for 1969-2001 had been in effect. But even Ike couldn’t resist temptation. After four years of real cuts in nondefense spending, he gave us the interstate highway program: another bureaucracy — and one with a nationwide constituency.

The last burst of the New Deal came in the emotional aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination and Lyndon Johnson’s subsequent landslide victory. Real nondefense spending in the Kennedy-Nixon years rose by 56 percent, even though the unemployment rate dropped by 48 percent during those years. The 56 percent increase in real spending would have been only 8 percent if the 1969-2001 relationship had applied.

As for Bush II, through the end of 2003 he was doing a bit better than average, by the standards of 1969-2001 — but not significantly better. He now seems to have become part of the problem instead of being the solution. In any event, the presence of the federal government has become so pervasive, and so important to so many constituencies, that any real effort to strangle the beast would invoke loud cries of “meanie, meanie” — cries that a self-styled “compassionate conservative” couldn’t endure.

Events since 1969 merely illustrate the fact that the nation and its politicians have moved a long way toward symbiosis with big government. The beast that frightened conservatives in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s has become a household pet, albeit one with sharp teeth. Hell, we’ve even been trained to increase his rations every year.

Tax cuts won’t starve the beast — Friedman, Becker, and other eminent economists to the contrary. But tax increases, on the other hand, would only stimulate the beast’s appetite.

The lesson of history, in this case, is that only a major war — on the scale of World War II — might cause us to cut the beast’s rations. And who wants that?

Deconstruct This!

First, the news:

Deconstructionism Founder Derrida Dies

Sat Oct 9, 7:01 PM ET

By ELAINE GANLEY, Associated Press Writer

PARIS – World-renowned thinker Jacques Derrida, a charismatic philosopher who founded the school known as deconstructionism, has died, the French president’s office said Saturday. He was 74….

Deconstructionists like Derrida explored the means of liberating the written word from the structures of language, opening limitless textual interpretations. Not limited to language, Derrida’s philosophy of deconstructionism was then applied to western values….

Then, the underlying “text”:

…What most characterizes deconstruction is its notion of textuality, a view of language as it exists not only in books, but in speech, in history, and in culture. For the deconstructionist, language is everything. The world itself is “text.” Language directs humanity and creates human reality. (A reality that cannot be named or described is illusory, at best.) Yet, upon close examination, words seem to have no connection with reality or with concepts or ideas.

Related to textuality, the notion of intertext refers to the broader cultural background, the context that saturates the text with innumerable and nonverbal conventions, concepts, figurations, and codes. Given the silent and hidden links of a text to its cultural and social intertext, the text’s content and meaning are, essentially, indeterminate. Texts, therefore, are unreadable, and the practice of interpretation may be defined as misreading.

Derrida’s deconstructions of Western thinkers from Plato to Martin Heidegger attack what he calls “logocentrism,” the human habit of assigning truth to logos — to spoken language, the voice of reason, the word of God. Derrida finds that logocentrism generates and depends upon a framework of two-term oppositions that are basic to Western thinking, such as being/nonbeing, thing/word, essence/appearance, presence/absence, reality/image, truth/lie, male/female. In the logocentric epistemological system the first term of each pair is the stronger (TRUTH/lie, MALE/female).

Derrida is critical of these hierarchical polarities, and seeks to take language apart by reversing their order and displacing, and thus transforming, each of the terms — perhaps by putting them in slightly different positions within a word group, or by pursuing their etymology to extreme lengths, or by substituting words in other languages that look and sound alike. Extending the work of Derrida, feminist critics have deconstructed the “phallocentric” pair male/female. Feminists in general see phallocentrism as fundamental to the larger “social text” of Western logocentric society, which, aided by language, has given women secondary sexual, economic, and social roles.

Deconstruction has been regularly attacked as childish philosophical skepticism and linguistic nihilism….

Precisely. Derrida’s philosophy — if you can call it that — is as dead (intellectually) as Derrida. What is, or was, deconstruction? If the preceding explanation seems opaque, that’s because deconstruction is essentially meaningless. It’s merely an arbitrary, open-ended method of attacking any philosophy, ideology, science, writing, or fact of life that runs counter to one’s prejudices. It’s on a par with conspiracy theories and junk science. It’s juvenile psychobabble. Deconstruction should go the way of Derrida.

Billy Bob and the Bard

“Billy: Bard’s a load of bull.” That’s the headline on a piece at The Sun Newspaper Online. There’s more:

HOLLYWOOD star Billy Bob Thornton has created Much Ado in the acting world — by branding William Shakespeare “bulls**t”.

The heavily-tattooed American actor, 49 — whose films include Bad Santa and Armageddon — launched an astonishing attack on the Bard.

He compared the legendary English playwright’s work to corny soap operas.

He said: “I think Shakespeare’s overrated. It’s bulls**t. I’d never go and see a Shakespeare play. Who’d want to see me in Hamlet?…

“It’s not that I don’t understand it. But people think if you speak with an English accent it somehow makes you smarter.

“I don’t believe in all the flowery language — all of his plays are just a series of soap operas.”

Billy Bob — who plays a foul-mouthed Father Christmas in the Santa comedy — likened works such as Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet to US daytime drama Days Of Our Lives….

Well, Billy Bob, no one would want to see you in Hamlet, that’s for sure. If he thinks there’s nothing more to Shakespeare than “flowery language” he doesn’t understand it, in spite of his protestations. But what do you expect from someone who starred in Bad Santa, a vile piece of trash that I tolerated for about five minutes. If the DVD hadn’t been a rental I would have smashed it.

Actually, I think Billy Bob’s in a bad mood because he’s made so many stinkers lately. Not counting Bad Santa, six of his last seven movies have garnered fair-to-terrible ratings by viewers, according to Internet Movie Database.

The Splenetic Krugman Truth Squad

According to Jeff Salamon, writing in today’s Austin American-Statesman,

Paul Krugman, whose incendiary columns occasionally run on the op-ed pages of the American-Statesman…, made the leap from famous-within-his-profession Princeton economics professor to famous-period pundit when he accepted a twice-weekly column at the no-longer-quite-so-Gray Lady. Krugman has been so tough on the current administration that he has even inspired a self-styled Krugman Truth Squad, who are even angrier than he is. Even when they get him dead to rights — and they do, sometimes — their rhetoric is so over the top (typical KTS blog headline: “Krugman Hate Crimes”) that you notice their spleen, rather than their facts.

The spleen is understandable. Krugman is the Goebbels of the pseudo-academic left. It’s hard to react to out-and-out vicious, lying propaganda with pure reason, even though the Krugman Truth Squad has reason (and facts) on its side.

But I’m not indulging in reason tonight. Just call me a member of the splenetic Krugman Truth Squad. And proud of it.

Dribble from Drabble

Margaret Drabble remains a favorite author, in spite of dribble like this:

My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness.

Unlike John the Square, Drabble has kept her anti-Americanism out of her fiction — except in mild, typically Brit-snob doses. My tolerance has limits, however. She goes off my list of favorite authors when her novels become hysterically anti-American, like John the Square’s Absolute Friends. So presposterous I couldn’t finish it. Nor will I link to it.

Epstein’s Freedom, Revisited

Yesterday, in response to a post by Tim Sandefur at Freespace, I posed five questions about Richard Epstein’s new book, Skepticism and Freedom. Sandefur and Jonathan Rowe, writing at jonrowe.blogspot.com, have addressed the questions, here and here. Herewith, the five questions (italicized), followed by excerpts of Sandefur’s and Rowe’s responses:

1. In light of Epstein’s belief that we ought to be highly skeptical of the idea that an outside party has better knowledge about the choices (and the benefits from them) that a person makes, how does Epstein reckon that the state, as an outside party, is able to determine that the parties to a forced exchange will be better off as a result of the exchange?

Sandefur:

The issue is one of valuation—if third parties can’t compute value for the two contracting parties, how can the state know that a forced exchange will leave them worse off? This challenge echoes Randy Barnett’s challenge to Epstein in their recent debate in the pages of Reason magazine. Although Epstein didn’t really answer, I think one answer would be that the value isn’t always indecipherable. People are often able to put a money value on their losses, including the loss of their rights. In theory, just compensation would leave parties no worse off, even in their own eyes. (One major problem in eminent domain is that the erosion of the public use clause necessarily undercompensates, in addition to its other negative effects.) Epstein would probably say that in many cases people can tell you whether they’re worse off or not. True, this subjectivism could exacerbate holdout problems, but it’s at least a partial answer. Also, suppose everyone in the state agrees to the proposition that dollars shall be legal tender for subjective losses. If they do that, then it might be perfectly fine for the state to measure people’s losses in money values, and decide that they’re better off when those money values rise, even in the face of a person claiming that he’s been wronged.

2. What happens to the transactions costs that (presumably) keep the parties from undertaking an exchange that the state decides to force? Do the costs simply vanish or does the state (that is, taxpayers) defray them?

Sandefur:

[J]ust compensation would make up the transaction costs (which, presumably, would be lower anyway for the state than for the parties themselves, since in Epstein’s view, the lower transaction costs for the state are a primary justification for state action to begin with), and that compensation would come from flat taxation.

3. Is Epstein’s concept of forced exchange a justification of the integration of commerce (e.g., forcing whites to accommodate blacks at hotels, restaurants, etc., and forcing whites to offer houses to black as well as white buyers)?

Sandefur:

[See no. 4: ED.]

4. If Epstein’s concept of forced exchange justifies the integration of commerce, how does the state account for the preference of whites not to trade with blacks, or does the state simply regard that preference as illegitimate?

Sandefur:

Epstein doesn’t, so far as I know, use his forced exchange principle to justify curbs on private racial discrimination—but, as I said, I haven’t read Forbidden Grounds, so perhaps Jonathan Rowe knows better than I….

Rowe:

Let me note two points that Epstein makes in Forbidden Grounds (a polemic against anti-discrimination laws). First, like me, Epstein doesn’t believe that the pattern of segregation that we saw in the Jim Crow south could have persisted absent enforcement by state and local governments. He notes the efforts of segregationists to restrict the black vote as powerful evidence of this. “Without ironclad white political control, someone, somewhere would have tried to gain entry into local markets, given the supra competitive returns.” (Epstein, Postscript, 8 Yale Law & Policy Rev. at 331).

In those areas of life where explicit ordinances demanding segregation weren’t present, private violence enforced the color line and the Jim Crow governments let that violence go by refusing, in violation of the 14th Amendment, to enforce the “equal protection of the laws.” Moreover, Epstein points outs that state governments could also enforce collateral restrictions against such firms that bucked the color line—taxes, zoning permits, health inspections, and the like, “could be brought to bear on firms that did not toe the line set by Jim Crow.” (Epstein, Forbidden Grounds, at 246.)

Yet, Epstein would indeed be willing to allow for the existence of anti-discrimination laws in the private sector so long as they were Pareto justified. But the problem is, according to Epstein, they clearly aren’t. Much of Forbidden Grounds and his law review articles on the subject were written to demonstrate this….

5. If the state chooses to treat the preference of whites as illegitimate, by what criterion does the state judge the legitimacy of the preferences of parties to a forced exchange being contemplated by the state?

Sandefur:

[This] question confuses me a bit. I think one problem is that Epstein’s not arguing that these preferences are illegitimate, or even that the state should ignore them. He’s saying that the state could adopt a forced exchange: that is, force a new state of affairs on the world while compensating those who would prefer otherwise, in most cases. But this raises the spectre of the protection racket—that is, people will demand compensation for refraining from doing things they had no right to do. Epstein sees this problem, but I don’t think he has sufficiently answered it, at least, not in Skepticism And Freedom….

The best solution that Epstein offers in his context is to “den[y] the monopolist the absolute right to exclude by requiring him to supply his goods or services, not at whatever price he [can] fetch, but only at reasonable prices”—that is, he introduces a notoriously vague term which brings up all sorts of extra problems. Are those problems so bad that the cure is worse than the disease? I don’t think so, in the context of segregation, but as [the author of Liberty Corner] says, it’s awfully hard to draw the line, once we’ve conceded the state’s authority to force whites to accommodate blacks. Good intentions can then go terribly awry, as we all know.

Both Sandefur’s and Rowe’s posts are worth reading in their entirety. Again, they’re here and here.

Favorite Posts: Affirmative Action and Race

Lileks Nails the Sunday Times Set

I used to subscribe to the Sunday edition of The New York Times. I quit when I got tired of being pounded by a point of view, in every damned section (even Sports). I hung on until I found that I no longer enjoyed the Magazine. Then I quit taking the Sunday Times and did my bit to prevent deforestation. James Lileks knows whereof I speak:

The Sunday Times is the weekly sermon: let us reinforce your world view, your sense of belonging to the Thinking Class, the Special Ones….Anyway, it’s a sunny fall morning – well, noonish. Now comes the capstone moment when you lay the slab of the Times in your lap and begin the autoposy of the week. Scan the A section headlines – yes, yes, yes, appalling. Scan the metro: your eyes glaze. The arts section – later. Travel – Greece again? Good for Greece….No comics . . . there was always comics on Sunday back home. But that was IOWA, for heaven’s sake, what else would you expect but Blondie and Ziggy and the rest . . . ah.

The Magazine.

Let’s begin! A little humorous piece – not funny haha funny, but, you know, arch, which is very urbane. Then there’s an essay on words, which is wonderful because you love words, and then a big serious piece about that horrible situation the administration isn’t doing anything about. You’ll read it later – skim the pull quotes for now. Best of all are the ads, because you really wouldn’t want to wear any of that stuff but it’s fun to look at….

(The New York Times Sunday Magazine is placed on the top of the toilet tank)

(The New York Times Sunday Magazine slides off the toilet tank, reminding you why you don’t put it there)

(The New York Times Sunday Magazine is strategically placed on the coffee table to alert anyone who comes into your flat that you read the New York Times Sunday Magazine)

(One week later, unread and unobserved, it is replaced by another edition. Cover story: global climate change and tourism threatens biodiversity in Antarctica. But you suspected as much. The whole world is going to hell. Except for New York. New York is fabulous. It just has to be.)

(Two weeks later: none of your friends are bloggers and none of your friends read blogs. So nevermind.)

But then there was the Book Review, which I kept taking (by mail) for a few more years. Then the Book Review began to get ever more serious — less fiction, more “relevance” — and ever more stridently left-wing — with a few libertarian-conservatives thrown into the mix, just for fun, in the spirit of “let’s show our compassion to the masses by inviting some anti-globalist protesters to our black-tie party.” Well, I quit taking the Book Review, too.

So, I’ve kicked the Times habit, and I wake up every morning feeling better about myself.

Epstein’s Freedom

In a post about Richard Epstein and his book, Skepticism and Freedom, Tim Sandefur of Freespace says:

The title comes from Epstein’s belief that we ought to be highly skeptical of the idea that an outside party has better knowledge about the choices (and the benefits from them) that a person makes. The person making the deal is in the best position to know whether the deal meets his desires or not, and unless the bystander is directly injured, he shouldn’t be able to substitute his choices.

But Sandefur later says:

A related element of Epstein’s argument — indeed, I think it’s the real thesis of the book — is that he believes the state may force exchanges between parties, without their consent, so long as these exchanges leave no party worse off, and leaves at least one party better off. The principle of eminent domain — about which Epstein wrote extensively in his book Takings — embodies this idea, ideally. Epstein acknowledges that this element of his thought makes him pretty unique among libertarians, who probably would not accept it. But Epstein believes that it is a necessary element of society; there are many collective agreements which would leave everyone better off, but which, due to some transaction cost, cannot be enforced. The law can then serve to enforce these agreements. This principle allows Epstein to (in theory) escape some of the more complicated problems of political philosophy, since it allows society to evolve in a direction that accommodates liberty in a practical manner[.]

Which leads me to ask:

1. In light of Epstein’s belief that we ought to be highly skeptical of the idea that an outside party has better knowledge about the choices (and the benefits from them) that a person makes, how does Epstein reckon that the state, as an outside party, is able to determine that the parties to a forced exchange will be better off as a result of the exchange?

2. What happens to the transactions costs that (presumably) keep the parties from undertaking an exchange that the state decides to force? Do the costs simply vanish or does the state (that is, taxpayers) defray them?

3. Is Epstein’s concept of forced exchange a justification of the integration of commerce (e.g., forcing whites to accommodate blacks at hotels, restaurants, etc., and forcing whites to offer houses to black as well as white buyers)?

4. If Epstein’s concept of forced exchange justifies the integration of commerce, how does the state account for the preference of whites not to trade with blacks, or does the state simply regard that preference as illegitimate?

5. If the state chooses to treat the preference of whites as illegitimate, by what criterion does the state judge the legitimacy of the preferences of parties to a forced exchange being contemplated by the state?

Favorite Posts: Affirmative Action and Race

Intellectuals, Academia, and the "Common" Person

Terry Eagleton, writing at New Statesman, reviews Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone? by Frank Furedi. Eagleton’s review is rife with trenchant observations. Here’s a sampling:

…We inherit the idea of the intellectual from the 18th-century Enlightenment, which valued truth, universality and objectivity – all highly suspect notions in a postmodern age. As Furedi points out, these ideas used to be savaged by the political right, as they undercut appeals to prejudice, hierarchy and custom. Nowadays, in a choice historical irony, they are under assault from the cultural left.

In the age of Sontag, Said, Williams and Chomsky, whole sectors of the left behave as though these men and women were no longer possible. Soon, no doubt, they will take to imitating the nervous tic by which the right ritually inserts the expression “so-called” before the word “intellectual”. Right-wingers do this because they imagine that “intellectual” means “frightfully clever”, a compliment they are naturally reluctant to pay to their opponents. In fact, there are dim-witted intellectuals just as there are incompetent chefs. The word “intellectual” is a job description, not a commendation….

[A] snap definition of an intellectual would be “more or less the opposite of an academic”….Literary academics are more likely than insurance brokers to be left-wingers….

University academics are discouraged from fostering adversarial debate, in case it should hurt someone’s feelings….In what one American sociologist has termed the McDonaldisation of the universities, students are redefined as consumers of services rather than junior partners in a public service….

[T]he politics of inclusion…in [Furedi’s] view belittles the capacities of the very people it purports to serve. It implies in its pessimistic way that excellence and popular participation are bound to be opposites….[H]e rejects cultural pessimism, decries the idea of a golden age, and applauds the advances that contemporary culture has made. It is just that he objects to slighting people’s potential for self-transformation under cover of flattering their current identities.

Paul Krugman, an Inspiration to Us All

Paul Krugman, NYT columnist and alleged economist, keeps trying to practice political punditry. Well, he needs a lot more practice. Here are some bits (in italics) from today’s column, interspersed with my comments:

Yet many voters still believe that Mr. Bush is doing a good job protecting America.

Well, so far, he is. I guess that fact is too obvious for Krugman to grasp.

…Dick Cheney is saying vote Bush or die….

Actually, Cheney said something to this effect: You’re more likely to die if Kerry is elected. It wasn’t a threat, it was a prediction. And not a bad one.

Can Mr. Kerry, who voted to authorize the Iraq war, criticize it? Yes, by pointing out that he voted only to give Mr. Bush a big stick.

Oh, was there an asterisk attached to Kerry’s vote? I didn’t see it in the Congressional Record.

Mr. Kerry can argue that he wouldn’t have overruled the commanders who had wanted to keep the pressure on Al Qaeda, or dismissed warnings from former Gen. Eric Shinseki, then the Army’s chief of staff, that peacekeeping would require a large force. He wouldn’t have ignored General Conway’s warnings about the dangers of storming into Falluja, or overruled his protests about calling off that assault halfway through.

He could argue those things, but he would be seen as nothing better than a Monday-morning quarterback. In any event, Krugman is studiously ignoring economic principles and bureaucratic facts of life: He doesn’t address the opportunity costs associated with the actions he implicitly endorses, nor does he acknowledge the very likely fact that Bush (and Rumsfeld) acted on military and diplomatic advice in taking their decisions.

And why is Krugman doing offering advice about how to win a war he didn’t want in the first place? What does he know about it, anyway? When I want to fight a war, I ask a general for advice. When I want to solve a problem in economics, I ask a real economist for advice. Where does that leave Krugman? Well, when I want to write a snarky post, I read Krugman for source material.

More Wisdom from Lileks

James Lileks has an inexhaustible supply of wisdom. His latest pearl invokes Pat Tillman, the NFL football player whose patriotism led him to the army and to Afghanistan, where he was killed in action:

[T]hose who think we’re living in some incipient Fascist state should note the absence of Tillmanism in the culture today – no songs in his name, no movies played on 2000 screens at the state’s request, no statues, no grade-school drills where the kids are taught to recite his Exploits, no posters of the Fallen Hero in the bus shelters, no mentions in every other speech. Hitler would have gone to town with Pat Tillman. And renamed it Tillmansberg.

Principled Conservative, My Foot

Andrew Sullivan writes this about Doug Bandow:

REAGANITES VERSUS BUSH: Doug Bandow joins the growing throng of principled conservatives unwilling to give Bush a second term. Money quote:

Quite simply, the president, despite his well-choreographed posturing, does not represent traditional conservatism — a commitment to individual liberty, limited government, constitutional restraint and fiscal responsibility. Rather, Bush routinely puts power before principle.

I wouldn’t make too much of Bandow’s supposed conservatism. In fact, he’s one of the “holier-than-thou” brigade of deluded professional libertarians (a senior fellow at the Cato Institute) who prize ideological purity above all else. He’s too high and mighty to give his endorsement to a mere mortal like Bush. He’s waiting for the libertarian messiah to come in from the desert.

Sullivan has put his anti-Bush money on the wrong horse.

Moral Confusion in the British Academy

Novelist and essayist John Banville, writing at books.guardian.co.uk, reviews Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions, by John Gray. Banville notes that Gray

is richly dismissive, for instance, of the Bush administration’s neo-conservatives — “Washington’s new Jacobins”, he calls them — who believe that it is possible to eradicate evil from the world. “The danger of American foreign policy,” he writes, “is not that it is obsessed with evil but that it is based on the belief that evil can be abolished.” Such foolishness, he points out, is far removed from the wisdom of America’s founding fathers, for whom “the purpose of government was not to conduct us to the Promised Land but to stave off the recurrent evils to which human life is naturally prone”.

Why does Gray think that the Founders rejected a promised land? If he would read our Declaration of Independence and the Preamble of our Constitution it would be clear to him that the Founders embraced a secular promised land and established a system of governance that would guide us to that promised land.

As for evil, Gray is merely nit-picking when he contrasts Bush’s supposed fixation on abolishing evil — falsely imputing naïveté to Bush — with the Founders’ view that evil is recurrent. A cheap rhetorical trick.

I am ceaselessly amused — but never amazed — by the depths to which half-baked, left-wing academicians will stoop to score points against their political enemies.

Proof That "Smart" Economists Can Be Stupid

Ten recipients of the Nobel prize for economics have signed an open letter in support of John Kerry’s candidacy for president. These geniuses have resorted to the usual arguments of the economically illiterate: those big, bad tax cuts for the “rich”; those big, bad deficits underwritten by foreign investors; rising income inequality; and the rising costs of health care. Their views, in other words, are a combination of wrong-headedness, xenophobia, and welfare-statism.

Kerry, of course, is going to do things right because he’ll restore fiscal responsibility. I guess they missed The Washington Post‘s analysis of Kerry’s proposals, which shows that Kerry’s ideas, if enacted, would add more than $2 trillion to the federal debt over the next 10 years.

On top of that Kerry will “do something” about health-care costs. What, repeal the laws of supply and demand? Nationalize medical care so that Americans can go to Mexico for better treatment?

Well, what do you expect from a bunch of lefties like Paul Samuelson who can explain economic principles without understanding them? They simply don’t trust free people and free markets, because they (the lefties) are smarter than the rest of us. Just ask them.

Broder Boots Another One

David Broder of The Washington Post, called by some the “dean” of Washington pundits, is true to form in this wrong-headed column:

Policing Political Ads

By David S. Broder

Sunday, August 29, 2004; Page B07

…With total reported political contributions for this cycle already past the $1 billion mark — and the heaviest ad buys still to come — the character of the perpetual debate about campaign financing has begun to shift. Instead of focusing on who is giving how much, the argument now seems to be about who has the right to join in the spending spree….

With record sums available to both sides — either through their official committees or through the independent groups supporting them — the real issue is not one of finance but of accountability….

The institutions and individuals with a stake in the presidential election are far more numerous than two parties and two candidates. All sorts of other groups — from left and right, from environmentalists to anti-abortionists — have much riding on the outcome. By what logic are they to be prohibited from running their ads?…

The reality is that, in a nation with our Constitution’s guarantee of free speech and a government whose decisions affect every aspect of life, the flow of money from the private sector into the political world will be almost impossible to control.

What can be disciplined is the tendency of these ads to exaggerate, distort or flat-out lie. And the candidates who benefit from the ads are the ones who have the first responsibility — along with the media — to police them. The candidates ought to be judged by their willingness to tell their supporters when they have crossed the line.

The headline is scary, but it belies the message. Broder was doing well until the last paragraph. Then he booted it.

The only “policing” that’s needed is the policing that citizens do in the privacy of their own minds. It’s impossible to take at face value a candidate’s disavowal or repudiation of ads attacking his opponent. Is the candidate being sincere or merely observing the niceties of political decorum? In the end, citizens are left to make up their own minds about the validity of third-party attack ads, just as they are left to make up their own minds about the validity of candidates’ ads.

But Broder is just being Broder, a paternalistic Washington insider who doesn’t trust “the masses” to think for themselves.

A Historian Who Needs a History Lesson

UPDATED BELOW

Niall Ferguson, professor of history at Harvard and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford, writes in OpinionJournal at WSJ.com that Bush’s defeat would be good for the GOP. He supports this bold thesis by dredging one (just one) example from history:

Many [British] Conservatives today would now agree that it would have been far better for their party if [Prime Minister John] Major had lost the election of 1992. For one thing, the government deserved to lose. The decision to take the United Kingdom into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism had plunged the British economy into a severe recession, characterized by a painful housing market bust. For another, the Labour candidate for the premiership, Neil Kinnock, had all the hallmarks of a one-term prime minister. It was Mr. Kinnock’s weakness as a candidate that enabled Mr. Major to scrape home with a tiny majority of 21 out of 651 seats in the Commons. Had Mr. Kinnock won, the exchange rate crisis of September 1992 would have engulfed an inexperienced Labour government, and the Conservatives, having replaced Mr. Major with a more credible leader, could have looked forward to an early return to office.

I won’t go into the parallels Ferguson draws between Major’s next five years in office and what he expects of a second Bush term. Let’s just say that his assessment is about as good as that of the average anti-Bush protester who’s blocking traffic in Manhattan.

Ferguson — a Glaswegian by birth — must have a weak grasp of American political history. Parties in this country hold onto power by holding onto it, not by abdicating it. Thus the Jeffersonian Republican dynasty of 1801-25, the new Republican dynasty of 1861-85, the Democrat hegemony of 1933-69 (broken only by Ike’s winning popularity), and the Republican hegemony of 1969-2005 (interrupted only by Carter’s one-term debacle and Clinton’s Perot-assisted two terms).

I’m being a bit unfair to Ferguson, because he isn’t suggesting that Bush throw the election. He simply thinks that Republicans might be better off, in the long run, if Bush loses. But regaining power once it’s lost can be a hard thing to do. Losing tends to breed losing, here as well as in Britain. If Republicans are, at bottom, different than Democrats — and if they are likely to stay different — there’s a good reason many of us fear a Democrat dynasty. And, given the way of American politics, a Democrat dynasty might flow from a Kerry victory. Look how far down the road to socialism we marched during the Democrat hegemony of 1933-69.

Are such bad things bound to happen in a second Bush term that Republicanism will vanish into the same black hole as the British Conservative Party? I look at it this way: If Bush has made mistakes he has undoubtedly learned from them. Kerry, on the other hand, is a bundle of mistakes waiting to be opened.

Here’s to the continuation of Republican control of the White House — and Congress.

UPDATE:

Ramesh Ponnuru of The Corner at NRO agrees with me (though I don’t think he’s read this post):

Ferguson says that a second term of hawkishness, big spending, and social conservatism will further divide the party rather than unify it. He also makes a comparison to 1956. Eisenhower had pursued regime change in the Middle East in his first term; he won re-election and had a disastrous second term; that led to the Democrats’ owning the 1960s.

We are supposed to believe that the party will be more unified if it has no leader. Maybe, but it’s not the way to bet. The Eisenhower comparison is a total failure. Ferguson’s own recitation of Eisenhower’s foreign-policy record undermines his claim that “President Bush can be relied upon to press on with a foreign policy based on pre-emptive military force”–on his telling, Eisenhower had switched gears by the end of his first term. (Ferguson blasts him for “incoherence,” without noticing he’s making his own argument incoherent.)

And Eisenhower’s second term wasn’t the prelude to a Democratic majority–it was an interruption of a Democratic majority. The Democrats had won the five presidential elections before Eisenhower, and won the two following him. Eisenhower’s massive popularity allowed the Republicans to hold on to national power during a time of Democratic ascendancy. Cutting the Eisenhower interregnum short would not have improved Republicans’ prospects in the following decade. It’s bad enough when predictions about the future are far-fetched; predictions about the past should be more solid.

Professor Krugman Flunks Economics

Paul Krugman, NYT columnist and ersatz professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University, writes today about “America’s Failing Health”. Herewith, some excerpts and commentary by yours truly:

Working Americans have two great concerns: the growing difficulty of getting health insurance, and the continuing difficulty they have in finding jobs. These concerns may have a common cause: soaring insurance premiums. [Let’s see how he pulls this one off.]

In most advanced countries, the government provides everyone with health insurance. [The “government” means taxpayers, of course. I love the way these well-educated left-wing economists ignore the truth when it suits them. Of course, we know he’s about to slam the U.S. for not being as “advanced” (i.e., socialistic) as other Western democracies. And sure enough…] In America, however, the government offers insurance only if you’re elderly (Medicare) or poor (Medicaid). Otherwise, you’re expected to get private health insurance, usually through your job….

Some employers have dropped their health plans. Others have maintained benefits for current workers, but are finding ways to avoid paying benefits to new hires – for example, by using temporary workers. And some businesses, while continuing to provide health benefits, are refusing to hire more workers. [Written in a tone that suggests there’s a social law that says businesses must “pay for” health insurance, and that they must hire workers they can’t afford.]

In other words, rising health care costs aren’t just causing a rapid rise in the ranks of the uninsured (confirmed by yesterday’s Census Bureau report); they’re also, because of their link to employment, a major reason why this economic recovery has generated fewer jobs than any previous economic expansion. [Wait a minute, prof, when employers don’t subsidize health insurance premiums, they’re able to hire more employees and/or pay current employees more. Businesses simply do employees a favor by creating group plans, which pool risks and therefore yield lower premiums than individual policies. In the alternative, employers would offer higher salaries and let employees fend for themselves.]

Clearly, health care reform is an urgent social and economic issue. But who has the right answer? [The market has the right answer. So what you’re about to say is irrelevant, but let’s plough on, anyway.]

The 2004 Economic Report of the President told us what George Bush’s economists think, though we’re unlikely to hear anything as blunt at next week’s convention. According to the report, health costs are too high because people have too much insurance and purchase too much medical care. [True, that’s exactly right, it’s called “moral hazard” — a concept that Prof. Krugman seems not to know or care about. But there’s more to it than that, as I’ll explain at the end.] What we need, then, are policies, like tax-advantaged health savings accounts tied to plans with high deductibles, that induce people to pay more of their medical expenses out of pocket. (Cynics would say that this is just a rationale for yet another tax shelter for the wealthy, but the economists who wrote the report are probably sincere.) [Well, I’m sure that the economists who wrote the report appreciate your insincere endorsement of their sincerity — as if they care. Though how tax-advantaged health savings accounts are a tax shelter for “the wealthy” (those filthy people who earn a living) is beyond me.]

John Kerry’s economic advisers have a very different analysis: they believe that health costs are too high because private insurance companies have excessive overhead, mainly because they are trying to avoid covering high-risk patients. [If that’s true — and it’s not, Bush’s economists are right — the answer is to induce more competition in the health insurance business, which I’ll come to.] What we need, according to this view, is for the government to assume more of the risk, for example by picking up catastrophic health costs, thereby reducing the incentive for socially wasteful spending, and making employment-based insurance easier to get. [In other words, “government” (i.e., taxpayers) would foot the bill. But because taxpayers wouldn’t foot the bill directly, they’d be inclined to undergo unnecessary medical treatments (it doesn’t take much these days to get into the “catastrophic” range) Then we’d be right back where we were, except that medical costs would be even higher.]

A smart economist can come up with theoretical justifications for either argument. The evidence suggests, however, that the Kerry position is much closer to the truth. [Only the kind of evidence Krugman would believe.]

The fact is that the mainly private U.S. health care system spends far more than the mainly public health care systems of other advanced countries, but gets worse results. In 2001, we spent $4,887 on health care per capita, compared with $2,792 in Canada and $2,561 in France. Yet the U.S. does worse than either country by any measure of health care success you care to name – life expectancy, infant mortality, whatever….[The relevant measure is the effectiveness of particular treatments — things like life expectancy, infant mortality, and whatever are explained by demographic factors, dietary habits, and “whatever”. With respect to the effectiveness of particular treatments, guess what? The U.S. leads them all. Read about it here.]

And the U.S. system does have very high overhead: private insurers and H.M.O.’s spend much more on administrative expenses, as opposed to actual medical treatment, than public agencies at home or abroad. [So what? Results count, not phony cost comparisons. Public agencies get a free ride on a lot of their administrative expenses. And you may have noticed that health care delivered by public agencies is distinctly second-rate.]

Does this mean that the American way is wrong, and that we should switch to a Canadian-style single-payer system? [Ah yes, the famous Canadian system that has Canadians flocking to the U.S. for treatment.] Well, yes. Put it this way: in Canada, respectable business executives are ardent defenders of “socialized medicine.” [That’s because they prefer not to compete for employees by offering health-care plans, so they let the taxpayers foot the bill.] Two years ago the Conference Board of Canada – a who’s who of the nation’s corporate elite – issued a report urging fellow Canadians to bear in mind not just the “symbolic value” of universal health care, but its “economic contribution to the competitiveness of Canadian businesses.” [Right, Canadian taxpayers pay to make Canadian businesses more competitive. And Krugman thinks U.S. businesses are rapacious.]

That’s enough of that. Now, let’s talk about why the cost of health care is rising in the U.S. and what to do about it. The cost of health care is rising in part because demand is rising, mainly because of rising incomes, access to employer-subsidized insurance, and rising numbers of Medicare beneficiaries. The supply of health care isn’t rising as fast because of government regulation (e.g., medical licensing and FDA approval of drugs), which is endorsed by those who are being regulated. Then, there is regulation of the insurance industry, which inhibits entry and competition among insurers. (Insurers, by the way, are able to negotiate with health-care providers and drug companies to get lower prices for their insureds, a fact that Krugman chooses to overlook in his effort to paint insurance companies as evil entities.) Deregulation — or less stringent regulation — is part of the solution. (I’ve written before that this is not a high-risk solution. See here, here, and here.)

The rest of the solution is to keep government out of the act. The market — especially a less-regulated market — will provide health insurance that’s tailored to consumers’ needs. As employers scale back or drop their insurance plans, employees will seek insurance elsewhere. A competitive market will provide it. A competitive market will even offer insurance for the hard-to-insure, either through tailored policies or ad-hoc groups of hard-to-insure consumers — groups that insurance companies will compete to create.

But all of that seems to be beyond the comprehension of Paul Krugman, ersatz economist and strident socialist.

Krugman, Fisked

I’ve written a few things about Paul Krugman, a self-promoting economist of middling talent who has taken up a second career as a shill for the Democrat Party on the op-ed page of The New York Times. Krugman’s nemesis in the blogosphere is Donald L. Luskin, proprietor of The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid. Luskin has just delivered a ferociously accurate Fisking of Krugman. Read it.