Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blog

What the heck is the big deal about married politicians sleeping around?  Why does this kill their careers?  Why are people shocked?  These are people who have spent a great deal of their lives pursuing power and self-aggrandizement.  Of course they sleep around.  Of course they don’t let promises like marriage vows stand in the way of getting what they want.  Of course they hurt the ones they should love in pursuit of another prize.  This is the entire psychology of people who attain national office.  From Wikipedia:

Three recent studies in the United States, using nationally representative samples, have found that about 10-15% of women and 20-25% of men admitted to having engaged in extramarital sex.^[3][4][5]

There are 535 people in Congress, 50 governors and dozens more national office holders.  This means, weighting for the distribution of men and women, and assuming that the alpha dog personality that drives politicians doesn’t lead them to be even more adulterous than the average American — a hundred or so national figures who are assuredly guilty of the same crime as Sanford, Clinton or whoever else you choose to name.  Plus, if you look throughout our leaders in the past, some of our most revered national heroes slept around quite a bit — and assuredly there were far more who did for whom we have no historical evidence.  Certainly my favorite founding father spent quite a bit of time in Paris brothels.

So what?  Absent adultery being a criminal offense, why does anyone care?  I assume it’s because they think that if a person can break important promises and emotionally harm the ones they’re supposed to care about, it means that they will probably do the same in office — and they probably have less reason to worry about hurting us!  But here’s the thing — if you’re honestly worried about that, then you should hardly restrain yourself to calling for the resignations of only the adulterers — because most of the people driven to achieve powerful national offices already have these qualities in spades.  If you don’t want “the kind of person who would cheat on their spouse” in office, then you should get rid of a lot more politicians than just the ones you actually catch doing it.

And here’s the best part — you don’t even have to do a lot of investigative reporting or track the guy going to Argentina — most politicians have a long and public history of betrayal, deceit, power-grubbing and power abuse to look up.  You can probably google most of it.  We get so upset about politicians doing things in secret when they do worse things even day in public.  Apparently Sanford abandoned his job responsibilities in order to meet his mistress.  If that’s all it takes to get him out of the office and to stop doing whatever stupid and destructive things that most politicians do all day, then great.  We should encourage this kind of thing more often.

Paul Krugman is very smart.   But here’s why you can’t trust him:

But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

[...]

Still, is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn’t it politics as usual?

Yes, it is — and that’s why it’s unforgivable.

Okay, so this is a perfect mirror of the PATRIOT Act.  Existential threat posited by supporters?  Check!  Bill that does lots of things but might not help?  Check.  Accusing those who vote against of being traitors?  Check.  Immediate association of “no” votes with “denial of problem?”  Check.  We’ve even got more reasonable individuals complaining about casual use of the word “treason” while still accepting that a problem exists.

But the most hilarious part is:

Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an “existential threat” to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole — but the existential threat from climate change is all too real.

Krugman even knows what he’s doing!  This is the problem, and what makes someone a hack: when you use the exact same slimy tactics as you criticized your opponents for using, that means you aren’t looking at things objectively.  Very intelligent, very talented people have become convinced of wrong things simply because they were emotionally invested in it — Krugman may in fact be right in this, but no matter how much evidence he lays out, its clear that he’s emotionally attached to the concept of his opponents being traitors to the planet.  If opponents of the PATRIOT Act or Waxman-Markey really are traitors bent on destroying America/Earth then you should lie, cheat and steal (or more accurately, call them traitors, ignore evidence that supports them, and tar their motives with broad strokes) to defeat them.  Even if he’s supporting the right side, Krugman’s obviously not looking over the facts and coming to their logical conclusion.  Why should he?  The other side is a bunch of traitors bent on — in his own words — destroying the world.

For example, I generally opposed the bailout of GM.  But if I describe every politician who voted for it as a bunch of evil, no-good communistic traitors who are leading this country to ruin, rather than simply wrong, you would question my objectivity in dealing with the subject.  You will think, “hmm, if he thinks the other side is evil, how likely is it that he has calmly and rationally assessed the pros and cons of the situation?”  And so it is with Krugman.

Shorter Krugman: “demonizing political opponents as traitors is bad when Bush does it, but good when I do it.  Also they’re traitors against the entire planet, which is totally worse than just America.”  Where’s Captain Planet when you need him?

Sometimes Thomas Sowell says very intelligent things.  So when he says this (via Marginal Revolution) I kinda think he’s gone nuts:

Perhaps people who are busy gushing over the Obama cult today might do well to stop and think about what it would mean for their granddaughters to live under sharia law.

That’s the line Cowen picked out.  Surely, I thought, there was some context here — perhaps he was trying to get us to sympathize with pro-liberalization elements in Iraq or Iran, who want to prevent theocratic elements?  Nope, he actually means sharia in America:

Just two nuclear bombs were enough to get Japan to surrender in World War II. It is hard to believe that it would take much more than that for the United States of America to surrender — especially with people in control of both the White House and the Congress who were for turning tail and running in Iraq just a couple of years ago.

Okay, just because I can, Japan did not surrender because of 2 nukes.  It had been getting crushed in a hemisphere-wide war for four entire years.  It had little-to-no oil, ships, planes, or pilots and only held a tiny percentage of the territory it could claim before Midway.  The nukes just pushed it over the edge.

With that out of the way, is there really anyone at all who believes in some scenario where Iran gets nukes and a  credible delivery mechanism (almost as difficult as nukes), then somehow manages to blow up New York and LA — and we surrender? You know, other than the obvious response: razing every square inch of Iran to radioactive dust?  Sowell was alive for a long chunk of the Cold War, when we fought an enemy with a lot more nukes and an actual military capable of theoretically invading us.  Did anyone think that if the Russians vaporized Chicago that we’d just roll over?  Of course not — so why on earth would we ever do so for a vastly weaker nation with fewer nukes?

It’s one thing to say “Iran can’t have nukes because it would destabilize the region — they’d be able to threaten Iraq or Israel.”  That’s a debate we can have.  But Iran isn’t going to conquer the United States and impose sharia law.  They can barely suppress their own people.  I feel like an idiot for even having to say that.  Sowell’s not an idiot — the only thing I can really say to mitigate this pure craziness is that he must be going senile.

Sometimes life makes you confront tough arguments that challenge your assumptions.  Other days you get this.  I think my work here is done!

The Atlantic has “15 Ways To Fix The World,” but I think maybe not everyone stuck to the assignment.  Anyway, here they are:

Rent Your Own Home
By Felix Salmon

“decree that whenever a bank forecloses on a home, the current occupant has the right to remain in the property indefinitely, simply by paying the fair-market rent.”

Sure!  Sounds good to me.  Of course, I don’t know why banks don’t do this already — it’s not like there’s a law against it.  It would seem natural that if the problem with the housing market is that people don’t have huge chunks of money to buy homes, and no one will loan it to them — then you should give them little chunks of home in exchange for little chunks of money.

Unleash the Dogs of Peace
By James S. Gibney

“And so it goes with all but the most routine UN peacekeeping missions, which are effective only to the extent that their host combatants allow.

There is a different, more robust approach to making peace in nasty places: deploy private military companies like Executive Outcomes, whose small, highly trained force defeated insurgencies in Sierra Leone and Angola during the 1990s. ”

No thanks.  As Gibney notes, there’s no reason to believe that PMC’s would be any nicer than the UN troops.  This is an argument to deploy neither.  Even if you buy his “but they’d be more effective” argument, it’s hard to imagine that the world’s problems merely want for a more effective global policeman.

Give Up on Democracy in Afghanistan
By Andrew J. Bacevich

Yes.  And while we’re at it, legalize opium production (or even buy it all for our own pain-killer market).

Privatize the Seas
By Gregg Easterbrook

“increasingly, nations are turning to tradeable permits, which go by names such as Dedicated Access Privilege or Individual Transferable Quotas. Australia, New Zealand, and Iceland pioneered the idea in the 1980s, and their fish stocks have for the most part recovered nicely; a recent University of California study shows that privatizing fishing rights usually makes fish populations significantly less prone to collapse.”

Double yes.  As Easterbrook notes: “Many environmental alarms are overstated, but fishery depletion is not.”  Let’s upgrade it to Triple Yes — this is a big deal.  Even if fish populations recover quickly, even a few years with insufficient fish yields means very serious bad things in the important “people having enough food to live” sector.

Tell the Truth About Colleges
By Thomas Toch

“The conventional wisdom is that you get what you pay for—that the larger the price tag, the better the product. But that’s not true in higher education. Tuition has been skyrocketing for years, with little evidence that education has improved. Universities typically favor research and publishing over teaching. And influential college rankings like the one published by U.S. News & World Report measure mostly wealth and status (alumni giving rates, school reputation, incoming students’ SAT scores); they reveal next to nothing about what students learn.

We need to shed more light on how well colleges are educating their students—to help prospective students make better decisions, and to exert pressure on the whole system to provide better value for money.”

Agree — but who cares?  Expensive colleges mainly just shift money from dumb rich people to somewhat more clever rich people.  Is preventing this going to “fix the world?”

Welcome Guest Workers
By Kerry Howley

“Nothing rich countries can send the global poor—not loans, not textbooks, not fair-wage campaign materials—will boost the income of the average worker nearly so much as letting him walk among the wealthy. Transported from Haiti or Nigeria to the United States or Canada, a low-skilled worker will watch the value of his labor jump more than 700 percent—instantly.”

Absolutely the best idea in the bunch — and one of the best ideas period.  Increased labor mobility is probably the single thing you could do to most improve the world.  I found this “15 ideas” list via Howley’s recommendation, so I can see why she’s plugging it — her idea kicks the crap out of the others.

Pay the Artists
By Felix Salmon

“If the Obama administration is serious about stimulating the economy and creating as many new jobs as possible, one choice is clear: it should announce a massive increase in federal arts funding.”

No offense, but this just reads like a joke.  Yes, folks, you may be having difficult paying the rent or making ends meet, but what we all really need is more opera.  It’s telling how all the proposals people had in wealthier times also just happen to be their prescriptions in the lean times as well.  When wealth declines, the government can’t buy as many things, and we have to choose between them.  Art will go on without federal funding.  In a time of crisis, there are simply more important things to spend money on, if that’s your chosen method of resolving the problem.

End All Taxes—Except One
By Reihan Salam

“There’s a certain compelling logic to the Single Tax that stands the test of time. When you tax income, aren’t you punishing people for working hard? But when you tax an asset like land, you’re simply encouraging the most valuable use of that land. In the years since George faded from the scene, a number of economists, from Milton Friedman to Paul Romer, have found virtue in the Single Tax, not least because it creates the right incentives for government”

As someone who owns a small amount of land, I shudder to think how high property taxes would have to be to pay for everything — but hey, if I didn’t have any other taxes?  Maybe!  I have no idea if this would work.

Civilize Homeland Security
By James Fallows

Sure — anything that reduces or improves the disaster that is DHS is fine by me.  I especially like this: “change the offensive, antirepublican, Teutono-Soviet name Homeland to Civil, as in Department of Civil Security.”  I still remember laughing when I heard what they were going to call it.

End the Corporate Income Tax
By Megan McArdle

“THE CORPORATE INCOME TAX may be the stupidest tax we have. At 35 percent, America’s levy on corporate income is one of the highest in the developed world. In 2007, about 2.5 million companies prepared lengthy returns at great expense, yet the tax generated only about 15 percent of total federal tax revenue. “

Agree!  The idea gains support in that lots of countries have lower corporate income taxes — and they don’t seem to be exploding.  My only request would be that it be accompanied, as McArdle would no doubt agree, by cutting spending by an equivalent amount.

Redesign the Dollar
By Michael Bierut

No capsule description here: he really responded to “come up with a way to save the world” with this: “with our financial system in crisis, the time is right to redesign the currency of the United States.”  My one compliment for this idea is at least we have a proposal that will not overreach itself.

End the Vice Presidency
By Matthew Yglesias

No paraphrasing here: everything is summed up in the one sentence.  I completely agree!  But surely, we can come up with more than one national level office to eliminate?

Teach Drinking
By John McCardell

“So what might states [...] do differently? They might license 18-year-olds—adults in the eyes of the law—to drink, provided they’ve completed high school, attended an alcohol-education course (that consists of more than temperance lectures and scare tactics), and kept a clean record. They might even mandate alcohol education at a young age. ”

I definitely endorse looser restrictions on alcohol consumption, and more education about how to responsibly consume it.  Not sure it’s going to “fix the world” but hey, got to start small.

Buy to Last
By Ellen Ruppel Shell

This “idea” is basically just a diatribe against IKEA, a target that I don’t even know enough about to defend.  I couldn’t find any policy suggestions, but given the thrust of the essay, I assume it would be something like “companies should make stuff that lasts longer.”  Uhm, okay?

Train Detroit
By Bruce Selcraig

“Instead of scattering nickels and dimes across dozens of states, a better idea would be to increase the train fund at least tenfold so America can have at least one legitimate high-speed rail line like Spain’s Madrid-to-Seville train, which runs at 186 mph (Amtrak averages only 79 nationwide). And let this man-on-the-moon project start in Detroit.

Yes, Detroit. The city that was once part of FDR’s “Arsenal of Democracy,” for its part in retooling auto plants to make World War II tanks and bombers, has easily a dozen empty auto plants that could be making train engines and train cars.”

It’s pretty weird how there are so many great business ideas running around that lack only for 80 billion in government subsidies.  I suppose implicitly Selcraig is also assuming we’d stop dumping so much money (which are effectively anti-subsidies for rail) on bailing out the automakers, since they would now be… train-makers, with which I can certainly agree — but that just gets us to the whole point: let’s stop having the government try to decide ahead of time that we need “cars” or “trains” or llama caravans.  Stop giving automakers all these bailouts, subsidies and friendly regulations, and maybe rail won’t need 80 billion to get moving.

All in all, I think the winner by a long shot (in terms of beneficial impact) is “Welcome Guest Workers” followed by “End the Corporate Income Tax.”  ”Privatize The Seas” gets the bronze.  Women writers are disproportionately represented on the medal podium!  Maybe a new idea should be “have women come up with the ideas more often.”

If I had to propose a 16th idea, I think I’d go with:

School Choice

Divide up every school budget in the country by the number of students they serve and transfer the quotient to whichever accredited institution the parents or student chooses.  As cliche as it sounds, education really is the foundation of, well, nearly everything else.  If we want it to improve, we need to grant greater control to the ones who will pay the price for its deficiency — and what greater check than to be able to vote with your feet?

Any idea to “fix the world” would need to gain acceptance from the voting public — if they are as good as their authors claim, it would follow that a better educated public would be more likely realize this and champion them.  Most of the ideas will also involve hard work by talented people to implement — another need that improved education can help meet.  We should always consider a wide range of ideas on how to fix the world, but higher quality education will make us better able to choose the best ideas — and perhaps think up entirely new and better ones.

This stuff is really interesting:

THE SCARIEST THING about geo-engineering, as it happens, is also the thing that makes it such a game-changer in the global-warming debate: it’s incredibly cheap. Many scientists, in fact, prefer not to mention just how cheap it is. Nearly everyone I spoke to agreed that the worst-case scenario would be the rise of what David Victor, a Stanford law professor, calls a “Greenfinger”—a rich madman, as obsessed with the environment as James Bond’s nemesis Auric Goldfinger was with gold. There are now 38 people in the world with $10 billion or more in private assets, according to the latest Forbes list; theoretically, one of these people could reverse climate change all alone. “I don’t think we really want to empower the Richard Bransons of the world to try solutions like this,” says Jay Michaelson, an environmental-law expert, who predicted many of these debates 10 years ago.

Apparently proposed anti-climate change responses are estimated to be super-cheap — within the range, as the article notes, of wealthy individuals, and even the smallest countries.  Lots of the solutions are pretty scary in their potential to go horribly, horribly wrong — but if there is some gradualist solution (some presented seemed to fit this bill) that can be slowly enacted to gauge their response, why shouldn’t we try it?

My only quibble with the piece is how it seems to imply that the risks of standard methods of dealing with climate change are not themselves extremely high.  Any plan to cut carbon emissions by enough to severely curtain warming is going to negatively impact the development of many countries — especially India and China.  Their massive uptick in pollution has directly led to much of the economic growth in those countries — pulling billions out of poverty.  What’s the cost of preventing the next billion from achieving the same?

Either way, given the likelihood of any comprehensive climate change plan ever being put in place, eventually we will be forced to consider geo-engineering.  Even if the US adopts a vastly more stringent form of the current Waxman-Markey bill at some point, for any of this to matter, India and China need to be on board.  If the US is barely managing to keep W-M alive today, the governments of India and China certainly aren’t going to do something even more radical.  And in reality, by “we” I am almost certainly referring to the Chinese government.  If it comes to a point where climate change is creating unmanageable problems, they will definitely use some form of geo-engineering to combat it.  Hopefully they won’t call their device the Annihilatrix.

There is no way on earth that expanding healthcare coverage via the government is going to cut total costs:

A Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 67 percent of Americans believe that they do not receive enough treatment and that only 16 percent believe that they have received unnecessary care. If the Obama administration covers more people with government-supplied or government-subsidized insurance, the political support will broaden for generous benefits, their continuation and, indeed, expansion of current expenditures.

For years, proponents of nationalized healthcare have regaled us with stories of the poor souls who must survive without it, and even of the people being denied care by greedy health insurance companies — and how we shouldn’t be so miserly so as to not support them.  Fair enough — this is a moral question and I’m willing to entertain the idea that we should.  Now, as we’ve entered this recession, we’re told that it turns out these plans will actually save us money!  Yes, giving people more of what they want, and introducing a political tool to enable them to vote people into power who will give them even more — this will save money.  Really.

This entire recession has been filled with this conversation:

“Hey, look at this amazing new program/policy that I’ve been plugging for years!  We should totally do it.”

“But we didn’t want to do it before, because it cost so much money — and now our revenues are plunging in this recession.”

“Oh look, I just realized — it also saves us money!  Did I forget to mention that before? “

That’s why it’s always weird when everyone’s favored stimulus/economic recovery plan just happens to be all the policies they favored when there wasn’t a recession.

Expansion of government provided healthcare is not, and will not be a cost saving measure.  The only way it will be is if you radically reduce the amount of healthcare you are providing — to a group of people who feel that they are not receiving enough healthcare right now.  Or, reduce the amount that you’re paying providers, who have an even more powerful lobby.  Good luck with that.  For better or worse, people never ever vote themselves less of something.

The scary part is that our budget looks pretty disastrous going forward — then you realize that we currently have “healthcare reform” listed as a savings.  That makes all the lunatic assumptions already built into that budget look pretty tame.

… but what the heck is going on in Iran?  Is this something serious, or just minor election day protests?  Of course, it might not actually be either … yet.

This essay by Robert Wright is very good (via Will Wilkinson):

So a machine that was designed to serve our interests is misfiring. The moral imagination was built to help us discriminate between people we can do business with and people we can’t do business with—to expand or contract, respectively. When Americans fail to extend moral imagination to Muslims, this is their unconscious mind’s way of saying, “We judge these people to be not worth dealing with.” Yet most of them are worth dealing with.

And for most people, “dealing with them” really involves dealing and wheeling.  Sure, politicians will engage in state level diplomacy, but I imagine many Americans would just rather sell them stuff, and vice versa.  This might even be more productive!  

The one point I disagree with:

Technology is warping our perception of the other player in this non-zero-sum game. The other player is a vast population of Muslims who, though perhaps not enamored of the West, don’t spend their time burning flags and killing Westerners. But what we see on TV—and what we may conflate with this other player—is a subset of Muslims who truly, and perhaps irreversibly, hate the West. We accurately perceive the stubborn hostility of the latter and our moral imagination contracts accordingly, but in the process it excludes the former.

Technology may have negatively warped the perceptions of some, but by and large, technology has without a doubt been a net positive for convincing people of the non-zero-sum nature of this game.  For every broadcast of flag burning, there have been thousands of other interactions (informational, business, cultural) made possible by technology that have improved our relations with the average inhabitant of the Middle East.  Now, it might be that our more obvious interactions with the region, such as a series of wars over the last 20 years, have swamped any positive effects — but compare to places we are not currently invading.  By Wright’s own logic, it’s hard to sympathize with people we don’t understand or know about — certainly technology has helped on that front.

Technology will enable the endgame of “the war on terror.”  For the next few decades, we’ll continue to have state level interactions with the Middle East: terrorist attacks, invasions, sanctions, condemnations.  At some point, even despite these things, citizens in both areas will realize they are far more alike than different, and this whole stupid period of history will be over.  We’re already a long way down that path — and no offense to Mr. Wright, but the main drivers have not been eloquent essays, but rather music, movies, food, tennis shoes, iPods, immigration, comedy shows and everything else.

I love reading Ta-Nehisi Coates, especially for stuff like this: 

We watch a lot of old movies in this house. It’s an odd thing–you’re watching these people live these lives in these places, and yet you know that, as a black person, they would have most likely thought of you as subhuman. It’s something to watch The Heiress, and know that in both the time it was filmed, and the time it takes place, you were a less-than. Half of me is watching Marlene Dietrich Barbara Stanwyck scheme her way through Double Indemnity, the other half is wondering how big of racist she was. 

And this is just relatively recent history.  He goes on:

I can not read about the Confederacy, the way I’d read about the aristocrats in the French Revolution. I can’t get drawn in by the daring of Forrest’s raids, or Lee’s genius. Stonewall Jackson has the coldest, most determined eyes I’ve ever seen. And yet we know what they were set on. I can’t go all the way in. I can’t get out of my own damn skin.

Now, he’s talking about something a lot more personal and recent than the subject matter that many historical pieces deal with — but this has always struck me as weird.  The way we judge historical figures, especially in cinema, seems to be tainted by our modern perceptions, so we often see the anachronistic liberal sentiments held by ostensibly historical figures who would’ve believed no such thing. Civil War movies, as Mr. Coates points out, are probably the most guilty of this.   So in this, movie makers are aware that they’re dealing with people who probably held what we would consider to be highly distasteful beliefs — yet in some other cases, we exalt as heroes those who were, first and last, defined by contemptible ideologies or beliefs.  

Take 300.  I loved the movie, but it’s really hard to avoid taking a deeper look at its heroes — the Spartans.  While their longtime enemies the Athenians were experimenting with democracy, (the blind eye turned to their own reprehensible beliefs is another story!) they pioneered the first racialist police state that would (and did) make the Nazis proud.  Every single one of the noble Spartan soldiers in the movie would have taken part in the crypteia:

Young Spartan men who had completed their training at the agoge with such success that they were marked out as potential future leaders, would be given the opportunity to test their skills and prove themselves worthy of the Spartan military tradition through participation in the krypteia.

Every autumn, according to Plutarch (Life of Lycurgus, 28, 3–7), the Spartan ephors (classical Greek Ἔφοροι) would pro forma declare war on the helot population so that any Spartan citizen could kill a helot without fear of blood guilt. Unarmed, the kryptes were sent out into the countryside with the instructions to kill any helot they encountered at night and to take any food they needed.  

So not only did they run a brutal slave society, (actual productive labor was considered beneath the full Spartan citizen) but every year the most recently brain-washed of their soldiers were sent into the countryside to murder their own slaves in their sleep, and steal what little food they had.  

Given that the helots were the vast majority, we can easily deduce what position most of us (or ancestors, if you happen to be Greek) would be holding in Spartan society: oppressed slave.  Great!  Who are we supposed to be cheering for again?  Even if we assume that without Sparta, Greece would have been conquered by the Persians, it’s not clear this would have had a massive change on Western history, given that the Persian empire wasn’t particularly concerned with how their vassal states ran their private affairs.  Even with the victory at Thermopylae, Greece was later completely subjugated by the Romans, who rather than extinguishing their innovations, were responsible for exporting them around the continent.

So basically the message here is that no matter how kindly a historical figure (and no matter how saintly their reputation today) is portrayed in modern media, they were almost certainly either actually themselves barbaric, murderous bastards or subscribed to a myriad of incredible racist, sexist, bigoted and contemptible beliefs.  This applies around the world, and for all of history, right up until nearly modern day — opinion polls have only barely started showing majority acceptance of things like interracial marriage, homosexuality, atheism and many others.  And even here, this is only in a relatively small number of countries — there are many where it probably wouldn’t even be safe to conduct the poll on such topics.

This is why, even though I certainly enjoy a number of them, I find that romanticized historical dramas usually leave a bad taste in my mouth.  So many feel like unthinking apologies for inexecusable crimes.  Not to particularly rain on anyone’s nostalgic parade, but history is best seen as one long, horrifying Dark Age, spiced up with some extra brutal Dark-er Ages.  Every few hundred years, with increasing frequency, we see a few tiny flickering lights of sanity peeking out (though usually quickly snuffed out), until finally today we seem to have a dim glow hinting that perhaps darkness is not our natural condition after all.

Update: one of the few historical figures who I think would actually seem like a decent guy today is Benjamin Franklin.  I can’t seem to find any dirt on the guy.  Every time I try, I just find some quote or action that just makes me like him even more:

Franklin bequeathed £1,000 (about $4,400 at the time) each to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia, in trust to gather interest for 200 years. The trust began in 1785 when a French mathematician named Charles-Joseph Mathon de la Cour wrote a parody of Franklin’s “Poor Richard’s Almanack” called “Fortunate Richard.” Mocking the unbearable spirit of American optimism represented by Franklin, the Frenchman wrote that Fortunate Richard left a small sum of money in his will to be used only after it had collected interest for 500 years. Franklin, who was 79 years old at the time, wrote to the Frenchman, thanking him for a great idea and telling him that he had decided to leave a bequest of 1,000 pounds each to his native Boston and his adopted Philadelphia. As of 1990, more than $2,000,000 had accumulated in Franklin’s Philadelphia trust, which had loaned the money to local residents. From 1940 to 1990, the money was used mostly for mortgage loans. When the trust came due, Philadelphia decided to spend it on scholarships for local high school students. Franklin’s Boston trust fund accumulated almost $5,000,000 during that same time, and was used to establish a trade school that became the Franklin Institute of Boston.^[69]

Damn it, Ben, you win again.

Update 2: 

 

In 1773, when Franklin’s work had moved from printing to science and politics, he corresponded with a French scientist on the subject of preserving the dead for later revival by more advanced scientific methods, writing:

I should prefer to an ordinary death, being immersed with a few friends in a cask of Madeira, until that time, then to be recalled to life by the solar warmth of my dear country! But in all probability, we live in a century too little advanced, and too near the infancy of science, to see such an art brought in our time to its perfection.^[66] (Extended excerpt also online.)^[67]

Oh man.

From Conor Friedersdorf, ostensibly about Harry Reid, sentence number one:

As Gene Healy’s cult of the presidency continues apace, it is equally remarkable that the legislative branch so often seems unable or unwilling to carry out basic functions proscribed by the Constitution.

The three American branches of government were designed, broadly speaking, such that the legislature would write laws, the executive would, well, execute them (but could veto, and potentially be overridden), and the judicial branch would determine their constitutionality.  This is no longer the case.  The United States, at least at the federal level, no longer has checks and balances.  Your high school civics class is now wrong.

Over the past few decades (or longer), the executive has basically taken the front seat.  The legislature is now a body that merely approves laws crafted (either directly, or their primary intent) by the executive.  The Supreme Court, despite major constitutional departures (suspension of habeas corpus, congressional declaration of war, and so many others) has proven unwilling to fulfill their role.  The United States now more closely resembles the Principate of the later Roman period, where instead of being equals, the wishes of the citizenry, judiciary and legislature were political luxuries the leader courted, but were fundamentally subservient to him when it came to policy.

In practice, the Principate was a period of enlightened absolutism, with occasional forays into quasi-constitutional monarchy; Emperors tended not to flaunt their power and usually respected the rights of citizens (although they never let this fact bind them).

Sound familiar?  At least we don’t have dynastic monarchs, where many of our leaders all hail from the same rich and powerful families?  Oh, right, never mind.

So, since the Supreme Court seems fundamentally uninterested in major constitutional breaches, the only way to suppress executive power has been when the legislature and the citizens are nominally opposed to it — as during the Clinton administration, or last two years of Bush II.  Good work, citizenry!  Unfortunately, this opposition is ultimately political (i.e. Republican vs. Democrat), not constitutional.  As soon as the citizens and congress were suitably aligned with Republican or Democratic presidents, this check vanished.  The fact that “aligned” is shorthand for relatively miniscule shifts in actual public opinion, and that the populace and both parties are actually in practice rather in agreement on most of the constitutional violations, is also worrisome.

So, if old-fashioned, checks-and-balances constitutional opposition to executive power is impotent, we’ll have to rely on that political opposition stuff!  Too bad one of our pathetic political parties is completely prostrate.  Jon Henke, with the other sentence: (okay fine it’s actually six sentences, you got me)

The implication of Hayek’s position is that conservatism can never achieve the vision of genuine individual freedom – it can only oppose the Left.  If that is the case, then who can achieve limited government?  The Compassionate Conservative approach has been tried, miserably (though some, like Douthat and others advocate variations on it).  The religious right seems inclined towards a Christian Democrats approach (Huckabee, et al).  There is the “energetic” and “ambitious” “national greatness” approach advocated by those like David Brooks, Bill Kristol & John McCain.  Libertarians and many independents/moderates are inclined toward a, you know, libertarian approach.

So, we have five potential Republican strategies (I’ll add one at the end):

Compassionate: didn’t work, as Henke notes.

Religious: isn’t going to work.  If it could, then the religious right wouldn’t be on a massive retreat on nearly every topic it cares about.

National Greatness: isn’t going to work.  It will be as popular as it’s centerpiece: the war in Iraq.  Good luck with that.

Libertarianism: obviously my favorite tactic for anyone to pursue, but there are many people on the left who would argue that the recent financial crisis has invalidated this as well — though I would disagree, the fact remains that lots of people think so.

Social: the culture war types, who don’t like rap music, violent videogames, pornography, etc…  This faction has been pretty much getting their asses handed to them for 40 years now.  Not going to work.

The two most tried-and-true of these, Social and Religious, are also the ones that have been most crushingly defeated, and will continue to be so for a long time primarily for the reason Henke also lays out here:

As Kristen Soltis has pointed out here recently, “young voters began abandoning the Republican Party long before Barack Obama was even a serious contender for the presidency. Those pinning the Republican Party’s poor fortunes among young voters on the Obama candidacy miss the source of the problem and certainly underestimate its severity.”

Lesson: Republicans had better become more appealing to young people, because patterns established in youth persist for life. 

Pardon my skepticism, but old religious fogeys who want to go back to a time without all these newfangled socially corrosive things aren’t really going to get many votes in the young people category.  Because here’s the problem: every day a bunch of people who might be swayed by these arguments die.  And a bunch of people who are vastly more likely to ignore them are born.  Unless there’s a really amazing pro-old-religious-fogey propaganda campaign going on here that will swamp these effects, those two positions are total dead ends.  While I like to rag on these two tactics, mainly because I find them distasteful, I’m not particularly fond of National Greatness or Compassionate either — but that’s okay, since they don’t seem to be doing too well.

So what do we have here?  A dysfunctional division of power.  The only remaining check, that of an opposition party, is pretty dead or dying, and even people like me, who really like divided government, aren’t even that sad to see it go.  Even if the Republican party manages to somehow right itself, (as the Democratic party did after its doom was widely forecast only a few years ago) all this means is that things might be okay when the electoral dice roll for divided government (and assuming the two parties actually disagree on the pertinent issues), and not-so-happy when they do not.

Given that what parties seem to do when they have unrestricted power is “expensive things that will get people to like us even more” in an effort to prolong their reign, we can much more briefly sum up the Future of American Politics with only one sentence and zero additional commentary:

How are we going to pay for all of this?

The Chinese Are Buying Hummer. Are You Outraged?

Hummers used to be a symbol of American greatness, or gratuity — if there’s a difference. Now a Chinese manufacturer is buying the company. How the mighty have fallen? Or, how the almost-as-mighty have been suckered into buying a worthless car company? 

The New York Times reports that the GM has agreed to sell its Hummer SUVs and trucks to the Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Company Ltd., a western Chinese machinery company that would like to start making cars. (Some advice from American experience: Don’t make Hummers.)

The best comment:

Joel |  June 2, 2009 6:45 PM

I’d only be outraged if I were a shareholder in this Chinese company.

I certainly thank this company for their kindly charitable donation to GM, as it will save my tax dollars from being used for the same purpose, but I have to wonder what the hell they were thinking.  I would not want to be the guy who arranged this deal.

So, given that the government’s 60% ownership of GM is supposed to be temporary, one assumes that they will need to sell their stake in it at some point.  What happens if GM continues to decline, and no one wants to buy it?  

Sure, you can call me a crazy free-market nut with my nasty rhetorical question, but even then — what’s the answer?