This is the third in a series of recycled posts about David Brooks (mostly) and Bret Stephens (once), house “conservatives” at The New York Times. The original posts were published from 2009 through 2019. But I have detected no change in the dynamic duo’s faux conservatism since I stopped wasting pixels on them.
Back in 2011, during an impasse in Congress about government spending on health care, the useful idiot known as David Brooks — The New York Times‘s idea of a conservative — wrote this:
Imagine you’re a member of Congress. You have your own preferred way to reduce debt. If you’re a Democrat, it probably involves protecting Medicare and raising taxes. If you’re a Republican, it probably involves cutting spending, reforming Medicare and keeping taxes low.
Your plan is going nowhere. There just aren’t the votes. Meanwhile, the debt ceiling is fast approaching and a national catastrophe could be just weeks away.
At the last minute, two bipartisan approaches heave into view. In the Senate, the “Gang of Six” produces one Grand Bargain. Meanwhile, President Obama and John Boehner, the House speaker, have been quietly working on another. They suddenly seem close to a deal.
There’s a lot you don’t know about these two Grand Bargains….
You are being asked to support a foggy approach, not a specific plan. You are being asked to do this even though you have no faith in the other party and limited faith in the leadership of your own. You are being asked to risk your political life for an approach that bears little resemblance to what you would ideally prefer.
Do you do this? I think you do….
You do it because while the Grand Bargains won’t solve most of our fiscal problems. They will produce some incremental progress. We won’t fundamentally address the debt until we control health care inflation….
Both Grand Bargains produce real fiscal progress. They aim for $3 trillion or $4 trillion in debt reduction. Boehner and Obama have talked about raising the Medicare eligibility age and reducing Social Security benefit increases. The White House is offering big cuts in exchange for some revenue increases, or small cuts in exchange for few or none. The Gang of Six has a less-compelling blend of cuts, but it would repeal the Class Act, a health care Ponzi scheme. It would force committees across Congress to cut spending, and it would introduce an enforcement mechanism if they don’t. Sure there’s chicanery, but compared with any recent real-life budget, from Republican or Democratic administrations, these approaches are models of fiscal rectitude.
You do it because both bargains would boost growth. The tax code really is a travesty and a drag on the country’s economic dynamism. Any serious effort to simplify the code, strip out tax expenditures and reduce rates would have significant positive effects — even if it raised some tax revenues along the way….
Miss Brooks, as usual, was full of hot air.
First, no “grand bargain” in Congress ever leads to an actual spending reduction, as opposed to cutting the rate of growth in government spending.
Second, with respect to “health care inflation”, government is the problem, not the solution. There are two key reasons for rising health-care prices, aside from research and innovation that yields expensive but effective drugs, procedures, and equipment. They are (a) the tax break that enables employers to subsidize employees’ health plans and (b) the subsidization of old folks’ health care via Medicare, Medicaid, and (indirectly) Social Security. Those two interventions result in the overuse of health-care products and services. (There’s a 25-year old but still valid RAND study on the subject.) A far better system — if one insists on government involvement — would be to provide means-tested vouchers that can be redeemed for a limited menu of vital medical products and services (e.g., critical surgeries, cardiovascular medications, chemotherapy). That’s it — no more Medicare, Medicaid, or their expansion via Obamacare.
Second, with respect to “tax expenditures” — there ain’t no such thing. Any action that results in higher taxes is a tax increase, no matter what Miss Brooks and his fellow Democrats choose to call it. And tax increases are growth inhibitors, not growth stimulators.
So much for the wisdom of The New York Times‘s pet “conservative”.
It was expected that Richard Nixon would rake in millions for his printed and televised memoirs. Mr. Nixon wanted the government to turn over the documents he compiled while an employee of the taxpayers, so that he could refer to them in writing his memoirs.
Henry Kissinger wanted the same deal. In fact, it was reported that he removed from the State Department the stenographic records of thousands of phone conversations he had while Secretary of State. Dr. K. claimed that those were personal documents. If that’s so, he should have refunded a good chunk of his government salary, to compensate taxpayers for the thousands of hours that he spent on personal phone calls.
There’s something to be said for allowing ex-presidents and other high officials access to their records so that they can tell us how great they were: Memoirs are a boon to insomniacs. Sleeping-pill manufacturers should have sued Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, and many others of their ilk for unfair competition. (JFK’s memoir wouldn’t have been soporofic, regardless of who wrote it for him.)
Many Americans were eager to read Nixon’s version of his presidency. I was among them, mainly because I wanted to see if Nixon would say that he was Deep Throat*. I’m serious. Can you recall another politician who reveled in misery like Mr. Nixon? Remember the “Checkers speech“; the 1960 election that Nixon lost to JFK, but probably could have won by contesting the Illinois results (enough votes turned up in Chicago to swing the outcome)**; the lashing-out at the press after losing the California governor’s race in 1962; and the sweaty, lying performance during the Watergate affair. Why couldn’t the person who as a boy signed a letter to his mother “Your good dog, Richard” have become a man who satisfied his need to grovel by blowing the whistle on himself?
Gerald Ford also wrote a memoir. (Buy it and throw away your Sominex.) Jerry would have been a good guy to have a beer with. I even voted for him. But I draw the line at self-inflicted boredom. Rather than read Ford’s memoir, I would watch grass grow.
As for Kissinger’s version of events, one should keep in mind Voltaire’s remark that “History is the lie agreed upon.”
_________ * In 2003, long after I published the original piece on which from which this post is drawn, Deep Throat was revealed as Mark Felt, then Deputy Director of the FBI. In 1972, following the break-in by White House operatives at Democrat headquarters in the Watergate Hotel and Office Building on Virginia Avenue in Washington, D.C. Felt fed inside information to Bob Woodward, who with Carl Bernstein wrote the series of articles in The Washington Post that led to congressional hearings into the Watergate affair, and Nixon’s eventual resignation on August 9, 1974. Felt’s secret meetings with Bob Woodward were held in the parking garage of an office building at 1401 Wilson Boulevard in Arlington, Virginia. At the time, I worked at 1401 Wilson Boulevard.
** In fact, even if Nixon had won Illinois, JFK would still have led Nixon in electoral votes: 276-246. Another 15 electoral votes were cast for Senator Harry Byrd by Virginia’s electors. Even if those electors had switched to Nixon, the tally would have been 276-261. It’s possible that if Nixon had won Illinois, enough Kennedy voters in the West would have stayed home to swing New Mexico or Nevada to Nixon. Kennedy won both States narrowly, and a Nixon victory in either State, coupled with a win in Illinois, would have made him the winner. Maybe.
Do you remember James Damore. He was the author of the now-notorious 10-page memo about Google’s ideological echo chamber — a memo that got him fired.
The point of the memo is the bias inherent in Google’s diversity policies, which ignore some basic (and well-known) facts about differences in men’s and women’s brains, bodies, and interests. Google fired Damore for “perpetuating stereotypes”, when it is Google that perpetuates anti-factual stereotypes.
I am writing about Google’s firing of Damore for daring to speak the truth because it is of a piece with the left’s political modus operandi:
Fixate on an objective, regardless of its lack of feasibility (e.g. proportional representation of various demographic groups — but not Asians or Jews — in STEM fields), lack of validity (e.g., the demonstrated inaccuracy of climate models that lean heavily on the effects of atmospheric CO2); or consequences (e.g., high failure rates among under-qualified “minorities”, lower standards that affect the quality of output and even endanger lives, the futile use of expensive “renewable” energy sources in place of carbon-based fuels).
Insist that attainment of the objective will advance liberty, equality, fraternity, or prosperity.
Demand punishment for those who question the objective, thereby suppressing liberty; fostering false equality; engendering resentments that undermine fraternity; and diminishing prosperity.
What happened to James Damore is what happens where leftists control the machinery of the state. (Be mindful that Hitler was a leftist, as I explain and document in “Leftism in America“.) I turn to Jean-François Revel’s Last Exit to Utopia: The Survival of Socialism in a Post-Soviet Era, with the proviso that his references to communism and socialism apply equally to leftism generally, whether it is called progressivism, liberalism, or liberal democracy:
[T]he abominations of actual socialism are characterized as deviations, or treasonous perversions of “true” Communism….
But this account of redemption through good intentions is undermined by an impartial and, above all, comprehensive exploration of socialist literature. Already among the most authentic sources of socialist thought, among the earliest doctrinarians, are found justifications for ethnic cleansing and genocide, along with the totalitarian state, all of which were held up as legitimate and even necessary weapons for the success and preservation of the revolution….
What all totalitarian regimes have in common is that they are “ideocracies”: dictatorships of ideas…. [T]he rulers, convinced that they possess the absolute truth and are guiding the course of history for all humanity, believe they have the right to destroy dissidents (real or potential), races, classes, professional or cultural categories — anyone and everyone they see as obstacles, or capable one day of being obstacles, to the supreme design….
… [Ideocracy] strives to suppress — and it must in order to survive — all thinking that is opposed to or outside the official party line, not only in politics and economics, but in every domain: philosophy, arts and literature, and even science.[pp. 94-100, passim]
The left’s supreme design includes the suppression of straight, white males who aren’t leftists; the elevation of females, blacks, Hispanics, other persons of color (but not Asians), and gender-confused persons, regardless of their inherent or actual abilities; the suppression of statements by anyone who questions the foregoing orthodoxies; the extinction of property and associative rights; and dirigisme on a scale that would be the envy of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao — despite its demonstrablydestructive effects.
This is the second in a series of recycled posts about David Brooks (mostly) and Bret Stephens (once), house “conservatives” at The New York Times. The original posts were published from 2009 through 2019. But I have detected no change in the dynamic duo’s faux conservatism since I stopped wasting pixels on them.
Some time back, lawprof bloggerTom Smith referred to the NYT columnist and pseudo-conservative David Brooks as “prissy little Miss Brooks”. (This was perhaps a reference to a classic radio and TV show about a teacher who had more cojones than David Brooks.)
Miss Brooks cringed when she contemplated an America without government, in the aftermath of a victorious Tea Party movement. Miss Brooks, it seems, is besotted with the manliness of limited-but-energetic governments
that used aggressive [emphasis added] federal power to promote growth and social mobility. George Washington used industrial policy, trade policy and federal research dollars to build a manufacturing economy alongside the agricultural one. The Whig Party used federal dollars to promote a development project called the American System.
Abraham Lincoln supported state-sponsored banks to encourage development, lavish infrastructure projects, increased spending on public education. Franklin Roosevelt provided basic security so people were freer to move and dare. The Republican sponsors of welfare reform increased regulations and government spending — demanding work in exchange for dollars.
Throughout American history, in other words, there have been leaders who regarded government like fire — a useful tool when used judiciously and a dangerous menace when it gets out of control. They didn’t build their political philosophy on whether government was big or not. Government is a means, not an end. They built their philosophy on making America virtuous, dynamic and great. They supported government action when it furthered those ends and opposed it when it didn’t.
I am surprised that Miss Brooks was able to recover from her swoon and finish writing the column in question. I am less surprised that Miss Brooks omitted to mention Thomas “Louisiana Purchase” Jefferson and Theodore “I Can Do Whatever I Please” Roosevelt, given that Jefferson was an effete Francophile and Roosevelt was a squeaky-voiced nutcase.
Other than that, there are only two problems with Brooks’s prescription for beneficent government: The first is the impossibility of electing only those leaders who know how to use government power judiciously. The second problem is the assumption that the things wrought by Washington, Lincoln, et al.were judicious uses of government power.
As to the first problem, all I can do is note the number of times that a majority of Americans has been convinced of the goodness of a candidate, only to be disappointed — when not outraged — by his performance in office. Take LBJ, Nixon, Carter, G.H.W. Bush, Clinton, G.W. Bush, Obama, and Biden — please take them! — not to mention myriad Congress-critters and State and local office-holders.
The second problem is a problem for reasons that are evidently beyond Miss Brooks’s comprehension:
Government action isn’t cost-less. It absorbs resources that the private sector could have put to use.
Government officials, despite their (occasional) great deeds, are not gifted with superior knowledge about how to put those resources to use.
Private firms — when not shielded from competition and failure by governments — put resources to uses that satisfy the actual needs of consumers, as opposed to the whims (however high-minded) of politicians.
Private firms — when not shielded from competition and failure by government — use resources more efficiently than government.
In short, Miss Brooks, Washington may have been a great man for having led a rag-tag army to victory over the British, and Lincoln may have been a great man for having waged war on an independent nation and (incidentally) freeing slaves, but neither man — and certainly no other man or collection of men exercising the arbitrary power of government — was or ever will be equal to the task of simulating the irreproducibly complex set of signals and decisions that are embedded in free markets.
In the end, Miss Brooks works herself into hysterics at the prospect of less government:
The social fabric is fraying. Human capital is being squandered. Society is segmenting. The labor markets are ill. Wages are lagging. Inequality is increasing. The nation is overconsuming and underinnovating. China and India are surging. Not all of these challenges can be addressed by the spontaneous healing powers of the market.
The social fabric is fraying precisely because government has pushed social institutions aside and made millions of Americans its dependents. Society is segmenting for the same reason, and also because millions of Americans are fed up with government and its dominance of their lives. Labor markets are ill because of various government actions that have throttled economic growth. The nation is overconsuming (i.e., underinvesting) and underinnovating because of the aforesaid government-caused economic malaise. That China and India are surging economically isn’t the real problem; the real problem is that they are also emboldened militarily because of feckless presidents since Ronald Reagan (Donald Trump excepted).
None of these “challenges” would be challenges were it not for governmental interference in private social institutions and markets. As Ronald Reagan said in his first inaugural address, “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Amen.
So, Miss Brooks, I advise you to take two Valium and read Friedrich Hayek’s Nobel Prize lecture, “The Pretence of Knowledge”. Then pass it on to your politician friends.
This is the first in a series of recycled posts about David Brooks (mostly) and Bret Stephens (once), house “conservatives” at The New York Times. The original posts were published from 2009 through 2019. But I have detected no change in the dynamic duo’s faux conservatism since I stopped wasting pixels on them.
David Brooks’s column, “The Protocol Society,” is a typical Brooksian muddle in which Brooks attributes evolutionary changes in economic behavior to the “discoveries” of contemporary economists.
Despite Brooks, there is nothing new (of value) under the sun of economic analysis. The practitioners of today who draw on sociology and psychology are simply returning to the roots of economics — the description of human behavior — which can be found in Adam Smith and his successors, well into the 20th century. This “old school” of literary economics didn’t give way to the “new school” of mathematical economics until after WWII, when Paul Samuelson led the profession down the dead-end street of convoluted, abstract theorizing.
The difference between the old-old school and the new-old school is that the moderns rely less on introspection and casual observation and more on data collection, “laboratory” experiments, statistical analysis, and the research findings of sociologists and psychologists. That this is not an unalloyed blessing can be seen in the “accomplishments” of a leading member of the new-old school, one Richard Thaler, whom Brooks omits to mention. Thaler’s specialty, which has been dubbed “behavioral economics”, focuses on the psychology of decision-making and how it leads individuals to make what Thaler believes are sub-optimal and even unwise choices. From there, Thaler and his collaborator, Cass Sunstein, have ventured into normative policy recommendations, which they dub “libertarian (or soft) paternalism”.
Needless to say, actual libertarians (and others) find much to criticize in Thaler’s normative prescriptions, which carve out a role for government in “nudging” people in directions that “wise men” like Thaler and Sunstein would like to seem them nudged. For much more about the fallacies and dangers of “libertarian paternalism”, see this post.
In any event, Brooks writes as if there were a real difference between economic activity in the 19th century and economic activity in the 21st century. As if, for example, there wasn’t a lot of brainpower and organizational skill involved in the “second industrial revolution” of the last third of the 19th century. As if, to take another example, the “protocols” of the modern food court didn’t have their counterparts in the market squares of yore. As if, to take a final example, the manufacture of steel, autos, and other durable goods didn’t (and doesn’t) involve massive capital investments (many of which were made possible by patented processes and machinery), so that the average cost of making each unit declines markedly as the rate of output rises. It is as if the 21st century simply arrived, bright and shining, with no connection to the past.
On the whole, Brooks is onto something, which is that economists are getting back in touch with the realities of human behavior. However, he is guilty of a gross attribution error. He writes as if there were something new in economic behavior because economists are now better able to describe it. The same attribution error is found among teenagers (of every era), who believe that sex didn’t exist until they discovered it.
I’m digging deep into the archives for this one because it involves Bret Stephens, now a house “conservative” for The New York Times. I’m gearing up to run a series about David Brooks, the other “conservative” on the payroll of the Times, and will throw in another piece by Stephens just to round out the series.
Back in 2004, when Stephens was writing at OpinionJournal, in“What Is a Cabinet For?“ (link lost), he captured the “conventional wisdom” about G.W. Bush’s cabinet appointments:
“Now that Condoleezza Rice has been nominated to be the next secretary of state,” The New York Times editorializes, “the whole world seems to be noticing that George Bush is stuffing his second-term cabinet with yes men and women. It’s worrisome. . . .” David Gergen, former wise man of Public Broadcasting, frets that Mr. Bush is “closing down dissent and centralizing power in a few hands.” Andrew Sullivan, in his column for the London Times, bemoans the cast of “flunkies” and “servants rather than peers” around the president. “Fierce loyalty is a prerequisite for serving Bush,” writes the disapproving Mr. Sullivan.
Allow me to speak from experience in the matter of appointing lieutenants. A leader must be confident that he and his lieutenants have common goals. A leader expects his lieutenants to give thoughtful, candid advice, but to give it privately and not leak it to the press in an effort to embarrass the leader or to shape policy. Sharing common goals and giving candid advice privately, isn’t a sign of blind obedience in a lieutenant, it’s a sign of loyalty, in the best sense of the word. The alternative to the good kind of loyalty is disfunction and disarray — but perhaps that’s what the pundits want.
Experience delivers the best proof of loyalty. That’s why good leaders tend to select lieutenants whom they have worked with and know to be trustworthy. Bush wasn’t- the first leader to select his lieutenants from a trusted, inner circle. Nor would he be the last.
But all of this is lost on reporters and pundits who have never managed anything bigger than an editorial column or a book-length assemblage of them.
When the dust settles on the devastation of America’s economic might and social fabric, under the onslaught of “green” policies and wokeism, what will be left?
The optimist will say that America has been through a lot in its history, and has survived more or less intact.
The realist will reply that the worst of what America went through in the past occurred when it had no foreign enemies who were strong enough to exploit its weaknesses.
This is no longer true. Russia, despite the intransigence of Ukraine, and China have been playing the long game and are ready to pounce on America when the time is right. In doing so, they will have the aid of Iran and North Korea, two of America’s implacable enemies, and the nuclear arsenals they they are assuredly building.
If the Democrats stay in power — and that seems more likely now than it did a few months ago — the day of reckoning will come within a decade. America’s surrender, in the form of military and economic concessions, will be sugar-coated as the inevitable result of historical processes (shades of Marx), and papered-over with treaties and declarations of friendship.
Americans will be poorer, more divided than ever, but alive — physically, not spiritually. Long-standing traditions and institutions — academic freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, an independent judiciary, a Congress with real power, etc., etc., etc. — will survive in name only. “Benign” bureaucratic governance, under the guidance of leftist elites, will thrive. Historical revisionism, re-education, and thought control will come to the fore. And all will be for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
It is customary in democratic countries to deplore expenditures on armaments as conflicting with the requirements of the social services. There is a tendency to forget that the most important social service that a government can do for its people is to keep them alive and free.
[S]cientific research must be uncorrupted by self-interested motivations. That is, in scientific research one must be focused on what the answer to a research question is, not on what the researcher wishes the answer to be. This principle and the detached scrutiny of research in terms of empirical and logical criteria (the principle of organized skepticism) aims to prevent biasing scientific research toward the desired aims of any group, be they small or large in number or influence.
It is one thing to say, as a scientist or analyst who draws on science, that a certain option (a policy, a system, a tactic) is probably better than the alternatives, when judged against a specific criterion (most effective for a given cost, more effective against a certain kind of enemy force). It is quite another thing to say that the option is the one that the decision-maker should adopt. The scientist or analyst is looking at a small slice of the world; the decision-maker has to take into account things that the scientist or analyst did not (and often could not) take into account (economic consequences, political feasibility, compatibility with other existing systems and policies).
That’s not to say that decision-makers are unbiased (far from it), but that it is wrong (unethical) to give them biased results to begin with. It is equally wrong (unethical) for a scientist or analyst to deliver biased findings to a biased decision-maker kowing that that the decision-maker wants biased findings. But both kinds of unethical behavior are rampant in the un-hallowed corridors of power in our nation’s capital. I know because I was there for a long time and saw a lot of it.
A classic case of “scientific” analsyis in the service of a desired policy outcome is the pseudo-science that feeds the hysteria surrounding the increase in “global” temperature in the latter part of the 20th century. The temperature increase, which has pretty much played out, coincided with with the rise in atmospheric CO2, which continues to rise regardless of changes in the direction of “global” temperature and man-made CO2 emissions. I have much much more to say (here) about the hysteria and the pseudo-science upon which it is based.
But a more appropriate case study for the purpose of this post isan event to which I was somewhat close: the treatment of the Navy’s proposal, made in the early 1980s, for an expansion to what was conveniently characterized as the 600-ship Navy. (The expansion would have involved personnel, logistics systems, ancillary war-fighting systems, stockpiles of parts and ammunition, and aircraft of many kinds — all in addition to a 25-percent increase in the number of ships in active service.)
The Administration’s five-year shipbuilding plan, containing 133 new construction ships and estimated to cost over $80 billion in fiscal year 1983 dollars, is more ambitious than previous programs submitted to the Congress in the past few years. It does not, however, contain enough ships to realize the Navy’s announced force level goals for an expanded Navy. In addition, this plan—as has been the case with so many previous plans—has most of its ships programmed in the later out-years. Over half of the 133 new construction ships are programmed for the last two years of the five-year plan. Achievement of the Navy’s expanded force level goals would require adhering to the out-year building plans and continued high levels of construction in the years beyond fiscal year 1987. [1982 report, pp. 71-72]
Even the budget increases estimated here would be difficult to achieve if history is a guide. Since the end of World War II, the Navy has never sustained real increases in its budget for more than five consecutive years. The sustained 15-year expansion required to achieve and sustain the Navy’s present plans would result in a historic change in budget trends. [1985 report, p. 26]
The bias against the 600-ship Navy drips from the pages. The “argument” goes like this: If it hasn’t been done, it can’t be done and, therefore, shouldn’t be attempted. Why not? Because the analysts at CBO were of a breed that emerged in the 1960s, when Robert Strange McNamara and his minions used simplistic analysis (“tablesmanship”) to play “gotcha” with the military services:
We [I was one of the minions] did it because we were encouraged to do it, though not in so many words. And we got away with it, not because we were better analysts — most of our work was simplistic stuff — but because we usually had the last word. (Only an impassioned personal intercession by a service chief might persuade McNamara to go against SA [the Systems Analysis office run by Alain Enthoven] — and the key word is “might.”) The irony of the whole process was that McNamara, in effect, substituted “civilian judgment” for oft-scorned “military judgment.” McNamara revealed his preference for “civilian judgment” by elevating Enthoven and SA a level in the hierarchy, 1965, even though (or perhaps because) the services and JCS had been open in their disdain of SA and its snotty young civilians.
In the case of the 600-ship Navy, civilian analysts did their best to derail it by sending the barely disguised message that it was “unaffordable”. I was reminded of this “insight” by a colleague of long-standing who recently proclaimed that “any half-decent cost model would show a 600-ship Navy was unsustainable into this century.” How could a cost model show such a thing when the sustainability (affordability) of defense is a matter of political will, not arithmetic?
Defense spending fluctuates as function of perceived necessity and political convenience (e.g., a preference for “social services” that erode self-reliance). Consider, for example, this graph:
Derived from estimates available at this page at usgovernmentspending.com.
What was “unaffordable” before World War II suddenly became affordable. And so it has gone throughout the history of the republic. Affordability (or sustainability) is a political issue, not a line drawn in the sand by a smart-ass analyst who gives no thought to the consequences of spending too little on defense.
Which brings me back to CBO’s “Building a 600-Ship Navy: Costs, Timing, and Alternative Approaches“, which crystallized opposition to the 600-ship Navy. The tome includes an estimate of the long-run, annual obligational authority (outlays to be incurred) to sustain a 600-ship Navy (of the Navy’s design). The estimate was about 20-percent higher (in constant dollars) than the FY 1982 Navy budget. (See Options I and II in Figure 2, p. 50.) The long-run would have begun around FY 1994, following several years of higher spending associated with the buildup of forces.
In what sense was the additional 20 percent “unaffordable”?
I don’t have a historical breakdown of the Department of Defense (DoD) budget by service, but I found values for all DoD spending on military programs at Office of Management and Budget Historical Tables. Drawing on Tables 5.2 and 10.1, I constructed constant-dollar indices of DoD’s obligational authority:
There was no inherent reason that defense spending couldn’t have remained on the trajectory from 1982 through 1985; that is, more than 20 percent higher (in constant dollars) than the 1982 level. The slowdown of the late 1980s was a reflection of improved relations between the U.S. and USSR. Those improved relations had much to do with the Reagan defense buildup, of which the goal of attaining a 600-ship Navy was an integral part.
The Reagan buildup helped to convince Soviet leaders (Gorbachev in particular) that trying to keep pace with the U.S. was futile and (actually) unaffordable by the USSR, given the USSR’s weak economy. The rest — the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the USSR — is history. The buildup, in other words, sowed the seeds of its own demise. But that couldn’t have been predicted with certainty in the early-to-middle 1980s.
Yes, defense spending receded after that end of the Cold War, but that was a deliberate response to the end of the Cold War and lack of other serious threats, not a historical necessity. It was certainly not on the table in the early 1980s, when the 600-ship Navy was being pushed. Had the Cold War not thawed and ended, there is no reason that U.S. defense spending couldn’t have continued to rise beyond the level it reached at the peak of the Reagan buildup.
In fact, after the bulge caused by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, “peacetime” (constant-dollar) defense spending in 2020 reached 133 percent of the 1982 level. But even then, defense spending as a percentage of GDP was significantly lower in 2020 (4.5 percent) than it was in 1985 (6.5 percent).
In sum, the 600-ship Navy was eminently affordable — all that was required to afford it was political will, which the smart-ass analysts at CBO (and elsewhere) were bent on subverting.
John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy from 1981 to 1987, was rightly incensed that analysts — some of them on his payroll as civilian employees and contractors — were, in effect, undermining a deliberate strategy of pressing against a key Soviet weakness — the unsustainability of its defense strategy. There was much lamentation at the time about Lehman’s “war” on the offending parties. One of them was the think-tank for which I then worked. I can now admit openly that I was sympathetic to Lehman and offended by the arrogance of analysts who believed that it was their job to suggest that spending more on defense was “unaffordable”.
To understand my disdain for the smart-asses, I will take you back another 20 years. When I was a neophyte analyst, I was handed a pile of required reading material. One of the items was was Methods of Operations Research, by Philip M. Morse and George E. Kimball. Morse, in the early months of America’s involvement in World War II, founded the civilian operations-research organization from which my think-tank evolved. Kimball was a leading member of that organization. Their book is notable not just as a compendium of analytical methods that were applied, with much success, to the war effort. It is also introspective — and properly humble — about the power and role of analysis.
Two passages, in particular, have stuck with me for the nearly 60 years since I first read the book. Here is one of them:
[S]uccessful application of operations research usually results in improvements by factors of 3 or 10 or more…. In our first study of any operation we are looking for these large factors of possible improvement…. They can be discovered if the [variables] are given only one significant figure, … any greater accuracy simply adds unessential detail.
One might term this type of thinking “hemibel thinking.” A bel is defined as a unit in a logarithmic scale corresponding to a factor of 10. Consequently a hemibel corresponds to a factor of the square root of 10, or approximately 3. [p. 38]
Morse and Kimball — two brilliant scientists and analysts, who worked with actual data (pardon the redundancy) about combat operations — counseled against making too much of quantitative estimates given the uncertainties inherent in combat. But, as I have seen over the years, analysts eager to “prove” something nevertheless make a huge deal out of minuscule differences in quantitative estimates — estimates based not on actual combat operations but on theoretical values derived from models of systems and operations yet to see the light of day. (I also saw, and still see, too much “analysis” about soft subjects, such as domestic politics and international relations. The amount of snake oil emitted by “analysts” — sometimes called scholars, journalists, pundits, and commentators — would fill the Great Lakes. Their perceptions of reality have an uncanny way of supporting their unabashed decrees about policy.)
The second memorable passage from Methods of Operations Research goes directly to the point of this post:
Operations research done separately from an administrator in charge of operations becomes an empty exercise. [p. 10].
In the case of CBO and other opponents of the 600-ship Navy, substitute “cost estimate” for “operations research”, “responsible defense official” for “administrator in charge”, and “strategy” for “operations”. The principle is the same: The CBO and its ilk knew the price of the 600-ship Navy, but had no inkling of its value.
Too many scientists and analysts want to make policy. On the evidence of my close association with scientists and analysts over the years — including a stint as an unsparing reviewer of their products — I would say that they should learn to think clearly before they inflict their views on others. But too many of them — even those with Ph.D.s in STEM disciplines — are incapable of thinking clearly, and more than capable of slanting their work to support their biases. Leading examples are Michael Mann, JamesHansen (more here), and their co-conspirators in the catastrophic-anthropogenic-global-warming scam.
This story has a coda. In the same year that the CBO and others (including some analysts from my own organization) were trying to sabotage the 600-ship Navy, I was telling an admiral, in so many words, that he was a fool to believe that analysis could prove what he wanted to prove. I was banished from his sight for my honesty. And I have never regretted it.
I remember my grandmother’s house in a small, lakeside village about 90 miles north of where I grew up. Her modest, two-story bungalow sat on a deep lot that backed up to open fields where doves cooed as I awoke on sunny, summer mornings to the smell of bacon frying. My favorite room was the kitchen, with its massive wood-fired range and huge, round, oak table, around which my grandmother, parents, and various aunts and uncles would sit after a meal, retelling and embellishing tales from the past.
I remember them all as if it were yesterday, even though they are long gone. There was my beloved Grandma, of course, the matriarch and mother of ten, seven sons and three daughters. (She survived Grandpa, who was buried on the day of my birth, by 36 years.) One of the daughters served in the WAC during World War II; six of the sons also saw active duty during the war (the seventh had servied before the war).
A few of the children were absent from our holiday gatherings because of family obligations and distance. Aunt Isabelle had her own brood of nine to care for; Aunt Helen, who didn’t wed until age 36, had seven step-children under her roof; Uncle Charles had departed for the sunny South soon after war’s end. Uncle Louis was missing because at the age of 40 he was killed in a road accident while on active duty in the Coast Guard.
Of the more-or-less regular holiday visitors there was Uncle Joe, the eldest son and another career Coast Guardsman, who among family would unbend from his Chief Petty Officer’s demeanor; Uncle Lawrence, the joker and story-teller; Uncle Chet, another raconteur (and the handsomest of a handsome lot); Uncle George, quieter than Lawrence and Chet, but good with the quip; and the “baby” (born when Grandma was 42) — Uncle Fred, taciturn to a fault and a bachelor until he was 42. My father (Pop), who rounded out the adult male contingent, was closer to his brothers-in-law than he was to his many half-siblings.
The women, in addition to Grandma: my mother (Mom) the eighth child and youngest of the three girls; Uncle Joe’s Mary, a flapper in her day; Uncle Lawrence’s Christine, the scold; Uncle Chet’s Mary, the jolly one; and Uncle George’s Peg, a schoolteacher who knew how to let her hair down — just enough.
Starting with Uncle Louis, all but Mom left this earth in the years spanning 1947 to 2004, with Grandma and Aunt Isabelle making it to the age of 96. Mom held out until 2015, when she succumbed seven months short of her 100th birthday.
Here’s to the departed:
Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom and Charley, The weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer, the fighter? All, all, are sleeping on the hill.
One passed in a fever, One was burned in a mine, One was killed in a brawl, One died in a jail, One fell from a bridge toiling for children and wife — All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.
From The Hill, by Edgar Lee Masters (1869-1930)
* * *
Time, you old gipsy man, Will you not stay, Put up your caravan Just for one day?….
Last week in Babylon, Last night in Rome, Morning and in the crush Under Paul’s dome; Under Paul’s dial You tighten your rein — Only a moment, and off once again; Off to some city Now blind in the womb, Off to another Ere that’s in the tomb.
From Time, You Old Gipsy Man, by Ralph Hodgson (1871-1962)
Dissecting an anarcho-capitalist’s ravings about national defense.
“But Wouldn’t Warlords Take Over?” is the title of a piece by Robert Murphy at the Mises Economics Blog. Murphy says:
… In a system of anarcho-capitalism or the free-market order, wouldn’t society degenerate into constant battles between private warlords?”…
For the warlord objection to work, the statist [or minarchist] would need to argue that a given community would remain lawful under a government, but that the same community would break down into continuous warfare if all legal and military services were privatized….
Now that we’ve focused the issue, I think there are strong reasons to suppose that civil war would be much less likely in a region dominated by private defense and judicial agencies, rather than by a monopoly [s]tate. Private agencies own the assets at their disposal, whereas politicians (especially in democracies) merely exercise temporarycontrol over the [s]tate’’s military equipment. Bill Clinton was perfectly willing to fire off dozens of cruise missiles when the Lewinsky scandal was picking up steam. Now regardless of one’s beliefs about Clinton’’s motivations, clearly Slick Willie would have been less likely to launch such an attack if he had been the CEO of a private defense agency that could have sold the missiles on the open market for $569,000 each.
Aside from this brief excursion into Clinton’s use or misuse of national-defense assets, Murphy’s argument is focused in the issue of intra-societal violence; viz: “civil war would be much less likely in a region dominated by private defense and judicial agencies, rather than by a monopoly [s]tate. ”
Returning to Murphy:
We can see this principle [of the profligate use of force] in the case of the United States. In the 1860s, would large scale combat have broken out on anywhere near the same scale if, instead of the two factions controlling hundreds of thousands of conscripts, all military commanders had to hire voluntary mercenaries and pay them a market wage for their services?
Murphy concedes that there might have been combat. He’s merely quibbling about its scale. He continues:
I can imagine a reader generally endorsing the above analysis, yet still resisting my conclusion. He or she might say something like this: “In a state of nature, people initially have different views of justice. Under market anarchy, different consumers would patronize dozens of defense agencies, each of which attempts to use its forces to implement incompatible codes of law. Now it’s true that these professional gangs might generally avoid conflict out of prudence, but the equilibrium would still be precarious.”
“To avoid this outcome,” my critic could elaborate, “citizens put aside their petty differences and agree to support a single, monopoly agency, which then has the power to crush all challengers to its authority. This admittedly raises the new problem of controlling the Leviathan, but at least it solves the problem of ceaseless domestic warfare.”
There are several problems with this possible approach. First, it assumes that the danger of private warlords is worse than the threat posed by a tyrannical central government. Second, there is the inconvenient fact that no such voluntary formation of a [s]tate ever occurred. Even those citizens who, say, supported the ratification of the U.S. Constitution were never given the option of living in market anarchy; instead they had to choose between government under the Articles of Confederation or government under the Constitution.
Murphy sets up a quasi-straw man — the voluntary formation of a state — then proceeds to blow it down. Big deal. That doesn’t prove that the danger of warlords is less than the threat posed by a central government, which is what Murphy implies. Non sequitur. Moreover, many citizens did support the ratification of the Constitution, and those who didn’t had the option of going over the Blue Ridge (or west of the Mississippi for good measure). Back to Murphy:
But for our purposes, the most interesting problem with this objection is that, were it an accurate description, it would be unnecessary for such a people to form a government. If, by hypothesis, the vast majority of people — —although they have different conceptions of justice — can all agree that it is wrong to use violence to settle their honest disputes, then market forces would lead to peace among the private police agencies.
Murphy’s hypothesis is his undoing. He assumes that if the vast majority of people agree that it’s wrong to use violence to settle disputes, then that won’t happen. Do the vast majority of people believe that it’s wrong to use violence to settle disputes? Perhaps, but it doesn’t take a vast majority to inject violence into a society; it takes only a relatively small number of renegades, who may be then be able to coerce others into condoning or supporting their criminal activities. There’s more:
Yes, it is perfectly true that people have vastly different opinions concerning particular legal issues. Some people favor capital punishment, some consider abortion to be murder, and there would be no consensus on how many guilty people should go free to avoid the false conviction of one innocent defendant. Nonetheless, if the contract theory of government is correct, the vast majority of individuals can agree that they should settle these issues not through force, but rather through an orderly procedure (such as is provided by periodic elections).
Well, Murphy now admits that there’s something to the voluntary formation of a state. But, like most anarcho-capitalists, he doesn’t want to admit to the legitimacy of an institution that he didn’t contract for. Tough. But that still doesn’t have anything to do with the superiority of private defense agencies over state-controlled police forces and courts. Nevertheless, Murphy plows on:
But if this does indeed describe a particular population, why would we expect such virtuous people, as consumers, to patronize defense agencies that routinely used force against weak opponents? Why wouldn’t the vast bulk of reasonable customers patronize defense agencies that had interlocking arbitration agreements, and submitted their legitimate disputes to reputable, disinterested arbitrators? Why wouldn’t the private, voluntary legal framework function as an orderly mechanism to settle matters of “public policy”?
That’s a lot of hypotheticals piled on top of one another. What Murphy doesn’t entertain is the possibility that a small but very rich cabal could create a dominant defense agency that simply refuses to recognize other defense agencies, except as enemies. In other words, there’s nothing in Murphy’s loose logic to prove that warlords wouldn’t arise. In fact, he soon gives away the game:
Imagine a bustling city, such as New York, that is initially a free market paradise. Is it really plausible that over time rival gangs would constantly grow, and eventually terrorize the general public? Remember, these would be admittedly criminal organizations; unlike the city government of New York, there would be no ideological support for these gangs.
We must consider that in such an environment, the law-abiding majority would have all sorts of mechanisms at their [sic] disposal, beyond physical confrontation. Once private judges had ruled against a particular rogue agency, the private banks could freeze its assets (up to the amount of fines levied by the arbitrators). In addition, the private utility companies could shut down electricity and water to the agency’’s headquarters, in accordance with standard provisions in their contracts.
Pardon me while I laugh at the notion that lack of “ideological support” for the gangs of New York would make it impossible for gangs to grow and terrorize the general public. That’s precisely what has happened at various times during the history of New York (and other cities), even though the “law-abiding majority [had] all sorts of mechanisms at [its] disposal”. Murphy insists on hewing to the assumption that the existence of a law-abiding majority somehow prevents the rise a powerful, law-breaking minorities, capable of terrorizing the general public. Wait a minute; now he admits the converse:
Of course, it is theoretically possible that a rogue agency could overcome these obstacles, either through intimidation or division of the spoils, and take over enough banks, power companies, grocery stores, etc. that only full-scale military assault would conquer it. But the point is, from an initial position of market anarchy, these would-be rulers would have to start from scratch. In contrast, under even a limited government, the machinery of mass subjugation is ready and waiting to be seized.
Huh? It’s certainly more than theoretically possible for a “rogue agency” to wreak havoc. A “rogue agency” is nothing more than a fancy term for a street gang, the Mafia, or al Qaeda cells operating in the U.S. A “rogue agency” run by and on behalf of rich and powerful criminals — for their own purposes — would somehow be preferable to police forces and courts operated by a limited government that is accountable to the general public, rich and poor alike? I don’t think so.
However much the American state engages in “mass subjugation” — and it does, to a degree — it is also held in check by its accountability to the general public under American law and tradition. A “rogue agency”, by definition, would be unbound by law and tradition. (Here I must admit that the CIA and FBI have, in recent years, become rogue agencies, though (thus far) for the accomplishment of a particular objective: to discredit Donald Trump and to deny him (or remove him from) the presidency.)
Anyone can conjure a Utopia, as Murphy has. But no one can guarantee that it will work. Murphy certainly hasn’t made the case that his Utopia would work.
In any event, by focusing on intra-societal violence Murphy ignores completely two crucial questions: (1) Can an anarchistic society effectively defend itself against an outside force? (2) Can it do so better than a society in which the state has a monopoly on the use of force with respect to outside entities? Murphy implies that the answer to both questions is “yes,” though he fails to explore those questions. Here is my brief answer: The cost of mounting a credible defense of the United States from foreign enemies probably would support only one supplier; that is, national defense is a natural monopoly. The American state — given its accountability to the general public — should be that supplier. (With the proviso that the leftward lurch in America’s governance is halted and reversed.)
To revert to Murphy’s example of Clinton’s profligate use of expensive missiles, the CEO of a private defense agency might well have an incentive to fire missiles at a bogus target. He might want to demonstrate his “toughness” in order to allay his shareholders’ doubts about it, or to attract new clients. Murphy’s example suggests only that the state may be wasteful in its expenditure of conscripted dollars. Murphy’s example does not show that the state is necessarily any less effective than would be a private defense agency or defense agencies. In matters of life and death, a wasteful state is preferable to an efficient private defense agency (if there could be such a thing).
A wasteful, accountable, American state is certainly preferable to an efficient, private, defense agency in possession of the same military might. Hitler and Stalin, in effect, ran private defense agencies (because Hitler and Stalin weren’t accountable to voters), and look where that landed the Germans and Russians. Talk about subjugation.
So the answer is “yes”. Warlords would take over in an anarcho-capitalist dream world in which there is no state to keep them in check.
Because Tucker didn’t state the point of the chart, I had to read his mind. He was probably trying to convey a message like this:
Defense spending was just “right” (i.e., close to zero) after demobilization from World War II.
Look at what has happened since then: Defense spending (in inflated dollars) has risen to a very large number, even though there hasn’t been a war on the scale of World War II.
The absence of a major war since World War II obviously means that the U.S. spends far too much on defense.
Defense spending, unlike domestic spending is driven by the outside world, by what others could or would do to us, regardless of our delusions about their benignity. It is necessary to spend a lot on defense even when we are not at war, for two purposes: deterrence and preparedness.
With that thought in mind, let’s look at the indicies in following chart (government spending includes State and local as well as federal outlays):
Sources: Current dollar values of government spending derived from Bureau of Economic Analysis, National Income and Product Accounts, Tables 3.1 and 3.95. Population statistics, constant-dollar GDP, and GDP deflators applied to government spending derived from Measuring Worth. (GDP – US data set).
What does the chart suggest? This:
The benchmark for “necessary” defense spending is World War II. Real defense spending has yet to return to that level. But, as a result of our foolish rush to demobilize after World War II, defense spending had to rise in response to Soviet- and Communist Chinese-backed aggression in Korea and the growing military power and aggressiveness of the Soviet Union. Subsequent “bumps” represent the Vietnam War; the Reagan defense buildup, which drove the USSR to its knees and thence to dissolution; and the squandered wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The most recent rise in defense spending, due to Trump, was cut short by Biden, in keeping with his unarticulated but obvious policy of “accommodating” Russia and China.
The gorilla in the room is redistributive spending: transfer payments (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and their expansion by Obamacare; food stamps; easier access to disability payments; more generous unemployment benefits; Covid-19 “stimmies”; etc., etc. etc.); subisidies (mainly for not growing crops and for wasteful “rewable energy” schemes); and interest on government debt — all of which rob Peter to pay Paul.
Non-defense spending hasn’t been ignored by any means.
All spending categories have outpaced GDP and (by a long shot) population. Defense spending should be driven by external threats, not population. Other government spending should be related to population, but they are obviously more strongly related to the greed of politicians (for votes) and various interest groups (for other people’s money).
Non-defense spending (including transfer payments, etc.) is now almost five times as great as defense spending.
It is evident that defense spending is far too low. If it had risen sufficiently, Russia and China would have remained content to rebuild their economies and refrain from military adventurism. By the same token, the gargantua of non-defense spending (and the regulatory burden that goes with it) has decimated the U.S. economy (see this and this). The far more robust economy that would have resulted absent regulation and profligate spending on “social services” would have had ample room in it for voluntary charity to assist the truly needy (as opposed to the conveniently disabled and lazy).
I will end with this:
It is customary in democratic countries to deplore expenditures on armaments as conflicting with the requirements of the social services. There is a tendency to forget that the most important social service that a government can do for its people is to keep them alive and free. — Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir John Slessor in Strategy for the West
For the last two year’s of Donald Trump’s presidency, he is all that stood between you and what you are now “enjoying” if you voted for Joe Biden: inflation, military weakness, high energy prices, and “wokeness”, to name the effect of some of “moderate” Biden’s policies. Wake up to the fact that your pearl-clutching (and a lot of Big Tech-media manipulation) helped to elect the most feckless president since Jimmy Carter, and helped to put Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Shumer in charge of Congress.
This is a good time to reproduce this post by Dery Murdock at The American Spectator:
President Trump’s Policy Victories, From A to Z
Let no one say he didn’t deliver wins for conservatives.
A reader who calls himself BillyBob left a comment after my recent op-ed in The American Spectator on the Never Trumpers’ attack on the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Georgia, Herschel Walker.
Here is what BillyBob wrote:
Liz [Cheney] is actually a true conservative. Trump has no value structure or political spine- all he cares about is “what more can I get for me”. Anyone who believes Trump is conservative is just daft. Kinda’ like Trump.
What utter nonsense! Whatever one thinks about President Donald J. Trump’s personality, his policies were the most conservative reforms that America has seen since President Ronald Wilson Reagan left office — and perhaps even before he arrived. Here is a partial list of what he got done in the White House in one term — even as he fought a totally unhinged Democrat Party, the ferocious news media, the vicious Deep State (including a virulently hostile FBI), and enough lies hurled against him to stretch Pinocchio’s nose to the size of a javelin.
a) The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — a massive tax reduction that largely remains in place
b) A 21 percent top-corporate tax rate, down from 35 percent
c) Eight regulations erased for every new one imposed
d) School voucher program for Washington, D.C., reauthorized and funded
e) Three constitutionalist justices added to the U.S. Supreme Court
f) Some 200 conservative judges placed in lower federal courts
g) Keystone XL Pipeline approved
h) Oil drilling in a small, specific portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge authorized
i) U.S. energy independence achieved
j) Critical race theory in federal programs dumped
k) Paris Climate Agreement abandoned
l) Iran Nuclear Deal ditched
m) Chinese Communist Party confronted and discredited
n) Islamic State group caliphate obliterated
o) U.S. embassy in Israel moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem
p) Four Middle Eastern peace deals with Israel and its neighbors signed
q) About 5 hundred miles of southern-border wall constructed
r) Some 8,000 Opportunity Zones to revitalize low-income areas through market incentives activated
u) Executive order requiring that new federal buildings be designed in classical Greco-Roman style signed
v) North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) replaced with the U.S.–Mexico–Canada Agreement — a new-and-improved free-trade pact
w) Free trade agreement with South Korea launched
x) Right to Try law allowing terminally ill patients access to experimental drugs signed
y) American military prowess restored and funded
z) Operation Warp Speed’s three COVID-19 vaccines delivered in record time via White House collaboration with the private sector
Donald J. Trump enjoyed enough victories to match the number of letters in the English alphabet. These 26 policies and achievements are all conservative. And there are many more (Space Force! Record-low black and Hispanic unemployment!).
Those who claim that President Trump is not a conservative and did not govern as one are either totally ignorant or wildly dishonest.
The saying goes: Luck is the residue of design. My version: The life one leads is — in the main, for most persons — the residue of choice.
There is a kind of person: one who drinks too much, who drives too fast, who spends money that he doesn’t have (or has little prospect of acquiring) on gadgets instead of useful things, who will not accept or hold onto a menial job because it is “beneath” him, who selects a mate for superficial reasons. Such a person is likely to lead a chaotic life — one filled with tension, frustration, and failure. Such a person is not deserving of charity because he is likely to squander it. And yet, the welfare state squanders tax-supported “charity” on such persons, thus encouraging their self-destructive behavior.
My home town once boasted fifteen schoolhouses that were built between the end of the Civil War and 1899. All but the high school were named for presidents of the United States: Adams, Buchanan, Fillmore, Harrison, Jackson, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Pierce, Polk, Taylor, Tyler, Van Buren, and Washington. Another of their ilk came along in the early 1900s; Lincoln was its name.
With the Adams School counting for two presidents — the second and sixth — there was a school for every president through Lincoln. Why Lincoln came late is a mystery to me. Lincoln was revered by us Northerners, and his picture was displayed proudly next to Washington’s in schools and municipal offices. We even celebrated Lincoln’s Birthday as a holiday distinct from Washington’s Birthday (a.k.a. President’s Day).
More schools — some named for presidents — followed well into the 20th century, but only the fifteen that I’ve named were built in the style of the classic red-brick schoolhouse: two stories, a center hall, imposing staircase, tall windows, steep roof, and often a tower for the bell that the janitor rang to summon neighborhood children to school. (The Lincoln, as a latecomer, was L-shaped rather than boxy, but it was otherwise a classic red-brick schoolhouse, replete with a prominent bell tower.)
I attended three of the fifteen red-brick schoolhouses. My first was Polk School, where I began kindergarten two days after the formal surrender of Japan on September 2, 1945.
Here’s the Polk in its heyday:
Kindergarten convened in a ground-floor room at the back of the school, facing what seemed then like a large playground, with room for a softball field. The houses at the far end of the field would have been easy targets for adult players, but it would have been a rare feat for a student to hit one over the fence that separated the playground from the houses.
In those innocent days, school-children in our small city got to school and back home by walking. Here’s the route that I followed as a kindergartener:
A kindergartener walking several blocks between home and school, usually alone most of the way? Unheard of today, it seems. But in those days predators were almost unheard of. And, as a practical matter, most families had only one car, which the working (outside-the-home) parent (then known as the father and head-of-household) used on weekdays for travel to and from his job. Moreover, the exercise of walking as much as a mile each way was considered good for growing children — and it was.
The route between my home and Polk School was 0.6 mile in length, and it crossed one busy street. Along that street were designated crossing points, at which stood Safety Patrol Boys, usually 6th-graders, who ensured that students crossed only when it was safe to do so. They didn’t stand in the street and stop oncoming traffic; they simply judged when students could safely cross, and gave them the “green light” by blowing a whistle. In the several years of my elementary-school career, I never saw or heard of a close call, let alone an injury or a fatality.
I began at Polk School because the school closest to my home, Madison School, didn’t have kindergarten. I went Madison for 1st grade. It was a gloomy pile:
Madison was shuttered after my year there, so I returned to Polk for 2nd and 3rd grades. Madison stood empty for a few years, and was razed in the late 1940s or early 1950s. Polk was shuttered sometime in the 1950s, and eventually was razed after being used for many years as a school-district warehouse.
The former site of Madison School now hosts “affordable housing”:
There’s a public playground where Polk School stood:
I spent two more years — 4th and 5th grades — in another red-brick schoolhouse: Tyler School. It’s still there, though it hasn’t been used as a school for many decades. It has served as an apartment house and a halfway house for addicts. It now looks like this:
The only other survivor among the fifteen red-brick schoolhouses is Monroe School, which now seems to serve as an apartment building:
Tyler and Monroe Schools are ghosts from America’s past — a past that’s irretrievable. It was a time of innocence, when America’s wars were fought to victory; when children could safely roam; when marriage was between man and woman, and usually for life; when deviant behavior was discouraged, not “celebrated”; when a high-school diploma and four-year degree meant something, and were worth something; when the state wasn’t the enemy of the church; when politics didn’t intrude into science; when people resorted to government in desperation, not out of habit; and when people had real friends, not Facebook “friends.”
It is with regret that I mention two grave errors in Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The speech begins with this: “Four score and seven years ago [in 1776] our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation”. Lincoln later characterizes the government as being “of the people by the people for the people”. Both statements are dead wrong.
Lincoln is far from the only influential person to have perpetrated myths about the founding of the United States and the character of the Constitution. These many myths help to sustain the unconscionably oppressive regime that now governs the United States.
It is the purpose of this essay to explode the myths, and to suggest ways to end the oppression.
I. THE CONSTITUTION OF 1787: A BLUEPRINT FOR A NEW NATION
As I will explain, the Constitution of the United States was a contract between the States that ratified it. The contract became binding not only on the States but also on their creature, the national government. (I use “national” throughout instead of “federal” because the Constitution created a new government of strictly limited but national power.)
This written Constitution — not the national government or any branch of it — was to be the supreme law of the land. As the supreme law. It was meant to be a bulwark against the expansion of the powers of the national government beyond those expressly granted to it by the Constitution.
There are many influential parties, justices of the Supreme Court included, who believe that the Constitution means what a majority of the Court says it means. But, as Randy Barnettputs it, the Supreme Court
does not have the power to change the written Constitution, which always remains there to be revived when there is a political and judicial will to do so. For example, after the Supreme Court gutted the Fourteenth Amendment during Reconstruction, it remained a part of the written Constitution for a future more enlightened Supreme Court to put to good use. By the same token, the current Supreme Court can still make serious mistakes about the Constitution. Because the Constitution is in writing, there is an external “there” there by which to assess its opinions.
The real meaning of the Constitution is fixed until it is amended through the process prescribed in the Constitution itself. It is not, unlike the British constitution, a do-it-yourself project. The American Constitution was designed by master architects, who meant it to be executed as it was written. It is a blueprint, not a Rohrschach test. Liberty is still possible under the American Constitution because it is still intact, waiting to be read and enforced correctly. (See Michael Stokes Paulsen, “Originalism: A Logical Necessity“, National Review, September 13, 2018. See also Willam M. Treanor, “Framer’s Intent: Gouverneur Morris, the Committee of Style, and the Creation of the Federalist Constitution“, Georgetown University Law Center, May 19, 2019, for a discussion of the ways in which the Committee of Style seems to have altered the Constitution as adopted piecemeal by the delegates to the convention of 1787, and why — especially in the view of Justice Clarence Thomas — the changes made by the Committee are valid because it was the Committee’s revised text that the convention approved.)
II. THE CONSTITUTION AS A CONTRACT FOR A NEW NATION
James Madison, known as the Father of the Constitution, characterized it as a contract, though he used an older word, namely, compact:
The [third Virginia] resolution declares, first, that “it views the powers of the federal government as resulting from the compact to which the states are parties;” in other words, that the federal powers are derived from the Constitution; and that the Constitution is a compact to which the states are parties. [Report on the Virginia Resolutions to the Virginia House of Delegates, January 1800]
What else could it be? Romantic rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, the Constitution is not the equivalent of the Ten Commandments or the Bible, handed directly from God or inspired by Him. The Constitution represents a practical arrangement through which the States that ratified it agreed to establish a national government with some degree of power over the States, but power that was carefully limited by enumeration.
The main purposes for establishing the national government were to provide for the common defense of the States, to ensure the free flow of commerce among the States, and to present a single face to the rest of the world in matters of trade and foreign policy.
These new arrangements represented a drastic change from the Confederation of 1781-89, which was more like a debating club or the United Nations. The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union had many provisions resembling those of the Constitution, but their enforcement was relegated to the Congress of the Confederation, that is, to the representatives of the States, each of which had one vote. A committee of the States could act when Congress was not in session, but only on the authority of nine of the thirteen States. In fact, all significant acts, including the creation and maintenance of armed forces and declarations of war required the approval of nine of the thirteen States.
The only way to revise this ponderous arrangement was to tear it up and start over. That was not the original aim of the delegates from twelve of the States who convened in Philadelphia the summer of 1787 with the aim of amending the Articles. (Rhode Island boycotted the convention in Philadelphia and was the last State to ratify the Constitution.) But that is what they did.
The Congress of the Confederation agreed to submit the proposed Constitution to the States for ratification. And when eleven of the States had ratified it, the Congress declared the new Constitution operative. At that point, the Confederation ceased to exist. So much for “perpetual union”.
The Constitution created a new nation, in which membership was voluntary. Non-ratifying States would not have been members of the new nation.
If the Constitution had not been ratified by at least nine States, it would have gone into the trash bin of history. The Confederation might have stumbled along as an ineffectual conclave of thirteen doggedly independent States. Or it might have been abandoned altogether, leaving thirteen disunited States in its wake, some of which might have formed other nations, trading partnerships, or mutual-defense alliances.
III. A CONTRACT BETWEEN THE STATES OR “THE PEOPLE”?
A crucial and often misrepresented aspect of the Constitution is the role of the States in its adoption. There is a prevailing view that the Constitution was adopted by “the people”, not by the States. No State or States, therefore, may withdraw from the constitutional contract because it is not theirs to begin with.
This view is taken because it argues against secession. Anti-secessionism is a religion whose adherents either hold a mistaken, romantic view of the genesis of the nation or dislike the word “secession” because of its association with the slave-holding States that did in fact secede.
The idea that the Constitution is the creature of “the people” is balderdash. It is balderdash of a high order because it was lent credence by none other than John Marshall, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court from 1801 to 1835, whose many opinions shaped constitutional jurisprudence for better and for worse. Consider this passage from Marshall’s opinion in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819):
The Convention which framed the constitution was indeed elected by the State legislatures. But the instrument, when it came from their hands, was a mere proposal, without obligation, or pretensions to it. It was reported to the then existing Congress of the United States, with a request that it might “be submitted to a Convention of Delegates, chosen in each State by the people thereof, under the recommendation of its Legislature, for their assent and ratification.” This mode of proceeding was adopted; and by the Convention, by Congress, and by the State Legislatures, the instrument was submitted to the people. They acted upon it in the only manner in which they can act safely, effectively, and wisely, on such a subject, by assembling in Convention. It is true, they assembled in their several States–and where else should they have assembled? No political dreamer was ever wild enough to think of breaking down the lines which separate the States, and of compounding the American people into one common mass. Of consequence, when they act, they act in their States. But the measures they adopt do not, on that account, cease to be the measures of the people themselves, or become the measures of the State governments.
Marshall argues against a strawman of his own construction: the insinuation that the Constitution was somehow ratified by “the American people”. He does not come out and say that, but he implies that holding the ratifying conventions in the various States was necessary because of the impracticality of holding a national convention of “the people”. The fact is that the conventions in the States were of modest size. The table given here shows that the total number of delegates voting yea and nay in each State ranged from a low of 26 to a high of 355, for an average of 127 per State. This was hardly anything like “one common mass” of the American people. The 1,648 delegates who voted in the thirteen conventions represented about two-tenths of one percent of the free white males aged 16 and older at the time (and presumably far less than one-half of one percent of the free-white males considered eligible for a convention).
The fact is that the ratifying conventions were held in the States because it was left to each State whether to join the new union or remain independent. The conventions were conducted under the auspices of the State legislatures. They were, in effect, special committees with but one duty: to decide for each State whether that State would join the union.
This view is supported by Madison’s contemporaneous account of the ratification process:
[I]t appears, on one hand, that the Constitution is to be founded on the assent and ratification of the people of America, given by deputies elected for the special purpose; but, on the other, that this assent and ratification is to be given by the people, not as individuals composing one entire nation, but as composing the distinct and independent States to which they respectively belong. It is to be the assent and ratification of the several States, derived from the supreme authority in each State, the authority of the people themselves. The act, therefore, establishing the Constitution, will not be a national, but a federal act. [The Federalist No. 39, as published in the Independent Journal, January 16, 1788]
Marshall’s fiction is compounded by the familiar image of the first words of the Preamble of the Constitution:
“We the People” is a brilliant public-relations ploy, but it has nothing to do with the facts of the case. The ratification of the Constitution was not the “will of the people” of the entire nation. It was the will of a tiny fraction of the people of each State that ratified it, and which might well have chosen to reject it.
IV. THE ABROGATION OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONTRACT
From the moment of the creation of the national government in 1789, that government was bound to honor the constitutional contract from which it arose. The national government has breached the contract by exceeding the scope of power granted to it by the constitutional contract. Immense, illegitimate power has accrued to the national government through the generations because of myriad laws, regulations, and court rulings that violate the real Constitution and distort its meaning.
The constitutional contract provides for:
primacy of the federal Constitution and of constitutional laws over those of the States
collective obligations of the States, as the united States, and individual obligations of the States to each other
structure of the national government — the three branches, elections and appointments to their offices, and basic legislative procedures
powers of the three branches
division of powers between the States and the national government
rights and privileges of citizens
a process for amending the Constitution.
The principles embodied in the details of the contract are few and simple:
The Constitution and constitutional laws are the supreme law of the land, within the clearly delimited scope of the Constitution. As the ardent nationalist Alexander Hamilton explains in Federalist No. 33, the Constitution “it expressly confines this supremacy to laws made pursuant to the Constitution”.
The national government has no powers other than those provided by the Constitution.
The rights of citizens include not only those rights specified in the Constitution but also any unspecified rights that do not conflict with powers expressly granted the national government or reserved by the States in the creation of the national government.
Moreover, the “checks and balances” in the Constitution are meant to limit the national government’s ability to act, even within its sphere of authority. In the legislative branch neither the House of Representatives nor the Senate can pass a law unilaterally. The president, in his primary constitutional role as head of the executive branch, must sign acts of Congress before they can become law, and may veto acts of Congress — which may, in turn, override his vetoes. From its position atop the judicial branch, the Supreme Court is supposed to decide cases “arising under” (within the scope of) the Constitution, not to change the Constitution without benefit of an amendment adopted as expressly provided in the Constitution.
The Constitution itself defines the sphere of authority of the national government and balances that authority against the authority of the States and the rights of citizens. Although the Constitution specifies certain powers of the executive and judiciary (e.g., commanding the armed forces and judging cases arising under the Constitution), the national government’s power rests squarely upon the legislative authority of Congress, as defined in Article I, Sections 8, 9, and 10.
Nevertheless, over the generations — and especially since the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt — various acts of Congress, the executive branch, and the judicial branch have usurped the powers and rights of States and citizens. This has happened because of deliberate misreadings of the real Constitution; for example:
The phrase “promote the general Welfare” in the Preamble refers to a desired result of the adoption of the Constitution. It is not an edict to redistribute income and wealth.
The phrase “general Welfare” in Article I, Section 8, is meant to place a further limit on the specific powers granted to Congress in the same section of the Constitution. Congress is supposed to exercise those powers for the benefit of all citizens and not for the benefit of the citizens of specific States or regions.
The power of Congress to tax is granted in Article I, Section 8, to enable Congress to execute its specific powers. This limited power has been aggrandized into a general power of taxation for any purpose, constitutional or unconstitutional.
The power of Congress “to regulate Commerce … among the several States” — also granted in Article I, Section 8 — is meant to prevent the States from restricting or distorting the terms of trade across their borders, not to grant the national government the unlimited statutory and regulatory authority that it now has, thanks to the Supreme Court.
In Article I, Section 8, the authority of Congress “[t]o make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof” has been distorted out of all recognition. The words “necessary and proper” are meant to apply to the exercise of Congress’s specific powers. They are not a license to expand those powers on the pretext that the new powers have something to do with those actually granted by the Constitution.
The “equal protection” clause of Amendment XIV — “nor shall any State … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws” — is meant to secure the legal equality of those former slaves whose freedom had been secured by Amendment XIII. Amendment XIV has became, instead, an excuse for legislation, executive orders, and judicial decisions that grants special privileges to specific, “protected” groups by curtailing the liberty of those who cannot claim affiliation with one or another of the “protected” groups.
All of that and more is documented in a biting paper, “Our Perfect, Perfect Constitution“, by Michael Stokes Paulsen, Distinguished University Chair and Professor of Law, University of St. Thomas (Minnesota). I will not excerpt the paper because it is short and deserves to be read whole. Instead, I offer my shorter, unschooled version of the Constitution as it now stands:
Congress may pass any law about anything.
The president and the independent regulatory agencies created by Congress may do just about anything they want to do because of (a) delegations of power by Congress and (b) sheer willfulness on the part of the president and the regulatory agencies.
The Supreme Court may rewrite law at will, regardless of the written Constitution, especially for the purposes of (a) enabling Congress to obliterate social and economic liberty, and (b) disabling the ability of the defense and law-enforcement forces of the United States to defend the life, liberty, and property of Americans.
V. THE BASES OF ABROGATION
A. The Framers’ Fatal Error
The wise men who framed the Constitution saw that a legislature could act like a mob; thus:
[I]t may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual.
Why has government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint. Has it been found that bodies of men act with more rectitude or greater disinterestedness than individuals? The contrary of this has been inferred by all accurate observers of the conduct of mankind; and the inference is founded upon obvious reasons. Regard to reputation has a less active influence, when the infamy of a bad action is to be divided among a number than when it is to fall singly upon one. A spirit of faction, which is apt to mingle its poison in the deliberations of all bodies of men, will often hurry the persons of whom they are composed into improprieties and excesses, for which they would blush in a private capacity.
[T]he more multitudinous a representative assembly may be rendered, the more it will partake of the infirmities incident to collective meetings of the people. Ignorance will be the dupe of cunning, and passion the slave of sophistry and declamation. The people can never err more than in supposing that by multiplying their representatives beyond a certain limit, they strengthen the barrier against the government of a few.
[T]here are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career, and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice, and truth can regain their authority over the public mind? What bitter anguish would not the people of Athens have often escaped if their government had contained so provident a safeguard against the tyranny of their own passions? Popular liberty might then have escaped the indelible reproach of decreeing to the same citizens the hemlock on one day and statues on the next.
The republican principle demands that the deliberate sense of the community should govern the conduct of those to whom they intrust the management of their affairs; but it does not require an unqualified complaisance to every sudden breeze of passion, or to every transient impulse which the people may receive from the arts of men, who flatter their prejudices to betray their interests. It is a just observation, that the people commonly intend the public good. This often applies to their very errors. But their good sense would despise the adulator who should pretend that they always reason right about the means of promoting it.
The primary inducement to conferring the power in question [the veto] upon the Executive is, to enable him to defend himself; the secondary one is to increase the chances in favor of the community against the passing of bad laws, through haste, inadvertence, or design. The oftener the measure is brought under examination, the greater the diversity in the situations of those who are to examine it, the less must be the danger of those errors which flow from want of due deliberation, or of those missteps which proceed from the contagion of some common passion or interest.
For all of their wisdom, however, the Framers were far too optimistic about the effectiveness of the checks and balances in their design. Consider this, from Hamilton:
It may … be observed that the supposed danger of judiciary encroachments on the legislative authority, which has been upon many occasions reiterated, is in reality a phantom. Particular misconstructions and contraventions of the will of the legislature may now and then happen; but they can never be so extensive as to amount to an inconvenience, or in any sensible degree to affect the order of the political system. This may be inferred with certainty, from the general nature of the judicial power, from the objects to which it relates, from the manner in which it is exercised, from its comparative weakness, and from its total incapacity to support its usurpations by force. And the inference is greatly fortified by the consideration of the important constitutional check which the power of instituting impeachments in one part of the legislative body, and of determining upon them in the other, would give to that body upon the members of the judicial department. This is alone a complete security. There never can be danger that the judges, by a series of deliberate usurpations on the authority of the legislature, would hazard the united resentment of the body intrusted with it, while this body was possessed of the means of punishing their presumption, by degrading them from their stations. While this ought to remove all apprehensions on the subject, it affords, at the same time, a cogent argument for constituting the Senate a court for the trial of impeachments. [Federalist No. 81]
Hamilton’s misplaced faith in the Constitution’s checks and balances is an example of what I call the Framers’ fatal error. The Framers underestimated the will to power that animates office-holders. The Constitution’s wonderful design — horizontal and vertical separation of powers — which worked rather well until the late 1800s, cracked under the strain of populism, as the central government began to impose national economic regulation at the behest of muckrakers and do-gooders. The Framers’ design then broke under the burden of the Great Depression, as the Supreme Court of the 1930s (and since) has enabled the national government to impose its will in matters far beyond its constitutional remit.
The Framers’ fundamental error can be found in Madison’s Federalist No. 51. Madison was correct in this:
It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.
But Madison then made the error of assuming that, under a central government, liberty is guarded by a diversity of interests:
[One method] of providing against this evil [is] … by comprehending in the society so many separate descriptions of citizens as will render an unjust combination of a majority of the whole very improbable, if not impracticable…. [This] method will be exemplified in the federal republic of the United States. Whilst all authority in it will be derived from and dependent on the society, the society itself will be broken into so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens, that the rights of individuals, or of the minority, will be in little danger from interested combinations of the majority.
In a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights. It consists in the one case in the multiplicity of interests, and in the other in the multiplicity of sects. The degree of security in both cases will depend on the number of interests and sects; and this may be presumed to depend on the extent of country and number of people comprehended under the same government. This view of the subject must particularly recommend a proper federal system to all the sincere and considerate friends of republican government, since it shows that in exact proportion as the territory of the Union may be formed into more circumscribed Confederacies, or States oppressive combinations of a majority will be facilitated: the best security, under the republican forms, for the rights of every class of citizens, will be diminished: and consequently the stability and independence of some member of the government, the only other security, must be proportionately increased.
Madison then went on to contradict what he had said in Federalist No. 46 about the States being a bulwark of liberty:
It can be little doubted that if the State of Rhode Island was separated from the Confederacy and left to itself, the insecurity of rights under the popular form of government within such narrow limits would be displayed by such reiterated oppressions of factious majorities that some power altogether independent of the people would soon be called for by the voice of the very factions whose misrule had proved the necessity of it. In the extended republic of the United States, and among the great variety of interests, parties, and sects which it embraces, a coalition of a majority of the whole society could seldom take place on any other principles than those of justice and the general good; whilst there being thus less danger to a minor from the will of a major party, there must be less pretext, also, to provide for the security of the former, by introducing into the government a will not dependent on the latter, or, in other words, a will independent of the society itself. It is no less certain than it is important, notwithstanding the contrary opinions which have been entertained, that the larger the society, provided it lie within a practical sphere, the more duly capable it will be of self-government. And happily for the REPUBLICAN CAUSE, the practicable sphere may be carried to a very great extent, by a judicious modification and mixture of the FEDERAL PRINCIPLE.
Madison assumed (or asserted) that in creating a new national government with powers greatly exceeding those of the Confederation a majority of States would not tyrannize the minority and that a collection minorities with overlapping interests would not concert to tyrannize the majority. Madison was so anxious to see the Constitution ratified that he oversold himself and the States’ ratifying conventions on the ability of the national government to hold itself in check. Thus the Constitution is lamentably silent on nullification and secession, which are real checks on power.
B. The New Deal and Beyond
Though the constitutional contract had not been strictly adhered to for some time, it began to unravel in earnest with the onset of the Great Depression, which led to the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal.
What went wrong? And how did it go wrong so quickly? Think back to 1928, when Americans were more prosperous than ever and the GOP had swept to its third consecutive lopsided victory in a presidential race. All it took to snatch disaster from the jaws of delirium was a stock-market crash in 1929 (fueled by the Fed) that turned into a recession that turned into a depression (also because of the Fed). The depression became the Great Depression, and it lasted until the eve of World War II, because of the activist policies of Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, which suppressed recovery instead of encouraging it. There was even a recession (1937-38) within the depression, and the national unemployment rate was still 15 percent in 1940. It took the biggest war effort in the history of the United States to bring the unemployment rate back to its pre-depression level.
From that relatively brief but deeply dismal era sprang a new religion: faith in the national government to bring peace and prosperity to the land. Most Americans of the era — like most human beings of every era — did not and could not see that government is the problem, not the solution. Victory in World War II, which required central planning and a commandeered economy, helped to expunge the bitter taste of the Great Depression. And coming as it did on the heels of the Great Depression, reinforced the desperate belief — shared by too many Americans — that salvation is to be found in big government.
The beneficial workings of the invisible hand of competitive cooperation are just too subtle for most people to grasp. The promise of a quick fix by confident-sounding politicians is too alluring. FDR became a savior-figure because he talked a good game and was an inspiring war leader, though he succumbed to pro-Soviet advice.
progressivism is … broadly accepted by the American public, inculcated through generations of progressive dominance of education and the media (whether that media is journalism or entertainment). Certainly Democrats embrace it. Now the political success of Donald J. Trump has opened the eyes of the Right to the fact that Republicans largely accept it….
Republicans have occasionally succeeded in slowing the rate at which America has become more progressive. President Reagan was able to cut income tax rates and increase defense spending, but accepted tax increases to kick the can on entitlements and could not convince a Democratic Congress to reduce spending generally. Subsequent administrations generally have been worse. A Republican Congress pressured Bill Clinton into keeping his promise on welfare reform after two vetoes. He did so during a period when the end of the Cold War and the revenues from the tech bubble allowed Washington to balance budgets on the Pentagon’s back. Unsurprisingly, welfare reform has eroded in the ensuing decades.
Accordingly, the big picture remains largely unchanged. Entitlements are not reformed, let alone privatized. To the contrary, Medicare was expanded during a GOP administration, if less so than it would have been under a Democratic regime…. Programs are almost never eliminated, let alone departments.
The Right also loses most cultural battles, excepting abortion and gun rights. Notably, the inroads on abortion may be due as much to the invention and deployment of the sonogram as the steadfastness of the pro-life movement. Otherwise, political and cultural progressivism has been successful in their march through the institutions, including education, religion, and the family.
Curricula increasingly conform to the progressive fashions of the moment, producing generations of precious snowflakes unequipped even to engage in the critical thinking public schools claim to prioritize over an understanding of the ages of wisdom that made us a free and prosperous people. Church membership and attendance continues their long-term decline. A country that seriously debated school prayer 30 years ago now debates whether Christians must be forced to serve same-sex weddings.
Marriage rates continue their long-term decline. Divorce rates have declined from the highs reached during the generation following the sexual revolution, but has generally increased over the course of the century during which progressivism has taken hold (despite the declining marriage rate). Those advocating reform of the nation’s various no-fault divorce laws are few and generally considered fringe. [“Americans Are As Deluded As Our Elites“, The Federalist, June 26, 2016]
There’s more, but disregard Henry’s reification of America when he should write “most Americans”:
Meanwhile, America has voted for decade after decade of tax-and-spend, borrow-and-spend, or some hybrid of the two. If the white working class is now discontented with the government’s failure to redress their grievances, this is in no small part due to the ingrained American expectation that government will do so, based on the observation that government typically hungers to increase government dependency (not that the white working class would use these terms).…
In sum, while it is correct to note that elites are not doing their jobs well, it is more difficult to conclude that elites have not been responding to the political demands of the American public as much as they have driven them.…
The presidential nominees our two major parties have chosen are largely viewed as awful. But Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump offer two slightly different versions of the same delusion: that progressivism works, if only the elites were not so stupid. This delusion is what most Americans currently want to believe.
[g]overnment in the United States, especially at the federal level, has become more about transfer payments and less about provision of goods and services.…
[There has been an] overall upward rise [of transfer payments] in the last half-century from 5% of GDP back in the 1960s to about 15% of GDP in the last few years….
The political economy of such a shift is simple enough: programs that send money to lots of people tend to be popular. But I would hypothesize that this ongoing shift not only reflects voter preferences, but also affect how Americans tend to perceive the main purposes of the federal government. Many Americans have become more inclined to think of federal budget policy not in terms of goods or services or investments that it might perform, but in terms of programs that send out checks. [“The Transition to Transfer Payment Government“, Conversable Economist, July 1, 2016]
VI. VIABLE REMEDIES: SECESSION AND PARTITION
What lies ahead? Not everyone is addicted to government. There are millions of Americans who want less of it — a lot less — rather than more of it. Several options are discussed at length in “A National Divorce”. Here, I borrow from the portions of that post which address secession and partition — the best of the lot. The secion on secession repeats some of the arguments made above.
A. Secession
In accordance with the doctrine of departmentalism, a State may be tempted to nullify an unconstitutional act of the national government. But there are probably many such acts that the State (or a preponderance of its citizens) would wish to nullify. Why do the thing piecemeal — and risk intervention by the national government for the sake of a single issue — when a sweeping solution is at hand? The sweeping solution, of course, is secession.
Secession is a legitimate constitutional act — a legal act, in other words — conventional wisdom to the contrary notwithstanding.
The best way to show that secession is legal is to construct a legal case for it, in the form of a resolution of secession:
In Convention, __________ 20__.
The Declaration of the representatives of the people of the State of _______________.
It has become necessary for the people of _______________ to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with the United States of America, and to assume the separate and equal status of an independent nation. A decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that the people of _______________ should declare the causes which impel them to the separation, and explain its legality.
The Constitution is a contract — a compact in the language of the Framers. The parties to the compact are not only the States but also the national government created by the Constitution.
It was by the grace of nine States that the Constitution became effective in 1789. Those nine States voluntarily created a new nation and national government and, at the same time, voluntarily ceded to that government certain specified and limited powers. The States and their people were given to understand that, in return for the powers granted it, the central government would exercise those powers for the benefit of the States and their people. Every State subsequently admitted to the union has subcribed to the Constitution with the same understanding as the nine States whose ratification effected it.
Lest there be any question about the status of the Constitution as a compact, we turn to James Madison, who is often called the Father of the Constitution. Madison, in a letter to Daniel Webster dated March 15, 1833, addresses
the question whether the Constitution of the U.S. was formed by the people or by the States, now under a theoretic discussion by animated partizans.
Madison continues:
It is fortunate when disputed theories, can be decided by undisputed facts. And here the undisputed fact is, that the Constitution was made by the people, but as imbodied into the several states, who were parties to it and therefore made by the States in their highest authoritative capacity.
“That this Assembly doth explicitly and peremptorily declare, that it views the powers of the federal government, as resulting from the compact to which the states are parties, as limited by the plain sense and intention of the instrument constituting that compact–as no further valid than they are authorized by the grants enumerated in that compact; and that, in case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of other powers, not granted by the said compact, the states who are parties thereto have the right, and are in duty bound, to interpose, for arresting the progress of the evil and for maintaining, within their respective limits, the authorities, rights, and liberties, appertaining to them.”…
The resolution declares, first, that “it views the powers of the federal government as resulting from the compact to which the states are parties;” in other words, that the federal powers are derived from the Constitution; and that the Constitution is a compact to which the states are parties….
The other position involved in this branch of the resolution, namely, “that the states are parties to the Constitution,” or compact, is, in the judgment of the committee, equally free from objection…. [I]n that sense the Constitution was submitted to the “states;” in that sense the “states” ratified it; and in that sense of the term “states,” they are consequently parties to the compact from which the powers of the federal government result. . . .
. . . The Constitution of the United States was formed by the sanction of the states, given by each in its sovereign capacity.
Finally, in The Federalist No. 39, which informed the debates in the various States about ratification, Madison says that
the Constitution is to be founded on the assent and ratification of the people of America, given by deputies elected for the special purpose; but, on the other, that this assent and ratification is to be given by the people, not as individuals composing one entire nation, but as composing the distinct and independent States to which they respectively belong. It is to be the assent and ratification of the several States, derived from the supreme authority in each State, the authority of the people themselves. . . .
That it will be a federal and not a national act, as these terms are understood by the objectors; the act of the people, as forming so many independent States, not as forming one aggregate nation, is obvious from this single consideration, that it is to result neither from the decision of a majority of the people of the Union, nor from that of a majority of the States. It must result from the unanimous assent of the several States that are parties to it, differing no otherwise from their ordinary assent than in its being expressed, not by the legislative authority, but by that of the people themselves. Were the people regarded in this transaction as forming one nation, the will of the majority of the whole people of the United States would bind the minority, in the same manner as the majority in each State must bind the minority; and the will of the majority must be determined either by a comparison of the individual votes, or by considering the will of the majority of the States as evidence of the will of a majority of the people of the United States. Neither of these rules have been adopted. Each State, in ratifying the Constitution, is considered as a sovereign body, independent of all others, and only to be bound by its own voluntary act.
Madison leaves no doubt about the continued sovereignty of each State and its people. The remaining question is this: On what grounds, if any, may a State withdraw from the compact into which it entered voluntarily?
There is a judicial myth — articulated by a majority of the United States Supreme Court in Texas v. White (1869) — that States may not withdraw from the compact because the union of States is perpetual:
The Union of the States never was a purely artificial and arbitrary relation. It began among the Colonies, and grew out of common origin, mutual sympathies, kindred principles, similar interests, and geographical relations. It was confirmed and strengthened by the necessities of war, and received definite form and character and sanction from the Articles of Confederation. By these, the Union was solemnly declared to “be perpetual.” And when these Articles were found to be inadequate to the exigencies of the country, the Constitution was ordained “to form a more perfect Union.” It is difficult to convey the idea of indissoluble unity more clearly than by these words. What can be indissoluble if a perpetual Union, made more perfect, is not?
The Court’s reasoning is born of mysticism, not legality. Similar reasoning might have been used — and was used — to assert that the Colonies were inseparable from Great Britain. And yet, some of the people of the Colonies put an end to the union of the Colonies and Great Britain, on the moral principle that the Colonies were not obliged to remain in an abusive relationship. That moral principle is all the more compelling in the case of the union known as the United States, which — mysticism aside — is nothing more than the creature of the States.
In fact, the Constitution supplanted the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, by the will of only nine of the thirteen States. Madison says this in Federalist No. 43 regarding that event:
On what principle the Confederation, which stands in the solemn form of a compact among the States, can be superseded without the unanimous consent of the parties to it? . . .
The . . . question is answered at once by recurring to the absolute necessity of the case; to the great principle of self-preservation; to the transcendent law of nature and of nature’s God, which declares that the safety and happiness of society are the objects at which all political institutions aim, and to which all such institutions must be sacrificed.
[a] rightful secession requires the consent of the others [other States], or an abuse of the compact, absolving the seceding party from the obligations imposed by it.
An abuse of the compact most assuredly legitimates withdrawal from it, on the principle of the preservation of liberty, especially if that abuse has been persistent and shows no signs of abating. The abuse, in this instance, has been and is being committed by the national government.
The national government is both a creature of the Constitution and a de facto party to it, as co-sovereign with the States and supreme in its realm of enumerated and limited powers. One of those powers enables the Supreme Court of the United States to decide “cases and controversies” arising under the Constitution, which is but one of the ways in which the Constitution makes the national government a party to the constitutional contract. More generally, the high officials of the national government acknowledge that government’s role as a party to the compact — and the limited powers vested in them — when they take oaths of office requiring them to uphold the Constitution.
Those high officials have nevertheless have committed myriad abuses of the national government’s enumerated and limited powers. The abuses are far too numerous to list in their entirety. The following examples amply justify the withdrawal of the State of _______________ from the compact:
A decennial census is authorized in Article I, Section 2, for the purpose of enumerating the population of each State in order to apportion the membership of the House of Representatives among the States, and for none of the many intrusive purposes since sought by the executive branch and authorized by Congress.
Article I, Section 1, vests all legislative powers of the national government in the Congress, but Congress has authorized and allowed agencies of the executive branch to legislate, in the guise of regulation, on a broad and seemingly limitless range of matters affecting the liberty and property of Americans.
Further, in violation of Article III, which vests the judicial power of the national government in the judicial branch, Congress has authorized and allowed agencies of the executive branch to adjudicate matters about which they have legislated, thus creating conflicts of interest that have systematically deprived millions of Americans of due process of law.
Article I, Section 8, enumerates the specific powers of Congress, which exclude many things that Congress has authorized with the cooperation and acquiescence of the other branches; for example, establishing and operating national welfare and health-care programs; intervening in the education of American’s children in practically every village, town, and city in the land; intrusively regulating not only interstate commerce but also intrastate commerce, the minutiae of manufacturing, and private, non-commercial transactions having only a faint bearing, if any, on interstate commerce; making and guaranteeing loans, including loans by quasi-governmental institutions and other third parties; acquisition of the stock and debt of business enterprises; establishment of a central bank with the power to do more than issue money; requiring the States and their political subdivisions to adopt uniform laws on matters that lie outside the enumerated powers of Congress and beyond the previously agreed powers of the States and their subdivisions; and coercing the States and the political subdivisions in the operation of illegitimate national programs by providing and threatening to withhold so-called federal money, which is in fact taxpayers’ money. The view that the “general welfare” and/or “necessary and proper” clauses of Article I, Section 8, authorize such activities was refuted definitively in advance of the ratification of the Constitution by James Madison in Federalist No. 41, wherein the leading proponents of the Constitution stated their understanding of the Constitution’s meaning when they made the case for its ratification.
One of the provisions of Article I, Section 10, prohibits interference by the States in private contracts; moreover, the Constitution nowhere authorizes the national government to interfere in private contracts. Yet, directly and through the States, the national government has allowed, encouraged, and required interference in private contracts pertaining to employment, property, and financial transactions.
Contrary to the express words of Article II, which vests executive power in the president, Congress has vested executive power in agencies that are not under the control and supervision of the president.
The Supreme Court, in various holdings, has curtailed the president’s ability, as commander-in-chief, to defend Americans and their interests by circumscribing his discretionary authority in matters concerning the capture, detention, interrogation, and appropriate imposition of military punishment for offenses against the law of war, of enemy prisoners captured in the course of ongoing hostilities pursuant to a congressional declaration of war or authorization for use of military force.
Amendment I of the Constitution provides that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.” But Congress has nevertheless abridged the freedom of political speech by passing bills that have been signed into law by presidents of the United States and not entirely struck down by the Supreme Court of the United States.
Amendment IX of the Constitution provides that its “enumeration . . . of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” But Congress, in concert with various presidents and Supreme Court majorities, has enacted laws that circumscribe such time-honored rights as freedom of association, freedom of contract, and property rights. That such laws were enacted for the noble purpose of ending some outward manifestations of discrimination does not exempt them from the purview of Amendment IX. As Amendment XIII attests, freedom is for all Americans, not just those who happen to be in favor at the moment.
As outlined above, the national government has routinely and massively violated Amendment X, which states that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
We, therefore, the representatives of the people of _______________ do solemnly publish and declare that this State ought to be free and independent; that it is absolved from all allegiance to the government of the United States; that all political connection between it and government of the United States is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as a free and independent State it has full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.
Dobbs is the case in which the Supreme Court overturned the anti-life rulings in Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. In West Virginia v. EPA the Court struck down the Environmental Protection Agency’s economically destructive overreach in the regulation of carbon dioxide emissions. And in Bruen the Court rejected a New York law restricting the right to bear arms.
U.S. Representative Maxine Waters (D – CA 43) captured the left’s reaction to these rulings when she said (in connection with Dobbs) “To hell with the Supreme Court. We will defy them.”
If the left succeeds in overturning or circumventing the Court’s decisions in these matters, conservatives — already outraged by leftist lunacy — will be livid.
If the left doesn’t succeed, its vilification of America and America’s political traditions will continue. Memes like “burn America to the goddam ground” will grow in popularity on social media and will spread to left-wing “news” outlets. The loss of the House in November 2022 and (very possibly) the Senate and White House in November 2024 will only intensify the left’s rage. Perhaps — like New England and the abolitionists of two centuries ago — Deep-Blue States will instigate a secession movement.
It would be wise, at that point, for those States with strong conservative governance to propose a national divorce. Leftists could have their own way in their part of the continent, and conservatives could be left in peace in their part of the continent. Let’s call these groupings Governmentland and Freedomland.
There would be some messy details to sort out. Foremost among them would be the question of defense. But it seems to me that if Governmentland shirks its share of the burden, Freedomland could easily afford a robust defense after having shed the many useless departments and agencies — and their policies — that burden taxpayers and the economy.
Further, a Freedomland foreign policy that is unfettered from the United Nations, and based on strength rather than diplomacy, would be a refreshing and fruitful departure from eight decades of feckless interventionism.
Because Freedomland would exist to foster the freedom and prosperity of its own citizens, it would have strict controls on entry. Visitors and temporary workers would vetted and strictly monitored. Prospective immigrants (including those from Governmentland) would be kept out by physical and electronic barriers, and would be vetted before they enter the country. Citizenship would be granted only after an applicant has demonstrated his ability to support himself (and his family if he has one in country), perhaps with the help of churches and charitable organizations. Non-citizens would be ineligible to vote, of course, and would have to have been citizens for 10 years before they are allowed to vote. (By that time one would hope that they would have been weaned from any allegiance to or dependence on a nanny state.)
What about trade between Governmentland and Freedomland? Self-sufficiency should be the watchword for Freedomland. It should not outsource energy, technology, or other products and services that are essential to defense. Some outsourcing may be necessary in the beginning, but there should be a deliberate movement toward self-sufficiency.
Freedomland’s constitution could be modeled on this one, though with some revisions to accommodate points made above.
Finally, why is a national divorce a matter of urgency? Complete victory for the enemies of liberty is only ever a few elections away. The squishy center of the American electorate — as is its wont — will eventually swing back toward the Democrat Party. With a competent Democrat in the White House, a Congress that is firmly controlled by Democrats, and a few party switches in the Supreme Court, the dogmas of the left will be stamped upon the land; for example:
Billions and trillions of additional dollars will be wasted on various “green” projects, including but far from limited to the complete replacement of fossil fuels by “renewables”, with the resulting impoverishment of most Americans, except for comfortable elites who press such policies).
It will be illegal to criticize, even by implication, such things as abortion, illegal immigration, same-sex marriage, transgenderism, anthropogenic global warming, or the confiscation of firearms. These cherished beliefs will be mandated for school and college curricula, and enforced by huge fines and draconian prison sentences (sometimes in the guise of “re-education”).
Any hint of Christianity and Judaism will be barred from public discourse, and similarly punished. Other religions will be held up as models of unity and tolerance.
Reverse discrimination in favor of females, blacks, Hispanics, gender-confused persons, and other “protected” groups will become overt and legal. But “protections” will not apply to members of such groups who are suspected of harboring libertarian or conservative impulses.
Sexual misconduct will become a crime, and any male person may be found guilty of it on the uncorroborated testimony of any female who claims to have been the victim of an unwanted glance, touch (even if accidental), innuendo (as perceived by the victim), etc.
There will be parallel treatment of the “crimes” of racism, anti-immigrationism, anti-Islamism, nativism, and genderism.
All health care in the United States will be subject to review by a national, single-payer agency of the central government. Private care will be forbidden, though ready access to doctors, treatments, and medications will be provided for high officials and other favored persons. The resulting health-care catastrophe that befalls most of the populace (like that of the UK) will be shrugged off as a residual effect of “capitalist” health care.
The regulatory regime will rebound with a vengeance, contaminating every corner of American life and regimenting all businesses except those daring to operate in an underground economy. The quality and variety of products and services will decline as their real prices rise as a fraction of incomes.
The dire economic effects of single-payer health care and regulation will be compounded by massive increases in other kinds of government spending (defense excepted). The real rate of economic growth will approach zero.
The United States will maintain token armed forces, mainly for the purpose of suppressing domestic uprisings. Given its economically destructive independence from foreign oil and its depressed economy, it will become a simulacrum of the USSR and Mao’s China — and not a rival to the new superpowers, Russia and China, which will largely ignore it as long as it doesn’t interfere in their pillaging of respective spheres of influence. A policy of non-interference (i.e., tacit collusion) will be the order of the era in Washington.
Though it would hardly be necessary to rig elections in favor of Democrats, given the flood of illegal immigrants who will pour into the country and enjoy voting rights, a way will be found to do just that. The most likely method will be election laws requiring candidates to pass ideological purity tests by swearing fealty to the “law of the land” (i.e., abortion, unfettered immigration, same-sex marriage, freedom of gender choice for children, etc., etc., etc.). Those who fail such a test will be barred from holding any kind of public office, no matter how insignificant.
Are my fears exaggerated? I doubt it. I have lived long enough and seen enough changes in the political and moral landscape of the United States to know that what I have sketched out can easily happen within a decade after Democrats seize total control of the national government. And that can happen given the fickleness of the electorate.
VII. A RADICAL REMEDY: SEEING THE CONSTITUTION FOR WHAT IT REALLY IS
All of the foregoing is predicated on the validity of the Constitution as the supreme law of the land. But there is a good case to be made that the Constitution is no more valid than a bankrupt gambler’s I.O.U. What follows draws and expands upon “Another Way to Declare Independence” and repeats some of the areguments made earlier in this post.
A. The Constitution’s Standing with “the People”
It is has long been glaringly evident that a large and vocal fraction of U.S. citizens rejects the Constitution’s blueprint for liberty. The blueprint delineates an edifice with these essential features: the horizontal and vertical separation of powers: a central government of limited and enumerated powers; coequal branches of that government, each possessing the ability to restrain the others; and the reservation to the States and the people of the powers not expressly granted to the central government.
More important than the edifice, perhaps, is the foundation upon which it was built: the Judeo-Christian tradition, generally, and the predominantly British roots of the signatories, in particular. As one blogger puts it, “underlying cultural assumptions are just as a important to the success of a republic as its political structures.”
Then, there are the Constitution’s underlying — and largely forgotten — purposes. Two of the main ones were keep the tenuous union of 1776 from flying apart because of sectional differences, and to defend the union militarily without depending on the whims of the various State legislatures.
The Framers’ brilliant scheme worked well for about 140 years, despite the depredations of the Progressive Era, which encompassed the imperial presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Then came the New Deal and it has since been all downhill for the Constitution.
The cultural underpinnings of the Constitution didn’t begin to rot until the onset of America’s societal and cultural degeneration in the 1960s. It was then that political polarization began, and it has accelerated with the passage of time (despite the faux unity that followed 9/11).
The Constitution is positive law, that is, law constructed by formal institutions (e.g., Congress, the Supreme Court), as opposed to natural law, which arises from human coexistence — the Golden Rule, for example. Natural law has moral standing because it appeals to and flows from human nature. Positive law may, by chance, be derived from natural law (e.g., murder is a crime), but it is a contrivance that can just as easily contravene natural law (e.g., the murder of an unborn human being is not a crime).
The myriad statutes, ordinances, regulations, executive orders, and judicial judgments that proscribe the behavior of Americans are positive law. Most of this body of positive law is designed to benefit or satisfy special interests or political ideologies. It has little to do with how human beings would behave were they free to do so, and were mindful of how their behavior would affect others and the behavior of others toward themselves. A great deal of this positive law exists because it has been imposed in the name of the Constitution or some “emanation” from it.
But the Constitution had no moral claim on most of the Americans living at the time of its adoption. And it has no moral claim on any American now living.
On this point, I turn to I turned to Lysander Spooner, anarchist extraordinaire. He begins No Treason(1867) with this:
The Constitution has no inherent authority or obligation. It has no authority or obligation at all, unless as a contract between man and man. And it does not so much as even purport to be a contract between persons now existing. It purports, at most, to be only a contract between persons living eighty years ago. And it can be supposed to have been a contract then only between persons who had already come to years of discretion, so as to be competent to make reasonable and obligatory contracts. Furthermore, we know, historically, that only a small portion even of the people then existing were consulted on the subject, or asked, or permitted to express either their consent or dissent in any formal manner. Those persons, if any, who did give their consent formally, are all dead now. Most of them have been dead forty, fifty, sixty, or seventy years. And the constitution, so far as it was their contract, died with them. They had no natural power or right to make it obligatory upon their children. It is not only plainly impossible, in the nature of things, that they could bind their posterity, but they did not even attempt to bind them. That is to say, the instrument does not purport to be an agreement between any body but “the people” then existing; nor does it, either expressly or impliedly, assert any right, power, or disposition, on their part, to bind anybody but themselves. Let us see. Its language is:
We, the people of the United States (that is, the people then existing in the United States), in order to form a more perfect union, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
It is plain, in the first place, that this language, as an agreement, purports to be only what it at most really was, viz., a contract between the people then existing; and, of necessity, binding, as a contract, only upon those then existing. In the second place, the language neither expresses nor implies that they had any right or power, to bind their “posterity” to live under it. It does not say that their “posterity” will, shall, or must live under it. It only says, in effect, that their hopes and motives in adopting it were that it might prove useful to their posterity, as well as to themselves, by promoting their union, safety, tranquillity, liberty, etc.
In sum, the Constitution is neither a compact between States (as sovereign entities) nor a law adopted by “the people”. It is a contract that was drawn up by a small fraction of the populace of twelve States, and put into effect by a small fraction of the populace of nine States. Its purpose, in good part, was to promote the interests of many of the Framers, who cloaked those interests in the glowing rhetoric of the Preamble (“We the People”, etc.). The other four of the original thirteen States could have remained beyond the reach of the Constitution, and would have done so but for the ratifying acts of small fractions of their populations. (With the exception of Texas, formerly a sovereign republic, States later admitted weren’t independent entities, but were carved out of territory controlled by the government of the United States. Figuratively, they were admitted to the union at the point of a gun.)
C. Spelling it Out
1. Despite their status as “representatives of the people”, the various fractions of the populace that drafted and ratified the Constitution had no moral authority to bind all of their peers, and certainly no moral authority to bind future generations.
2. The Constitution was and is binding only in the way that a debt to a gangster who demands “protection money” is binding. It was and is binding because state actors have the power to enforce it, as they see fit to interpret it. (One need look no further than the very early dispute between Hamilton and Madison about the meaning of the General Welfare Clause for a relevant and crucial example of interpretative differences.)
3. The Constitution contains provisions that can be and sometimes have been applied to advance liberty. But such applications have depended on the aims and whims of those then in positions of power.
4. It is convenient to appeal to the Constitution in the cause of liberty — and I have often done just that — but this does not change the fact that the Constitution was not and never will be a law enacted by “the people” of the United States or any State thereof.
5. Any person and any government in the United States may therefore, in principle, reject the statutes, executive orders, and judicial holdings of the United States government (or any government) as non-binding.
6. Secession is one legitimate form of rejection (though the preceding discussion clearly implies that secession by a State government is morally binding only on those who assent to the act of secession).
7. The ultimate and truly legitimate form of rejection is civil disobedience — the refusal of individual persons, or voluntary groupings of them (e.g., family, church, club, and other institutions of civil society), to abide by positive law when it infringes on natural law and liberty.
8. States and municipalities governed by leftists are engaging in institutional civil disobedience (e.g., encouragement of illegal immigration, spiteful adoption of aggressive policies to combat “climate change” and to circumvent the Second Amendment; an organized effort to undermine the Electoral College; a conspiracy by state actors to thwart the election of Trump, to oust him from the presidency, to prevent him from running again, and to descredit anyone who subsribes to his view of the “deep state” as an enemy of liberty).
9. The lesson for defenders of liberty is to do what the left is doing, and to do it aggressively. When the left regains control of the White House and Congress — as it will given the mindlessness of most American voters — conservatives must be prepared to resist the edicts emanating from Washington (unless a national divorce can be arranged). The best way to prepare is to emulate and expand on the examples mentioned above. The best defense is a good offense: Dare Washington to deploy its weaponry in the service of slavery.
10. Slavish obedience to the edicts of the central government is neither required by the dead Constitution nor in keeping with moral principles. Those principles put traditional morality and voluntarily evolved social norms above the paper promises of the Constitution. In fact, those paper promises are valid only insofar as they foster the survival of traditional morality and voluntarily evolved norms.
I used to correspond with a fellow whom I had known for 50 years. He’s a pleasant person with a good sense of humor and an easy-going personality. He’s also a chameleon.
By which I mean that he takes on the ideological coloration of his surroundings. He agrees with his companions of the moment. It’s therefore unsurprising that he proudly calls himself a “centrist”. Though he wouldn’t put it this way, his centrism involves compromises between good and evil — the necessary result of which is more evil.
“Centrist,” in his case, is just another word for collabo.
An exchange from six years ago will tell you all that you need to know about him. It began with an e-mail from a third party, in which this was quoted:
IF YOU HAD A HUNCH THE NEWS SYSTEM WAS SOMEWHAT RIGGED AND YOU COULDN’T PUT YOUR FINGER ON IT, THIS MIGHT HELP YOU SOLVE THE PUZZLE.
ABC News executive producer Ian Cameron is married to Susan Rice, National Security Adviser.
CBS President David Rhodes is the brother of Ben Rhodes, Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications.
ABC News correspondent Claire Shipman is married to former White House Press Secretary Jay Carney.
ABC News and Univision reporter Matthew Jaffe is married to Katie Hogan, Obama’s Deputy Press Secretary.
ABC President Ben Sherwood is the brother of Obama’s Special Adviser Elizabeth Sherwood.
CNN President Virginia Moseley is married to former Hillary Clinton’s Deputy Secretary Tom Nides.
Ya think there might be a little bias in the news?
The chameleon’s comment:
I share your concern about MSM bias, but am not as troubled by it. (I stopped watching the Big 3s’ evening news 50 years ago because I couldn’t get a straight view on the Vietnam War.)
My comment on his comment:
You may have stopped watching, and I did too, but millions haven’t. And too many of them are swallowing it whole, which is a big reason for the leftward drift of the country over the past 50 years. (JFK could pass for a conservative today.) So I’m very troubled by it.
His reply to me:
But at my absolute center is a belief in universal suffrage. In a nation of 150m or so (potential) voters, tens of millions are going to be swayed by CBS or, egads, Fox. If it weren’t those sources, it would be something else like them.
I can’t fix that, and see trying as futile. That’s why I’m not troubled. (My lack of concern also stems from seeing the USA as fundamentally on the right track. The latest evidence for that is the rejection of Trump about to occur. And yes, we’ll get Hillary’s excesses in consequence — but Congress will put on the brakes. We survived the Carter presidency when I’d have preferred Ford.)
Let’s parse that.
But at my absolute center is a belief in universal suffrage.What’s sacred about universal suffrage?If suffrage should encompass everyone who’s looking for a free ride at the expense of others — which it does these days — it should certainly include children and barnyard animals. Why should suffrage of any kind be the vehicle for violating constitutional limits on the power of the central government? That’s what it has come to, inasmuch as voters since the days of TR (at least) have been enticed to elect presidents and members of Congress who have blatantly seized unconstitutional powers, with the aid of their appointed lackeys and the connivance of a supine Supreme Court.
In a nation of 150m or so (potential) voters, tens of millions are going to be swayed by CBS or, egads, Fox. If it weren’t those sources, it would be something else like them. True, and all the more reason to keep the power of the central government within constitutional limits.
I can’t fix that, and see trying as futile. That’s why I’m not troubled.You, and I, and every adult can strive to “fix it” in ways big and small. Voting is one way, though probably the least effective (as an individual act). Speaking and writing on the issues is another way. I blog in the hope that some of what I say will trickle into the public discourse.
My lack of concern also stems from seeing the USA as fundamentally on the right track. It’s on the right track only if you think that the decades-long, leftward movement toward a powerful, big-spending, paternalistic government is the right track. That may very well suit a lot of people, but it also doesn’t suit a lot of people. Even FDR never won more than 61 percent of the popular vote, and his numbers dwindled as time went on. But perhaps you’re a utilitarian who believes that the pleasure A obtains from poking B in the eye somehow offsets B’s pain. You may not believe that you believe it, but that’s the import of your worship of universal suffrage, which is nothing more than blind allegiance to the primitive kind of utilitarianism known as majority rule.
The latest evidence for that is the rejection of Trump about to occur. Trump hasn’t yet lost, and even if he does, that won’t be evidence of anything other than desperation on the part of the operatives of the regulatory-welfare state and their various constituencies. Rejection, in any case, would be far from unanimous, so rejection is the wrong word — unless you believe, as you seem to do, that there’s a master “social conscience” which encompasses all Americans.
And yes, we’ll get Hillary’s excesses in consequence — but Congress will put on the brakes. Not if the Dems gain control of the Senate (a tie will do it if HRC is elected), and the ensuing Supreme Court appointees continue to ratify unconstitutional governance.
We survived the Carter presidency when I’d have preferred Ford.There have been more disastrous presidencies than Carter’s, why not mention them? In any event “survival” only means that the nation hasn’t yet crashed and burned. It doesn’t mean that there hasn’t been irreparable damage. Mere survival is a low hurdle (witness the Soviet Union, which survived for 74 years). Nor is mere survival an appropriate standard for a nation with as much potential as this one — potential that has been suppressed by the growth of the central government. So much loss of liberty, so much waste. That’s why I’m troubled, even if I can do little or nothing about it.
I didn’t send the reply because I’m too nice a guy. And because it would pointless to challenge anyone who is so morally obtuse — as many subsequent exchanges confirmed.
But I did finally quit corresponding with him. Enough is enough. The time I wasted reading and responding to his missives is now better spent writing posts for this blog.
The original “progressives” started it, and it’s still going strong.
Can the economic cost of government be estimated? I have done it for the post-World War II era, in an analysis that takes account of the fraction of GDP absorbed by federal, State, and local governments; the rate at which the federal government issues new regulations; the constant-dollar value of business investment (which is influenced by government spending and regulation); and changes in the consumer price index.
But that analysis doesn’t tell the whole story. In fact, it leaves untold the big story: The United States has been in a mega-depression since 1907.
Consider the following graph, which is derived from estimates of constant-dollar GDP per capita that are available here:
There are four eras, as shown by the legend (1942-1946 omitted because of the vast economic distortions caused by World War II):
1866-1907 — annual growth of 2.0 percent — A robust economy, fueled by (mostly) laissez-faire policies and the concomitant rise of industry, mass production, technological innovation, and entrepreneurship.
1908-1941 — annual growth of 1.4 percent — A dispirited economy, shackled by the fruits of “progressivism”; for example, trust-busting; the onset of governance through regulation; the establishment of the income tax; the creation of the destabilizing Federal Reserve; and the New Deal, which prolonged the Great Depression.
1947- 2007 — annual growth of 2.2 percent — A rejuvenated economy, buoyed by the end of the New Deal and the fruits of advances in technology and business management. The rebound in the rate of growth meant that the earlier decline wasn’t the result of an “aging” economy, which is an inapt metaphor for a living thing that is constantly replenished with new people, new capital, and new ideas.
2008-2021 — annual growth of 1.0 percent — An economy sagging under the cumulative weight of the fruits of “progressivism” (old and new); for example, the never-ending expansion of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security; and an ever-growing mountain of regulatory restrictions on business. (In a similar post, which I published in 2009, I wrote presciently that “[u]nless Obama’s megalomaniacal plans are aborted by a reversal of the Republican Party’s fortunes, the U.S. will enter a new phase of economic growth — something close to stagnation.)
Had the economy of the U.S. not been deflected from the course that it was on from 1866 to 1907, per capita GDP would now be about 1.4 times its present level. Compare the position of the dashed green line in 2021 — $83,000 — with per capita GDP in that year — $58,000.
If that seems unbelievable to you, it shouldn’t. A growing economy is a kind of compound-interest machine; some of its output is invested in intellectual and physical capital that enables the same number of workers to produce more, better, and more varied products and services. (More workers, of course, will produce even more products and services.) As the experience of 1947-2007 attests, nothing other than government interventions (or a war far more devastating to the U.S than World War II) could have kept the economy from growing along the path of 1866-1907. (I should add that economic growth in 1947-2007 would have been even greater than it was but for the ever-rising tide of government interventions.)
The sum of the annual gaps between what could have been (the dashed green line) and the reality after 1907 (omitting 1942-1946) is almost $700,000 — that’s per person in 2012 dollars. It’s $800,000 per person in 2021 dollars, and even more in 2022 dollars.
That cumulative gap represents our mega-depression.
Have you ever chanced to hear it said “There is no better investment than taxes. Only see what a number of families it maintains, and consider how it reacts on industry; it is an inexhaustible stream, it is life itself.” . . .
The advantages which officials advocate are those which are seen. The benefit which accrues to the providers is still that which is seen. This blinds all eyes.
But the disadvantages which the tax-payers have to get rid of are those which are not seen. And the injury which results from it to the providers, is still that which is not seen, although this ought to be self-evident.
When an official spends for his own profit an extra hundred sous, it implies that a tax-payer spends for his profit a hundred sous less. But the expense of the official is seen, because the act is performed, while that of the tax-payer is not seen, because, alas! he is prevented from performing it.
In the case of aggregate economic activity, what we see is what has been left to us by government. What we do not see is the extent to which the fruits of labor taken from us by government and the restrictions placed upon economic activity by government have deprived the economy of entrepreneurship, innovation, technology, and productive capacity. The cumulative effect of those deprivations — that which we do not see — dwarfs the Great Depression.
Rod Dreher, in the course of a premature paean to Barack Obama’s “diplomatic” approach to ideological strife, wrote this:
The source of our culture war is conflicting visions of what it means to be free and what it means to be an American – and even what it means to be fully human. More concretely, as Princeton’s Robert George has written, they have to do mainly “with sexuality, the transmitting and taking of human life, and the place of religion and religiously informed moral judgment in public life.” Because the cultural left and cultural right hold to irreconcilable orthodoxies on these questions, we find scant cultural consensus. That’s life in America. Unless we become a homogeneous country, we will continue to struggle to live together, staying true to our deepest beliefs while respecting the liberty of others to stay true to their own. But we do not live in a libertarian Utopia. We can’t have it all. If, for example, courts constitutionalized same-sex marriage, as gay activists seek, that would have a ground-shaking effect on religious liberty, public schooling and other aspects of American life. Without question, it would intensify the culture war, as partisans of the left and right fight for what each considers a sacred principle. What irritates conservatives is the liberals’ groundless conceit that they fight from a values-neutral position, while the right seeks to impose its norms on others. Nonsense. Marriage was a settled issue until liberals began using courts to impose their moral vision on (so far) an unwilling majority. Who fired the first shot there? [“Obama Won’t End the Culture Wars”, RealClearPolitics, February 16, 2009]
Dreher was wrong about the good faith in which the left pursues its agenda, but he was certainly right about the earth-shattering effects of the constitutionalization of same-sex “marriage”.
In any event, it doesn’t matter whether the unwilling upon whom the left’s agenda is imposed are a majority or a minority. Just about everyone is a loser in the war against morality and liberty. When social norms — long-established rules of behavior — are sundered willy-nilly, the result is a breakdown of the voluntary order known as civil society. The ability to live a peaceful, happy, and even prosperous life depends on the norms of civil society. That is so because it is impossible and — more importantly — undesirable for the state to police everyone’s behavior.
Liberty depends, therefore, on the institutions of civil society — family, church, club, and the like — through which individuals learn to treat one another with respect, through which individuals often come to the aid of one another, and through which instances of disrespect can be noted, publicized, and even punished (e.g., by criticism and ostracism). That is civil society, which the state ought to protect, but instead usurps and destroys.
Usurping the functions of civil society is one of the state’s primary (and illegitimate) objectives. The state establishes agencies (e.g., public schools, welfare), gives them primary and even sole jurisdiction in many matters, and funds them with tax money that could have gone to private institutions. Worse, however, is the way in which the state destroys the social norms that foster social harmony — mutual respect and trust — without which a people cannot flourish. As I observed some years ago, in connection with same-sex “marriage”:
Given the signals being sent by the state, the rate of formation of traditional, heterosexual marriages will continue to decline. (According to the Census Bureau , the percentage of adult males who are married dropped steadily from 71.1 percent in the 1960 census to 58.6 percent in the 2000 census; for females, the percentage dropped from 67.4 to 54.6. About half of each drop is explained by a rise in the percentage of adults who never marry, the other half by a rise in the percentage of divorced adults. Those statistics are what one should expect when the state signals — as it began to do increasingly after 1960 — that traditional marriage is no special thing by making it easier for couples to divorce, by subsidizing single mothers, and by encouraging women to work outside the home.)
“Thanks” to the signals sent by the state in the form of legislative, executive, and judicial dictates, we now have not just easy divorce, subsidized illegitimacy, and legions of non-mothering mothers, but also abortion, concerted (and deluded) efforts to defeminize females and to neuter or feminize males, forced association (with accompanying destruction of property and employment rights), suppression of religion, absolution of pornography, and the encouragement of “alternative lifestyles” that feature disease, promiscuity, and familial instability. The state, of course, doesn’t act of its own volition. It acts at the behest of special interests — interests with a “cultural” agenda. Dreher calls them liberals. I call them left-statists. They are bent on the eradication of civil society — nothing less — in favor of a state-directed Rousseauvian dystopia from which morality and liberty will have vanished, except in Orwellian doublespeak.
Liberty disappears slowly at first, then suddenly.
In “Social Norms and Liberty” I list 24 moral precepts that would prevail a polity that could be fairly described as a regime of liberty: a regime of voluntary and mutually beneficial coexistence based on mutual trust, respect, and forbearance.
The list isn’t exhaustive, and some of its elements are far more complex than others, but it will do as a starting point for this exercise, which is to explain conceptually how a polity like the United States goes from liberty (or something far closer to it than is now the case) to tyranny (which impends).
If the general observance of 24 precepts creates the conditions for liberty, what happens when one of them is discarded? There are 23 left, and 23 is almost 24, so something like liberty may still obtain.
But in the real world of slippery slopes (which is the world that I have inhabited for more than 80 years), the discarding of one precept becomes the starting point for the discarding of more. In fact, the precept of self-reliance and — when necessary — reliance on the organs of civil society, to the exclusion of government, had been badly eroded by the New Deal before I was born. The further diminution of self-reliance and reliance on civil society has become almost complete because of the slippery slope that led from Social Security to Medicare, Medicaid, welfare as an entitlement, food stamps, etc., etc. etc.
How many of the 24 precepts remain generally observed? None of them, by my count. How many others that I didn’t list have also fallen by the wayside? Most of them, probably, based on the present state of American morals and mores.
What caused the precepts to fall by the wayside? A combination of these things did it:
Asymmetrical ideological warfare, which favors the opponents of traditional morality and the proponents of big government (statists), and which both parties use to characterize their opponents, ironically, as “nazis” and “fascists” — which is the height of psychological progjection. (See the list of related posts at the bottom of this one.)
The onslaught of permissiveness — as promoted and apprroved by “educators” and pseudo-psychologists — given official status by the government-ordered abandonment of traditional moral codes (e.g., no-fault divorce; filthy speech as free speech; the legalization of abortion, sodomy, and same-sex “marriage”)
Growing reliance on government — whether instigated by government’s “beneficiaries” by “activists”, or by politicians (whether power-hungry or truly compassionate), social engineers (economists, sociologists, etc.), or combinations of these — which fostered the abandonment of some moral codes in the first place and became (ineffective) substitutes for them in the second place (e.g., the practical elimination of the death penalty and its replacement by “life” sentences that aren’t life sentences, accompanied by greater leniency across the board in prosecutions and sentences).
Because the codes of traditional morality are interlocking and mutually reinforcing, they have (or had) a combined power that is (or was) greater than a mere summing of them. For the sake of illustration, the combined power of the 24 precepts could be thought of as the square of 24, which is 576. The removal of one precept therefore reduced the combined power of the remaining precepts to 529, which is less than 23/24. (It is about 22/24). The removal of half (12) of the precepts reduced the combined power the the remaining precepts to 144, which is only one-fourth the power of the original number. (Don’t take them numbers literally; I’m just illustrating the cumulative effect of abandoning precepts.)
So, the abandonment of a civilizing precept not only encourages the abandonment of others (the slippery slope), but the cumulative effect of the resulting lacunae is out-sized. To return to the mathematical analogy, if one precept of 24 were left standing, it would represent 1/576 of the power of the original 24; that is, it would have no practical effect on the behavior of the citizens of the polity.
Somewhere along the way, government — which plays a central role in the abandonment of civilizing precepts — intervenes to avert utter chaos. But government intervention merely exacerbates the unraveling of social comity because it results in greater reliance on government. To compensate for the loss of civilizing norms, which enable a people to coexist peacefully and cooperatively (with minimal government intervention), government must institute draconian rules, ensure (through surveillance) that they are obeyed, and exact punishments if they are not obeyed. But when the governors are not respectful of traditional morality, the rules are ones that further erode it (e.g., requiring all citizens to “respect” behavior that undermines civilizing norms). The enforcement of anti-social rules requires more government intervention, and on and on until “Big Brother” is watching everyone and brooks no deviation from its edicts.
The same governors — in the same spirit of pseudo-omniscient omnipotence — are emboldened to impose one-size-fits all rules about economic relationships (e.g., the substitution of “renewables” for reliable and efficient sources of energy). The result, as with social relationships, is economic degradation to match social degradation.
Government, as is always the case under tyranny, casts a glowing light on the degradation and presents it as progress. Which is like putting lipstick on a pig, but — to change the metaphor — none will dare say with impunity that dictator has no clothes.
I usually eschew “we” and “us” in writing about a collection of persons who happen to be thrown together in a category (e.g., Americans, economists, Republicans). “We” and “us” connote unanimity or collective action, both of which are rare if not impossible in groups that consist of widely varying backgrounds, interests, objectives, biases, etc.
There are nevertheless some things that are so close to being universal that it’s fair to refer to them as characteristics of “we” and “us”. The inadequacy of language is one of those things.
Why is that the case? Try to describe in words a person who is beautiful or handsome to you, and why. It’s hard to do, if not impossible. There’s something about the combination of that person’s features, coloring, expression, etc., that defies anything like a complete description. You may have an image of that person in your mind, and you may know that — to you — the person is beautiful or handsome. But you just can’t capture in words all of those attributes. Why? Because the person’s beauty or handsomeness is a whole thing. It’s everything taken together, including subtle things that nestle in your subconscious mind but don’t readily swim to the surface. One such thing could be the relative size of the person’s upper and lower lips in the context of that particular person’s face; whereas, the same lips on another face might convey plainness or ugliness.
Words are inadequate because they describe one thing at a time — the shape of a nose, the slant of a brow, the prominence of a cheekbone. And the sum of those words isn’t the same thing as your image of the beautiful or handsome person. In fact, the sum of those words may be meaningless to a third party, who can’t begin to translate your words into an image of the person you think of as beautiful or handsome.
Yes, there are (supposedly) general rules about beauty and handsomeness. One of them is the symmetry of a person’s features. But that leaves a lot of ground uncovered. And it focuses on one aspect of a person’s face, rather than all of its aspects, which are what you take into account when you judge a person beautiful or handsome.
And, of course, there are many disagreements about who is beautiful or handsome. It’s a matter of taste. Where does the taste come from? Who knows? I have a theory about why I prefer dark-haired women to women whose hair is blonde, red, or medium-to-light brown: My mother was dark-haired, and photographs of her show that she was beautiful (in my opinion) as a young woman. (Despite that, I never thought of her as beautiful because she was just Mom to me.) You can come up with your own theories — and I expect that no two of them will be the same.
What about facts? Isn’t it possible to put facts into words or into symbols that stand for words? Not really, and for much the same reason that it’s impossible to describe beauty, handsomeness, love, hate, or anything “subjective” or “emotional.” Facts, at bottom, are often subjective, and sometimes based on emotion.
Let’s take a “fact” at random: the color red. We can all agree as to whether something looks red, can’t we? Even putting aside people who are color-blind, the answer is: not necessarily. For one thing red is defined as having a predominant light wavelength of roughly 620–740 nanometers. “Predominant” and “roughly” are weasel-words. Clearly, there’s no definite point on the visible spectrum where light changes from orange to red. If you think there is, just look at this chart and tell me where it happens. Red comes in shades, which various people describe variously: orange-red and reddish-orange, for example.
does not … contain all the colors that the human eyes and brain can distinguish. Unsaturated colors such as pink, or purple variations such as magenta, are absent, for example, because they can be made only by a mix of multiple wavelengths.
Thus we have magenta, fuchsia, blood-red, scarlet, crimson, vermilion, maroon, ruby, and even the many shades of pink — some are blends, some are represented by narrow segments of the light spectrum. Do all of those kinds of red have a clear definition, or are they defined by the beholder? Well, some may be easy to distinguish from others, but the distinctions between them remain arbitrary. Where does scarlet or magenta become vermilion?
In any event, how do you describe a color in words? Referring to its wavelength or composition in terms of other colors or its relation to other colors is no help. Wavelength really is meaningless unless you can show an image of the visible spectrum to someone who perceives colors exactly as you do, and point to red — or what you call red. In doing so, you will have pointed to a range of colors, not to red, because there is no red red and no definite boundary between orange and red (or yellow and orange, or green and yellow, etc.).
Further, you won’t have described red in words. And you can’t — without descending into tautologies — because red (as you visualize it) is what’s in your mind. It’s not an objective fact.
My point is that description isn’t the same as definition. You can define red (however vaguely) as a color which has a predominant light wavelength of roughly 620–740 nanometers. But you can’t describe it. Why? Because red is just a concept that resides in your brain.
A concept isn’t a real thing that you can see, hear, taste, touch, smell, eat, drink from, drive, etc. How do you describe a concept? You define it in terms of other concepts, which leads to more uncertainty and is the mental equivalent of tail-chasing.
All right, you say, it’s impossible to describe concepts, but surely it’s possible to describe things. People do it all the time. See that ugly, dark-haired, tall guy standing over there? I’ve already dealt with ugly, indirectly, in my discussion of beauty or handsomeness. Ugliness, like beauty, is just a concept, the idea of which differs from person to person. What about tall? It’s a relative term, isn’t it? You can measure a person’s height, but whether or not you consider him tall depends on where and when you live and the range of heights you’re used to encountering. A person who seems tall to you may not seem tall to your taller brother. Dark-haired will evoke different pictures in different minds — ranging from jet-black to dark brown and even auburn.
But if you point to the guy you call ugly, dark-haired, tall guy, I may agree with you that he’s ugly, dark-haired, and tall. Or I may disagree with you, but gain some understanding of what you mean by ugly, dark-haired, and tall.
And therein lies the secret of how people are able to communicate with each other, despite their inability to describe concepts or to define them without going in endless circles and following endless chains of definitions. First, human beings possess central nervous systems and sensory organs that are much alike, though within a wide range of variations (e.g., many people wear glasses and those glasses come in an almost-infinite variety of corrections; hearing aids are programmed to an almost-infinite variety of settings; sensitivity to touch varies widely; reaction times vary widely; etc.). Nevertheless, most people seem to perceive the same color when light with a wavelength of, say, 700 nanometers strikes the retina. The same goes for sounds, tastes, smells, etc., as various external stimuli are detected by various receptors. Those perceptions then acquire agreed definitions through acculturation. For example, an object that reflects light with a wavelength of 700 nanometers becomes known as red; a sound with a certain frequency becomes known as middle C; a certain taste is characterized as bitter, sweet, or sour.
Objects acquire names in the same way: for example: in American English, a fully grown person who was born female is a “woman”; a square piece of cloth that’s wrapped around a person’s head or neck is a “bandana”, and a longish, curved, yellow-skinned fruit with a soft interior a “banana”. And so I can visualize a woman wearing a red bandana and eating a banana.
There is less agreement about “soft” concepts (e.g., beauty) because they’re based not just on “hard” facts (e.g., the wavelength of light, biological sex), but on judgments that vary from person to person. A face that’s cute to one person may be beautiful to another person, but there’s no rigorous division between cute and beautiful. Both convey a sense of physical attractiveness that many persons will agree upon, but which won’t yield a consistent image. A very large percentage of Caucasian males (of a certain age) would agree that Ingrid Bergman and Hedy Lamarr were beautiful, but there’s nothing like a consensus about Katharine Hepburn (perhaps striking but not beautiful) or Jean Arthur (perhaps cute but not beautiful).
Other concepts, like GDP, acquire seemingly rigorous definitions, but they’re based on strings of definitions, the underpinnings of which may be as squishy as the flesh of a banana (e.g., the omission from GDP of the value of housework and the effects of pollution). So if you’re familiar with the definitions of the definitions, you have a good grasp of the concepts. If you aren’t, you don’t. But if you have a good grasp of the numbers underlying the definitions of definitions, you know that the top-level concept is actually vague and hard to pin down. The numbers not only omit important things but are only estimates, and often are estimates of disparate things that are grouped because they’re judged to be enough alike (which is vagueness on stilts).
Acculturation in the form of education is a way of getting people to grasp concepts that have widely agreed definitions. Mathematics, for example, is nothing but concepts, all the way down (though it starts with something real: the counting of things). And to venture beyond arithmetic is to venture into a world of ideas that’s held together by definitions that rest upon definitions and end in nothing real. Unless you’re one of those people who insists that mathematics is the “real” stuff of which the universe is made, which is nothing more than a leap of faith. (Math, by the way, is nothing but words in shorthand.)
And so, human beings are able to communicate and (usually) understand each other (if they speak the same language) because of their physical and cultural similarities, which include education in various and sundry subjects. Those similarities also enable people of different cultures and languages to translate their concepts (and the words that define them) from one language to another.
Those similarities also enable people to “feel” what another person is feeling when he says that he’s happy, sad, drunk, or whatever. There’s the physical similarity — the physiological changes that usually occur when a person becomes what he thinks of as happy, etc. And there’s acculturation — the acquired knowledge that people feel happy (or whatever) for certain reasons (e.g., a marriage, the birth of a child) and display their happiness in certain ways (e.g., a broad smile, a “jump for joy”).
A good novelist, in my view, is one who knows how to use words that evoke vivid mental images of the thoughts, feelings, and actions of characters, and the settings in which the characters act out the plot of a novel. A novelist who can do that and also tell a good story — one with an engaging or suspenseful plot — is thereby a great novelist.
But good and great novelists are thin on the ground. That is to say, there are relatively few persons among us who are able to grasp and communicate effectively a broad range of the kinds of thoughts and feelings that lurk in the minds of human beings. And even those few have their blind spots. Most of them, it seems to me, are persons of the left, and are therefore unable to empathize with the thoughts and feelings of the working-class people who seethe with resentment about the fawning and favoritism toward blacks, illegal immigrants, gender-confused persons, and other so-called victims. In fact, those few otherwise perceptive and articulate writers make it a point to write off the working-class people as racists, bigots, and ignoramuses.
Which just underscores my point about the impossibility of objectively forming our thoughts and feelings about the world around us and the other people in it. And we’re practically tongue-tied when it comes to expressing those thoughts and feelings to others. And our feelings — such as our political preferences, which probably are based more on temperament than on facts — get in the way.
Love, to take a leading example, is a feeling that just is. The why and wherefore of it is beyond our ability to understand and explain. Some of the feelings attached to it can be expressed in prose, poetry, and song, but those are superficial expressions that don’t capture the depth of love and why it exists.
The world of science is of no real help. Even if feelings of love could be expressed in scientific terms — the action of hormone A on brain region X — that would be worse than useless. It would reduce love to chemistry, when we “know” that there’s more to it than that. Why, for example, is hormone A activated by the presence or thought of person M but not person N, even if they’re identical twins?
The world of science is of no real help about “getting to the bottom of things”. Science is an infinite regress. S is explained in terms of T, which is explained in terms of U, which is explained in terms of V, and on and on. For example, there was the “indivisible” atom, which turned out to consist of electrons, protons, and neutrons. But electrons have turned out to be more complicated than originally believed, and protons and neutrons have been found to be made of smaller particles with distinctive characteristics. So it’s reasonable to ask if all of the particles now considered elementary are really indivisible. Perhaps there other more-elementary particles yet to be hypothesized and discovered. And even if all of the truly elementary particles are discovered, scientists will still be unable to explain what those particles really “are.”
And even if scientists get to the bottom of elementary particles, so to speak, will they know when they have done so? And even if they do know, will they know how and why those elementary particles came into being? It is safe to say that they will not know when they have reached bottom, and they will have no idea of how and why elementary particles exist because they will be asking questions to which answers do not lie in the material universe that bounds their potential knowledge.
Politics and Prosperity 
