How did you go bankrupt?” Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.
― Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
That stands as a metaphor for America’s decline.
Here’s another one: The soil in which the seeds of decline were to be planted was broken in the Progressive Era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The seeds were planted and nourished by “leaders”, “intellectuals”, and “activists” from TR’s time to the present. The poisonous crop burst blossomed brightly in the 1930s and again in the 1960s, but it had not yet engulfed the land. It continued to spread slowly (and often unheeded) for several decades before racing across the land in recent years. Its poisonous vines are now strangling liberty and prosperity.
These are the paradoxes of liberty and prosperity: Without a moral foundation they lead to their own destruction.
If you value liberty, you do not countenance speech and actions that subvert it. If you value prosperity, you must be careful not to let it breed the kind of idleness (of mind and body) that gives rise to speech and actions that subvert liberty — and thus prosperity.
The Founders understood those things. They believed that the Constitution would preserve liberty and foster prosperity because they believed that Americans would remain religious and moral. They did not believe that Americans would undermine liberty by being soft on crime, by feeding masses (and elites) at the public trough (and at the expense of taxpayers), or by accommodating foreign aggression. They did not believe that Americans would countenance such things, nor that political leaders would suborn and join efforts to ostracize, suppress, and oppress those Americans who oppose such things.
The Founders, sadly, were wrong. The did not and could not foresee these events (and many more not mentioned):
A goodly fraction of Americans would spurn religion and become morally slack and complacent about the preservation of liberty.
Freedom of speech and assembly would be turned against liberty, to foster crime, lack of personal responsibility, and the accommodation of deadly enemies, within and without.
Firearms, always omnipresent in America for useful purposes, would become violent, murderous extensions of a growing tendency to toward psychological instability in a morally rootless populace.
Governments, political “elites”, and corporations would celebrate and reward (or fail to punish) persons based on the color of their skin (as long as it isn’t white or “yellow”)*, their pro-constitutional political views (which “exonerate” many whites), and their sex (preferably female or confused).
Abortion would become legal and support for abortion would be openly and boastfully proclaimed by political leaders and “elites”. Unborn human beings would be disposed of as inconveniences and treated like garbage.
Parents would lose control of the upbringing of their children, who might be cajoled into psychologically devastating treatments and surgeries by teachers and others under the rubric of “gender-affirming care”.
Women and girls would be forced to room with, shower with, and compete against males who “identify” as females (or “other”).
Intelligence and superior (non-athletic) skills would be denounced as unfair and “white supremacist” (with Asians counting as white).
Lawlessness and pathological deviancy would be rewarded (or not punished).
Leading politicians and “activists” would bay and howl for the confiscation of arms, under the rubric of “gun control”, when the underlying problem isn’t gun ownership by moral and mental depravity.
Political “leaders” would enable and allow a virtual invasion of the country, despite its negative consequences for the “little people” whom those “leaders” and other “elites” claim to champion.
The national government (and many others) would ignore science and invoke pseudo-science to force Americans into isolation, disrupt the economy, and burden the poorest Americans because of a virus that would have run its course naturally and less destructively than had it been combated scientifically.
The national government (and many others) would ignore science and invoke pseudo science to make Americans (especially poor Americans) poorer in an unnecessary and futile quest to “save the planet” from the use of fossil fuels, fertilizers, and other productive substances that the majority of the world’s populace will not refrain from using. (Regarding the state of science, see Maggie Kelly’s, “Professors Publish ‘Controversial’ Paper Defending Merit in Science”, The College Fix, May 2, 2023.)
Prosperity — a fruit of liberty — would foster the moral softness and the mental laxity that gives rise to addle-pated schemes such as those outlined above.
Vast numbers of Americans — having been indoctrinated in public schools, in left-dominated universities, and by the Democrat-allied media — would believe and subscribe to such schemes, which are made palatable by the application of double-speak labels to them (e.g., “defense of the homeland”, “combating misinformation”, “following the science”).
Government officials, including law-enforcement officers, would collude with and encourage the press and other purveyors of “information” to distort and suppress facts about much that is alluded to above, to discredit and hound a president (Trump) who opposed them, and to help elect and protect possibly the most corrupt president in America’s history (Biden) because it is through him that the left’s agenda is being implemented.
All of this (and more) would occur because almost-absolute power would accrue to the morally (and sometimes venally) corrupt politicians and their powerful enablers who advance and enforce such schemes.
Had the Founders foreseen what later generations of Americans would make of the liberty and prosperity bequeathed them, what might the Founders have done differently? It doesn’t matter. What matters now is what happens next.
In the best of possible worlds, there would be a voluntary return to something much closer to the America that the Founders envisioned. (Even a return to the post-New Deal 1940s and 1950s would do.) If such a return were in the cards, it would show up in the statements of political elites — chief among the being Democrats in government and their highly placed power-brokers, donors, and “intellectuals”.
Those statements would have to come when there is not an election at hand, which is when leftists often start making moderate noises so as to lull independents and even some nominal Republicans into voting for them. (Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden are masters of hypocrisy.) But aside from a few lonely voices (e.g., Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr.), it is unlikely that the Democrat Party will actually reject the leftist dogmas that have sundered the nation and are threatening to impoverish it.
Might rejection come when enough “minority” voters and women have had enough of “enlightened” policies and their economic and social consequences? Old habits are hard to break, and it would take a major turnaround in voting habits to yield the kind of wholesale rejection of Democrats that would drive them from power, let alone cause them to change their spots.
I don’t mean something like the turnaround in the House of Representatives following the elections of 1994 and 2010 (GOP gains of 12 and 15 percent). I mean something like the turnaround of 1930-1932 (total Democrat gains of 91 percent). In the wake of that turnaround, Democrats went on to control the House for the next 60 years (except for post-World War II reaction of two years).
But the mass rejection of the GOP in 1930 and 1932 was a consequence of an economic upheaval, the Great Depression, that hit vast numbers of Americans and hit them suddenly and hard where it hurts: in the pocketbook. The policies that are now engulfing the land, onerous as they may be, are insidious by comparison — and are practically ignored or touted as “good things” by most media (including “entertainment” media).
Moreover, “woke” America is the laughing-stock of its enemies. And too weak to stare them down. The growing unwillingness and inability of America’s “leaders” to deter and fight enemies** really doesn’t matter to those enemies. In the end, the will to resist aggression and to accede to the wishes of aggressors depends on the will of the populace to stand together against aggression. That will, in turn, depends on broad (if not unanimous) allegiance to the survival and success of the nation.
There is no longer such an allegiance. The left hates what America long was, and will not relent until that America is destroyed. The right hates what America is rapidly becoming at the hands of the left. A house divided against itself cannot stand.
I used to believe that an event that threatened the lives and livelihoods of all Americans would re-unite them. I no longer believe that.
I now believe that a nationaldivorce — a negotiated partition of the nation — is a dire necessity. (Its precursor, a concerted secession, islegal under the Constitution.) It would allow a large fraction of Americans, perhaps half of them, to break free of the economic and social oppressions that emanate from Washington. It would also allow those same Americans to defend themselves against invaders from the south and overseas enemies instead of wasting their treasure on the left’s destructive agenda.
Absent a national divorce, everyone will go down with a sinking ship. Across the land there will be declining material comfort, rising criminality, rampant social acrimony, the suppression of views that threaten the grip of the ruling class, the oppression of persons who express those views, and a fascistic arrangement between politicians and favored corporations — those that subscribe to the quasi-religion of “climate change” and the “wokeness” that propels schemes that put skin color, sex (or lack of it), and other personal characteristics above truth, above merit, and above the rule of law.
My apologies to readers who have seen my many other posts that deal with the subjects of this one. I had to get this off my chest. I will now move on to other subjects.
* Proponents of anti-white discrimination might feel justified because some Founders held slaves, and slavery certainly played a key role in anti-black discrimination — some of it state-enforced. But if racial discrimination is wrong, why should today’s whites be victimized when none of them holds slaves and almost none of them derives any benefit from slave-holding in the distant past. “White privilege” and “white supremacy” are mere slogans that are meant to draw attention away from the fact that, on average, whites do better than blacks because whites are more intelligent than blacks.
** The so-called proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is a costly and inconsequential sideshow. See, for example, this, this, and this.
For much more, browse “Blog History and Index of Posts”, especially the posts listed under America Divided; Economics and Economists; Liberty, Rights, and the Constitution; Politics, Politicians, and Government in Action; Science, Pseudoscience, and the Tools of Science; and War, Peace, and the Tools of Strategy.
Here’s a minuscule but noteworthy sample of recent posts and articles by other writers that bear on the theme of this post:
Mark Hyman, “‘Woke’ Defined”, The American Spectator, April 15, 2023
Here’s the latest, including the first (April 2023) estimate of GDP in the first quarter of 2023:
The exponential trend line indicates a constant-dollar (real) growth rate for the entire period of 0.77 percent quarterly, or 3.1 percent annually. The actual beginning-to-end annual growth rate is also 3.1 percent.
The red bands parallel to the trend line delineate the 95-percent (1.96 sigma) confidence interval around the trend. GDP has been below the confidence interval since the government-induced pandemic recession of 2020. Come to think of it, the back-to-back recessions of 1980-1982 and the Great Recession of 2008-2010 were also government-caused — the government in those cases being the Federal Reserve. The short recession of 2022, which may soon be followed by another one, can also be chalked up to the Fed.
Here’s another depiction of the general decline in real economic growth:
And here’s another view:
The trend lines, which reflect the rate of growth during each business cycle, are getting progressively “flatter”, that is, the rate of growth (with a few exceptions) is dropping from cycle to cycle.
However you look at it, the steady decline in real GDP growth is the handiwork of government spending and regulatory policies. For much more about that plague, which has existed for more than a century, see this and this.
Unemployment
The government-reported unemployment rate of 3.4 percent for April 2023 is actually 10.1 percent. What the government doesn’t publicize is the labor-force participation rate, which has dropped from its January 2000 peak of 67.3 percent to 62.6 percent. (See this post for details of the calculation.) Here’s an up-to-date graph of nominal vs. actual unemployment rates:
The good news is that the labor-force participation rate is on the rise:
That’s a good sign for inflation. Perhaps it will actually “cool” — but it has a long way to go.
Inflation
The index of prices for urban consumers (CPI-U) is the one that gets the headlines. There has been much ado in recent days about the drop in the rate of inflation, which only means that prices (as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics) aren’t rising quite as rapidly as they had been.
Here’s how things looked through April 2023:
Today’s big headline in the leftist media is that inflation “cooled” to an annual rate of 4.9 percent. Big whoop! It “cooled” from 4.98 percent to 4.93 percent, a difference that is surely well within the margin of error for CPI statistics. Moreover, the four-quarter average of annualized monthly readings has been rising since December 2022 and is now 6.81 percent.
Rumors of the demise of inflation are premature.
The Stock Market
A bear market is usually defined as decline of at least 20 percent in a broad stock-market index. The S&P 500 index topped out at 4818.22 in January 2022, dropped to 3636.87 in June, rose to 4325.28 in August, dropped to 3491.58 in October — the low (to date) for the current bear market, 27 percent below the January peak.
Since then, the index has risen, dropped, and risen again. Yesterday’s closing price of 4119.17 left the index almost 15 percent below its peak. Technically (and arbitrarily), the market is no longer in bear country, but that doesn’t mean that the bear market is over.
Here’s the story to date:
The dashed red line is 20 percent below the January 2022 high. The meandering route of the weekly average (which I use for analysis of long-term trends) has taken the index above the “magic” 20-percent line more than once.
The indicators that I use suggest that the bear market is over. Now, the question is how long the current (weak) bull market will last. There’s no guarantee that the market won’t take another dive before it reaches the January 2022 peak. There were back-to-back bear markets in 2000-2003. And after the collapse of 2007-2009, the market didn’t return to its (nominal) pre-crash peak until four years after it had hit bottom.
As the man said, the market is a random walk down Wall Street. Anything can happen, and it usually does: war, riot, natural disaster, political turmoil, unexpectedly bad or good economic news, etc., etc., etc.
Stay tuned.
Presidential Popularity: Obama, Trump, Biden
I have followed the Presidential Tracking Poll at Rasmussen Reports* since Obama was elected in 2008. The straightforward Approval Index (strongly approve minus strongly disapprove) doesn’t quite capture the way that likely voters assess a president’s performance. So I concocted an “enthusiasm ratio” — the number of likely voters who strongly approve as a percentage of the number of likely voters who venture an opinion one way or the other (thus omitting the voters who are non-committal). Here’s a comparison of the enthusiasm ratios for Obama (first term), Trump, and Biden (through 05/10/23):
You might ask how Biden caught up with Obama. I have no answer other than the fact that most voters have short memories and seem to care little about the consequences of leftist governance. It will take a major change to move the needle downward; for example, irrefutable proof of Biden’s direct involvement in the family influence-peddling business. Even better, irrefutable proof that some of the classified documents found in various places owned or controlled by Joe were used by Hunter in the conduct of said business.
Right Direction or Wrong Track
Rasmussen Reports also publishes a weekly poll in which 1,500 likely voters are asked whether the country is going in the right direction or is on the wrong track. The results, as you would expect, are volatile — reflecting the recent headlines and media spin. Government shutdowns, for example, which are actually good news, are widely viewed as bad news. Here are the comparative results for the presidencies of Obama, Trump, and Biden (through 05/08/23):
The mood of the voters polled during Trump’s term in office never reached the depths that it reached under Obama. Biden has challenged Obama’s lows but is now in Trump territory. How long will he stay there? See the discussion of presidential popularity, above.
In a race, the quickest runner [Achilles] can never overtake the slowest [Tortoise], since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started [i.e. the pursued has a head start], so that the slower must always hold a lead.
Ridiculous, of course.
To show what’s wrong with Aristotle’s analysis, I begin with an example that adopts his “logic”:
Achilles (A), a quasi-god with a tricky tendon, runs at a mortal speed of 15 miles an hour (a 4-minute miler, he).
Tortoise (T) plods at a speed of 1 mile an hour. (I exaggerate for simplicity of illustration.)
If A gives T a 15-mile lead, A reaches T’s starting point in 1 hour. T has, in that hour, moved ahead by 1 mile.
A covers that mile in 1/15 of an hour, in which time T has moved ahead by 1/15 of a mile.
A runs the 1/15 of a mile in 16 seconds, in which time T has moved ahead by another 23.47 feet.
And so on.
Therefore, A can never catch T.
What’s the catch? It’s verbal sleight-of-hand, much like the “proof” that 1 = 2 (“proof” here; fallacy explained here), or the “proof” that a boost in government spending causes GDP to rise by a “multiplier” (fallacy exposed here).
We know that A must be able to catch T, but we are trapped in a fallacious argument which seems to prove that A can’t catch T. Let’s break out of the trap.
The verbal sleight-of-hand in the Zeno/Aristotle argument is that A’s and T’s movements involve distance but not time. Velocity (distance/time) is ignored. This allows Zeno/Aristotle to imply (a nonsensical) sequence of events: T proceeds to a certain point; A reaches that point and waits for T to proceed to the next point; and so on.
In fact (if a fable may be called a fact) A catches up with T by covering a greater distance than T in the same length of time — that is, A proceeds at a greater velocity than T. Along the way, A passes points already passed by T, but A doesn’t pause at any of those points and allow T to move a bit farther ahead. A keeps on moving and catches up with T.
Going back to the example (A runs 15 miles an hour, etc.), we can determine when and where A catches T simply by describing events correctly. To begin:
A’s time (in hours) x A’s velocity (in miles per hour) = A’s distance (in miles).
T’s time x T’s velocity + T’s head start = T’s distance.
When A catches up with T, A’s time in motion will equal T’s time in motion and A’s distance in motion will equal T’s distance in motion + T’s head start.*
Example:
T has a head start of 15 miles.
T and A start plodding/running from their respective positions at the same time.
When A runs for 15/14 hours at 15 miles an hour he travels a distance of 225/14 miles (16 and 1/14 miles).
In that same 15/14 hours, T (plodding at generous 1 mile an hour) travels a distance of 1-1/14 mile.
Adding the distance T travels in 15/14 hours to T’s head start of 15 miles, we see that T is exactly 16-1/4 miles from A’s starting point after plodding for 15/14 hours.
In sum, A catches up with T when both have been moving for 15/14 hours, at a distance of 16-1/4 miles from A’s starting point.
Moreover, once A catches up with T, A then moves farther ahead of T with each stride because A is running at 15 miles an hour, whereas T is moving at only 1 mile and hour.
There is a variant of the Achilles-Tortoise “paradox” which says that Achilles never reaches a goal because he gets halfway there, then half of the remaining half, and so on; that is, he gets infinitesimally close to the goal but never reaches it. It would be fair to point out that Achilles is able to get halfway to the goal, and halfway might have been chosen as the goal. But let’s proceed as if the Achilles must reach the original goal.
Why can’t he get there? Zeno assumes (without realizing or admitting it) that the goal keeps receding from Achilles, even as he runs toward it. That’s the only explanation that makes sense. Otherwise, if the goal is 15 miles from Achilles and Achilles runs at 15 miles an hour, he’ll be halfway to the goal in 30 minutes, three-fourths of the way to it in 45 minutes, and at it in 1 hour.
It’s true that Achilles will reach the halfway point, the three-fourths point, etc. But it’s not true that Achilles won’t reach the goal — unless, like the mechanical rabbit in dog racing — the goal keeps moving away from Achilles.
Travel involves distance and velocity. Aristotle/Zeno ignored the latter. They were either clever or stupid. Take your pick.
* Mathematically:
tA is A’s time in motion and tT is T’s time in motion.
tA = tT = t (the duration of the race) when A catches up with T, both having started at the same time.
dA is A’s distance from his starting point and dT is T’s distance from A’s starting point, which includes T’s head start: h.
dA = dT = d (the distance A travels) when A catches up with T.
dA = (vA)(t), where vA is A’s speed
dT = h + (vT)(t), where vT is T’s speed
Substituting into dA = dT, to find the duration (time) of the race:
(vA)(t) = h + (vT)(t)
(vA)(t) – (vT)(t) = h
t(vA – vT) = h
t = h/(vA – vT)
Given t, vA, and vT, it is trivial to compute d, the distance traveled by A when he catches up with T.
The wages of amorality, immorality, and power-lust.
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” instead of “federal” because the Constitution created a new government of strictly limited but national power.)
This written Constitution — not the minions or edicts of the national government — 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 the document is still there, waiting to be read and enforced correctly.
I don’t expect to see such a turnaround anytime soon, and probably not even in what remains of my lifetime (10 years, more or less). The reason for my pessimism is that the foundation upon which the Constitution was built has eroded badly. The (small “l”) libertarian edifice designed by the architects of the Constitution was meant to stand on a foundation of deeply ingrained Judeo-Christian morality.
Justice Clarence Thomas, speaking a few years ago at the dedication of Christ Chapel at Hillsdale College, quoted John Adams’s address to the Massachusetts militia in 1798:
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Thomas underscored the critical point, one that is missing from most lamentations about the failures of the educational establishment. “The preservation of liberty,” he said in his peroration, “is not guaranteed. Without the guardrails supplied by religious conviction, popular sovereignty can devolve into mob rule, unmoored from any conception of objective truth.” [“A Genuinely Transgressive Act: On the Dedication of Christ Chapel at Hillsdale College”, The New Criterion, November 2019]
As Jennifer Roback Morse and Friedrich Hayek rightly argue (here and here), a libertarian order can be sustained only if it is built on a morality that is ingrained in social norms and inculcated by the institutions of civil society. But those norms and institutions have been undermined by a rot that began in the Progressive Era of the late 1800s and early 1900s, was nurtured in public schools and universities, was propagandized by the mass media, and has become enshrined in the edicts of the national government — a government that has accrued power which it was never meant to have. This has been especially true when the national government has held captive by the left, which seeks to replace civil society with an unattainable, dispiriting, and divisive Utopia that dispenses “equity”, “social justice”, and their like.
As traditional social norms and civil society were (and are) being shattered by the left, the destructive results — spelled out here by Malcolm Pollack — have merely invitedthe further growth of the state and the enactment of yet more destructive policies. Failure breeds more failure because the left cares not about consequences of its agenda. Power — absolute power — is its golden calf.
How should sane Americans respond to all of this? Pollack counsels what he calls a “acceleration”:
If things really are as bad as they seem … this whole rotten system may be so far gone, so diseased, and so at odds with the nature of human flourishing, that it must eventually collapse and die of its own accord. If that’s so, then it’s best, for the sake of our children and children’s children, if it happens sooner rather than later: the sooner we can plow Leviathan’s decomposing corpse into the ground, the sooner we can begin the process of organic regrowth….
Perhaps, then, it is best in the long run not to slow this process by incremental and ineffective political resistance. It may be that such an approach, by making the decay more gradual, will also make it somehow more bearable, day by day, and might turn it from an acute and intolerable affliction to a slow and chronic decline — a creeping Brazilification, a great national frog-boiling. Perhaps we would be wiser simply to let the cleansing fire of fever run its course, and burn itself out. It will be painful, and surely debilitating for a while, but then it will be over. And then, at last, we can awaken, blink our eyes, and get back on our feet.
Another term for the Big Guy might be all it takes. Four more years!!
I am less sanguine. Because of the extensive destruction of traditional morality and civil society that has already taken place, I doubt that America can be restored to a semblance of its pre-1960s character. (See “1963: The Year Zero”.) I doubt that the fourth “great awakening” in which America is presently mired can be succeeded by a fifth one that undoes the damage wrought by number four.
But if it could be, it would only be because of massive resurgence of traditional morality under the aegis of religion, especially religion in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The core of that morality is outlined in the Catholic Encyclopedia:
The precepts [of the last six of the Commandments] are meant to protect man in his natural rights against the injustice of his fellows.
And in order to make him still more secure in the enjoyment of his rights, it is declared an offense against God to desire to wrong him, in his familyrights by the Ninth;
Though I am a deist, I would gladly live in a society in which most of my fellow citizens believed in and adhered to the Ten Commandments, especially the last six of them. I reject the notion, promoted by nihilistic leftists, that religion per se breeds violence. In fact, a scholarly, non-sectarian meta-study, “Religion and its effects on crime and delinquency” (Medical Science Monitor, 2003; 9(8):SR79-82), offers good evidence that religiosity leads to good behavior:
[N]early all [reports] found that that there was a significant negative correlation between religiosity and delinquency. This was further substantiated by studies using longitudinal and operationally reliable definitions. Of the early reports which were either inconclusive or found no statistical correlation, not one utilized a multidimensional definition or any sort of reliability factor. We maintain that the cause of this difference in findings stemmed from methodological factors as well as different and perhaps flawed research strategies that were employed by early sociological and criminological researchers.The studies that we reviewed were of high research caliber and showed that the inverse relationship [between religiosity and delinquency] does in fact exist. It therefore appears that religion is both a short term and long term mitigat[o]r of delinquency.
But a society in which behavior is guided by the Ten Commandments seems to be receding into the past. As one headline puts it, “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace”. And the degree of religious belief probably is overstated because respondents tend to say the “right” thing, which (oddly) continues to be a profession of religious faith (in the hinterlands, at least).
I am not sure British people are necessarily afraid of religion, but they are certainly not much interested in it these days. Indeed, the decline of Christianity — not just in Britain but across Europe — stands out as one of the most remarkable phenomena of our times.
There was a time when Europe would justly refer to itself as “Christendom.” Europeans built the Continent’s loveliest edifices to accommodate their acts of worship. They quarreled bitterly over the distinction between transubstantiation and consubstantiation. As pilgrims, missionaries and conquistadors, they sailed to the four corners of the Earth, intent on converting the heathen to the true faith.
Now it is Europeans who are the heathens. . . .
The exceptionally low level of British religiosity was perhaps the most striking revelation of a recent … poll. One in five Britons claim to “attend an organized religious service regularly,” less than half the American figure. [In light of the relationship between claimed and actual church attendance, discussed above, the actual figure for Britons is probably about 10 percent: ED.] Little more than a quarter say that they pray regularly, compared with two-thirds of Americans and 95 percent of Nigerians. And barely one in 10 Britons would be willing to die for our God or our beliefs, compared with 71 percent of Americans. . . .
Chesterton feared that if Christianity declined, “superstition” would “drown all your old rationalism and skepticism.” When educated friends tell me that they have invited a shaman to investigate their new house for bad juju, I see what Chesterton meant. Yet it is not the spread of such mumbo-jumbo that concerns me as much as the moral vacuum that de-Christianization has created. Sure, sermons are sometimes dull and congregations often sing out of tune. But, if nothing else, a weekly dose of Christian doctrine helps to provide an ethical framework for life. And it is not clear where else such a thing is available in modern Europe.
… Britons have heard a great deal from Tony Blair and others about the threat posed to their “way of life” by Muslim extremists such as Muktar Said Ibrahim. But how far has their own loss of religious faith turned Britain into a soft target — not so much for the superstition Chesterton feared, but for the fanaticism of others?
Yes, what “way of life” is being threatened — and is therefore deemed worth defending — when people do not share a strong moral bond?
I cannot resist adding one more quotation in the same vein as those from Clarence Thomas and Niall Ferguson. This comes from Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels), a no-nonsense psychiatrist who, among his many intellectual accomplishments, has thoroughly skewered John Stuart Mill’s fatuous essay, On Liberty. Without further ado, here is Dalrymple on religion (“Why Religion Is Good for Us”, New Statesman, April 21, 2003):
I remember the day I stopped believing in God. I was ten years old and it was in school assembly. It was generally acknowledged that if you opened your eyes while praying, God flew out of the nearest window. That was why it was so important that everyone should shut his eyes. If I opened my eyes suddenly, I thought, I might just be quick enough to catch a glimpse of the departing deity….
Over the years, my attitude to religion has changed, without my having recovered any kind of belief in God. The best and most devoted people I have ever met were Catholic nuns. Religious belief is seldom accompanied by the inflamed egotism that is so marked and deeply unattractive a phenomenon in our post-religious society. Although the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are said to have given man a more accurate appreciation of his true place in nature, in fact they have rendered him not so much anthropocentric as individually self-centred….
[T]he religious idea of compassion is greatly superior, both morally and practically, to the secular one. The secular person believes that compassion is due to the victim by virtue of what he has suffered; the religious person believes that compassion is due to everyone, by virtue of his humanity. For the secular person, man is born good and is made bad by his circumstances. The religious person believes man is born with original sin, and is therefore imperfectible on this earth; he can nevertheless strive for the good by obedience to God.
The secularist divides humanity into two: the victims and the victimisers. The religious person sees mankind as fundamentally one.
And why not? If this life is all that you have, why let anything stand in the way of its enjoyment? Most of us self-importantly imagine that the world and all its contrivances were made expressly for us and our convenience….
The secularist de-moralises the world, thus increasing the vulnerability of potential victims and, not coincidentally, their need for a professional apparatus of protection, which is and always will be ineffective, and is therefore fundamentally corrupt and corrupting.
If a person is not a victim pure and simple, the secularist feels he is owed no compassion. A person who is to blame for his own situation should not darken the secularist’s door again: therefore, the secularist is obliged to pretend, with all the rationalisation available to modern intellectuals, that people who get themselves into a terrible mess – for example, drug addicts – are not to blame for their situation. But this does them no good at all; in fact it is a great disservice to them.
The religious person, by contrast, is unembarrassed by the moral failings that lead people to act self-destructively because that is precisely what he knows man has been like since the expulsion from Eden. Because he knows that man is weak, and has no need to disguise his failings, either from himself or from others, he can be honest in a way that the secularist finds impossible.
Though I am not religious, I have come to the conclusion that it is impossible for us to live decently without the aid of religion. That is the ambiguity of the Enlightenment.
The weakening of the Judeo-Christian tradition in America is owed to enemies within (established religions trying in vain to be “relevant”) and to enemies without (leftists and nihilistic libertarians who seek every opportunity to denigrate religion). Thus the opponents of religiosity seized on the homosexual scandals in the Catholic Church not to attack homosexuality (which would go against the attackers’ party line) but to attack the Church, which teaches the immorality of the acts that were in fact committed by a relatively small number of priests.
Despite the misleading nature of the controversy — one which Dalin questions from the outset — the first critics of the wartime papacy were not Jews. Among the worst attacks were those of leftist non-Jews, such as Carlo Falconi (author of The Silence of Pius XII), not to mention German liberal Rolf Hochhuth, whose 1963 play, The Deputy, set the tone for subsequent derogatory media portrayals of wartime Catholicism. By contrast, says Dalin, Pope Pius XII “was widely praised [during his lifetime] for having saved hundreds of thousands of Jewish lives during the Holocaust.” He provides an impressive list of Jews who testified on the pope’s behalf, including Albert Einstein, Golda Meir and Chaim Weizmann. Dalin believes that to “deny and delegitimize their collective memory and experience of the Holocaust,” as some have done, “is to engage in a subtle yet profound form of Holocaust denial.”
The most obvious source of the black legend about the papacy emanated from Communist Russia, a point noted by the author. There were others with an axe to grind. As revealed in a recent issue of Sandro Magister’s Chiesa, liberal French Catholic Emmanuel Mounier began implicating Pius XII in “racist” politics as early as 1939. Subsequent detractors have made the same charge, working (presumably) from the same bias.
While the immediate accusations against Pius XII lie at the heart of Dalin’s book, he takes his analysis a step further. The vilification of the pope can only be understood in terms of a political agenda — the “liberal culture war against tradition.” . . .
Rabbi Dalin sums it up best for all people of traditional moral and political beliefs when he urges us to recall the challenges that faced Pius XII in which the “fundamental threats to Jews came not from devoted Christians — they were the prime rescuers of Jewish lives in the Holocaust — but from anti-Catholic Nazis, atheistic Communists, and… Hitler’s mufti in Jerusalem.”
I believe that the incessant attacks on religion have helped to push people — especially impressionable adolescents and young adults — away from religion, to the detriment of liberty. It is not surprising that leftists tend to be anti-religious, for — as Dalrymple points out — they disdain the tenets of personal responsibility and liberty that are contained in the last six of the Ten Commandments.
Humans need no education in aggression and meddling, which come to us naturally. But we do need to learn to take responsibility for our actions and to leave others alone — and we need to learn those things when we are young. Such things will not be taught in public schools. They could be taught in homes, but are less likely to be taught there as Americans drift further from their religious roots.
Am I being hypocritical because I am unchurched and my children were not taken to church? Perhaps, but my religious upbringing imbued in me a strong sense of morality, which I tried — successfully, I believe — to convey to my children. But as time passes the moral lessons we older Americans learned through religion will attenuate unless those lessons are taught anew to younger generations.
Rather than join the left in attacking religion and striving to eradicate all traces of it from public discourse, those who claim to love liberty ought to accommodate themselves to it and even encourage its acceptance — for liberty’s sake.
A legal scholar (?) has made a claim that reminds me of the famous “proof” that 1 = 2 (“proof” here; fallacy explained here). The “proof” is invalid because it relies on the multiplication of both sides of an equation by zero. But anything multiplied by zero equals zero. It is therefore possible to “prove”, for example, that 1 = 1,000,000.
I come now to Perry Dane, who seems to have “proved” that the interpretation of laws by consulting their original public meaning is “incoherent”. This is from the abstract of his paper on the subject:
The method of original public meaning has a distinct, deadly, bit of intractable incoherence: It is, uniquely, largely useless in interpreting the meaning of contemporaneous legal enactments. If we, today, are trying to figure out the meaning, not of a provision enacted years ago, but of a text enacted today or recently, then looking to original public meaning will usually be a circular, empty, effort. After all, we – the interpreters of a contemporaneous text – are the original public.
Do you see what he’s done? He has noted, correctly, that a person today who interprets a contemporary text adds no meaning to that text because its meaning is obvious, having (presumably) been written with today’s meanings in mind. He then assumes, insidiously, that the value added by interpreting the meaning of texts is always zero, regardless of the age of the texts.
How ridiculous is that? What do you think of when you read “sidearms”? Because you are a contemporary of mine, you probably think of pistols or revolvers, generally, and pistols or revolvers that can be carried in holsters (usually at the waist), specifically. Do you think of military weapons of any kind that are worn at the side, especially the swords of officers? Well, you would if you were interpreting the meaning of “sidearm” in a text from the late 1700s.
A word that is no longer in use or which has changed meaning will not be understood properly until research reveals the meaning of the word in today’s language.
To put it mathematically:
The interpretive multiplier on a contemporary text is one (not zero): uninterpreted text (1) x interpretation (1) = meaning (1).
The interpretive multiplier on a text from long ago is greater than one (in the hands of a good interpreter): uninterpreted text (<1) x interpretation (>1) = meaning (1).
I argue in “The Constitution: Myths and Realities” that the Constitution doesn’t forbid secession and therefore allows it. A couple of key points (though not the only ones) are these:
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.
In fact,
[t]he 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.
Was the Constitution intended to operate forever? On the surface, the answer is “no” because it superseded an agreement of “perpetual union” without specifying that it was also an agreement of “perpetual union” — an omission that could hardly have been lost on the delegates to the convention of 1787 or the States’ ratifying conventions. There is also contemporary evidence that the Constitution wasn’t expected to be “perpetual”; for example:
At the end of the Constitutional Convention, George Washington said, “I do not expect the Constitution to last for more than 20 years.” (Source here.)
Thomas Jefferson [proposed] that the nation adopt an entirely new charter every two decades. A constitution “naturally expires at the end of 19 years,” he wrote to James Madison in 1789. “If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right.” (Source here.)
Moreover, according today’s unanimous opinion in New York v. New Jersey, a State need not prove abuse of the constitutional compact by the national government in order to withdraw from the compact, though proof of abuse (of which there is plenty) would prove valuable in the “court of public opinion”. All that as State must do (Lincoln et al. to the contrary notwithstanding) is to withdraw (secede) from the compact.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, author of the Court’s unanimous opinion, spells it out:
The question presented is straightforward: Does the Waterfront Commission Compact allow New Jersey to unilaterally withdraw from the Compact notwithstanding New York’s opposition? The answer is yes….
Because the Compact’s text does not address whether a State may unilaterally withdraw, we look to background principles of law that would have informed the parties’ understanding when they entered the Compact. This Court has long explained that interstate compacts “are construed as contracts under the principles of contract law.”… To that end, the Court has looked to “background principles of contract law” to interpret compacts that are silent on a particular issue….
Under the default contract-law rule at the time of the Compact’s 1953 formation, as well as today, a contract (like this Compact) that contemplates “continuing performance for an indefinite time is to be interpreted as stipulating only for performance terminable at the will of either party.”… Parties to a contract that calls for ongoing and indefinite performance generally need not continue performance after the contractual relationship has soured, or when the circumstances that originally motivated the agreement’s formation have changed, for example….
In sum, background principles of contract law, reinforced here by principles of state sovereignty and the fact that the States did not intend for the Compact to operate forever, indicate that New Jersey may unilaterally withdraw from the Waterfront Commission Compact. To be clear, the contract-law rule that we apply today governs compacts (like this Compact) that are silent as to unilateral withdrawal and that exclusively call for ongoing performance on an indefinite basis.
There you have it: a precedent that any State can use to argue that it has the right to withdraw from the compact known as the Constitution, and therefore from the confederation known as the United States of America.
It’s tax time. Let’s celebrate with a bit of revisionist literary history. William Shakespeare was a tax protestor. Think about the message hidden in the titles of several of his plays:
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is about a man who hopes soon to repay the money he borrowed to meet his tax bill. Winter’s Tale follows him through months of overtime work as he struggles to save money for his old age. In Love’s Labor’s Lost he confronts the ugly reality that his savings will go to the IRS. A Comedy of Errors depicts his travails with Form 1040 and its many schedules. In Much Ado About Nothing he discovers, alas, that he owes the IRS even more than he had feared. Stunned by the discovery, he decides in Twelfth Night (April 12) not to file a tax return and tears it into tiny pieces. He reconsiders, and The Tempest recounts his struggle to complete a new return by the deadline for filing. As You Like It celebrates his triumphal march to the Post Office, armed with a return that shows him even with the IRS. All’s Well That Ends Well is a fantasy in which the IRS finds no fault with our hero’s return.
Then there is the real text of Hamlet’s soliloquy:
To file or not to file — that is the question; Whether ‘tis nobler in the pocketbook to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous taxes, Or to take arms against a sea of instructions And by ignoring evade them. To file — to pay — No more; and by not paying to say we end The headache and the burdensome debts That Uncle Sam is heir to — ‘tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d. To run — to hide — To hide! Perchance in Bimini! Ay there’s the spot; For in that sunny isle what dreams may come When we have eluded the revenue agent Must give us pause; there’s the reality That makes mockery of such simple plans; For who would bear the heat and hard bunks of Leavenworth; The cell-block bully’s fist, the guard’s glare The bagginess of prison garb, the sad children’s tears, The righteousness of neighbors, and the spurns That the gray-faced ex-con takes When he himself might his quietus make With a simple check? Who would these taxes bear, To grunt and sweat under a glaring desk lamp, But that the dread of something after mid-April, The uncelebrated penitentiary from whose walls No inmate leaves, without parole, And makes us rather bear those taxes we must Than fly to Bimini or other exotic places? Thus conscience does make taxpayers of us all….
Donald Trump was indicted not only to “get Trump” — and end in itself for the left — but also to ensure his nomination as the GOP candidate for president in 2024. With a riled-up “base”, Trump is sure to be nominated, even if he is in prison — especially if he is in prison.
Trump will then lose the election because almost no one will vote for him other than his hard-core supporters, who probably comprise one-third of the electorate. I voted for Trump twice because he was the lesser of two evils — by a long shot — but he is now unelectable. Worse than that, his nomination will secure a Democrat victory.
A lot of otherwise GOP-leaning voters will stay home out of disgust with Trump’s crudity and resignation to a Democrat victory. That will leave a solid majority of voters — including NeverTrumpers, independents, and other pearl-clutching types — to join Yellow-Dog Democrats (there ain’t no other kind no more) to deliver a landslide victory to Joe Biden or to his successor after his influence-peddling while VP becomes undeniable or he is declared mentally incompetent, whichever comes first. It is even possible that the Dems will forgo electoral fraud, which the GOP will be better-equipped to detect in 2024, thus “legitimizing” the victory of the Dems’ nominee.
With the election of 2024 out of the way and a Democrat still in the White House, all hell will break loose. By “all hell”, I mean the full-scale construction of a fascistic state, which will be accomplished by executive fiat and friendly judges even if the GOP somehow controls at least one chamber of Congress despite Trump’s resounding defeat. It’s more likely, however, that Democrats will securely hold both chambers of Congress and will enact whatever fascistic and economically destructive legislation comes out of the White House, thus coating it with a veneer of legality that would not accrue to executive orders. The only possible bulwark of liberty — a conservative-controlled Supreme Court — will be breached by a successful court-packing plan that FDR would have envied. (This will be supplemented by packing district and appellate courts.)
All hell having broken loose, (solid) Red State governors and legislatures will engage in acts of resistance of the legalistic variety. These will fail because (a) their success would require judicial support, which will be lacking, and (b) the Democrat administration will simply ignore rulings that are unfavorable to its agenda. (The Biden administration’s flouting of immigration law, work-arounds to blunt the effect of Dobbs, and refusal to protect conservative Supreme Court justices’ homes are harbingers of the lawlessness to come.)
Red State hot-heads will then be unable to resist the urge to engage in futile acts of violence against the regime. The effect will be to justify harsh “anti-terroristic” measures that will result in unbridled censorship and jailing of conservatives for the mere “crime” of pointing out the regime’s lawlessness. But that would just be the start of full-scale suppression of dissent.
Red State governments that try to resist the regime will be found to be unconstitutional according to some kind of legalistic argumentation. The central government will then declare them null and void, invoking the Constitution: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government….” (Article IV, Section 4). Armed resistance, where it is attempted, will be squashed by superior force and rewarded with draconian punishments.
So … the answer to the question posed by the title of this post is that Civil War II won’t start. It will be aborted by the pro-abortion party.
The moral of this depressing look into the future? The GOP must find a way to deny Trump the nomination and keep him off the ballot as a third-party candidate. If those things can be done, and if the GOP is able to thwart excessive electoral chicanery, the dire picture I have drawn may not come to pass.
But … it is also quite possible that the Dems will simply refuse to concede the election and find a way (backed by force) to nullify it.
With commentary about unequal justice before the law.
You know about Jack Teixeira, of course. He’s the Air National Guardsman who published a “trove” highly classified information on the internet in recent months.
Unfortunately, execution is no longer contemplated as a punishment for crime, except in a few still-enlightened States. And if Hillary is allowed to flout the law and store classified information on a server in her home, why should Teixeira be held to a different standard? He will be, of course, but it won’t be done in the kind of swift and harsh way that discourages emulators. If he had wanted to do something subversive without being punished, he should have worn a dress and bombed the home of a conservative justice.
When games were short and ballparks were fan-friendly.
I bought a pair of tickets for a Detroit-Baltimore day-night doubleheader to be to be played at Detroit on August 15, 1961. The friend who had planned to go with me dropped out. I asked my father if he’d like to go and he snapped up the invitation.
Before I tell you about the games, I must set the stage.
Tiger Stadium, formerly Navin Field and Briggs Stadium, was a gem of a ballpark. It was double-decked all the way around and roofed all the way around, except for the bleachers in deep center field. The playing field was maintained meticulously and sparkled in the bright lights when the Tigers played night games.
Here’s a daytime photo of Tiger Stadium from 1961 (Tony Spina, Detroit Free Press.)
The best seats were in the upper deck. They were the best seats because the upper deck was stacked above the lower deck (not set back as in modern ballparks), affording fans who wisely opted for the upper deck a bird’s eye view of the action on the field and a clear view of the trajectory of high fly balls. On August 15, 1961, my father and I were seated in the upper deck behind third base (and in front of the columns that supported the roof).
The 1961 Tigers were making their best run at an American League pennant since the 1950 team finished 3 games behind the hated Yankees. The Tigers had led the league as recently as July 24. Going into the doubleheader, the Tigers were only 3-1/2 games behind the Yankees.
The 1961 team featured future Hall-of-Famer Al Kaline, who was enjoying another outstanding year in right field. He was joined in the outfield by wide-ranging center-fielder Bill Bruton and slugging left-fielder Rocky Colavito. (Kaline and Colavito both possessed powerful throwing arms.) Colavito’s home-run output (45 in 1961) was supplemented by the first-baseman Norm Cash a slick fielder with power (41 home runs in 1961) whose once-in-a-career batting average (.361) won him the AL batting title and helped to keep the Tigers in contention.
What made the doubleheader so memorable for me — aside from being with my father in a beautiful “green cathedral” — was the excitement of the two games. The Tigers won the first one 2-0, on 7th inning 2-run homer by Cash (with Colavito on first with a single). The Tigers came back to win the second game 3-2; Kaline singled to drive in the winning run in the bottom of the 9th. They double-header sweep narrowed left the Tigers only 2 games behind the Yankees. (They stayed close for another few weeks, and were only 1-1/2 games behind on September 1. They then faded and finished in second place by 8 games.)
The double victory was made all the more enjoyable by the swiftness of the games: the first one was clocked at 2:15; the second one at 2:25. Now, 62 years later, major-league baseball is striving to match such celerity by resorting to the artifice of the pitch clock. (The application of the rule book would do the trick.)
But that’s not the end of the story. Baseball games of that day were for real fans; they weren’t substitutes for trips to Disney World. To be sure, there were groups of Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, etc., but those groups were confined to distant outfield seats. For most fans, the aisles were devoid of children running up and down and being escorted endlessly to rest rooms (as they were in my later visits to ball parks). And the ear-splitting music of today and recent decades was blissfully absent; between-inning music, when there was any, was supplied by a rather tame electronic organ.
The good old days of baseball (and much else) really were good.
If my background and credentials matter to you, I present them in the following sections:
Personal and Career Highlights
Socioeconomic Background and Character
Intelligence, Temperament, and Beliefs
A Word to Leftists and Doctrinaire Libertarians
My Moral Profile
PERSONAL AND CAREER HIGHLIGHTS
Birth and Upbringing
I was born before Pearl Harbor, but was not old enough to remember it or World War II. (Japan formally surrendered two days before my first day of kindergarten.) I was raised in two small, adjoining cities in the flat, eastern part of Michigan’s lower peninsula. (But not in the Detroit metro area, as we hastened to add when asked “What part of Michigan?”.) I am not a son of privilege, by any means (see “Socioeconomic Background and Character”).
Academics
I graduated from Big-Ten U in the early 1960s with a B.A. in Economics. Having been accepted for graduate study in economics at several top schools, including Chicago, M.I.T., and some Ivy League schools, I chose M.I.T. and soon regretted the choice: gray, rainy Cambridge and robotic mathematical approach to economics made for a depressing combination. I returned to Big-Ten U to finish the academic year, then quit to join the (somewhat) “real world” and earn some money.
First and Lasting Employment
A former professor encouraged me to join a government-funded think-tank in Northern Virginia. I worked there for 30 of my 34 years of post-collegiate, full-time employment.
Marriage and Family
I met my first love at the think-tank and married her 58 years ago. Our happy union blessed us with two grown children — whose lives validate the love (sometimes tough) and support we gave them — and twelve bright, loving, and engaging grandchildren.
Early and Mid-Career
After four years as an analyst at the think-tank, I went to the Pentagon as a “whiz kid” for two years, at the height of the Vietnam War. Another regrettable choice. I returned to the think-tank and stayed seven more years, advancing from analyst to project director and program director (i.e., manager of several project directors).
Escape from the D.C. Area
The futility of analytical work (see “Beliefs”) led to the purchase of a small publishing company (weekly paper and free shopping guide) in a village in western New York State. I worked like a dog for three years, and brought the habit back to the think-tank.
Return
When asked why I returned, I replied “Give a person an opportunity to feed at the public trough and that person will take the opportunity.” Incentives work! Another incentive was the opportunity to criticize analysis (instead of doing it) as an in-house reviewer of technical reports.
Home Stretch
I stayed at the think-tank another 18 years. After three years of reviewing reports, I established and ran the think-tank’s publications department, combining the theretofore editorial, graphics, and printing operations. A year later I was promoted to chief financial and administrative officer, with a portfolio consisting of accounting, computer operations, contracting, facility planning and operations, financial management, human resources (a.k.a. personnel), library and technical information services, physical and information security, programming services, and publications. I became deeply involved in legal matters, including the spin-off of the think-tank from its parent company, the resolution of affirmative-action claims, and complex contract and lease negotiations. I contrived retirement at age 56.
characterized by or making quick changes in direction to avoid widely scattered tacklers.
The term is also a metaphor for course changes that avert bad outcomes — in investing, politics, and life in general. Here’s my version of it:
– Excel in undergraduate school and gain acceptance to several prestigious graduate schools.
– Regret the choice of school and drop out.
– Join a high-powered think-tank as a junior analyst, thanks to a good relationships with an undergrad professor.
– Jump ahead of peers and become a project director.
– Complain about the group director (who is later relieved of duty) and move to another group.
– Regret the move and leave the think-tank for a prestigious assignment in the Pentagon.
– Regret going to the Pentagon and return to the think tank.
– Jump ahead of peers and become a program director (manager of project directors). Complain about the group director (who is later relieved of his duties) and get reassigned to direct another program.
– Tire of the D.C. rat race and buy a small publishing operation in a rural village.
– Return to the think-tank to make possible a comfortable retirement (and to escape the rural village’s harsh winters). Negotiate for and get the position sought but denied in the second tour at the think-tank.
– Move up to the front office, then move of it (to stay out of the spotlight) when the think-tank is taken over by new management.
– Parlay publishing experience into creation and management of a publications department. Parlay that experience into selection as vice president for finance and administration.
– Put up with an inept CEO for several years, then report his ethics violation to the board, anticipating retaliation against me.
– Wait patiently (more than a year) for the retaliatory move.
– Seize on the retaliation (a reduction of responsibility) to resign with continued enrollment in the company’s health-insurance program and generous severance pay (new benefits concocted by yours truly).
– Retire at age 56 with a big smile on my face.
Post-retirement
Itching for intellectual stimulation, I joined a privately funded think-tank as managing editor of an economics journal — not for the meager wage but for the stimulation of working with intelligent, intellectually honest contributors and colleagues. I quit after 18 months, when this part-time job became too consuming.
Last Stops
To be near wife’s parents in their late years, we moved from cold-rainy-hot-humid-hazy-cloudy Northern Virginia to hot, sunny Austin, whose mainly left-wing denizens irritated me with their political posturing and self-centered drivinghabits. (I was in Austin, but not of Austin.) After a downsizing that took five months to accomplish, we returned to Virginia (not the unbearable D.C. area) to be near our son and (most) of our grandchildren. It is good to be back in the land of tall trees and ample rain.
In my lifetime I have been related to, known, befriended, and worked with a broad cross-section of humanity. I have seen poverty and squalor, conversed with semi-literates and near-idiots, heard the rantings and taunts of bigots and bullies, known lazy louts and no-account dreamers, and admired hard workers with few skills and little learning who were proud of their meager possessions because they had earned them.
Both of my parents came from poor families — poor by today’s standards, at least. But by dint of hard work, there was always food on the table, though no one in those days took or expected handouts from government.
My parents’ outlook on life reflected the small-town values of the places in which they were raised. Through a grandmother to whom I was close, I got a good taste of how she, and my parents, had lived. I also came to know the advantages of living in villages, towns, and small cities: physical security and the kind of serenity that is almost impossible to find, for more than a few hours at a time, in the large cities and vast metropolitan areas that now dominate the human landscape of America.
If my father ever earned as much as a median income, it would come as a surprise to me. Our houses, neighborhoods, and family friends were what is known as working-class. If there were twinges of envy for the rich and famous, they were balanced with admiration for their skills and accomplishments. These children of the Great Depression — my parents and their siblings and friends — betrayed no feelings of grievance toward those who had more of life’s possessions. They were rightly proud of what they had earned and accumulated, and did not feel entitled to more than that because of their “bad luck” or lack of “privilege”.
In my own life, my jobs have ranged from busing tables to serving as a corporate officer. I have spent time in the company of high-ranking government officials, high-priced and expert lawyers, brilliant scientists and academicians, and talented musicians and artisans.
In short, I have walked many streets of life and seen many facets of the human condition. I have been spared much; my personal history excludes the direct effects of war, disaster, and privation. And I have been content to settle for relative obscurity and comfort rather than fame and fortune, even though I might have attained them had I chosen to strive for them.
On the whole, what I have seen, known, and done amounts to a large sample of the human experience. I am not trapped in the upper-middle-class “bubble” defined in Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010.
My personality is more aloof than openly empathic (see “Temperament”). Why, I cannot say. I do know that aloofness can be an avoidance mechanism for persons who are too easily overwhelmed by emotion. And I do have an emotional side that I usually avoid exposing to others. Let me just say that my ability to observe the human condition is not dulled by automatic empathy of the kind that I have seen so often in persons whose political views are based on nothing more than raw emotion. Nor am I animated by prolonged adolescent rebellion, guilt, or an inability to advance beyond collegiate leftism. I am self-aware and self-critical to a fault.
Finally, I am strongly inclined toward justice. And I mean justice, not “fairness”, which is an excuse for leveling. True justice consists of two things, and only two things: the enforcement of voluntary, mutual obligations, and the punishment of wrongdoing.
What is the point of these recollections and glimpses of my character? It is to say that my upbringing, experiences, and personality give me an advantage when it comes to understanding the human condition and its ills. This blog — in its very small way — is a place of refuge from uninformed emotion, prolonged adolescent rebellion, guilt, and a refusal (or inability) to change one’s political views for whatever reason — whether it is obduracy, willful ignorance, simple stupidity, or an inability to admit error (even to oneself).
INTELLIGENCE, TEMPERAMENT, AND BELIEFS
A man who is not a Liberal at sixteen has no heart; a man who is not a Conservative at sixty has no head. — attributed to Benjamin Disraeli
Intelligence and Its Application
My Graduate Record Examinations scores: verbal aptitude, 96th percentile; quantitative aptitude, 99th percentile; advanced test in economics, 99th percentile. The combined verbal and quantitative scores qualify me for membership (which I do not seek) in the Triple-Nine Society, whose members “have tested at or above the 99.9th percentile on at least one of several standardized adult intelligence tests”. But I am much older now — four times the age I was when I took the GREs — so I do not claim to be “brilliant”. On the other hand, I know a lot more now than I did then, which must count for something.
My intelligence was recognized at an early age, but its use was not much stimulated by my parents or the K-12 schools I attended. Only when I went to college was I “stretched”, and then the stretching came mostly at my initiative (unassigned reading and long, solitary sessions working through economic theory). The stretching — which was episodic during my working career — continues to this day, in the form of blogging on subjects that require research, careful analysis, and self-criticism of what I have produced. Self-criticism is central to my personality (see next) and leaves me open to new ideas (see next after that).
Temperament
The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is in ill repute, but I have always found it to be reliable, especially in my own case. I am an INTJ, which is I(ntroverted), (i)N(tuitive), T(hinking), J(udging):
For INTJs the dominant force in their lives is their attention to the inner world of possibilities, symbols, abstractions, images, and thoughts. Insight in conjunction with logical analysis is the essence of their approach to the world; they think systemically. Ideas are the substance of life for INTJs and they have a driving need to understand, to know, and to demonstrate competence in their areas of interest. INTJs inherently trust their insights, and with their task-orientation will work intensely to make their visions into realities. (Source: “The Sixteen Types at a Glance“.)
For more revelations about my temperament, see this, this, this, and this.
Beliefs
I have moved great distances with respect to political philosophy and theology.
I was apolitical until I went to college. There, under the tutelage of economists of the Keynesian persuasion, I became convinced that government could and should intervene in economic affairs. My pro-interventionism spread to social affairs in my early post-college years, as I joined the “intellectuals” of the time in their support for the Civil Rights Act and the Great Society, which was about social engineering as much as anything.
The urban riots that followed the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. opened my eyes to the futility of LBJ’s social tinkering. I saw at once that plowing vast sums into a “war” on black poverty would be rewarded with a lack of progress, sullen resentment, and generations of dependency on big brother in Washington. (Regarding my racial views, see the first entry under “My Moral Profile”.)
At about the same time, my eyes were opened fully to the essential incompetence of government by LBJ’s inept handling of the war in Vietnam. (Gradualism, phooey — either fight to win or get out.)
However, it was not momentous events but a bit of seemingly irrelevant analysis that administered the coup de grâce to my naïve “liberalism”. It happened in the early 1970s, when my boss asked me to concoct grand measures of effectiveness for the Navy (i.e., summary measures of antisubmarine warfare capabilities, of tactical strike capabilities, and so on). I struggled with the problem, and made a good-faith effort to provide the measures. But in the end I had to report to my boss that he had given me “mission impossible”. Why? Because, no summary measure could capture the effects of the many factors that would determine the effectiveness of the armed forces: the enemy, the characteristics of his forces, the timing and geographic particulars of any engagement, and so on. (See this post.)
What does that have to do with my final rejection of “liberalism” and turn toward libertarianism? When government intervenes in economic and social affairs, its interventions are based on crude “measures of effectiveness” (e.g., eliminating poverty and racial discrimination) without considering the intricacies of economic and social interactions. Governmental interventions are — and will always be — blunt instruments, the use of which will have unforeseen, unintended, and strongly negative consequences (e.g., the cycle of dependency on welfare, the inhibition of growth-producing capital investments through taxation and regulation). I then began to doubt the wisdom of having any more government than is necessary to protect me and my fellow Americans from foreign and domestic predators. My later experiences in the private sector and as a government contractor confirmed my view that professors, politicians, and bureaucrats who presume to interfere in the workings of the economy are naïve, power-hungry, or (usually) both.
But there is more to my journey into political philosophy. I began to think seriously about liberty and libertarianism in the 1990s. Eventually, I began to question doctrinaire libertarianism (pro-abortion, pro-same-sex “marriage”, etc.) which seems to have no room in it for the maintenance of social norms that bind civil society and make it possible for people to live in actual liberty: to coexist willingly and peacefully, and to engage in beneficially cooperative behavior. And so, I have become what I call a Burkean libertarian.
The development of my theological views, which I will not trace in detail, has paralleled the development of my political philosophy. My collegiate atheism gradually turned to agnosticism as I came to understand the scientific bankruptcy of atheism. There is not a great gap between agnosticism and deism, and about fifteen years ago I made the small jump across that gap.
A WORD TO LEFTISTS AND DOCTRINAIRE LIBERTARIANS …
… who may be offended by many of the posts at this blog.
I have noticed that a leftist will accuse you of “hate” just for saying something contrary to the left-wing orthodoxy of the day. If you disagree with what I have to say here, but prefer to spew invective instead of offering a reasoned response, don’t bother to submit a comment — at least not until your rage has passed or your medication has taken effect.
The same goes for jejune libertarians, of all ages, whose narrow rationalism often materializes in rank offensiveness and a tendency toward naïve absolutism.
Having said that, I acknowledge that I sometimes adopt a biting or dismissive tone. (See, for example, the fourteen words that follow the em-dash two paragraphs above.) If you will read my blog carefully, however, you will find that my views are grounded in facts and logic. Where you disagree with or question something that I say in a particular post, search the index of posts for more on the same subject.
If you will bother to read very much of this blog and its predecessors (here and here), you will find that I am pro-peace, pro-prosperity, and pro-liberty — positions that leftists and certain libertarians like to claim as theirs, exclusively. Unlike most leftists and more than a few self-styled libertarians, I have seen enough of this world and its ways to know that peace, prosperity, and liberty are achieved when government carries a big stick abroad and treads softly at home (except when it comes to criminals and traitors). Most leftists and many self-styled libertarians, by contrast, engage in “magical thinking”, according to which peace, prosperity, and liberty can be had simply by invoking the words and attaching them to policies that, time and again, have led to war, slow economic growth, and loss of liberty.
MY MORAL PROFILE
Racial Views
I was unaware of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) until a few years ago, when I took a test at YourMorals.Org that purported to measure my implicit racial preferences. I’ll say more about that after discussing IAT, which has been exposed as junk. That’s what John. J. Ray calls it:
Psychologists are well aware that people often do not say what they really think. It is therefore something of a holy grail among them to find ways that WILL detect what people really think. A very popular example of that is the Implicit Associations test (IAT). It supposedly measures racist thoughts whether you are aware of them or not. It sometimes shows people who think they are anti-racist to be in fact secretly racist.
I dismissed it as a heap of junk long ago (here and here) but it has remained very popular and is widely accepted as revealing truth. I am therefore pleased that a very long and thorough article has just appeared which comes to the same conclusion that I did. [“Psychology’s Favorite Tool for Measuring Racism Isn’t Up to the Job“, Political Correctness Watch, September 6, 2017]
The article in question (which has the same title as Ray’s post) is by Jesse Singal. It appeared at Science of Us on January 11, 2017. Here are some excerpts:
Perhaps no new concept from the world of academic psychology has taken hold of the public imagination more quickly and profoundly in the 21st century than implicit bias — that is, forms of bias which operate beyond the conscious awareness of individuals. That’s in large part due to the blockbuster success of the so-called implicit association test, which purports to offer a quick, easy way to measure how implicitly biased individual people are….
Since the IAT was first introduced almost 20 years ago, its architects, as well as the countless researchers and commentators who have enthusiastically embraced it, have offered it as a way to reveal to test-takers what amounts to a deep, dark secret about who they are: They may not feel racist, but in fact, the test shows that in a variety of intergroup settings, they will act racist….
[The] co-creators are Mahzarin Banaji, currently the chair of Harvard University’s psychology department, and Anthony Greenwald, a highly regarded social psychology researcher at the University of Washington. The duo introduced the test to the world at a 1998 press conference in Seattle — the accompanying press release noted that they had collected data suggesting that 90–95 percent of Americans harbored the “roots of unconscious prejudice.” The public immediately took notice: Since then, the IAT has been mostly treated as a revolutionary, revelatory piece of technology, garnering overwhelmingly positive media coverage….
Maybe the biggest driver of the IAT’s popularity and visibility, though, is the fact that anyone can take the test on the Project Implicit website, which launched shortly after the test was unveiled and which is hosted by Harvard University. The test’s architects reported that, by October 2015, more than 17 million individual test sessions had been completed on the website. As will become clear, learning one’s IAT results is, for many people, a very big deal that changes how they view themselves and their place in the world.
Given all this excitement, it might feel safe to assume that the IAT really does measure people’s propensity to commit real-world acts of implicit bias against marginalized groups, and that it does so in a dependable, clearly understood way….
Unfortunately, none of that is true. A pile of scholarly work, some of it published in top psychology journals and most of it ignored by the media, suggests that the IAT falls far short of the quality-control standards normally expected of psychological instruments. The IAT, this research suggests, is a noisy, unreliable measure that correlates far too weakly with any real-world outcomes to be used to predict individuals’ behavior — even the test’s creators have now admitted as such.
How does IAT work? Singal summarizes:
You sit down at a computer where you are shown a series of images and/or words. First, you’re instructed to hit ‘i’ when you see a “good” term like pleasant, or to hit ‘e’ when you see a “bad” one like tragedy. Then, hit ‘i’ when you see a black face, and hit ‘e’ when you see a white one. Easy enough, but soon things get slightly more complex: Hit ‘i’ when you see a good word or an image of a black person, and ‘e’ when you see a bad word or an image of a white person. Then the categories flip to black/bad and white/good. As you peck away at the keyboard, the computer measures your reaction times, which it plugs into an algorithm. That algorithm, in turn, generates your score.
If you were quicker to associate good words with white faces than good words with black faces, and/or slower to associate bad words with white faces than bad words with black ones, then the test will report that you have a slight, moderate, or strong “preference for white faces over black faces,” or some similar language. You might also find you have an anti-white bias, though that is significantly less common. By the normal scoring conventions of the test, positive scores indicate bias against the out-group, while negative ones indicate bias against the in-group.
The rough idea is that, as humans, we have an easier time connecting concepts that are already tightly linked in our brains, and a tougher time connecting concepts that aren’t. The longer it takes to connect “black” and “good” relative to “white” and “good,” the thinking goes, the more your unconscious biases favor white people over black people.
Singal continues (at great length) to pile up the mountain of evidence against IAT, and to caution against reading anything into the results it yields.
Having become aware of the the debunking of IAT, I went to the website of Project Implicit. I was surprised to learn that I could not only find out whether I’m a closet racist but also whether I prefer dark or light skin tones, Asians or non-Asians, Trump or a previous president, and several other things or their opposites. I chose to discover my true feelings about Trump vs. a previous president, and was faced with a choice between Trump and Clinton.
What was the result of my several minutes of tapping “e” and “i” on the keyboard of my PC? This:
Your data suggest a moderate automatic preference for Bill Clinton over Donald Trump.
Balderdash! Though Trump is obviously not of better character than Clinton, he’s obviously not of worse character. And insofar as policy goes, the difference between Trump and Clinton is somewhat like the difference between a non-silent Calvin Coolidge and an FDR without the patriotism. (With apologies to the memory of Coolidge, my favorite president.)
Now, what did IAT say about my racism, or lack thereof? For years I proudly posted these results:
The study you just completed is an Implicit Association Test (IAT) that compares the strength of automatic mental associations. In this version of the IAT, we investigated positive and negative associations with the categories of “African Americans” and “European Americans”.
The idea behind the IAT is that concepts with very closely related (vs. unrelated) mental representations are more easily and quickly responded to as a single unit. For example, if “European American” and “good” are strongly associated in one’s mind, it should be relatively easy to respond quickly to this pairing by pressing the “E” or “I” key. If “European American” and “good” are NOT strongly associated, it should be more difficult to respond quickly to this pairing. By comparing reaction times on this test, the IAT gives a relative measure of how strongly associated the two categories (European Americans, African Americans) are to mental representations of “good” and “bad”. Each participant receives a single score, and your score appears below.
Your score on the IAT was 0.07.
Positive scores indicate a greater implicit preference for European Americans relative to African Americans, and negative scores indicate an implicit preference for African Americans relative to European Americans.
Your score appears in the graph below in green. The score of the average Liberal visitor to this site is shown in blue and the average Conservative visitor’s score is shown in red.
It should be noted that my slightly positive score probably was influenced by the order in which choices were presented to me. Initially, pleasant concepts were associated with photos of European-Americans. I became used to that association, and so found that it affected my reaction time when I was faced with pairings of pleasant concepts and photos of African-Americans. The bottom line: My slight preference for European-Americans probably is an artifact of test design.
In other words, I believed that my very low score, despite the test set-up, “proved” that I am not a racist. But thanks (or no thanks) to John Ray and Jesse Singal, I must conclude, sadly, that I have no “official” proof of my non-racism.
I suspect that I am not a racist. I don’t despise blacks as a group, nor do I believe that they should have fewer rights and privileges than whites. (Neither do I believe that they should have more rights and privileges than whites or persons of Asian or Ashkenazi Jewish descent — but they certainly do when it comes to college admissions, hiring, and firing.) It isn’t racist to understand that race isn’t a social construct (except in a meaningless way) and that there are general differences between races (see many of the posts listed here). That’s just a matter of facing facts, not ducking them, as leftists are wont to do.
What have I learned from the IAT? I must have very good reflexes. A person who processes information rapidly and then almost instantly translates it into a physical response should be able to “beat” the IAT. And that’s probably what I did in the Trump vs. Clinton test, if not in the racism test. I’m a fast typist and very quick at catching dropped items before they hit the floor. (My IQ, or what’s left of it, isn’t bad either; go here and scroll down to the section headed “Intelligence, Temperament, and Beliefs”.)
Perhaps the IAT for racism could be used to screen candidates for fighter-pilot training. Only “non-racists” would be admitted. Anyone who isn’t quick enough to avoid the “racist” label isn’t quick enough to win a dogfight.
Fair and balanced. That’s me.
Temperament
I have already said that I am an INTJ, and an especially strong I, T, and J. Here are my latest scores (02/16/17) on the Keirsey Temperament Sorter (KTS), which is similar to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). The descriptive excerpts are from David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates’s Please Understand Me.
EXTRAVERSION 0 – INTROVERSION 10
The person who chooses people as a source of energy probably prefers extraversion, while the person who prefers solitude to recover energy may tend toward introversion.
SENSATION 8 – INTUITION 12
The person who has a natural preference for sensation probably describes himself first as practical, while the person who has a natural preference for intuition probably chooses to describe himself as innovative.
THINKING 20 – FEELING 0
Persons who choose the impersonal basis of choice are called the thinking types by Jung. Persons who choose the personal basis are called the feeling types…. The more extreme feeling types are a bit put off by rule-governed choice, regarding the act of being impersonal as almost inhuman. The more dedicated thinking types, on the other hand, sometimes look upon the emotion-laden decisions and choices as muddle-headed.
JUDGING 19 – PERCEIVING 1
Persons who choose closure over open options are likely to be the judging types. Persons preferring to keep things open and fluid are probably the perceiving types. The J is apt to report a sense of urgency until he has made a pending decision, and then he can be at rest once the decision has been made. The F person, in contrast, is more apt to experience resistance to making a decision, wishing that more data could be accumulated as the basis for the decision. As a result, when a P person makes a decision, he may have a feeling of uneasiness and restlessness, while the J person, in the same situation, may have a feeling of ease and satisfaction.
Js tend to establish deadlines and take them seriously, expecting others to do the same. Ps may tend more to look upon deadlines as mere alarm clocks which buzz at a given time, easily turned off or ignored while one catch an extra forty winks, almost as if the deadline were used more as a signal to start than to complete a project.
* * *
I have taken many of the other tests that are offered at YourMorals.Org. What follows is a selection of results from those tests that are especially revealing of my beliefs and personality.
The Big 5 Personality Inventory and Life Satisfaction
I first took the “Big 5” personality test on 05/28/2009, with this result (details here):
My scores are in green; the average scores of all other test-takers are in purple. The five traits are defined as follows:
1. Openness to experience: High scorers are described as “Open to new experiences. You have broad interests and are very imaginative.” Low scorers are described as “Down-to-earth, practical, traditional, and pretty much set in your ways.” This is the sub-scale that shows the strongest relationship to politics: liberals generally score high on this trait; they like change and variety, sometimes just for the sake of change and variety. Conservatives generally score lower on this trait. (Just think about the kinds of foods likely to be served at very liberal or very conservative social events.)
2. Conscientiousness: High scorers are described as “conscientious and well organized. They have high standards and always strive to achieve their goals. They sometimes seem uptight. Low scorers are easy going, not very well organized and sometimes rather careless. They prefer not to make plans if they can help it.”
3. Extraversion: High scorers are described as “Extraverted, outgoing, active, and high-spirited. You prefer to be around people most of the time.” Low scorers are described as “Introverted, reserved, and serious. You prefer to be alone or with a few close friends.” Extraverts are, on average, happier than introverts.
4. Agreeableness: High scorers are described as “Compassionate, good-natured, and eager to cooperate and avoid conflict.” Low scorers are described as “Hardheaded, skeptical, proud, and competitive. You tend to express your anger directly.”
5. Neuroticism: High scorers are described as “Sensitive, emotional, and prone to experience feelings that are upsetting.” Low scorers are described as “Secure, hardy, and generally relaxed even under stressful conditions.”
A strong sense of security is consistent with this result (from a test taken on 10/02/14):
Moral Foundations Questionnaire
The scale you completed was the “Moral Foundations Questionnaire,” developed by Jesse Graham and Jonathan Haidt at the University of Virginia.
The scale is a measure of your reliance on and endorsement of five psychological foundations of morality that seem to be found across cultures. Each of the two parts of the scale contained three questions related to each foundation: 1) harm/care, 2) fairness/reciprocity (including issues of rights), 3) ingroup/loyalty, 4) authority/respect, and 5) purity/sanctity.
The idea behind the scale is that human morality is the result of biological and cultural evolutionary processes that made human beings very sensitive to many different (and often competing) issues. Some of these issues are about treating other individuals well (the first two foundations – harm and fairness). Other issues are about how to be a good member of a group or supporter of social order and tradition (the last three foundations). Haidt and Graham have found that political liberals generally place a higher value on the first two foundations; they are very concerned about issues of harm and fairness (including issues of inequality and exploitation). Political conservatives care about harm and fairness too, but they generally score slightly lower on those scale items. The big difference between liberals and conservatives seems to be that conservatives score slightly higher on the ingroup/loyalty foundation, and much higher on the authority/respect and purity/sanctity foundations.
This difference seems to explain many of the most contentious issues in the culture war. For example, liberals support legalizing gay marriage (to be fair and compassionate), whereas many conservatives are reluctant to change the nature of marriage and the family, basic building blocks of society. Conservatives are more likely to favor practices that increase order and respect (e.g., spanking, mandatory pledge of allegiance), whereas liberals often oppose these practices as being violent or coercive.
In the graph below, your scores on each foundation are shown in green (the 1st bar in each set of 3 bars). The scores of all liberals who have taken it on our site are shown in blue (the 2nd bar), and the scores of all conservatives are shown in red (3rd bar). Scores run from 0 (the lowest possible score, you completely reject that foundation) to 5 (the highest possible score, you very strongly endorse that foundation and build much of your morality on top of it).
Implicit Ethicality
The study you just completed was an implicit measure of how much you associate yourself with ethicality.
The idea behind the IAT is that concepts with very closely related (vs. unrelated) mental representations are more easily and quickly responded to as a single unit. For example, if “me” and “sharing” are strongly associated in one’s mind, it should be relatively easy to respond quickly to this pairing by pressing the “E” or “I” key. If “me” and “sharing” are NOT strongly associated, it should be more difficult to respond quickly to this pairing. By comparing reaction times on this test, the IAT gives a relative measure of how strongly associated the two categories (Me, Not Me) are to mental representations of “ethical” and “unethical”. Each participant receives a single score, and your score appears below.
Note that there is a great deal of controversy as to the exact meaning of what these reaction time associations actually mean, so please take your results with a grain of salt. While a great deal of previous research has validated the use of such procedures to detect associations of group level bias across groups, the use of IAT procedures to measure individual ethicality is still in development and all of these procedures have been validated probibalistically, at the group level, rather than being validated as being absolutely diagnostic for individuals. That being said, many (though not all) people have found validity in their implicit scores and have found there to be some real psychological process that tracks implicit associations.
Your score on the IAT was 1.218.
Positive scores indicate that ethical associations with the self-concept are stronger than negative associations, and a negative score indicates the opposite.
Your score appears in the graph below in green. The score of the average Liberal visitor to this site is shown in blue and the average Conservative visitor’s score is shown in red.
Moral Motivation Scale
The scale is a measure of the degree to which people are motivated to act morally by internal and external factors. An example of an internal motivational factor is the drive to achieve (or maintain) one’s happiness through acting morally. An example of an external motivational factor is the drive to act morally in order to improve (or maintain) relationships.
The idea behind the scale is that people vary on the degree to which they experience internal and external moral motivations. Though we suspect that some people are more internally (rather than externally) motivated to act morally, we suspect that everyone is motivated to act morally by internal and external factors. We expect that internal vs. external motivation might relate to who gives to charity in a more public vs. a more private way or who is more likely to be honest when in a group setting vs. a private setting. As well, some national surveys have shown that women make harsher moral judgments than men, and we expect that that might reflect higher moral motivations.
Your Score (in green):
Business Ethics Questionnaire
The scale is a measure of statements describing behaviors relevant to five categories of business ethics: (a) usurpation of company resources (e.g. using company time/products), (b) corporate gamesmanship (politics), (c) cheating customers, (d) concealment of misconduct, and (e) offering kickbacks/gifts.
The idea behind the scale is that there is very little systematic research on everyday ethical issues in business. This measure has been tested cross-culturally to show relevance for participants from Hong Kong, mainland China and Taiwan. Specifically, a values structure highlighting the importance of self-transcendence values correlates with more ethical behavioral orientations, while a values structure highlighting the importance of the self-enhancement dimension of values correlates with less ethical behavioral orientations. Further, we are interested in what behaviors are seen as unethical as while all individuals espouse ethicality, different types of behavior are often seen as being more or less relevant to ethics, depending on one’s culture. In previous research, women have reported being more ethical than men.
The graph below shows how often people say that they find various everyday ethical situations to be acceptable in everyday life. This business ethics questionnaire includes 5 categories: Usurpation of company resources, Offering kickbacks, Corporate gamesmanship, Concealment of misconduct, & Cheating Customers. Higher scores indicate greater acceptance of these behaviors.
Self Responses:
Marlowe-Crown Social Desirability Scale
The scale you just completed was the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale, developed by Douglas Crowne and David Marlowe (1960). This scale measures social desirability concern, which is people’s tendency to portray themselves favorably during social interaction. Each of the 33 true-false items that you just filled out describes a behavior that is either socially acceptable but unlikely, or socially unacceptable but likely. As a result, people who receive high scores on this measure may be more likely to respond to surveys in a self-promoting fashion.
We are interested in examining how liberals and conservatives score on this scale. Although previous research has investigated how these groups can be biased when evaluating political information, little is known about the relationship between political attitudes and social desirability concern.
The graph below shows your score on this scale. The scores range from 0% to 100% and represent the proportion of answers that indicated socially desirable responding. Thus, higher scores correspond with higher degrees of socially desirable responding. Your score is shown in green (1st bar). The score of the average liberal respondent is shown in light blue and the score of the average strong liberal is shown in dark blue. The average conservative score is shown in light red and the score of the average strong conservative is shown in dark red.
Free Will and Determinism Scale
Liberals and conservatives seem to disagree in their basic understandings of the causes of human action, particularly of immoral action. Liberals are more likely to believe that social forces, poverty, childhood trauma, or mental illness can serve as valid excuses. Conservatives are more likely to reject such excuses and want to hold people accountable for their actions, including a preference for harsher punishments. At least, that is the way things play out in many disputes in the legal world. We want to see if we can look at this stereotypical difference in more detail. We want to find out WHICH kinds of free will and determinism show a correlation with politics, and with other psychological variables.
The Paulhus scale measures people’s attitudes about four constructs related to freedom vs. determinism, which we have graphed for you in the four green bars below.
The first graph shows your score on two measures of belief in determinism:
Fate: the belief that individuals cannot control their own destinies
Scientific causation: the belief that people’s actions are fully explained by a combination of biological and environmental forces
The second graph shows your score on two subscales about belief in NON-determinism, or freedom:
Randomness: the belief that some events are truly random, that chance plays a role in human affairs
Free Will: the degree to which people can truly decide upon their behaviors and are personally responsible for their outcomes.
In the graphs below, your score is shown in green (the first bar in each cluster). The scores of all people who have taken the scale on our site and who described themselves during registration as politically liberal are shown in the blue bars. The scores of people who described themselves as politically conservative are in red. Scores run from 1 (the lowest possible score, least belief in that construct) to 5 (the highest possible score).
Satisfaction with Life Scale
The scale is a measure of your general happiness level. Despite its simplicity, the scale has been found to do a good job of measuring people’s general state of “subjective well-being.” It is widely used, in many nations.
We are interested in measuring happiness on this site because many studies have found that religious people are happier than non-believers, and some have found that politically conservative people are slightly happier than are political liberals, even after controlling statistically for religiosity. A recent Gallup survey found that religiosity was associated with better mental health for Republicans, but it didn’t make a difference for Democrats. We want to investigate these complex relationships among happiness, morality, religion, and ideology.
In the graph below, your score is shown in green. The scores of all people who have taken the scale on our site and who say that they go to religious services never, or just a few times a year, are shown in blue. The scores of all people who have taken the scale on our site and who said (during registration) that they go to religious services a few times a month or more are shown in red. Scores run from 1 (the lowest possible score, least happy) to 7 (the highest possible score, most happy).
In addition, we asked you some questions on the second page about your mental health. That recent Gallup poll showed that conservatives and religious people report having better mental health when asked using a single question (“how would you rate your mental health?”). We want to see if their finding holds up using a more specific scale, so we asked you to report on a variety of symptoms related to depression and anxiety, which are the most common kinds of mental health symptoms that people report. In the graph below, your score is shown in green. High scores mean MORE mental health complaints. Scores run from 1 (the lowest possible score, no symptoms at all) to 5 (the highest possible score, people who responded “extremely” to all items). As before, the blue bar shows the score of the less religious people; the red bar shows the average score of the most religious people.
Implicit Happiness
The study you just completed included both a self-report and an implicit measure of well-being. The self-report measure of well-being was the Satisfaction With Life Scale, and the implicit measure was an Implicit Association Test (IAT) that compared the strength of automatic mental associations. In this version of the IAT, we investigated associations between the self-concept and the concepts of happiness and sadness.
The idea behind the IAT is that concepts with very closely related (vs. unrelated) mental representations are more easily and quickly responded to as a single unit. For example, if “me” and “happy” are strongly associated in one’s mind, it should be relatively easy to respond quickly to this pairing by pressing the “E” or “I” key. If “me” and “happy” are NOT strongly associated, it should be more difficult to respond quickly to this pairing. By comparing reaction times on this test, the IAT gives a relative measure of how strongly associated the two categories (Me, Not Me) are to mental representations of “happy” and “sad”. Each participant receives a single score, and your score appears below.
Your score on the IAT was 1.059.
Positive scores indicate that “happiness” associations with the self-concept are stronger (i.e., faster) than “sadness” associations, and a negative score indicates the opposite.
Your score appears in the graph below in green. The score of the average Liberal visitor to this site is shown in blue and the average Conservative visitor’s score is shown in red.
Comprehensive Justice Scale
The scale is a measure of your attitudes toward crime and punishment. Some of the items reflected a “progressive” and less punitive attitude toward criminals (for example agreeing with the statement that “punishment should be designed to rehabilitate offenders,” and being opposed to the death penalty). Other items reflected a more “traditional” attitude, including a willingness to use traditional forms of punishment, such as shaming or flogging. We grouped these two kinds of items together to give you a “progressive” and a “traditional” score in the first graph below. We call this the “comprehensive” justice scale because research on justice and punishment has usually taken either a liberal or conservative approach. We are trying to examine the broadest possible range of ideas and intuitions about what you think should happen to the offender, and the victim. Disagreements about crime and punishment have long been at the heart of the “culture war.” By linking your responses here to the information you gave us when you registered, or when you took other surveys, we hope to shed light on what kinds of people (not just liberals and conservatives) endorse what kinds of responses to crime, and why.
The graph below shows your scores (in green) on the items from the first page, compared to those of the average liberal (in blue) and the average conservative (in red) visitor to this website. The scale runs from 1 (lowest score) to 7 (highest score).
The second graph shows your results from the items on page 2, where we asked about “alternatives to prison.” This page should produce similar results to what you see from Page 1. We expect liberals to favor the more lenient and rehabilitative alternatives, and conservatives to favor the more punitive options. We are trying out various ways of asking these questions to see which format, or combination of formats, produces the best measurement of people’s attitudes.
Cultural Thought Styles
The graph below shows your percentage of intuitive pairings (in green) compared to those of the average liberal (in blue), the average moderate (in purple), the average conservative (in red), and the average libertarian (in gold) visitor to this website.
Low = formal; high = intuitive reasoning. Also, scores of zero are common. It simply means you chose all formal reasoning options.
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Lest you conclude that intuitiveness precludes knowledge and sound reasoning, look at the next three results (and read this).
Test Your Knowledge
Your score on the OCT is calculated by taking into account your familiarity with the real items (e.g., Bill Clinton) and subtracting how familiar you rated the false/fake items to be (e.g., Fred Gruneberg — my next door neighbor). Also, familiarity ratings of 1 to 4 are treated the same. So if you rated your familiarity with “Bill Clinton” as 1, 2, 3, or 4 then you scored a +1 for that item. And if you rated your familiarity with “Fred Gruneberg” as 1, 2, 3, or 4 then you scored a -1 for that item. If you were unfamiliar with any real or false items, your scores for those items are 0. A perfect score would be identifying all real items and not recognizing any of the false items.
The graph below shows your score on the OCT as it compares to others who have taken this survey on our website. Scores range from 0%-100% and higher values correspond to more correct responses to the OCT. Your score is shown in green, scores of the average liberal are in blue, and scores of the average conservative are in red.
Science and Research Knowledge
The scales you completed were designed to assess your familiarity with scientific research processes and your comfort with working with numerical information. The order in which you received them was randomized.
One scale uses questions from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) 2010 Science and Engineering Indicators, which is an effort to track public knowledge and attitudes toward science and technology trends in the U.S. and other countries. For this survey, the items pertaining to understanding statistics, how to read data charts, and conducting an experiment were used.
The other scale is the Subjective Numeracy Scale by Angela Fagerlin and colleagues, which measures individuals’ preference for numerical information. Numeracy (adapted from the term ‘literacy’) represents individuals’ ability to comprehend and use probabilities, ratios, and fractions. Traditional measures of numeracy ask people to perform mathematical operations, such as ‘If person A’s risk of getting a disease is 1% in 10 years, and person B’s risk is double that of A’s, what is B’s risk?’ However, some participants find these types of problems stressful and unpleasant, plus they are difficult to score in online studies. Subjective numeracy measures (like the scale you just took) are shown to be equally good measures of numeracy, without burdening participants.
U.S. Political Knowledge Test
The scale you completed was a General Political Knowledge scale for American politics that we developed and is based on work by Michael Delli Carpini, Scott Keeter, Milton Lodge, and Charles Taber.
The scale measures the factual knowledge people possess about politics. We used questions about three broad topics: 1) civics and what the government is and does (e.g. who has the final responsibility to decide if a law is constitutional or not?); 2) public officials or leaders (e.g. who is the current Speaker of the House?); and 3) political parties (e.g. which party is more conservative on a national scale?).
The idea behind this scale is that objective factual knowledge may be an important factor in studies about political issues and reasoning. It may be that people who are more informed about politics (whether they’re liberal or conservative) think and reason differently about moral or political issues than people who are less informed. For instance, are people who are more informed more or less likely to objectively evaluate political arguments? We suspect that, ironically, people with more political knowledge may be less objective when it comes to a number of information processes (see recommended reading below).
The graphs below show your scores (in green) compared to those of the average liberal (in blue), the average conservative (in red), and the average libertarian (in orange) visitor to this website. The first graph shows your score on the political knowledge scale in comparison to other liberals and conservatives and scores run from 0% (the lowest possible score) to 100% (the highest possible score*).
Libertarians, God bless them, are always looking for simple solutions to complex problems. Here, for example, is David Bernstein, writing at The Volokh Conspiracy:
I doubt [that] any two libertarians agree on the exact boundaries of libertarianism, but how’s this for a working definition: “A libertarian is someone who generally opposes government interference with and regulation of civil society, even when the result of such government action would be to clamp down on things the individual in question personally dislikes, finds offensive, or morally disapproves of.”
Thus, for example, a libertarian who hates smoking opposes smoking bans in private restaurants, a libertarian who thinks homosexual sodomy is immoral nevertheless opposes sodomy laws, a libertarian who finds certain forms of “hate speech” offensive still opposes hate speech laws, a libertarian who believes in eating natural foods opposes bans or special taxes on processed foods, and a libertarian who thinks that all employers should pay a living wage nevertheless opposes living wage legislation. It doesn’t matter whether the libertarian holds these positions because he believes in natural rights, for utilitarian reasons, or because he thinks God wants us to live in a libertarian society. [“How’s This for a Working Definition of ‘Libertarian’?”, February 26, 2015]
This reminds me of the title of a poem by A.E. Housman: “Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff.” Why is it stupid stuff? Because it omits an essential ingredient of liberty, which is line-drawing.
By Bernstein’s logic, one must conclude that anything goes; for example, a libertarian who hates murder, rape, theft, and fraud must oppose laws against such things. Bernstein, like many a libertarian, propounds a moral code that is devoid of morality.
Libertarianism is an ideology rooted in John Stuart Mill’s empty harm principle (a.k.a the non-aggression principle), about which I’ve written many times (e.g., here). Regarding ideology, I turn to Jean-François Revel:
As an a priori construction, formulated without regard to facts or ethics, ideology is distinct from science and philosophy on the one hand, and from religion and ethics on the other. Ideology is not science — which it pretends to be. Science accepts the results of the experiments it devises, whereas ideology systematically rejects empirical evidence. It is not moral philosophy — which it claims to have a monopoly on, while striving furiously to destroy the source and necessary conditions of morality: the free will of the individual. Ideology is not religion — to which it is often, and mistakenly, compared: for religion draws its meaning from faith in a transcendent reality, while ideology aims to perfect the world here below.
Ideology — that malignant invention of the human spirit’s dark side, an invention which has cost us dearly — has the singular property of causing zealots to project the structural features of their own mentality onto others. Ideologues cannot imagine that an objection to their abstract systems could come from any source other than a competing system.
All ideologies are aberrations. A sound and rational ideology cannot exist. Falsehood is intrinsic to ideology by virtue of cause, motivation and objective, which is to bring into being a fictional version of the human self — the “self,” at least, that has resolved no longer to accept reality as a source of information or a guide to action. [Last Exit to Utopia, pp. 52-53]
A key aspect of ideology — libertarian ideology included — is its studied dismissal of human nature. Arnold Kling notes, for example,
that humans in large societies have two natural desires that frustrate libertarians.
1. A desire for religion, defined as a set of rituals, norms, and affirmations that are shared by a group and which the group believes it is wrong not to share….
2. A desire for war. I think that it is in human nature to fantasize about battles against tribal enemies….
If these desires were to disappear, I believe that humans could live without a state. However, given these desires, the best approach for a peaceful large society is that which was undertaken in the U.S. when it was founded: freedom of religion guaranteed by the government, and a political system designed for peaceful succession and limitations on the power of any one political office….
I think that it is fine for libertarians to warn of the dangers of religion and to oppose war…. On other other hand, when libertarians assume away the desire for religion and war, their thinking becomes at best irrelevant and at worst nihilistic. [“Libertarians vs. Human Nature,” askblog, February 17, 2017]
In Madison’s words:
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. [The Federalist No. 51, February 6, 1788]
is not an historical period, but a process of social, psychological or spiritual development, unbound to time or place. Immanuel Kant defines “enlightenment” in his famous contribution to debate on the question in an essay entitled “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784), as humankind’s release from its self-incurred immaturity; “immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.” Expressing convictions shared among Enlightenment thinkers of widely divergent doctrines, Kant identifies enlightenment with the process of undertaking to think for oneself, to employ and rely on one’s own intellectual capacities in determining what to believe and how to act. Enlightenment philosophers from across the geographical and temporal spectrum tend to have a great deal of confidence in humanity’s intellectual powers, both to achieve systematic knowledge of nature and to serve as an authoritative guide in practical life. This confidence is generally paired with suspicion or hostility toward other forms or carriers of authority (such as tradition, superstition, prejudice, myth and miracles), insofar as these are seen to compete with the authority of one’s own reason and experience. Enlightenment philosophy tends to stand in tension with established religion, insofar as the release from self-incurred immaturity in this age, daring to think for oneself, awakening one’s intellectual powers, generally requires opposing the role of established religion in directing thought and action. The faith of the Enlightenment – if one may call it that – is that the process of enlightenment, of becoming progressively self-directed in thought and action through the awakening of one’s intellectual powers, leads ultimately to a better, more fulfilled human existence.
The Enlightenment’s great flaw — probably fatal to Western civilization — is found in the contrast between the two passages that are highlighted in bold, italic type. I will not go on at length about the Enlightenment because I have addressed it elsewhere, directly and by implication (e.g., here, here, here, here, eighth item here, here, here, and here).
Here is an apt passage from Richard Fernandez’s review of Michael Walsh’s The Fiery Angel:
Deleting God, patriotism, heroic myths and taboos and all the “useless stuff” from Western culture turns out to be as harmless as navigating to the system folder … , “selecting all,” and pressing delete. Far from being clever, it leads to consequences far greater than anyone anticipated.
The Enlightenment reminds me of O.J. Simpson’s bloody glove. A single “fact” — that the glove seemed tight on O.J.’s hand — was instrumental in the acquittal of Simpson in the murder of his ex-wife and a friend of hers. This sliver of unreasonable doubt obscured the overwhelming evidence against Simpson. Later, he was found responsible for the murders in a civil trial, and then all but admitted his guilt in a book.
Robin Hanson makes a mistake [here] that is common to “rationalists”: He examines every thread of human behavior for “reasonableness.”
It is the fabric of human behavior that matters, not each thread. Any thread, if pulled out of the fabric, might look defective under the microscope of “reason.” But pulling threads out of a fabric — one at a time — can weaken a strong and richly textured tapestry.
Whether a particular society is, in fact, a “strong and richly textured tapestry” is for its members to determine, through voice and exit. The “reasonableness” of a society’s norms (if they are voluntarily evolved) should be judged by whether those norms — on the whole — foster liberty (as explained here), not by the whether each norm, taken in isolation, is “reasonable” to a pundit inveighing from on high.
UPDATE … : Hanson has updated his post…. But he digs himself a deeper, rationalistic hole when he says
I’ll now only complain about [Russ Roberts’s] bias to hold his previous beliefs to a lower standard than he holds posssible alternatives.
He should complain, rather, about his own, too-easy willingness to reject the wisdom of inherited beliefs on the basis of statistical analysis.
The Age of Enlightenment is the age of empty logic and the nirvana fallacy.
I am far from nostalgic about my home town. But it’s still my home town, and I often revisit it in my mind’s eye.
I revisit with special pleasure the first home that I can remember — where I lived from age 1 to age 7 — and the first of the three red-brick school houses that I attended.
I haven’t been to my home town in eight years. The occasion was the funeral of my mother, who lived to the age of 99.
I may not go back again. But it’s still my home town.
I think of it that way not only because I grew up there but also because it’s a “real” place: a small, mostly run-down, Midwestern city with a population of about 30,000 — the largest city in a county that lies beyond the fringes of the nearest metropolitan area.
Perhaps I’m nostalgic about it, after all, because “real” places like my home town seem to be vanishing from the face of America. By real, I mean places where (real) people still work with their hands; live in houses that are older than they are (houses that have fewer bathrooms than bedrooms); mow their own lawns, clean their own homes, and make their own meals (except when they partake of the American Legion fish fry or go to a Chick-Fil-A); bowl, hunt, fish, stroll their neighborhoods and know their neighbors (who have been their neighbors for decades); read Reader’s Digest,Popular Mechanics, and romance novels; go to bars that lack ferns and chrome; prefer Fox News and country music to NPR, CNN, MSNBC, and hip-hop; go to church and say grace before meals; and vote for politicians who don’t think of real people as racists, ignoramuses, gun nuts, or religious zealots (“deplorables”, in other words).
In fact, America is (or was) those real places with real people in them. And it is vanishing with them.
I have lived outside the real world of real people for a very long time, but the older I get, the more I miss it.
You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood … back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.
I was reminded of Wolfe’s insight by Making It, Norman Podhoretz‘s memoir that stirred up the literati of New York City. According to Jennifer Schuessler (“Norman Podhoretz: Making Enemies”, Publisher’s Weekly, January 25, 1999), Podhoretz’s
frank 1967 account of the lust for success that propelled him from an impoverished childhood in Brooklyn to the salons of Manhattan, … scandalized the literary establishment that once hailed him as something of a golden boy. His agent wouldn’t represent it. His publisher refused to publish it. And just about everybody hated it. In 1972, Podhoretz’s first high-profile personal squabble, with Random House’s Jason Epstein, went public when the New York TimesMagazine published an article called “Why Norman and Jason Aren’t Talking.” By 1979, when Podhoretz published Breaking Ranks, a memoir of his conversion from radicalism to militant conservatism, it seemed just about everybody wasn’t talking to Norman.
Next month, Podhoretz will add another chapter to his personal war chronicle with the publication of Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer. In this short, sharp, unabashedly name-dropping book, Podhoretz revisits the old battles over communism and the counterculture, not to mention his bad reviews. But for all his talk of continued struggle against the “regnant leftist culture that pollutes the spiritual and cultural air we all breathe,” the book is a frankly nostalgic, even affectionate look back at the lost world of “the Family,” the endlessly quarreling but close-knit group of left-leaning intellectuals that gathered in the 1940s and ’50s around such magazines as the Partisan Review and Commentary.
Given this bit of background, you shouldn’t be surprised that it was Podhoretz who wrote this about Barack Obama (which I quote in “Presidential Treason“):
His foreign policy, far from a dismal failure, is a brilliant success as measured by what he intended all along to accomplish….
… As a left-wing radical, Mr. Obama believed that the United States had almost always been a retrograde and destructive force in world affairs. Accordingly, the fundamental transformation he wished to achieve here was to reduce the country’s power and influence. And just as he had to fend off the still-toxic socialist label at home, so he had to take care not to be stuck with the equally toxic “isolationist” label abroad.
This he did by camouflaging his retreats from the responsibilities bred by foreign entanglements as a new form of “engagement.” At the same time, he relied on the war-weariness of the American people and the rise of isolationist sentiment (which, to be sure, dared not speak its name) on the left and right to get away with drastic cuts in the defense budget, with exiting entirely from Iraq and Afghanistan, and with “leading from behind” or using drones instead of troops whenever he was politically forced into military action.
The consequent erosion of American power was going very nicely when the unfortunately named Arab Spring presented the president with several juicy opportunities to speed up the process. First in Egypt, his incoherent moves resulted in a complete loss of American influence, and now, thanks to his handling of the Syrian crisis, he is bringing about a greater diminution of American power than he probably envisaged even in his wildest radical dreams.
For this fulfillment of his dearest political wishes, Mr. Obama is evidently willing to pay the price of a sullied reputation. In that sense, he is by his own lights sacrificing himself for what he imagines is the good of the nation of which he is the president, and also to the benefit of the world, of which he loves proclaiming himself a citizen….
No doubt he will either deny that anything has gone wrong, or failing that, he will resort to his favorite tactic of blaming others—Congress or the Republicans or Rush Limbaugh. But what is also almost certain is that he will refuse to change course and do the things that will be necessary to restore U.S. power and influence.
And so we can only pray that the hole he will go on digging will not be too deep for his successor to pull us out, as Ronald Reagan managed to do when he followed a president into the White House whom Mr. Obama so uncannily resembles. [“Obama’s Successful Foreign Failure,” The Wall Street Journal, September 8, 2013]
Though I admire Podhoretz’s willingness to follow reality to its destination in conservatism — because I made the same journey myself — I am drawn to his memoir by another similarity between us. In the Introduction to the re-issue of Making It, Terry Teachout writes:
Making It is never more memorable than when it describes its author’s belated discovery of “the brutal bargain” to which he was introduced by “Mrs. K.,” a Brooklyn schoolteacher who took him in hand and showed him that the precocious but rough-edged son of working-class Jews from Galicia could aspire to greater things — so long as he turned his back on the ghettoized life of his émigré parents and donned the genteel manners of her own class. Not until much later did he realize that the bargain she offered him went even deeper than that:
She was saying that because I was a talented boy, a better class of people stood ready to admit me into their ranks. But only on one condition: I had to signify by my general deportment that I acknowledged them as superior to the class of people among whom I happened to have been born. . . . what I did not understand, not in the least then and not for a long time afterward, was that in matters having to do with “art” and “culture” (the “life of the mind,” as I learned to call it at Columbia), I was being offered the very same brutal bargain and accepting it with the wildest enthusiasm.
So he did, and he never seriously doubted that he had done the only thing possible by making himself over into an alumnus of Columbia and Cambridge and a member of the educated, art-loving upper middle class. At the same time, though, he never forgot what he had lost by doing so, having acquired in the process “a distaste for the surroundings in which I was bred, and ultimately (God forgive me) even for many of the people I loved.”
It’s not an unfamiliar story. But it’s a story that always brings a pang to my heart because it reminds me too much of my own attitudes and behavior as I “climbed the ladder” from the 1960s to the 1990s. Much as I regret the growing gap between me and my past, I have learned from experience that I can’t go back, and don’t want to go back.
What happened to me is probably what happened to Norman Podhoretz and tens of millions of other Americans. We didn’t abandon our past; we became what was written in our genes.
This mini-memoir is meant to illustrate that thesis. It is aimed at those readers who can’t relate to a prominent New Yorker, but who might see themselves in a native of flyover country.
My “ghetto” wasn’t a Jewish enclave like Podhoretz’s Brownsville, but an adjacent pair of small cities in the eastern flatlands of Michigan, both of them predominantly white and working-class. They are not suburbs of Detroit — as we used to say emphatically — nor of any other largish city. We were geographically and culturally isolated from the worst and best that “real” cities have to offer in the way of food, entertainment, and ethnic variety.
My parents’ roots (and thus my cultural inheritance) were in small cities, towns and villages in Michigan and Ontario. Life for my parents, as for their forbears, revolved around making a living, “getting ahead” by owning progressively nicer (but never luxurious) homes and cars, socializing with friends over card games, and keeping their homes and yards neat and clean.
All quite unexceptional, or so it seemed to me as I was growing up. It only began to seem exceptional when I became the first scion of the the family tree to “go away to college”, as we used to say. (“Going away” as opposed to attending a local junior college, as did my father’s younger half-brother about eight years before I matriculated.)
Soon after my arrival on the campus of a large university, whose faculty and students hailed from around the world, I began to grasp the banality of my upbringing in comparison to the cultural richness and sordid reality of the wider world. It was a richness and reality of which my home-town contemporaries and I knew little because we were raised in the days of Ozzie and Harriet — before the Beatles, Woodstock, bearded men with pony-tails, shacking up as a social norm, widespread drug use, and the vivid depiction of sex in all of its natural and unnatural variety.
My upbringing, like that of my home-town contemporaries was almost apolitical. If we overheard our parents talking about politics, we overheard a combination of views that today seems unlikely: suspicion of government; skepticism about unions (my father had to join one in order to work), disdain for “fat cats”; sympathy for “the little guy”; and staunch patriotism.
And then, as a student at a cosmopolitan Midwestern university (that isn’t an oxymoron), I began to learn — in and out of class. The out-of-class lessons came through conversations with students whose backgrounds differed greatly from mine, including two who had been displaced persons in the wake of World War II. My first-year roommate was a mild-mannered Iranian doctoral student whose friends (some of them less mild-mannered) spoke openly about the fear in which Iranians lived because of SAVAK‘s oppressive practices. In my final year as an undergraduate I befriended some married graduate students, one of whom (an American) had spent several years in Libya as a geologist for an American oil company and had returned to the States with an Italian wife.
One of the off-campus theaters specialized in foreign films, which I had never before seen, and which exposed me to people, places, attitudes, and ideas that were intellectually foreign to me, but which I viewed avidly and with acceptance. My musical education was advanced by a friendship with a music major, through whom I met other music majors and learned much about classical music and, of all things, Gilbert and Sullivan. One of the music majors was a tenor who had to learn The Mikado, and did so by playing a recording of it over and over. I became hooked, and to this day can recite large chunks of the libretto. I used to sing them, but my singing days are over.
Through my classes — and often through unassigned reading — I learned how to speak and read French (fluently, those many years ago), and ingested various-sized doses of philosophy, history (ancient and modern), sociology, accounting (the third of four majors), and several other things that escape me at the moment.
Through economics (my fourth and final major), I learned (but didn’t then question), the contradictory tenets of microeconomics (how markets work to allocate resources and satisfy wants efficiently) and macroeconomics (then dominated by the idea of government’s indispensable role in the economic order). But I was drawn in by the elegance of economic theory, and mistook its spurious precision for deep understanding. Though I have since rejected macroeconomic orthodoxy (e.g., see this).
My collegiate “enlightenment” was mild by today’s standards, but revelatory to a small-city boy. And I was among the still relatively small fraction of high-school graduates who went away to college. So my exposure to a variety of people, cultures, and ideas immediately set me apart — apart not only from my parents and the members of their generation, but also apart from most of the members of my own generation.
What set me apart more than anything was my loss of faith. In my second year I went from ostentatiously devout Catholicism to steadfast agnosticism in a span of weeks. I can’t reconstruct the transition at a remove of almost 60 years, but I suspect that it involved a mixture of delayed adolescent rebellion, a reckoning (based on things I had learned) that the roots of religion lay in superstition, and a genetic predisposition toward skepticism (my father was raised Protestant but scorned religion in his mild way). At any rate, when I walked out of church in the middle of Mass one Sunday morning, I felt as if I had relieved myself of a heavy burden and freed my mind for the pursuit of knowledge.
The odd thing is that, to this day, I retain feelings of loyalty to the Church of my youth — the Church of the Latin Mass (weekly on Sunday morning, not afternoon or evening), strict abstinence from meat on Friday, confession on Saturday, fasting from midnight on Sunday (if one were in a state of grace and fit for Holy Communion), and the sharp-tongued sisters with sharp-edged rulers who taught Catechism on Saturday mornings (parochial school wasn’t in my parents’ budget). I have therefore been appalled, successively, by Vatican Council II, most of the popes of the past 60 years (John Paul II and Benedict XVI excepted), the various ways in which being a Catholic has become easier, and (especially) the egregious left-wing babbling of Francis. And yet I remain an agnostic who only in recent years has acknowledged the logical necessity of a Creator, but probably not the kind of Creator who is at the center of formal religions. Atheism — especially of the strident variety — is merely religion turned upside down; a belief in something that is beyond proof; I scorn it.
To complete this aside, I must address the canard peddled by strident atheists and left-wingers (there’s a lot of overlap) about the evil done in the name of religion, I say this: Religion doesn’t make fanatics, it attracts them (in relatively small numbers), though some Islamic sects seem to be bent on attracting and cultivating fanaticism. Far more fanatical and attractive to fanatics are the “religions” of communism, socialism (including Hitler’s version, addressed in this post), and progressivism (witness the snowflakes and oppressors who now dominate the academy). I doubt that the number of murders committed in the name of religion amounts to one-tenth of the number of murders committed by three notable anti-religionists: Hitler (yes, Hitler), Stalin, and Mao. I also believe — with empirical justification — that religion is a bulwark of liberty; whereas, the cult of libertarianism — usually practiced by agnostics and atheists — is not (e.g., this post and the others linked to therein).
It’s time to return to the chronological thread of my narrative. The main thing to note here is what I learned during the early mid-life crisis which took me away from the D.C. rat race for about three years, as owner-operator of a (very) small publishing company in a rural part of New York State.
In sum, I learned to work hard. Before my business venture, I had coasted along using my intelligence (but not a lot of energy), nevertheless earning praise and good raises at a defense think-tank. I was seldom engaged it what I was doing: the work seemed superficial and unconnected to anything real to me.
That changed when I became a business owner. I had to meet a weekly deadline or lose advertisers (and my source of income), master several new skills involved in publishing a weekly “throwaway” (as the free Pennysaver was sometimes called), and work six days a week with only two brief respites in three years. Something clicked, and when I gave up the publishing business and returned to the D.C. area and the think-tank, I kept on working hard — as if my livelihood depended on it.
And it did. Much as I had loved being my own boss, I wanted to live and retire more comfortably than I could on the meager income that flowed uncertainly from the Pennysaver. (Incentives matter.) So in the 18 years after my return to the think-tank I not only kept working hard and with fierce concentration, but I developed (or discovered) a ruthless streak that propelled me into the upper echelon of the think-tank.
And in my three years away from the D.C. area I also learned, for the first time, that I couldn’t go home again.
I was attracted to the publishing business because of its location in a somewhat picturesque village. The village was large enough to sport a movie theater, two super markets, and a variety of commercial establishments, including restaurants, shoe stores, clothing stores, jewelers, a Rite-Aid drug store, and even a J.J. Newberry dime store. It also had many large, well-kept homes All in all, it appealed to me because, replete with a “real” main street, it reminded me of the first small city in which I grew up.
But after working and associating with highly educated professionals, and after experiencing the vast variety of restaurants, museums, parks, and entertainment of the D.C. area, I found the village and its natives dull. Not only dull, but also distant. They were humorless and closed to outsiders. It came to me that the small cities in which I had grown up were the same way. My memories of them were distorted because they were memories of a pre-college boy who had yet to experience life in the big city. They were memories of a boy whose life centered on his parents and a beloved grandmother (who lived in a small village of similarly golden memory).
You can’t go home again, metaphorically, if you’ve gone away and lived a different life. You can’t because you are a different person than you were when you were growing up. This lesson was reinforced at the 30-year reunion of my high-school graduating class, which occurred several years after my business venture and a few years after I had risen into the upper echelon of the think-tank.
There I was, with my wife and sister (who graduated from the same high school eight years after I did), happily anticipating an evening of laughter and shared memories. We were seated at a table with two fellows who had been good friends of mine (and their wives, whom I didn’t know). It was deadly boring; the silences yawned; we had nothing to say to each other. One of the old friends, who had been on the wagon, was so unnerved by the forced bonhomie of the occasion that he fell off the wagon. Attempts at mingling after dinner were awkward. My wife and sister readily agreed to abandon the event. We drove several miles to an elegant, river-front hotel where we had a few drinks on the deck. Thus the evening ended on a cheery note, despite the cool, damp drizzle. (A not untypical August evening in Michigan.)
I continued to return to Michigan for another 27 years, making what might be my final trip for the funeral of my mother.. But I went just to see my parents and siblings, and then only out of duty.
The golden memories of my youth remain with me, but I long ago gave up the idea of reliving the past that is interred in those memories.
You know what happens to a once-vibrant city when criminals are allowed to run rampant and it adopts the “Blue model”: bloated city government, extravagant salaries and pensions, corrupt dealings with contractors, oppressive regulation of businesses, flight to the suburbs, higher taxes on the remaining citizens and businesses, more flight to the suburbs, etc., etc., etc.
If you don’t what happens, here it is:
That’s Detroit. A city 50 miles from where I grew up but a light-year away in character from the well-run, low-crime cities of my youth.
Detroit’s not the only major city to experience a significant decline. But, so far, it’s the worst of the lot.
Portland seems to be riding the same death spiral.
At my previous blog, Politics & Prosperity, I published 26 posts in a series that I called “Not-So-Random Thoughts”. The hook upon which the series hung was my discovery of pieces by other writers on subjects that I had addressed at my blog. The entries in the series, though they date back to 2011, seem to have retained their freshness, so I am republishing them here, with some light editing. I will leave the links as they are in the original posts, so some of them may be broken.
[Stephen] Meyer … argued [in a talk at the University Club in D.C.] that biological evolutionary theory, which “attempts to explain how new forms of life evolved from simpler pre-existing forms,” faces formidable difficulties. In particular, the modern version of Darwin’s theory, neo-Darwinism, also has an information problem.
Mutations, or copying errors in the DNA, are analogous to copying errors in digital code, and they supposedly provide the grist for natural selection. But, Meyer said: “What we know from all codes and languages is that when specificity of sequence is a condition of function, random changes degrade function much faster than they come up with something new.”…
The problem is comparable to opening a big combination lock. He asked the audience to imagine a bike lock with ten dials and ten digits per dial. Such a lock would have 10 billion possibilities with only one that works. But the protein alphabet has 20 possibilities at each site, and the average protein has about 300 amino acids in sequence….
Remember: Not just any old jumble of amino acids makes a protein. Chimps typing at keyboards will have to type for a very long time before they get an error-free, meaningful sentence of 150 characters. “We have a small needle in a huge haystack.” Neo-Darwinism has not solved this problem, Meyer said. “There’s a mathematical rigor to this which has not been a part of the so-called evolution-creation debate.”…
“[L]eading U.S. biologists, including evolutionary biologists, are saying we need a new theory of evolution,” Meyer said. Many increasingly criticize Darwinism, even if they don’t accept design. One is the cell biologist James Shapiro of the University of Chicago. His new book is Evolution: A View From the 21st Century. He’s “looking for a new evolutionary theory.” David Depew (Iowa) and Bruce Weber (Cal State) recently wrote in Biological Theory that Darwinism “can no longer serve as a general framework for evolutionary theory.” Such criticisms have mounted in the technical literature. (Tom Bethell, “Intelligent Design at the University Club”, The American Spectator, May 2012)
And this:
[I]t is startling to realize that the entire brief for demoting human beings, and organisms in general, to meaningless scraps of molecular machinery — a demotion that fuels the long-running science-religion wars and that, as “shocking” revelation, supposedly stands on a par with Copernicus’s heliocentric proposal — rests on the vague conjunction of two scarcely creditable concepts: the randomness of mutations and the fitness of organisms. And, strangely, this shocking revelation has been sold to us in the context of a descriptive biological literature that, from the molecular level on up, remains almost nothing buta documentation of the meaningfully organized, goal-directed stories of living creatures.
Here, then, is what the advocates of evolutionary mindlessness and meaninglessness would have us overlook. We must overlook, first of all, the fact that organisms are masterful participants in, and revisers of, their own genomes, taking a leading position in the most intricate, subtle, and intentional genomic “dance” one could possibly imagine. And then we must overlook the way the organism responds intelligently, and in accord with its own purposes, to whatever it encounters in its environment, including the environment of its own body, and including what we may prefer to view as “accidents.” Then, too, we are asked to ignore not only the living, reproducing creatures whose intensely directed lives provide the only basis we have ever known for the dynamic processes of evolution, but also all the meaning of the larger environment in which these creatures participate — an environment compounded of all the infinitely complex ecological interactions that play out in significant balances, imbalances, competition, cooperation, symbioses, and all the rest, yielding the marvelously varied and interwoven living communities we find in savannah and rainforest, desert and meadow, stream and ocean, mountain and valley. And then, finally, we must be sure to pay no heed to the fact that the fitness, against which we have assumed our notion of randomness could be defined, is one of the most obscure, ill-formed concepts in all of science.
Overlooking all this, we are supposed to see — somewhere — blind, mindless, random, purposeless automatisms at the ultimate explanatory root of all genetic variation leading to evolutionary change. [Stephen L. Talbott, “Evolution and the Illusion of Randomness”, The New Atlantis, Fall 2011]
My point is not to suggest that that the writers are correct in their conjectures. Rather, the force of their conjectures shows that supposedly “settled” science is (a) always far from settled (on big questions, at least) and (b) necessarily incomplete because it can never reach ultimate truths.
Martin was acting suspiciously and smelled of marijuana.
Zimmerman was rightly concerned about Martin’s behavior, given the history of break-ins in Zimmerman’s neighborhood.
Martin attacked Zimmerman, had him on the ground, was punching his face, and had broken his nose.
Zimmerman shot Martin in self-defense.
Whether the encounter was “ultimately avoidable”, as a police report asserts, is beside the point. Zimmerman acted in self-defense, and the case against him should have been dismissed. The special prosecutor should have been admonished by the court for having succumbed to media and mob pressure in bringing a charge of second-degree murder against Zimmerman.
What we have here is the same old story: There is a black “victim”, which leads to a media frenzy to blame whites (or a “white Hispanic”), without benefit of all relevant facts. The facts then often exonerate whites. To paraphrase Shakespeare: The first thing we should do after the revolution is kill all the pundits (along with the lawyers).
Creepy People
Exhibit A is Richard Thaler, a self-proclaimed libertarian who is nothing of the kind. Thaler defends the individual mandate that is at the heart of Obamacare (by implication, at least), when he attacks the “slippery slope” argument against it. Annon Simon nails Thaler:
Richard Thaler’s NYT piece from a few days ago, Slippery-Slope Logic, Applied to Health Care, takes conservatives to task for relying on a “slippery slope” fallacy to argue that Obamacare’s individual mandate should be invalidated. Thaler believes that the hypothetical broccoli mandate — used by opponents of Obamacare to show that upholding the mandate would require the Court to acknowledge congressional authority to do all sorts of other things — would never be adopted by Congress or upheld by a federal court. This simplistic view of the Obamacare litigation obscures legitimate concerns over the amount of power that the Obama administration is claiming for the federal government. It also ignores the way creative judges can use previous cases as building blocks to justify outcomes that were perhaps unimaginable when those building blocks were initially formed….
[N]ot all slippery-slope claims are fallacious. The Supreme Court’s decisions are often informed by precedent, and, as every law student learned when studying the Court’s privacy cases, a decision today could be used by a judge ten years from now to justify outcomes no one had in mind.
In 1965, the Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut, referencing penumbras and emanations, recognized a right to privacy in marriage that mandated striking down an anti-contraception law.
Seven years later, in Eisenstadt v. Baird, this right expanded to individual privacy, because after all, a marriage is made of individuals, and “[i]f the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual . . . to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.”
By 1973 in Roe v. Wade, this precedent, which had started out as a right recognized in marriage, had mutated into a right to abortion that no one could really trace to any specific textual provision in the Constitution. Slippery slope anyone?
This also happened in Lawrence v. Texas in 2003, where the Supreme Court struck down an anti-sodomy law. The Court explained that the case did not involve gay marriage, and Justice O’Connor’s concurrence went further, distinguishing gay marriage from the case at hand. Despite those pronouncements, later decisions enshrining gay marriage as a constitutionally protected right have relied upon Lawrence. For instance, Goodridge v. Department of Public Health (Mass. 2003) cited Lawrence 9 times, Varnum v. Brien (Iowa 2009) cited Lawrence 4 times, and Perry v. Brown (N.D. Cal, 2010) cited Lawrence 9 times.
However the Court ultimately rules, there is no question that this case will serve as a major inflection point in our nation’s debate about the size and scope of the federal government. I hope it serves to clarify the limits on congressional power, and not as another stepping stone on the path away from limited, constitutional government. [“The Supreme Court’s Slippery Slope”, National Review Online, May 17, 2012]
Simon could have mentioned Wickard v. Filburn (1942), in which the Supreme Court brought purely private, intrastate activity within the reach of Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce. The downward slope from Wickard v. Filburn to today’s intrusive regulatory regime has been been not merely slippery but precipitous.
Then there is Brian Leiter, some of whose statist musings I have addressed in the past. It seems that Leiter has taken to defending the idiotic Elizabeth Warren for her convenient adoption of a Native American identity. Todd Zywicki tears a new one for Leiter:
I was out of town most of last week and I wasn’t planning on blogging any more on the increasingly bizarre saga of Elizabeth Warren’s claim to Native American ancestry, which as of the current moment appears to be entirely unsubstantiated. But I was surprised to see Brian Leiter’s post doubling-down in his defense of Warren–and calling me a “Stalinist” to boot (although I confess it is not clear why or how he is using that term). So I hope you will indulge me while I respond.
First, let me say again what I expressed at the outset–I have known from highly-credible sources for a decade that in the past Warren identified herself as a Native American in order to put herself in a position to benefit from hiring preferences (I am certain that Brian knows this now too). She was quite outspoken about it at times in the past and, as her current defenses have suggested, she believed that she was entitled to claim it. So there would have been no reason for her to not identify as such and in fact she was apparently quite unapologetic about it at the time….
Second, Brian seems to believe for some reason that the issue here is whether Warren actually benefited from a hiring preference. Of course it is not (as my post makes eminently clear). The issue I raised is whether Warren made assertions as part of the law school hiring process in order to put herself in a position to benefit from a hiring preference for which she had no foundation….
Third, regardless of why she did it, Warren herself actually had no verifiable basis for her self-identification as Native American. At the very least her initial claim was grossly reckless and with no objective foundation–it appears that she herself has never had any foundation for the claim beyond “family lore” and her “high cheekbones.”… Now it turns out that the New England Historical Genealogical Society, which had been the source for the widely-reported claim that she might be 1/32 Cherokee, has rescinded its earlier conclusion and now says “We have no proof that Elizabeth Warren’s great great great grandmother O.C. Sarah Smith either is or is not of Cherokee descent.” The story adds, “Their announcement came in the wake of an official report from an Oklahoma county clerk that said a document purporting to prove Warren’s Cherokee roots — her great great great grandmother’s marriage license application — does not exist.” A Cherokee genealogist has similarly stated that she can find no evidence to support Warren’s claim. At this point her claim appears to be entirely unsupported as an objective matter and it appears that she herself had no basis for it originally.
Fourth, Brian’s post also states the obvious–that there is plenty of bad blood between Elizabeth and myself. But, of course, the only reason that this issue is interesting and relevant today is because Warren is running for the U.S. Senate and is the most prominent law professor in America at this moment.
So, I guess I’ll conclude by asking the obvious question: if a very prominent conservative law professor (say, for example, John Yoo) had misrepresented himself throughout his professorial career in the manner that Elizabeth Warren has would Brian still consider it to be “the non-issue du jour“? Really?
For another insight into Leiter’s character, read this and weep not for him.
Tea Party Sell-Outs
Business as usual in Washington:
[T]he Club for Growth released a study of votes cast in 2011 by the 87 Republicans elected to the House in November 2010. The Club found that “In many cases, the rhetoric of the so-called “Tea Party” freshmen simply didn’t match their records.” Particularly disconcerting is the fact that so many GOP newcomers cast votes against spending cuts.
The study comes on the heels of three telling votes taken last week in the House that should have been slam-dunks for members who possess the slightest regard for limited government and free markets. Alas, only 26 of the 87 members of the “Tea Party class” voted to defund both the Economic Development Administration and the president’s new Advanced Manufacturing Technology Consortia program (see my previous discussion of these votes here) and against reauthorizing the Export-Import Bank (see my colleague Sallie James’s excoriation of that vote here).
I assembled the following table, which shows how each of the 87 freshman voted. The 26 who voted for liberty in all three cases are highlighted. Only 49 percent voted to defund the EDA. Only 56 percent voted to defund a new corporate welfare program requested by the Obama administration. And only a dismal 44 percent voted against reauthorizing “Boeing’s bank.” That’s pathetic. [Tad DeHaven, “Freshman Republicans Switch from Tea to Kool-Aid”, Cato@Liberty, May 17, 2012]
Lesson: Never trust a politician who seeks a position of power, unless that person earns trust by divesting the position of power.
Technocracy, Externalities, and Statism
From a review of Robert Frank’s The Darwin Economy:
In many ways, economics is the discipline best suited to the technocratic mindset. This has nothing to do with its traditional subject matter. It is not about debating how to produce goods and services or how to distribute them. Instead, it relates to how economics has emerged as an approach that distances itself from democratic politics and provides little room for human agency.
Anyone who has done a high-school course in economics is likely to have learned the basics of its technocratic approach from the start. Students have long been taught that economics is a ‘positive science’ – one based on facts rather than values. Politicians are entitled to their preferences, so the argument went, but economists are supposed to give them impartial advice based on an objective examination of the facts.
More recently this approach has been taken even further. The supposedly objective role of the technocrat-economist has become supreme, while the role of politics has been sidelined….
The starting point of The Darwin Economy is what economists call the collective action problem: the divergence between individual and collective interests. A simple example is a fishermen fishing in a lake. For each individual, it might be rational to catch as many fish as possible, but if all fishermen follow the same path the lake will eventually be empty. It is therefore deemed necessary to find ways to negotiate this tension between individual and group interests.
Those who have followed the discussion of behavioural economics will recognise that this is an alternative way of viewing humans as irrational. Behavioural economists focus on individuals behaving in supposedly irrational ways. For example, they argue that people often do not invest enough to secure themselves a reasonable pension. For Frank, in contrast, individuals may behave rationally but the net result of group behaviour can still be irrational….
… From Frank’s premises, any activity considered harmful by experts could be deemed illegitimate and subjected to punitive measures….
[I]t is … wrong to assume that there is no more scope for economic growth to be beneficial. Even in the West, there is a long way to go before scarcity is limited. This is not just a question of individuals having as many consumer goods as they desire – although that has a role. It also means having the resources to provide as many airports, art galleries, hospitals, power stations, roads, schools, universities and other facilities as are needed. There is still ample scope for absolute improvements in living standards…. [Daniel Ben-ami, “Delving into the Mind of the Technocrat”, The Spiked Review of Books, February 2012′]
There is much to disagree with in the review, but the quoted material is right on. It leads me to quote myself:
[L]ife is full of externalities — positive and negative. They often emanate from the same event, and cannot be separated. State action that attempts to undo negative externalities usually results in the negation or curtailment of positive ones. In terms of the preceding example, state action often is aimed at forcing the attractive woman to be less attractive, thus depriving quietly appreciative men of a positive externality, rather than penalizing the crude man if his actions cross the line from mere rudeness to assault.
The main argument against externalities is that they somehow result in something other than a “social optimum.” This argument is pure, economistic hokum. It rests on the unsupportable belief in a social-welfare function, which requires the balancing (by an omniscient being, I suppose) of the happiness and unhappiness that results from every action that affects another person, either directly or indirectly….
A believer in externalities might respond by saying that they are of “economic” importance only as they are imposed on bystanders as a spillover from economic transactions, as in the case of emissions from a power plant that can cause lung damage in susceptible persons. Such a reply is of a kind that only an omniscient being could make with impunity. What privileges an economistic thinker to say that the line of demarcation between relevant and irrelevant acts should be drawn in a certain place? The authors of campus speech codes evidently prefer to draw the line in such a way as to penalize the behavior of the crude man in the above example. Who is the economistic thinker to say that the authors of campus speech codes have it wrong? And who is the legalistic thinker to say that speech should be regulated by deferring to the “feelings” that it arouses in persons who may hear or read it?
Despite the intricacies that I have sketched, negative externalities are singled out for attention and rectification, to the detriment of social and economic intercourse. Remove the negative externalities of electric-power generation and you make more costly (and even inaccessible) a (perhaps the) key factor in America’s economic growth in the past century. Try to limit the supposed negative externality of human activity known as “greenhouse gases” and you limit the ability of humans to cope with that externality (if it exists) through invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Limit the supposed negative externality of “offensive” speech and you quickly limit the range of ideas that may be expressed in political discourse. Limit the supposed externalities of suburban sprawl and you, in effect, sentence people to suffer the crime, filth, crowding, contentiousness, heat-island effects, and other externalities of urban living.
The real problem is not externalities but economistic and legalistic reactions to them….
The main result of rationalistic thinking — because it yields vote-worthy slogans and empty promises to fix this and that “problem” — is the aggrandizement of the state, to the detriment of civil society.
The fundamental error of rationalists is to believe that “problems” call for collective action, and to identify collective action with state action. They lack the insight and imagination to understand that the social beings whose voluntary, cooperative efforts are responsible for mankind’s vast material progress are perfectly capable of adapting to and solving “problems,” and that the intrusions of the state simply complicate matters, when not making them worse. True collective action is found in voluntary social and economic intercourse, the complex, information-rich content of which rationalists cannot fathom. They are as useless as a blind man who is shouting directions to an Indy 500 driver….
When I entered college [in 1958], I was among the 28 percent of high-school graduates then attending college. It was evident to me that about half of my college classmates didn’t belong in an institution of higher learning. Despite that, the college-enrollment rate among high-school graduates has since doubled.
American taxpayers should be up in arms over the subsidization of an industry that wastes their money on the useless education of masses of indeducable persons. Then there is the fact that taxpayers are forced to subsidize the enemies of liberty who populate university faculties.
I pray that the Supreme Court will decide (in Biden v. Nebraska) that taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to repay $500 billion in loans to students who foolishly believed that “higher education” would make them smarter (it won’t) and enable them to earn more money (that myth has been busted).
It is by now old news that Scott Adams has been “cancelled” for a “racist rant”. Why did Adams say what he said, and will he succeed in his purpose? Some relevant posts are here, here, and here.
I’m going to focus on the charge of racism. The word has come to stand for something other than its traditional meaning, which is this:
There is a superior race (usually that of the believer in such a thing), and other races are inferior to it (or another, particular, race is inferior to it). Persons of inferior races are to be detested, feared, subjugated, or eliminated. They are not to be associated with unless they are in a subservient position.
The sense of superiority needs no justification. It just exists. A racist is usually a person who has learned to detest persons of a different race simply because they are of a different race. Along with that learning comes pre-packaged rationalizations for detesting persons of a different race.
I grew up — in the North — among white racists. They weren’t the kind who would lynch a black person or organize a mob to terrorize blacks. But they didn’t want to associate with blacks, and they demeaned them in many ways (though usually not to their faces). They would remark on their language (non-standard English), intelligence (without actual evidence of it), “loud” attire, supposed moral laxity, supposed dependence on welfare, “rhythm”, race-based superiority in certain athletic endeavors (e.g., jumping and sprinting), and so on.
Some of those distinguishing characteristics were (and are) true, in general (e.g., average intelligence of blacks vs. whites and East Asians), though untrue in vast numbers of particular cases. But facts and individual differences weren’t what mattered. Most whites were simply prejudiced against blacks, period. And there were certainly many blacks then (as now) who reciprocated the feeling. (Then, as now, white “elites” would eschew overt expressions of racism but evince it through condescension toward blacks and low expectations for them.)
A lot has happened during the intervening years; for example:
desegregation of the armed forces
desegregation of public schools based on race (but no longer — in most places — geographically)
desegregation of colleges and universities
desegregation of “public accommodations” (hotels, bars, restaurants, etc.)
easier access of “minorities” to credit for buying homes and cars and starting or expanding businesses (usually by lowering credit standards directly or setting up special funding carve-outs)
“affirmative action”, that is, favoritism toward blacks in hiring and promotion)
the rise of “diversity” and then “diversity, equity, and inclusion”, meaning that blacks deserve certain privileges because of the color of their skin because some blacks decades and centuries ago were
a long-term shift in the treatment by law-enforcement of blacks — from beatings and violent suppression to standing back from black criminality — with the notable and exploited exception of cases of malfeasance against individual blacks
a long-term shift in the governance of many major cities from mostly white to mostly black, and the concomitant degradation of public services and “law and order” in those cities (or so it seems to the casual observer).
To many whites, even those who have been disposed to helping blacks advance (or, at least, have not hindered or resented their advancement), the story arc looks like this:
1. systematic and undeserved mistreatment of blacks as a group
2. good-faith efforts to end mistreatment, treat blacks fairly, and give them more opportunities to advance socially and economically
3. bad-faith efforts to bestow unearned power and privileges on blacks
4. blaming white racism for isolated (but highly publicized) instances of police brutality and for the persistent social and financial problems of blacks.
I believe that Scott Adams is one of the whites — an anti-racist, supportive one — who has deciphered the story and given up. Like many whites, he has given up because he knows what’s next:
5. growing resentment of blacks by non-”elite” whites, commingled with resentment of and scorn for “elite” whites who are stuck in stage 1 of the story arc and/or seek to signal their superiority to racist whites (whose numbers they vastly exaggerate)
6. continued failure of blacks, in general, to close the income and wealth gaps between whites and blacks
7. more interracial tension and violence, especially black-on-white violence (largely ignored by the media)
8. more efforts by governments and private institutions to mollify and condescend to blacks (e.g., the irritating and glaring over-representation of blacks in commercials, movies, and TV shows)
9. accordingly, more favoritism toward blacks leading to more financial and social burdens on whites (aside from immunized “elites”), including but far from limited to the cost of reparations and the institutionalization of “social credit”
If that is what lies ahead, then it behooves most whites not only to give up on racial “equity” (whatever that is) but to resist efforts to attain it.
None of what I have said in this post is racist or should be considered racist. Unless, of course, you are using a definition of racism which condemns any account of black-white differences as racist if it doesn’t attribute those differences to (white) “racism”.
If Scott Adams would agree with what I have said, he is not a racist. Most likely, he is — like me — a realist. But under the new dispensation, that makes us racists.
Here’s the latest, including the second (February 2023) estimate of GDP in the final quarter of 2022:
The exponential trend line indicates a constant-dollar (real) growth rate for the entire period of 0.77 percent quarterly, or 3.1 percent annually. The actual beginning-to-end annual growth rate is also 3.1 percent.
The red bands parallel to the trend line delineate the 95-percent (1.96 sigma) confidence interval around the trend. GDP has been below the confidence interval since the government-induced pandemic recession of 2020. Come to think of it, the back-to-back recessions of 1980-1982 and the Great Recession of 2008-2010 were also government-caused — the government in those cases being the Federal Reserve. The short recession of 2022, which may soon be followed by another one, can also be chalked up to the Fed.
Here’s another depiction of the general decline in real economic growth:
And here’s another view:
The trend lines, which reflect the rate of growth during each business cycle, are getting progressively “flatter”, that is, the rate of growth (with a few exceptions) is dropping from cycle to cycle.
However you look at it, the steady decline in real GDP growth is the handiwork of government spending and regulatory policies. For much more about that plague, which has existed for more than a century, see this and this.
Unemployment
The government-reported unemployment rate of 3.3 percent for January 2023 is actually 10.5 percent. What the government doesn’t publicize is the labor-force participation rate, which has dropped from its January 2000 peak of 67.3 percent to 62.2 percent. See this post for details of the calculation. Here’s an up-to-date graph of nominal vs. actual unemployment rates:
Consumer Price Index
The index of prices for urban consumers (CPI-U) is the one that gets the headlines. There has been much ado in recent days about the drop in the rate of inflation, which only means that prices (as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics) aren’t rising quite as rapidly as they had been.
Here’s how things looked as of January 2023:
I don’t take any solace in the fact that the most recent year-over-year rate — 6.45 percent — means that prices double every 11 years. Back in the good old days when inflation was running in the neighborhood of 2 percent, prices would be expected to double every 36 years. An average Joe — not the idiot in the White House — could live with that. Now, he’s scrambling to pay his bills, probably with credit debt that is becoming more expensive to carry.
Ominously, perhaps, is the 4-quarter average of annualized monthly changes in the CPI. The 4-quarter average had been dropping steadily since hitting its recent high of 14.0 percent in June 2022. But in January 2022 it jumped from the previous month’s value of -0.7 percent to 2.5 percent. Not a good sign, especially give the jump in the producer price index (PPI), which may foreshadow a rise in the year-over-year value of the CPI.
The Stock Market
A bear market is usually defined as decline of at least 20 percent in a broad stock-market index. The S&P 500 index topped out at 4818.22 in January 2022, dropped to 3636.87 in June, rose to 4325.28 in August, dropped to 3491.58 in October — the low (to date) for the current bear market, 27 percent below the January peak.
Since then, the index has risen, dropped, and risen again. Friday’s closing price of 3970.04 left the index 18 percent below its peak. Technically (and arbitrarily), the market is no longer in bear country, but that doesn’t mean that the bear market is over.
Here’s the story to date:
The dashed red line is 20 percent below the January 2022 high. The meandering route of the weekly average (which I use for analysis of long-term trends) has taken the index above the “magic” 20-percent line more than once.
But the end of a bear market isn’t confirmed until two things happen. The first is that the 26-week average turns up and continues to rise for at least 13 weeks. That hasn’t happened, yet. And it may not happen for a while. The low (to date) occurred after the impressive rally of June-October 2022.
The second indicator is the value of a volatility index that I have concocted. It hasn’t dropped into bull-market territory yet. But it can drop suddenly — and unpredictably.
As the man said the market is a random walk down Wall Street. Anything can happen, and it usually does: war, riot, natural disaster, political turmoil, unexpectedly bad or good economic news, etc., etc., etc.
Stay tuned.
Presidential Popularity: Obama, Trump, Biden
I have followed the Presidential Tracking Poll at Rasmussen Reports* since Obama was elected in 2008. The straightforward Approval Index (strongly approve minus strongly disapprove) doesn’t quite capture the way that likely voters assess a president’s performance. So I concocted an “enthusiasm ratio” — the number of likely voters who strongly approve as a percentage of the number of likely voters who venture an opinion one way or the other (thus omitting the voters who are non-committal). Here’s a comparison of the enthusiasm ratios for Obama (first term), Trump, and Biden (through 02/24/23):
You might ask how Biden caught up with Obama. I have no answer other than the fact that most voters have short memories and seem to care little about the consequences of leftist governance. It will take a major change to move the needle downward; for example, irrefutable proof that some of the classified documents found in various places owned or controlled by Joe were used by Hunter in the family’s influence-peddling business. On the other hand, a peaceful resolution of the Russia-Ukraine War would (for no real reason) redound to Biden’s benefit in the polls.
Right Direction or Wrong Track
Rasmussen Reports also publishes a weekly poll in which 1,500 likely voters are asked whether the country is going in the right direction or is on the wrong track. The results, as you would expect, are volatile — reflecting the recent headlines and media spin. Government shutdowns, for example, which are actually good news, are widely viewed as bad news. Here are the weekly results (through last week) since Obama took office in January 2009:
The mood of the voters polled during Trump’s term in office never reached the depths that it reached under Obama. Biden is following in Obama’s footsteps, and he has two more years in which to reach a new low — unless he is impeached and removed from office for his influence-peddling business.
* I follow Rasmussen Reports because of its good track record — here and here, for example. Though the Rasmussen polls are generally accurate, they are out of step with the majority of polls, which are biased toward Democrats. This has caused Rasmussen Reports to be labeled “Republican-leaning”, as if the other polls aren’t “Democrat-leaning”.
The ups and downs of the [Social Security] trust fund just reflect a change in how we finance spending. While payroll taxes > social security spending, which was the case until 2007, then payroll taxes are financing other spending. When payroll taxes < social security spending, then income taxes or increases in debt are financing social security spending, which (graph below) was the case after 2008.* The trust fund just adds up this change over time. But exhausting the trust fund is, in this view, really irrelevant.
That doesn’t mean we can all go to sleep, for two reasons. First, when payroll taxes < Social Security outlays, and the trust fund is winding down, then income taxes or additional public debt must finance the shortfall. The government has to spend less on other things, raise income tax receipts, or borrow which means raising future taxes. And, per the graph, the numbers are not small. 1% of GDP is $230 billion. The extra strain on income taxes, other spending, or debt, happens right now, when the trust fund is positive but decreasing.
Zero matters only because by law, when the trust fund goes to zero, Social Security payments must be automatically cut to match Social Security taxes. That’s the sudden drop in the graph. The program was set up as if the trust fund were buying stocks and bonds, real assets, and would not lay claim on income tax revenues. But it was not; social security taxes were used to cover other spending, and now income taxes must start to pay social security benefits.
What happens when the trust fund runs out, then? Congress has a choice: automatically cut benefits, as shown, or change the law so that the government can pay Social Security benefits from income taxes, or, more realistically, by issuing ever more debt, until the bond vigilantes come. (Or raise payroll taxes, or reform the whole mess.) I bet on change the law….
* In the end,
payroll taxes + income & other taxes + increase in public debt = Social Security spending + other spending.
The trust fund nets out. [See my post, “Social Security: A Primer”, for a thorough explanation of why the trust fund is a fiction.]
It is extremely unlikely that Congress and the president (regardless of party) will allow benefits to be cut. It is extremely likely that the law will be changed so that scheduled benefits can be paid in full. The resulting addition to the federal deficit, as Cochrane says, will be funded by higher income taxes and/or (more likely) the issuance of more debt. (There’s also the possibility of collecting more payroll taxes from high-income earners, but that would be a symbolic gesture with little practical effect on the government’s overall deficit.)
Social Security benefits will be left untouched regardless of the consequences for the cost of funding the government’s debt (i.e., interest payments) or the inflationary effects of a larger debt (monetization by the Fed). The very last thing that Congress and the president (whoever he/she is) will allow is a reduction in schedule benefits (except possibly for “the rich”.) (When I say “very last thing”, I mean that even if World War III occurs, Social Security benefits will remain intact.)
A report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) puts the whole thing in perspective:
Primary Deficit and Total Budget Deficit, Actual and Projected
In GAO’s simulation, increasing primary deficits are driving spending and revenue trends.
Spending: Medicare, other federal health care programs, and Social Security are requiring an increasingly large share of federal resources. Under GAO’s simulation, spending for both major federal health care programs and Social Security would account for 85 percent of projected revenue in 2050, up from 63 percent in 2019.
Revenue: Average annual revenue as a share of GDP was lower over the last 20 years than in prior decades. From 2000 to 2021, revenue averaged 16.8 percent of GDP annually, compared to annual average of 17.9 percent of GDP between 1980 and 2000.
Given the way things have been going and will continue to go, the depletion of the mythical Social Security trust fund will be a fiscal non-event. And it won’t have any effect on Social Security benefits.
“Section 230” refers to Section 230 of the 1996 Federal Communications Decency Act, relevant portions of which are reproduced at the bottom of this post. As an article at The American Spectator explains, Section 230
protects online platforms from legal liability for the comments, posts, and videos that users share on social media. Currently, one may sue the person who posts inflammatory or defamatory content but not the companies that own the platforms. Without Section 230, Google, Facebook, and YouTube would face an endless sea of litigation.
What’s not to like about that? Well, the same article offers some dire predictions:
If the legal code treats social media platforms like traditional publishers, then they would face a choice: they could either strictly police content or stop policing it at all. Social media users would find two types of resulting platforms: a) those that are highly moderated and would, of course, anger virtually everyone (and conservatives especially), and b) those that would quickly resemble one’s spam file or an open sewer.
Are there other ways of regulating internet platforms to deter censorship of conservative points of view, either directly (through algorithms and human intervention) or by using excuses such as “disinformation” (i.e., facts and opinions that the operators of platforms don’t like)?
any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected….
The phrases are “otherwise objectionable” and “whether or not such material is constitutionally protected” give platform operators carte-blanche to censor anything. And given the “liberal” bent of most platform operators, they will censor almost anything that seems to pose a serious threat to leftist dogmas and projects, the First Amendment to the contrary notwithstanding.
Why is the First Amendment relevant? Doesn’t it apply only to government? No, it also applies to private actors who are in fact state actors doing the bidding of the state with its encouragement and acquiescence. This is from a piece by Vivek Ramaswamy and Jed Rubenfeld in The Wall Street Journal (“Save the Constitution from Big Tech“, January 11, 2021):
Conventional wisdom holds that technology companies are free to regulate content because they are private, and the First Amendment protects only against government censorship. That view is wrong: Google, Facebook and Twitter should be treated as state actors under existing legal doctrines. Using a combination of statutory inducements and regulatory threats, Congress has co-opted Silicon Valley to do through the back door what government cannot directly accomplish under the Constitution.
It is “axiomatic,” the Supreme Court held in Norwood v. Harrison (1973), that the government “may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.” That’s what Congress did by enacting Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which not only permits tech companies to censor constitutionally protected speech but immunizes them from liability if they do so….
Section 230 is the carrot, and there’s also a stick: Congressional Democrats have repeatedly made explicit threats to social-media giants if they failed to censor speech those lawmakers disfavored [emphasis and link added]. In April 2019, Louisiana Rep. Cedric Richmond warned Facebook and Google that they had “better” restrict what he and his colleagues saw as harmful content or face regulation: “We’re going to make it swift, we’re going to make it strong, and we’re going to hold them very accountable.” New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler added: “Let’s see what happens by just pressuring them.”
Such threats have worked. In September 2019, the day before another congressional grilling was to begin, Facebook announced important new restrictions on “hate speech.” It’s no accident that big tech took its most aggressive steps against Mr. Trump just as Democrats were poised to take control of the White House and Senate. Prominent Democrats promptly voiced approval of big tech’s actions, which Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal expressly attributed to “a shift in the political winds.”
Moreover, as the “Twitter files” exposé demonstrates vividly, Big Tech is sometimes nothing more than a puppet whose strings are pulled by agencies of the federal government (CIA, FBI, and Department of Justice in particular). It is not a coincidence that the string-pulling is intended to subvert candidates, facts, and opinions opposed to the left’s politicians and policies.
Section 230, as it stands, gives Big Tech (and its satellites) a license to censor on behalf of the state. The language of Norwood v. Harrison quoted above, though seemingly dispositive, is drawn from a district-court opinion in a civil-rights case from the 1960s. It is imperative, therefore, that a case be brought to the Supreme Court that directly challenges censorship conducted by Big Tech (and its satellites) behind the cloak of Section 230. (Two recentlyargued cases involving Big Tech are unlikely to go to the heart of the problem: platform operators as state actors.)
Absent a definitive Supreme Court ruling that bars censorship by state actors, Section 230 can be reformed only when (and if) Congress and the White House are controlled by Republicans. The Catch-22 is that absent a substantive revision of Section 230, Big Tech will still hold censorship power that can thwart the GOP’s efforts to regain control of the federal government.
In any event, the fix is relatively simple (in my opinion). The language of Section 230 should be changed as follows, with deletions indicated by strikethroughs and additions indicated by boldface:
(c) Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material
(1) Treatment of publisher or speaker
No provider or user of an interactive computer serviceinternet platform shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
(2) Civil liability
No provider or user of an interactive computer serviceinternet platform shall be held liable on account of—
(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionabledefamatory of a non-public person or persons, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1); except that
(C)a provider or user of an internet platform may be held liable for any action taken to restrict access to or availability of material for any reason other than those listed in paragraph (2)(A); and
(D) a provider or user of an internet platform may be held liable for denying or restricting the technical means of accessing the material described in paragraph (1) unless the means are denied or restricted for a reason listed in paragraph (2)(A) or for non-payment of a fee that is applicable to all similarly situated providers or users.
The substitution of “internet platform” for “interactive computer service” is intended to reflect the significant changes in the composition of internet entities during the past 27 years. The definition would be changed accordingly:
The term “interactive computer service”“internet platform” means any information service, system, or access software provider that provides or enables computer access by multiple users to a computer server, including specifically a service or system that provides access to the Internet and such systems operated or services offered by libraries or educational institutions. “Internet platform” also means any website or means of communication which is accessed through the Internet and which provides or enables communication among users, the sale of products and services, or the exchange and dispensation of news, facts, opinions, or other expressions of ideas and points of view.
The revisions are aimed at the four types of platform that are at the center of this controversy, plus a fifth type that provides the means by which the other four operate:
True social-media platforms (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram), which afford users a way in which to communicate photos, videos, personal notes, family news, notifications of upcoming events, opinions, etc., with other users.
Commercial platforms (e.g., Amazon and Yelp), which offer products and services for sale and, crucially, also provide venues in which users of products and services may rate and review them.
Providers of information (e.g., Google, Wikipedia, and the internet arms of traditional media companies like The New York Times and NBC), which consists either of “hits” on internet sources deemed relevant to a user’s query, user-generated and user-edited articles purporting to provide authoritative information on a wide range of subjects, or content that is open to comment by subscribers and/or the general public.
Platforms that host blogs (e.g., WordPress and Substack), some of which allow comments by readers and some of which don’t.
Providers of the internet’s hardware and software infrastructure (e.g., AT&T, Verizon, GoDaddy, and Microsoft).
All such platforms already have in place mechanisms for deleting material and banning users in violation of terms of service, including sub-rosa terms of service that are anti-conservative. I cannot see how the changes that I have proposed would lead to the bifurcation dreaded by The American Spectator:
“highly moderated” platforms “that would, of course, anger virtually everyone (and conservatives especially), and “those [platforms] that would quickly resemble one’s spam file or an open sewer.”
In fact, nothing would change but the ability to publish and read more content that advances conservative views and scientific evidence against such things as mask-and-vaccinate theater, widespread lockdowns, school closures, “gender affirming care”, the psychological damage wrought by abortion, the foolishness and economic devastation caused by “climate change” hysteria — and on and on and on.
What about “misinformation”? True misinformation is all around us, all the time. The left is a leading purveyor of it. The only way to eliminate misinformation is to cripple the search for truth. That, of course, is precisely what the left wants to do because “misinformation”, as used by the left, really means facts and opinions that threaten leftist dogmas and programs.
(1) The rapidly developing array of Internet and other interactive computer services available to individual Americans represent an extraordinary advance in the availability of educational and informational resources to our citizens.
(2) These services offer users a great degree of control over the information that they receive, as well as the potential for even greater control in the future as technology develops.
(3) The Internet and other interactive computer services offer a forum for a true diversity of political discourse, unique opportunities for cultural development, and myriad avenues for intellectual activity.
(2) to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet and other interactive computer services, unfettered by Federal or State regulation;
(3) to encourage the development of technologies which maximize user control over what information is received by individuals, families, and schools who use the Internet and other interactive computer services;
(4) to remove disincentives for the development and utilization of blocking and filtering technologies that empower parents to restrict their children’s access to objectionable or inappropriate online material; and
(5) to ensure vigorous enforcement of Federal criminal laws to deter and punish trafficking in obscenity, stalking, and harassment by means of computer.
(c) Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material
(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).[1]
(d) Obligations of interactive computer service
A provider of interactive computer service shall, at the time of entering an agreement with a customer for the provision of interactive computer service and in a manner deemed appropriate by the provider, notify such customer that parental control protections (such as computer hardware, software, or filtering services) are commercially available that may assist the customer in limiting access to material that is harmful to minors. Such notice shall identify, or provide the customer with access to information identifying, current providers of such protections.
(e) Effect on other laws
(1)No effect on criminal law
Nothing in this section shall be construed to impair the enforcement of section 223 [pertains to obscene or harassing phone calls] or 231 [pertains to restriction of access by minors] of this title, chapter 71 (relating to obscenity) or 110 (relating to sexual exploitation of children) of title 18, or any other Federal criminal statute.
The term “interactive computer service” means any information service, system, or access software provider that provides or enables computer access by multiple users to a computer server, including specifically a service or system that provides access to the Internet and such systems operated or services offered by libraries or educational institutions.
The term “information content provider” means any person or entity that is responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation or development of information provided through the Internet or any other interactive computer service.
Politics and Prosperity 