The Only Winning Move

I’m not one to defend Sarah Palin, but the 11,000+ comments on HuffingtonPost in the wake of her recent admission that she and her family used to go to Canadian hospitals when she was young seem a bit of a cheap shot. Apparently, it’s “hypocritical” of Palin to denounce Canada’s healthcare system when she herself once took advantage of it.

Yeah - only if you’re in a position to believe that 5-year-old kids are responsible for decisions that their parents make. Further, that people in general are not allowed to change their mind ever about anything, not even over a 50-year time window.

AND you have to ignore the fact that the nearby hospital in Whitehorse that Palin and her parents regularly went to when they lived in Skagway is the only one in the area. Alaska and the Yukon Territory are remote, people.

But even assuming the left’s preferred spin on this were true - that Palin’s parents were deliberately freeriding on the Canadian system - how does that possibly become an argument in favor of such systems? All that does is confirm what the right has been saying about the public option all along: that it will crowd out private options and function - intentionally or not - as a kind of trojan horse that brings us an eventual single-payer system.

If I were a left-wing supporter of single-payer healthcare, far from celebrating it, I would want this story buried.

It’s interesting to look at the history of ideas as an evolutionary process, by which parent ideas adapt defenses to survive their circumstances which they then pass on to their descendendants. Presumably, we’re all aiming at The Truth, whatever that is, and we try out solutions until one seems to fit. And once one seems to fit, people become invested in it, often beyond the merits of the idea. Which is not unlike natural selection, really - since an individual creature doesn’t usually opt out of the gene pool once he realizes his geneset is less than ideal. Rather, he resorts to various kinds of gaming the system. Rape is presumably one of these, and it’s an interesting question whether this kind of thing is an adaptive advantage (in that strong-willed, physically capable, aggressive genes get passed on), or a polluting of the selection process (no reason it can’t be both, I suppose).

An analogy in the history of ideas would be things like Faith, or False Consciousness. Marx must have realized early on that his system was not viable because it had the huge problem of explaining why workers went to great lengths to obtain the very factory jobs that it was claimed were oppressing them. Typically, one does not leave his home, move somewhere else at great expense and then stand in line begging to be oppressed! So it was necessary to invent “False Consciousness,” by which workers were confused about their circumstances. The Revolution was delayed because people weren’t educated enough … or something.

Maybe it started out as a mutation, but now it’s in the geneset of the Left, and it won’t let go! The reason why it’s helpful to think of it as a kind of genetic inheritance, actually, is because I see False Consciousness being employed even when it can’t POSSBLY be the right analysis (Marx, at least, really was dealing with largely uneducated contemporaries), almost as if by reflex.

Take, for example, the constant references to “raising awareness” about the dangers of smoking in campaigns to ban same. Does anyone HONESTLY think there’s anyone alive who doesn’t know not only that smoking is dangerous but also in exactly what way it’s dangerous? Can anyone POSSIBLY believe that people are still confused on this score? Back in the “Mad Men” 60’s, of course, it was not only possible but likely that a good chunk of the population was confused. I’m guessing no one who truly paid attention ever thought that inhaling chemically-treated smoke would be good for them (certainly not when it’s the kind of chemicals that go into cigarettes!), mind you, but advertisements of the day definitely promoted the idea that smoking might be healthy. I don’t think it’s a stretch to believe that a lot of the not-so-conscientious actually bought it. But now? Everyone in my generation saw pictures of blackened lungs when they were 6 and can quote the cancer statistics in their sleep. We’ve all seen the video about the guy who talks though a hole in his neck. We’ve all had our heartstrings tugged with weepy stories about people watching their loved ones slowly die, and we’ve all been shocked with the horror of something SO ADDICTIVE that someone would actually smuggle a cigarette into an oxygen tent and inadvertently blow himself up. Awareness is raised as high as it’s going to go, and so any talk of “raising awareness” at this point is just transparent: the person advocating it is just asking the government to foot the bill for his political campaign. The thing is, False Consciousness is so ingrained in the Left at this point that I don’t think the people looking to “raise awareness” of that of which everyone is already very much aware actually notice the contradiction. If they sat down and thought about what they were doing, they’d spot it in an instant, of course, but politics, as we all well know, isn’t always about rational thought so much as herd mentality. You don’t like smoking, and your friends don’t like smoking, and you and your friends are all left-wingers, and someone floats the idea that smokers might not know what they’re doing, and because everyone in the group is steeped in leftist political training that idea seems as natural as the sun rising, and no one does it the courtesy of a second though. Kind of the way that religious types, if they really stopped to think about it, would know that God didn’t make the subway late to punish them for eating too much jam, and yet the idea that God pulls even such minute strings as these is so ingrained in their thinking that they don’t think twice about it. At least, that’s the only way I can explain it to myself.

Another more personal example. I am the TA (”AI” in IUSpeak) for a Topics course called “Language and Politics” in which we analyze the speeches of political actors as linguistic devices. In essence, looking at language as a kind of technology that political actors use to get what they want. Well, the other AI is a big feminist and recently voiced a concern that we weren’t doing enough analysis of speeches by women (never mind that Margaret Thatcher and Sarah Palin have featured prominently so far). I fired back that we were choosing speeches that well illustrated the concepts we were covering in class, and that I didn’t appreciate the suggestion that me and the main instructor had been ignoring speeches by women for sexist motives. And so of course the leftist fell back on her training: he wasn’t doing this on purpose, but Society-capital-S has trained him so well in the language of male superiority that he doesn’t even know he’s excluding women anymore. (!!!) Not only that, but when asked why she felt it was important that we have x number of speeches by women - where x is an integer that can only be accessed internally by her by polling her own private feelings, as far as I can tell - she honestly said, and I can’t stress enough that this is a real quote:

I believe that it is worthwhile to do, to make women more visible in our class presentations, and to demonstrate that politics, for good and for bad, is not just about what men have to say.

And I’m left scratching my head trying my damndest to imagine a person who thinks that politics is “just about what men have to say.” Honestly? No, she simply can’t actually believe this. This is like “raising awareness” of the dangers of smoking. Everyone is already well aware that politics is “not just about what men have to say.” Because just like with smoking, everyone in my generation and afterward has heard countless times already just how much politics USED to be just about men, but how women are making headway now and how wonderful a thing that is, and how someday there will be a female president, etc. And of course you look around you and you know this is true. The Speaker of the House is female. The Secretary of State is female. That same female Secretary of State came within inches of the presidency herself a year and a half ago. There are two women on the Supreme Court. The previous Congress (110) had a record number of women - 90, which is just under 20%. It’s true enough that women are underrepresented (as a proportion of the actual population) in politics - certainly in US politics. But it’s safe to say that there are enough of them that no one is confused about politics being an exclusively male domain. I mean honestly, what does my co-worker think, that Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton just sit there at meetings and nod their heads while the men are talking? That Margaret Thatcher did this? The Sonia Sotomayor does this? That all those countless majority opinions that Sandra Day O’Connor authored were ghostwritten? Again, I think it’s just reflex - kinda the way you instinctively hit rather than grabbing a gun when threatened, just because that’s what’s in your geneset. False Consciousness is so deeply embedded within the ideological geneset of the Left that it’s what they resort to in a pinch, even if they can’t possibly really mean it.

I wonder if Libertarians have something like this? In our caricatured version I suppose answering “the market will fix it” to any social challenge is one such thing. But that’s a caricature - I think those of us (and I’m definitely one) who count as market fundamentalist Libertarians don’t reach for the market explanation as so much a reflex as out of a real belief in it. The difference, in other words, is that I’m aware that I’m a market fundamentalist, and that usually when I offer “the market will fix it” solutions it’s not because I’m parrying with something that I learned from waxing on and waxing off, it’s because I’ve actually thought about how market mechanisms will respond to the problem and sincerely believe that they will work.

But then, we’re none of us ever as self-critical as we should be, so maybe I do put too many eggs in the “market” basket out of sheer reflex from time to time. Or maybe I and libertarians like me have other tics that I’m just not consciously aware of. Maybe. But my genuine guess is that we don’t, and that’s because Libertarianism isn’t in the spotlight enough to put Libertarians on the spot often enough (har) to develop these kinds of kneejerk defenses. That may be changing, though. One can hope!

An asinine comment seen on Facebook:

Thinks that Evan Bayh needs to stand up more and not sit it out, if he is dissatisfied with Capital Hill. We need strong leaders. I think he’s worried that the conflict of interest will shine through.

Referring, of course, to the fact that Evan Bayh is taking his toys and going home.

OK, so here’s my question. How do we know if a leader is “strong?” One interpretation would be that the leader gets his way more often than not. But on that interpretation it’s synonymous with having a bunch of docile followers, and what this guy is arguing for is empirically indistinguishable from saying that people need to follow their leaders more. And yet, somehow that’s not what I think he means. Anyway, I posted something to that effect, and get this - even more asinine - in response:

Actually I meant leaders synonymously with elected representation. What we need is representation that is confident enough to weather the slings and arrows of the voices of the far Left and far Right, honorable enough to reject the lobbyists and corruption, and strong enough to stand in the middle of Congress to help bring it together for the good of the country.

Christ, where to begin?

Well, for one thing, this is a named fallacy. It’s called the “Middle Ground Fallacy,” and it’s the assumption that if you have the one camp that supports the one option, and the other camp that supports the other option, then some compromise between those two options must be the right one. So it’s of the same pedigree as the more commonly cited False Dilemma - bucept in this case we’re ruling out the two given options without proof (whereas in False Dilemma one typically accepts that one of the two must be true without proof). Point being - one of the two options of “Far Left” or “Far Right” might turn out to be just what’s “for the good of the country” for all I know. Just saying they’re both bad options doesn’t make it so.

More to the point, presumably the people who represent the “Far Left” and “Far Right” are also members of the electorate with the same constitutional voting rights that I have, and with the same level of sincerity about their beliefs that I have, and their input is therefore a valid part of the democratic process. I may not really respect their idiotic views personally, but democratic legitimacy requires that they be allowed to participate in the political process just like everyone else. And that means, ultimately, that whatever strong leader this Facebook friend is arguing for is also responsible for representing the interests of his Far Left and Far Right constituents. Of course, almost by definition they will not represent the main swathe of the constituency the representative is supposed to represent, but they are still part of the electorate and thus have the same right to form pressure groups to bring their concerns to the attention of their duly elected representative that everyone has.

But the real point comes when I try to figure out what “Far Left” and “Far Right” even are in America. Do we have these categories? What the hell is this guy actually talking about? I mean, to the extent that there is a CPUSA, it has about 50 members, none of whom live in Indiana. And to the extent that there is Storm Front, it has about 50 members, some of whom probably do live in Indiana, but I doubt whether they vote. And so I think the single most asinine thing of all the asinine things this guy is saying is right here in this idea that somehow the American political spectrum is this broad, all-encompassing thing that’s besieged on the one side by left wing crazies and on the other by fascists. Reality is - the Republicans and the Democrats are just not all that different. Or, rather, they represent quite different underlying political philosophies (the Democrats Socialism, the Republicans any one of the mutually incompatible Fascism/Traditionalism, Theocracy, and Classical Liberalism), but rather mild versions of these philosophies in all cases. There is no one on the Democrat side who advocates or even reads about Marxism, and there is no one on the Republican side who is seriously calling for a police state or a real lasseiz faire market economy. These are tendencies rather than ideologies, as far as I can tell, and they’re so compromised with each other by this point that even though the tendencies are different there is broad agreement on all sides about the scope, purpose, and even the actual policies of government. What partisan bickering goes on in Washington is not driven by ideology so much as power jockeying, and this is actually by design - because it keeps us on a pretty even keel from year to year. There are never radical policy shifts, and I believe that this kind of stability, more than anything else, makes up the lion’s share of government’s contribution to the economic success of the US. Note that this is NOT a claim that things could not be better! Obviously (to me, anyway), a radically Classical Liberal (American translation: Libertarian) government would bring us much more stability and prosperity than we currently have. But that’s a pipe dream, not in line with what the electorate wants. What we do have is second-best - a broadly market-oriented economy that’s not all that politically capricious. And I think if you look around the world you’ll see the same ingredient present in a lot of the other well-known success stories. Japan - the world’s number two - is not a market economy by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s nothing if not completely politically stable. Sweden is also not a market economy, but again, it’s highly stable. Pretty much any country that has done well over the long term will be marked by a broad popular political consensus - which isn’t to say there isn’t internal bickering over policy, just that everyone is basically on board with what the political culture values and where it’s headed.

There are no extremes in this country, so what’s he whining about? Imaginary problems caused by imaginary foes. There is no Far Right in America, there is no Far Left. It’s pretty much just a well-stocked kitchen filled with a bunch of mediocre chefs who spend all day debating how much saccharine to put in. None at all for me, thanks - I like the REAL stuff. And the good news is, as long as they sit there scratching their heads about it, we don’t get too much actual saccharine. It’s not the BEST solution, but it’s one that seems to work well enough, and so I’m not too keen to rock the boat. Because I’m telling you, if THIS bunch manages to elect a head chef, it’s splenda jello casserole with marshmellows forever. Maybe with Rice Krispies and whipped cream on top.

And how, to asked the begged question, are we to characterize this mythical “middle” that he seems to think exists anyway? There’s some coherent broad agreement about what that is, is there? Such that some “strong leader” could reasonably represent “its interests?” Yeah, I don’t really think so. I think it’s more like this: there’s broad consensus about what America is and what its government does, and within that framework there’s a rag-tag fleet of more-or-less one-issue special interests that spend time trying to push policicy an inch or two toward their quadrant on the grid. So to the extent that there’s a “center” such that most people are in it, it isn’t a coherent thing that can be faithfully represented in any way. No, it’s a bunch of largely unrelated things that all get their input, and there isn’t anywhere in the world a “Joe (the plumber) Normal” who is all of these concerns at once. The only way there would ever be a coherent “middle” position would be if some leader came along and defined it - at which point of course he’s the antithesis of “elected representation,” as he’s setting the agenda rather than channeling it.

No thanks - no leaders, please. In fact, let’s just turn the volume down and forget they’re even arguing. They’re grandstanders, and paying too much attention to them only encourages them. Stop looking to the government to solve your problems, because it never will - not adequately. Stop dreaming about leaders, grow up, make your own decisions, live your own life. Thank you.

A popular meme these days is that we’re about to make the same mistake FDR did during Great Depression 1.0 - that of pulling back government stimulus too soon. The argument goes that the Great Depression was ending by 1937 until FDR pulled the rug out of the recovery by trying to reign in deficit spending. That being the case, we should sneeze at our multi-trillion dollar deficit and spill even more red ink to finance public works projects aimed at getting the recovery going. Bruce Bartlett is currently getting some press for this prescription.

Well, it might be right. But I see a couple of problems with the story even if you buy the Keynesian analysis that government pump-priming can be something other than distortionary - particularly with Bartlett’s version.

First, the idea that FDR was a deficit hawk is misleading. It seems to be true that he was worried about deficit spending - at least in the sense that he worried his voters were worried about it - but one can be a deficit hawk and still a fan of massive government spending and economic micromanagement, and FDR was pretty clearly a fan of both spending and micromanagement. The attempts to paint FDR as some kind of cautious conservative when it comes to pump-priming just aren’t going to work, even if you’re in a position to believe that he was serious about tackling the deficit in 1937. Our objections to Obama aping FDR aren’t objections to deficit spending per se, in other words, they’re broader objections to the whole idea of government massively interfering with markets. FDR’s temporary fit of concern about deficits isn’t going to answer the broader objections.

Now, I follow the logic that debt is a good thing if it gives you capital to grow: you borrow when you’re poor to get the resources you need to get rich, and then pay back when you’re rich. Fine. But this obviously only works if you spend your loan wisely. Squander it and you’re twice as poor as you were before. So another burden of proof that these new fans of stimulus spending need to meet is that of showing that the current stimulus spending is actually doing any good. In FDR’s case, as Bartlett points out, the problem was that once he cut public works programs to try to balance the budget, unemployment shot back up into the double digits. I am willing to buy that as evidence that a lot of the employment at the end of the Depression was maintained by the government. But what evidence is there for that in the current stimulus? My understanding is that a lot of the stimulus money hasn’t been spent, and that what has been spent has been spent mostly to shore up already-existing government jobs. There hasn’t been any massive public works investment like there was in the 30s - and so it’s hard to see how cutbacks in federal spending are going to throw anyone out of work. The percentage of employment that is accounted for by direct government payouts now is not so different from the percentage accounted for by direct government payouts before - in CONTRAST to the situation FDR faced in 1937. The stimulus of the noughts, to the extent that we had one, was in keeping the financial system from collapsing, not in paying people to dig pointless ditches.

OK, so maybe people like Bartlett are arguing for public works projects as a way to cut some of the existing unemployment. But if that’s the case, then isn’t the FDR experience more like a counterargument? What FDR’s budget cuts show, if anything, is that government-provided jobs have a way of NOT turning into self-sustaining economic activity. Cut the budget even a little, and people have nowhere else to go. That’s NO ONE’s idea of a road to sustainable recovery! To the extent that government spending works to stimulate the economy, then only by getting cash flowing again so that the inarguably more efficient private sector can start investing. 1937 shows us that far from stimulating the private sector to do that, government provision of jobs just causes stagnation. If in 1933 the government “creates” a bunch of jobs that by 1937 have still not led to a situation where jobs can create themselves, then it’s fair to conclude that the jobs created in 1933 were just proxies for handouts - a covert dole. Unless Bartlett is arguing that we want a bunch of people stuck on the government payroll approximately forever, I’m not really seeing the point of holding FDR up as an example to follow.

I think the most galling thing about these arguments is that somehow the government always gets as much time as it needs to claim credit for jobs recovery, but if the private sector can’t deliver by tomorrow capitalism is pronounced dead on arrival. The financial crisis became apparent about a year and a half ago. If employment hasn’t recovered yet, well I’m not any happier about it than anyone else, but a year and a half is hardly the 4 years* that we’re giving FDR to build his track record now, is it? So how about this - pull back the stimulus and if in 2013 unemployment is still 10% or more, we can talk about massive public works investment. But since signs show that unemployment is abating even without this investment, what would the argument POSSIBLY be for starting it?

*Actually it’s a lot more than that, since full recovery from the Depression didn’t come until 1951-2. So apparently the government gets a 20-year handicap from its fans.

Here’s Megan McArdle saying pretty much what I did about the Brown win’s likely effect on healthcare legislation:

As I read it, majorities of both houses do not want to pass this bill–otherwise, they wouldn’t have run for the exits so quick. They were looking for an excuse that they could deploy without risking retaliation from the leadership–and what the Massachusetts election showed, is that they don’t have all that much to fear from the leadership, because the leadership may not be there after November. Reid’s almost certain to lose his seat, and Pelosi may lose her majority in the house.

Seemingly small changes in power distribution make a big difference when they’re not targeted right. And power blocks in republics are NOT always a reflection of the will of the majority.

On a related note - a common theme in the blogosphere - both left and right - is chewing over whether President Obama overreached by making healthcare a priority. The leftists say no - Republicans would never have let it pass; the right say yes - the average American voter is satisfied with his healthcare plan and doesn’t want government intervention on this scale. My own thought is that it’s neither: Obama could’ve passed some kind of national healthcare plan resembling the one he wanted if he’d been more cautious and open about it. Start by recognizing that a national healthcare plan is a big step and that it will make the public nervous. Then give yourself a year to do real research into policies that have been adopted abroad and how they would likely translate to an American context. Then allow Congress to chew on it slowly. While this process is going on, make comments about it that are informed, rather than alarmist. That is, rather than just endlessly repeating the numbers we’ve all heard before about how many people your plan would insure, engage the opposition by admitting that they have a point about side-effects (because honestly, can anyone name even a single welfare state plan that didn’t sport some unintended side-effects?) and try to address their concerns. Also, just admit that there are going to be costs. Because there are going to be. If you can’t be honest about what everyone (reasonable) already knows, can you really be surprised when people don’t trust you? Above all, DON’T try to pass sea change legislation in your first year in office. Set a more reasonable timeline. I think if Obama had taken this approach, national healthcare would’ve been a slam dunk, and he would’ve even gotten points from historians for his thoughtfulness.

Oh well.

On the off chance you haven’t heard, Brown won the seat vacated by Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts yesterday, thus popping the Dems’ supermajority. Now they will have no effective defense against the fillibuster, which Republicans are expected to use to sabotage Obama’s healthcare plans.

Predictably, then, here’s Matt Yglesias trying to downplay it and completely missing the point in the process.

Yglesias’ argument is that since there are already Democrats like Evan Bayh who are dragging their feet on the president’s healthcare agenda, Brown’s win does’t actually matter that much. You see, these people were already going to sabotage the agenda, were already going to make the Dems come up a vote or two short, and so adding one more Republican to the mix doesn’t really change that much. In his own words:

Scott Brown joining the Senate will make it impossible to make big progress on the big issues facing the country. But a number of “centrist” Democrats have been making it clear for a while now that they don’t want to make big progress on the big issues facing the country. That’s too bad, and Brown winning will only make things worse. We’re much more likely looking at a situation where Brown’s victory becomes an excuse for people not to do things they didn’t want to do anyway than a situation where Brown’s victory is the actual reason those things can’t be done. [Emphasis mine]

Ahem. So Brown winning is no big deal, but it provides an excuse for people not to do things they didn’t want to do anyway? Wha…? Unless I’m very much mistaken, that’s actually an argument for Brown’s win being a big deal - as in possibly decisive on the healthcare issue.

Let me tell you a story about Romania. It was once ruled by a very bad king. Actually, he started out as a passably good king, and was at least useful in undermining the power of the empire of which his country was a principality, but as the years rolled by he grabbed more and more power for himself and eventually made his people very poor, even though they were well-educated and produced many useful things. Now it turns out that 20th century kings - rather like 9th century kings - have to be reconfirmed in office every couple of years (yes, even Bernanke) by winning the approval of their immediate underlings, the noblemen, and this king was no different. However bad he became, however, his noblemen just kept on approving - and in fact when he was finally deposed, it was because of a violent revolution among the peasants - inspired by foreign events, no less! - rather than a straightfoward denounciation by his peers. But this seems wrong: why would the noblemen allow it to come to a peasant revolt? Peasant revolts are never good for the nobility…

As it turns out, many - maybe even most - of the noblemen wanted to depose the king, and there were frequent secret agreements to do just that. But here is the trouble. The confirmation ceremony to either retain or boot the king involves each nobleman individually standing up and saying whether he approves or not. That puts the first man to disapprove in a very awkward position. He has no way of guaranteeing that his comrades will back him up - and if they don’t, the price is very high. He will, at the very least, lose his status. He may even lose his life, for he will be called a traitor - disloyal to the man on whose authority he is a noble! But what he stands to gain is uncertain. If a new king is elected, he may also lose some of his status, though he will not lose his life. Of course, it is more likely that he will gain in status with the new king, but by how much it is impossible to say. It is little surprise, therefore, that however many plots to vote against the king were hatched, it very rarely happened that the conspirators went public, and the few times they did, their comrades, predictably perhaps, refused to back them (here’s a video of the most famous such incident). Risks run high when you don’t know how many people you have on your team.

Of course, it’s a completely different game when your king isn’t a king. If your king isn’t a king, then you don’t depose him simply by speaking out against him. Because how can you depose someone who isn’t on a throne?

That, it seems to me, is the game-changing trump that is Senator-elect Brown. Currently, the Democratic Leadership in Congress is on a throne. It has an absolute majority plus a team-member as president, and can therefore pass whatever legislation it wants. In reality, we know that this means it can only pass the legislation that is especially important to it - but that is another way of saying that there is a political price to be paid for opposing the legislation the leadership wants passed from within the party. Brown, however, means that the Democratic Leadership is no longer a king. It continues to have great power, but that power is no longer absolute. It has been deprived of the luxury of picking a handful of legislative packages for which it can guarantee passage. Now that the throne is no longer in the room, there is nothing to depose.

In particular, now that there is no longer a throne in the room, it is not so clear that the electoral success of individual Democrats is tied to the Democratic Leadership. It isn’t just that Brown’s election means that the peasants are not so keen on the king anymore, you understand. It’s that because the Democratic Leadership is now no longer a king, it has less ability to present a coherent legislative package which it can carry to the next election. The deposition of the king puts the “I” back in “team,” so to speak. When the king was around, it was clear where power lay and whom you had to petition to get more of it. Now that the king is gone, it’s not so clear, and everyone is kind of on his own to build strength through alliances. There isn’t so much of a danger of being denounced as a traitor anymore because what, exactly, would you be betraying?

I guess the reason that the Twelfth Party Congress ended up unanimously reelecting Ceașuescu, even after Pîrvulescu’s Big Denounciation, is just because of the uncertainty associated with booting him. When you know where power sits, then you at least know where power sits. It’s the devil you know - a devil, yes, but you know where it is. And if you’ve been trying to get power for yourself all this time, then you’ve been trying to get it from that very devil. There are investments at stake.

The US Congress is of course not the PCR Party Congress, and that is precisely the point. Because there is a seated opposition in the US Congress - unlike in the PCR Party Congress - there won’t be a Pîvulescu who stands up before his own party and is publicly booed as a traitor - even as a disconnected majority of the booers secretly agrees with him. There is no need for such a man: the adversarial system we cherish assigns the duty of opposing the government to the opposition. It’s their job! And when the rival party does the denouncing, no one in the ruling party considers it treasonous - that’s just what rival parties do. The point for individual members of the ruling party is that once the denouncing’s been done, it’s already public. You don’t undermine anything that hasn’t already been undermined by saying what you think about what’s already been said.

Yglesias is right that there were always nay-sayers within the Democratic ranks. But when in history has there been a power block without nay-sayers? Unanimity of opinion only happens in naive fantasies of politics. In the real world, there are ALWAYS private objections to legislative agenda. The question for the people driving the agenda is now and has always been more one of keeping those objections private through the end of the vote than making sure there are no objections in the first place. Brown’s election will have seriously undermined their ability to do that - and THAT is the point. It’s everything, actually, and if Yglesias can’t see that, then only because he doesn’t understand politics. But then, that’s been an open secret for some time.

In arguing with a friend about the appropriateness of Congress regulating college football championships, it occurs to me that this is a great example of Hayek’s law vs. legislation distinction. My friend, you see, is trying to argue that while he doesn’t necessarily think Congress needs to or should get involved, the law as proposed is nevertheless valid - because it’s attacking a form of fraud. Since everyone understands a “championship” to be a contest between the elite of a given sports league to determine which among them is best, it’s not clear that the BCS qualifies as a “championship.” This is because in the BCS, matchups are determined by poll and computer, so it is possible for all kinds of counterintuitive things to happen - such as undefeated teams not qualifying for the “championship” game. My friend is certainly right that this isn’t your typical “championship series” as most people understand the term.

In that sense, he has a case for this being “illegal” in the Hayekian sense of Law (nomos), rather than Legislation (thesis). “Law” is what a community understands to be the rules - the kind of “rules” that emerge from years of tacit agreement and overt negotiation. “Legislation” is what is actually written down in the codified law books - acts of Congress and such. So - for example - Legislation says that I have to drive exactly the speed limit or less (down to, in some jurisdictions and for some speed categories, a legislated minimum), but Law says that I’m allowed to go a little faster than that, that I won’t be arrested for anything up to 5mph over the legislated limit. And, for another example, Legislation says that I cannot help myself to a small snack out of a bulk bin at a grocery store without paying, because that’s stealing. The fact that people frequently do this with impunity, however, tells us that this is not “shoplifting” in the sense of Law. It is probably still petty theft - and we know this because the community doesn’t approve, exactly - but it is nevertheless not shoplifting because there’s general consensus that arresting someone for such a thing would be going too far. It’s “shoplifting” in the sense of Legislation no matter how much you take, but only “shoplifting” in the sense of Law if it’s done repeatedly with no intention of buying, or if the ratio of takings to purchases goes over some fuzzy community standard.

So what my friend’s argument boils down to - without his personally being aware of the terms - is that the BCS is currently in violation of the Law on what championships should be, but not of Legislation, and that since the legislation proposed aims to bring Legislation in line with Law, there’s no real damage, even if he personally probably feels that it’s a bit too intrusive.

My own response, then, would be to say that while that may be true for “championships,” it’s not true for “fraud.” By the letter of Legislation, the BCS probably is a form of fraud - because it markets as a “championship” game something that few people understand to meet the qualifications. But I think that in terms of Law it is not fraud at all - because no one who follows BCS is under any illusions about what he’s getting. In terms of what’s on paper, any kind of a misrepresentation of what you’re selling counts as fraud, of course, but in reality I think few of us consider anything to be REAL fraud unless there is some danger of a reasonable person getting tricked. And in the case of BCS, there just isn’t any such danger. Exactly no one who cares who the “best” team in college football is enough to watch the bowl series will have been tricked into thinking that the series settles that question. So it’s just not fraud in the sense of Law.

So we have a dilemma. On the one hand, Legislation is already in line with Law in terms of barring the BCS on grounds of fraud. On the other hand, Legislation is not in line with Law on the matter of whether the BCS is an actual championship. Since there doesn’t seem to be a way of resolving both issues simultaneously, my suggestion would be that we pick one - preferably the more important one, where “importance” is, of course, political importance. Clearly, preserving the integrity of the law with regard to fraud is more important than preserving the integrity of the law with regard to what can and cannot technically be called a championship. Ergo, the bill should not be passed - or even further discussed on the House floor.

If Congress passes this bill, it will essentially be saying that making sure that Law and Legislation are aligned on the subject of what can and cannot be called a “championship” outranks making sure Law and Legislation are aligned on the subject of what is “fraud.” A fine set of priorities.

So, there’s this bill that made it out of committee in the House to regulate what does and doesn’t count as a “championship game” in college football. It probably won’t pass. There is no similar legislation in the Senate, and most of the public comments from other members of the House indicate that they understand that the bill is silly.

Let me repeat that - they understand that the bill is silly. I’m not sure, however, that they understand why the bill is silly.

Is it because - as Rep. John Barrow (D-Georgia) put it - “… I really think we have more important things to spend our time on?”

Nope. Well, sort of. It’s true enough that Congress has better things to do, and it’s true enough that with the scant number of hours that Congressmen actually work they can’t fit an infinite, or even reasonably large, number of priorities into a given legislative session. They have to perform triage, and Rep. Barrow is right that no reasonable triage system would let this pass. But he’s still wrong about why it should have been weeded out. NOT because it’s unimportant (true though that certainly is), but…

…maybe Rep. Zack Space (D-Ohio) has the answer.

Space said that with people facing tough times, the decision to focus on college football sends the “wrong message.”

Ah, ok, ahem, NO - NOT THAT EITHER. Or, erm, I guess not - I have to admit I’m having some trouble parsing this one. What “message” does letting this bill out of committee send, exactly, and in what way is it “wrong?” What would the “right message” at this particular point in time be? And, more to the point, if Rep. Space knows what that “right message” is, can’t he just go ahead and give it to us, rather than letting the committee keep banging its head against the wall like one of those toy monster trucks until it makes it through the door?

By the way - there are people named “Zack Space.” Just sayin’.

OK, I know, you’re shuddering with anticipation, so here comes Christmas! The REAL reason why this bill is silly is BECAUSE…

…REGULATING FOOTBALL ISN’T CONGRESS’ FUCKING JOB!

Honestly - it’s like calling a plumber to come fix your computer. Imagine a world where there was just the one job - a generic “fixit man(/woman/person-of-nonspecific-gender)” - that covered ALL repairs. So, actually, it would be really convenient in terms of getting someone out to your house when something broke. It would definitely have that going for it. You drop the blender, it cracks, and so you dial 1-800-FIXDUDE, and some person who fixes things shows up at your house. Only, once they get inside, just your luck, it turns out to be someone who’s really better with lawn mowers than blenders. Ah. Well. Maybe we were better off back in the days where you called up the kitchen appliance specialist to fix kitchen appliances, and the yard equipment specialist to fix yard equipment. Back when brain surgeons did brain surgery and you called a proctologist to deal with your back door.

And yet, this kind of hypercentralized model is exactly what certain supporters of the bill are expressly advocating. Some evidence from Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas):

“What can we say — it’s December and the BCS is in chaos again,” said the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, the top Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. He said the BCS system is unfair and won’t change unless prompted by Congress.

So you see, if there’s any unfairness of any kind anywhere, Congress is allowed to fix it. JUST ’cause it’s unfair!

Great. Well I remember picks for kickball teams in elementary school being unfair - is that on the agenda, then?

Presumably not - nor should it be - and not because it’s actually fair (it isn’t), but just because at some point fixing the unfairness in the world is just too damn expensive and/or none of your business. You can’t - just can’t - be an expert at everything. And even if you could, it’s not clear that there is a general solution to the problem of “unfairness” to begin with.

I like to think of it as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of politics. I’m no physicist, so I’ll let Wikipedia do my talking here:

In quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that certain pairs of physical properties, like position and momentum, cannot both be known to arbitrary precision. That is, the more precisely one property is known, the less precisely the other can be known.

And the classic example, as we all know, is the speed and position of certain subatomic particles. The more you know about where they are, the less you know about how fast they’re going, and vice versa. And the reason this is so is because whatever you do to determine the speed of the particle actually changes its position, and whatever you do to determine the position changes the speed. And the more you want to know about speed, the more of that thing you have to do, consequently disturbing the position to the point of complete uncertainty.

Politics is like that too. If you want unfairness to go away, you have to have two things: control over the situation, and (accurate) information about the situation. The paradox is that the more control you have over it, the less information you have about it - and the more information you have about it, the less control. And that’s because getting information about something means letting it do what it does without your interference, so that you can observe it. Once you start controlling it, well, you get control, but you have to give up on understanding because the system will no longer be following its natural inclinations.

Price controls are the classic example here. As so many have pointed out, there is no such thing as a truly objective standard of value. “Valuable” is only to a particular person in a particular situation at a particular point in time. The prices that you get at the market are already an abstraction from that - or, rather, an aggregation of all the desires of all the people participating in the market at some common point. Some people buy lots of shoes because they want them, some people wait to buy shoes until they really need them, sometimes it’s cheaper to make shoes, sometimes it’s more expensive, some people have one pair of shoes, some have several - etc. All of this gets washed down to a handful of goods at a handful of prices. If you want to know what the value of shoes is, you have to let that price float so that you can get all this information. The price will approximate the (aggregated) value. Of course, if you just want to know what the price of shoes is, you can hold it artificially steady. The catch is that the more you fix the price of shoes, the less it tells you about how valuable they are. And that’s what the Soviets learned the hard way, of course. Once you fix the price of bread at something that “seems reasonable,” then either it’s out of everyone’s reach (as was the case with vodka in the 80s), and people find substitutes, or it’s too low, and people buy too much of it, and there are shortages.

Another classic example would be the Hundred Flowers Campaign in China. This was a two-year period when government ideological controls were lifted - and it’s widely believed to have been a deliberate trap to flush out all the dissidents. You liberate the press, allow dissidents to express their views, and then hammer down the nails that stuck up. Whether or not that was the intention from the outset, there’s no doubt that a LOT of people were arrested when it ended - and that’s kind of the point. You can control the press, or you can know who your enemies are, but you can’t do both. To the extent that you control expression, you destroy information about dissent. But of course if you know who the dissidents are, then only because you have not been controlling the press.

I think this generalizes. We can never completely eliminate unfairness because to the extent that we are actively involved in making things fair, we are destroying necessary information that we need to implement fairness. And of course if we have all the information that we need to implement fairness, then only because we haven’t, in fact, been implementing it. So there’s a tradeoff, and the very existence of that tradeoff implies that the world will never be completely fair - at least not as a result of top-down solutions. Because we have to allow some amount of unfairness in order to get the information we need to make things fair at all.

The problem with so many government solutions, in fact, is that they’re like having a central “repairs” office that employs “repairmen” whose job it is to “fix things.” These solutions sound great on paper, and they do typically do a great job of eliminating one generally superficial annoyance. The problem is that in eliminating that annoyance, they usually cause more problems than they fixed, and precisely because that annoyance was the price you were paying for your information. The annoyance in the case of repairmen is that you have to call different ones to fix different things. Government can “fix” that by making a central repairs office, but only with the hugely ironic side-effect that a lot less stuff will get repaired.

Can Congress fix unfairness in college football? Well, probably, yes - at least this minor bit of unfairness (they can’t, obviously, guarantee that all refs make the right calls, or that recruitment methods are wholly transparent, etc.). But is the fact that unfairness exists in college football enough to justify Congressional intervention? Certainly not. Congress is not, strictly speaking, in the business of eliminating unfairness. That’s a hugely complicated task that should no more be left up to a central authority than repairing broken machines should. Congress is perhaps in the business of eliminating a certainly narowly-tailored form of political unfairness - the unfairness associated with violations of rights. Since the framers can’t have anticipated everything about the day-to-day minutiae of running a nation, and since they in fact didn’t even try, we have a Congress that resolves complaints and implements suggestions for dealing with unanticipated situations brought by the people (the House of Representatives) and the states as political entities (the Senate), which are then subject to interpretation by the Executive and review by the Judiciary - the Executive in terms of their enforceability and the Judiciary in terms of their relationship to the existing body of legislation (specifically whether they conflict with this body). The way I understand this setup, it isn’t the government’s job to “do good.” That’s up to the people. Rather, the government just provides a framework in which the people do good (or not, as the case may be).

In any case, there are two very good practical reasons why no government anywhere should be involved in actively “doing good.” The first is that - as mentioned - it’s futile. The problem of human unhappiness is (much) bigger than any government, and as is usual with these things, when you try to impose simplistic solutions onto complex issues, you just get ever-more-complex issues. The second is that it’s overkill. It’s like using a powerdrill to tighten the screws on a clarinet. If the general problem of human unhapiness is bigger than any government, then the individual manifestations of it are much smaller. Governments can and often should get involved in resolving systemic unfairnesses. But minor unfairnesses that don’t threaten the functioning of the system in any way? There are more precise tools for dealing with these. In particular, in the case of the Bowl Championship system, it’s not clear that anything unfair is even going on. From some objective point of view, sure. Objectively speaking, it seems like a poor way to set up a championship, and it may in fact be an abuse of the term “championship.” But saying that this is a job for Congress simply because it’s “unfair” confuses the (mathematical?) issue of game system design with the political issue of safeguarding rights. No one who follows college football is under any illusions how the system operates. It may be a bad system, but then so are CandyLand and Hungry, Hungry Hippos, and no one has suggested that we ban these games simply because the method by which the winner is chosen is arbitrary. They are, perhaps, poorly-designed games from some sort of academic point of view, but it’s not clear that their purpose is to be well-designed. They’re distractions - and, ultimately, so is college football. If the confusing championship system gives people lots to discuss over beers in bars, then maybe it’s functioning just fine.

It’s not up to Congress to decide. This is not what Congress was designed for, nor can I think of a compelling reason why we would want to update our understanding of Congress’s mission to include this kind of thing. THAT is why this bill is silly - because it sticks Congress’ nose into an issue where it is unwelcome, unqualified, probably unnecessary, and in any case philophically unsuited to intervene. The fact that many Congressmen understand that they shouldn’t be doing this without understanding why is symptomatic of this nation having lost its way.

This post reminds me why I read Will Wilkinson. It is wonderfully concise, has a good point to make, and presents an angle on a common debate topic that neither side will have really considered. I am in general suspicious of Wilkinson for some of the same reasons that Todd Seavey seems to be (to quote: “rightly or wrongly — you have to admit that his shtick is arguing that libertarians ought to accept elements of the welfare state”). But today is one of the days that I do believe he’s on “our team.” For all that is really required to be on “our team” is that one be appropriately skeptical of government intervention. And by that I don’t mean signal skepticism of govenrnment intervention (in the Robin Hanson sense) - which is cheap and easy. I mean actually stepping back and thinking about whether the government program du jour really is necessary and/or more likely to be efficient/effective than the private sector alternative. Since in the vast majority of cases the answer will be “no,” and since in the vast majority of cases the government program du jour will have as a side effect the increasing of opportunities for mismanagement and corruption, then the default position should be to oppose any new proposals for government intervention. This isn’t an insurmountable barrier for the socialists, it’s just a way of keeping the burden of proof on those who want to expand the role of government. As I’ve made clear on this blog, I’m not knee-jerk opposed to an increased government role in the healthcare sector, for example. But I AM very much knee-jerk opposed to the timetable on which the Obama crowd seems to want to get it done. They’ve skpped straight past making the case for government intervention, and then straight past taking the time to reasonably compare alternative models of government intervention, right over to “pass some plan, ANY plan, yesterday.” This is NOT a good idea.

I wonder whether Matt Yglesias - or anyone else, for that matter - will get around to answering Wilkinson’s excellent question about TARP?

Things like this demonstrate why it’s ultimately futile for the government to enforce a currency monopoly - and they also demonstrate another quirk of human nature, a maladaption similar, in a way, to our apparently inability to think of organizations and individuals as separate categories.

The story is about a company that’s lighting some fire under the credit card companies by issuing one-off debit cards that act like credit cards. You prepay them, and they only charge the merchant 0.5% at point of sale - compared with about 2% for regular credit cards. American Express has just acquired the company for a huge sum as a way of expanding their business.

Now - this is interesting for two reasons. First the boring one: it’s a nice demonstration of just how unnecessary government intervention in the credit markets actually is. I hear a lot of talk these days about the need to regulate the credit card companies to keep interest rates down. Sounds to me like the market it getting around to doing just that faster than the government, and more effectively.

Second - it’s interesting to me that this doesn’t show up on the government’s radar as an “illegal private currency.” It’s every bit as much of a currency as the much-prosecuted Liberty Dollars, right? I mean, just like with Liberty Dollars, you buy some of these from the merchant at a markup, and take them to participating stores where you can exchange them for goods and/or services. And yet in the case of Liberty Dollars the government shits its wad coughing up all kinds of specious arguments (no pun intended, really) to sic the dogs on them, but when it’s an electronic card that doesn’t call itself a “dollar” or come on printed currency-like paper, everything’s peachy. Which just demonstrates another unfortunate human tendency, actually - the undue focus on trappings rather than substance. Apparently you can issue alternate currency so long as you don’t make it look like that’s what you’re doing. Which doesn’t say much for the so-called “experts” at the Secret Service, actually, but no matter. Private currencies are an unambiguous good, so if turning up the heat slowly rather than quickly lets us boil this frog, let’s do it!