Hope
The election is over, and the candidate from Hope won. The most hopeful analysis I have seen is this one from Perry de Havilland:
Unlike many, well, most of my compatriots, I am not filled with a deep sense of gloom and foreboding at the prospect of the most left wing president since FDR gaining the Whitehouse. In truth, I can see many reasons to think it may well be a far better outcome than if a Big State Republican like McCain won.
Of course Obama will bring an avalanche of policies that will be truly appalling and quite wicked, of that I have no doubt, much like his predecessors in office in that respect. As the global economy continues to come unglued, everything Obama does to deal with the mounting crises will I fact make things worse. Civil liberties will be hammered, all in the name of ‘fairness’, and the flood of regulations pertaining to every aspect of economic life will grow into a drowning ocean.
And that is actually the good news.
Why? Because in truth the Republicans under John “I support the bailout” McCain would scarcely have done much better. The economic global meltdown is only just starting to roll: if you think the sub-prime mortgage crisis was the biggie, just wait until you see the fallout from the fun and frolics of the impending mess in other areas, such as debt swaps. This is all going to get worse, a lot worse, and Obama is going to do absolutely everything to dig the holes deeper. Looking back on this period ten to twenty years from now, the Republicans crying into their beer tonight will be saying “thank Christ it was not us in office then”.
The lesser evil is not going to win this time and much as it may not seem that way now… or any time soon I suspect… in the long run this has a far far better chance of leading to the rebirth of a genuine pro-liberty, pro-market political culture, something which the gradual incremental surrender of recent times made impossible (such as the ‘pragmatic voting’ of people who want a smaller state for Republican candidates who ended up growing the regulatory state).
Many will find the glee of the statist left over the next few days and weeks hard to endure, but to be honest I have been walking around with a grin all day. Finally the era of gradualism is over and the masks are going to come off. The USA has voted for statism and it is going to get exactly what it voted for at a juncture in history where it will very quickly be impossible to hide the cost of those votes.
Obama is not the start of a new era, he is the death knell for the old one.
It seems we have the government we deserve. If I had no children I think I might be able to spare a grim smile for the coming train wreck.
Posted on November 5th, 2008 by pwyll
Filed under: politics
Entries RSS
Oh wonderful! We drank a deadly poison. The good news is it is a slow poison. Thank heavens for small miracles.
“Of course Obama will bring an avalanche of policies that will be truly appalling and quite wicked, of that I have no doubt”
An avalanche of quite wicked policies? Of course?
“…in the long run this has a far far better chance of leading to the rebirth of a genuine pro-liberty, pro-market political culture.”
Because that additional 3% added to the top tax bracket is going to crush the spirit of creativity out there in America. American creativity is so damn fragile, you know.
Goodness, the only thing missing from that drivel is to blame the current financial crisis on those stupid poor folks who bought those houses they couldn’t really afford, because, you know, the government perturbed the “free market” with all of its regulation.
It is critical to understand that the financial system is one huge interconnected dynamical system. The world economy is much freer than at any time in history, and is arguably too free.
Too free? How can this be? What about the “Of course, optimal markets are always the most free” theorem? Well, there’s no such thing. Belief in this isn’t mathematics, it’s religious dogma.
What is mathematics is dynamical systems theory. What we have to get away from is the religious belief that there’s is no way to control this thing and any attempt will only make things worse. No one is talking about a 5 year plan. What we need is a system that is strongly mixing with bounded variation. Too much freedom, and too much (geographic) concentration of wealth seems to produce extremely large variations.
I say “seems to” since I will readily admit that this is also speculation. Just as the “freer markets are always better” is speculation.
What we need is more economic and political pragmatism, and less economic and political religious dogma.
I think I have made my beliefs about the scope and purpose of government clear enough. My objections to statism and socialism are moral, not mathematical.
The opposite of freedom is coercion, which is to say applied violence. I prefer freedom. There was a time when Americans at least understood the motto “Live free or die”. Now it is fine to intrude with the full power of the state into any matter, for any reason, say to reduce market variability. And here I thought that’s what portfolio diversification was for.
I don’t want more pragmatism. I want freedom. You propose to use dynamical systems theory to control markets, which is to say, to control people’s voluntary interactions. I do not want to be controlled, however scientifically.
My objection to Obama is not this or that issue about marginal tax rates or the like. It runs much deeper. Things you and Obama consider desirable outcomes, say market coercion and redistribution of income, I consider “appalling and quite wicked”. Is that so hard to understand?
The dream of a controlled society is as old as Plato’s Republic. I do not share that dream.
Your objections may be moral, but they are based on conditions in the world that no longer exist. Conservatives in general, and libertarians in particular, run the risk of becoming irrelevant if they don’t reexamine certain fundamental assumptions about the world, and create new arguments for the ideas they believe are central to their philosophy.
As an example, consider the concept of “original sin”. The notion is central to Catholic moral and sacramental theology. Sin, in general, according to this theology, flows from this original act of disobedience: the attempt to “be like gods”. This first sin precipitated the Fall. During the Easter vigil, a hymn is sung to this “necessary sin of Adam, which gained for us so great a Savior”. No Fall, no need for redemption.
Only one problem. It never happened.
The argument and narrative for a Savior in traditional Catholic teaching is built around original sin. But the Church no longer believes in a literal interpretation of the Bible. If the “original sin” never happened, then how did sin enter the world. Why do we need to be saved?
The Church has ignored this question for over 50 years (Pius XII in 1950 acknowledged evolution as God’s mechanism for human creation). By ignoring it, and not doing the hard work necessary to reformulate the argument, the entire notion of sin has become increasingly irrelevant in the modern world.
I’m ok, you’re ok, but I’m (somewhat) sorry if you felt hurt by what I did.
Freedom as merely freedom from coercion, and all government regulations considered as examples of coercion are ideas, it seems to me, that need the same reexamination. Who better than libertarians to carefully look at the role of government and try to discern the types of regulation that make sense in today’s world?
Why? Because the economic grid is completely connected, changes happen at light speed, and “markets” can no longer react fast enough to correct bad decisions. Bad decisions no longer stay local.
In the old days, when the snake oil salesman came to town, he would sell a dozen bottles, and folks would wake up the next day with a headache, and the salesman would be gone. Oh well. Caveat emptor. The next guys who came to town trying to sell some snake oil would suffer through the “market correction”.
That world is gone. Because of the interconnectedness of things, small groups of people can create virtually unbounded effects on the system. In this world, a careful reexamination of the role of regulation is necessary.
Yeah, let’s get right on reconsidering whether government regulation is coercion. Here’s an interesting place to start, as per the President Elect’s website:
I read that as mandatory child labor to be served in the Obama Youth Corps. What do you call it?
Here’s more detail:
# Obama and Biden will set a goal that all middle and high school students do 50 hours of community service a year. They will develop national guidelines for service- learning and will give schools better tools both to develop programs and to document student experience.
#Green Job Corps: Obama and Biden will create an energy-focused youth jobs program to provide disadvantaged youth with service opportunities weatherizing buildings and getting practical experience in fast-growing career fields.
# Require 100 Hours of Service in College: Obama and Biden will establish a new American Opportunity Tax Credit that is worth $4,000 a year in exchange for 100 hours of public service a year.
Yeah boy, brown shirts here we come.
The pretty words and trendy causes don’t impress me, at least not favorably. The only thing I care about is whether the programs will be compulsory.
I know, they won’t be, officially. ‘Compulsory’ is such a harsh word, and there’s that pesky 13th amendment. No need to rile the cattle. Here’s how the sugar coating will be applied. The Feds will threaten to withhold funds from states that don’t get with the program, and the states will fall right in line. The schools will make “service” part of the curriculum, and who could object to that?
Not only is it for a good cause, but it’s good for the impressionable youngsters. Why just the other day the wife and I were wondering how to get our daughter some experience weatherizing buildings. And if she gets 20 or 50 hours of political/religious indoctrination in
Gaia worshipenvironmentalism, why that’s just a bonus. No doubt there will be many fine people eager to instruct her in how to serve the community, and what beliefs best serve the community. And I’m pretty damn sure what they’ll want her to Believe is quite unlike what I believe.Open your eyes. You seem to think an Obama Youth Corps is a good thing. Do you even for a moment believe I will ever agree? The very idea is revolting.
We’re clearly not going to agree. If he is as bad as you seem to think, then he will be out after one term, and all will be well.
No doubt there are very few buildings in your neighborhood that need “weatherizing”, but paying kids in poor neighborhoods to help improve homes that are falling apart, and learning useful job skills at the same time, just doesn’t strike me as evil incarnate.
Anyone who wants to pay kids to work is free to do so. It’s called hiring; capitalists and libertarians are ok with it. What I object to is conscription. The difference lies in whether the kids will be free to decline to do the job. And we both know they won’t be.
The nice circumloqution for this is “expansion of the nanny state”. Instead of families or churches encouraging altruistic behavior we have the government taking on the role of what and how it will be manifested. The government plays an ever encroaching role into or lives so we look to big brother for solutions to everything from employment to drafty windows and doors. The religion becomes the religion of state worship. That is when you get out the brown shirts. By the way Hitler’s volken wore brown because an italian bully bought up all the black ones. We’ll probably wear something more hip. It will still be fascism but with a ’smily face’.
As someone who actually spends time in schools and neighborhoods in some of the poorest community in the country, I’m wondering how you imagine “the market” in these places works. What capitalist decides that the risk/reward equation for fixing broken windows in these neighborhood makes sense?
If none do, what is the appropriate response? Everyone who could move out of these neighborhoods, has moved out. What to do with those left behind?
What seems to be happening in this country is an increasingly bimodal income distribution. Suppose pure unregulated capitalism as a dynamical system has two points of attraction, 0 and “infinity”? Again, there are no theorems one way or the other, but assume for the moment this is true.
Is the proper response to do nothing and watch it happen?
I put my answers to that last round of questions on the front page.
To suggest that compulsory community service is tantamount to fascism because some fascists made people do things is more than a little sloppy and disingenuous.
I favor the reinstitution of the draft, and have a moral problem with waging wars on the backs of people who, through no fault of their own, had no better options than joining the military. What of the forty year-old “volunteers” with families who have been called up to Iraq and Afghanistan three times already?
I attribute much of the decline in manners and basic civility in today’s society to the fact that people are no longer made to learn to get along with each other, whether this happens through the draft or some other compulsory service, or through common circumstances.
“To suggest that compulsory community service is tantamount to fascism because some fascists made people do things is more than a little sloppy and disingenuous.”
Don, I’m not sure whether that is addressed to me. I made no mention of fascism, though one commenter did. I agree that the argument “X is wrong because fascists did X” is not a good one. I would argue instead “the fascists were wrong because (among other things) they did X”.
Here is my reply to proponents of compulsory community service: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
Your comments regarding the draft are revealing. Where I see the finest, most professional, most ethical military ever to exist, you see “people who, through no fault of their own, had no better options than joining the military”. I have the honor to know and work with many men who are serving or have served in our military. I have not met one who was not proud of his service, or who enlisted as some sort of desperate last resort. Your disdain for these men as some sort of simpletons or pawns shows through, and it does you no credit.