Pearls Before Swine and John Maynard Keynes

Animal Spirits: "Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits—a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities." - The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936)

*****

Do-nothing long-run focused economics: "Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again." - A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923)

In addition to the comforts of alcohol: "I should have drunk more champagne" - attributed last words before dying in 1946

Mankiw on Taxes

There's been an interesting exchange in the blogosphere on taxes originating with this post from Greg Mankiw. Mankiw makes the reasonable version of Arthur Laffer's point when he writes:

"High tax rates tend to depress GDP. Looking at taxes as a percentage of GDP may mislead us into thinking we can increase tax revenue more than we actually can"

A fair point. But that's when things start to get weird. He follows up with:

"For some purposes, a better statistic may be taxes per person, which we can compute using this piece of advanced mathematics: Taxes/GDP x GDP/Person = Taxes/Person"

Basically, more productive, more advanced, wealthier countries will count as having more burdensome taxes than other countries, holding all else equal. This is inherent in his metric - a logical necessity of the metric that he thinks may be "better" under some circumstances. I really hope we learn that someone hacked into Mankiw's blog and posted this before Greg noticed. This is pretty weird, and unfortunate coming from someone like him. This was first brought to my attention when I saw the inflammatory title of Matt Yglesias's post on it in my blogroll. I very often disagree with Yglesias on economics, so I thought Yglesias must have read something wrong. I often agree with Brad DeLong, so when I saw it next from him on my blogroll, I got more curious. Then I scrolled down to read the original Mankiw post, and sure enough: weird, crazy, and makes you wonder about the Harvard Economics department.

*I actually don't wonder about the Harvard Economics Department. I have a great deal of respect for Mankiw, I often agree with him, and I'm sure this was just one of those posts that slipped out before he got the chance to think about it.

The Long Shadow of History

Gunnar Myrdal called it the "American Dilemma". The American idea of race is, like all understandings of "race", unique and historically contingent; and for America, the load-bearing pillar of "race" is the divide between Black and White. At various points the Irish, Poles, Jews, or Hispanics have had important roles to play as well. But these concerns have been more transitory and less fundamental than the "Black/White idea".

One of the most important reasons why the Black/White idea has been so immutable is that it has been irrevocably tied up with so much of the rest of our identity. The American idea of liberty can never rid itself of its relationship with chattel slavery. Not only did some of the greatest proponents of human liberty actually own slaves, but these proponents made clear in no uncertain terms their failing or at least their inconsistency on the question.

The Black/White idea was driven even deeper into American identity as George Washington's worries about sectional animosities between East and West were, within a generation, replaced with far greater sectional differences between North and South. While the East-West division that flared up in armed rebellion soon after independence was purely a struggle between white Americans, the later North-South division couldn't avoid entanglement with the White/Black idea. Whatever the causes of the Civil War (and I am one that thinks it's entirely appropriate to discount the extent to which many people claim it was simply a "war over slavery"), one thing remains absolutely clear: the power, entitlement, legislative dominance, and identity of the antebellum South was crucially dependent on the enslavement of black Americans.

This struggle, and repeated episodes afterwards from Appomattox to the Civil Rights Act, began to fuse racism and the Black/White idea to the concept of "states' rights". Never mind the fact that the famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was also a secessionist (albeit for the North). The Confederacy beat him to it, and since then assertive states have been associated with racism. If history had gone slightly differently and Garrison had gotten his way, assertive state governments could have been associated with abolitionism. Calls for secession of the North also appeared when Texas - a slave state - enthusiastically joined the Union in 1845.

But history casts a long shadow, particularly the history of the Black/White idea as it relates to states' rights. As a result, Arkansas has remained on the sidelines of the legal fight over the health insurance mandate that is being waged by several state attorney generals. The sordid history of states' rights is especially sensitive for Arkansas, which defied the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling, when Governor Faubus refused to integrate Little Rock Central High School in 1957. Faubus called up the Arkansas National Guard to prevent integration. After attempting to talk him down, President Eisenhower responded by sending the 101st Airborne into Little Rock, and federalizing the Arkansas National Guard (yes, that second one is unequivocally constitutional, Tea Partiers).

Many states have defied federal authority in the past, but Arkansas was one of the few states in recent history who has had the "burnished rows of steel" at the disposal of the federal government arrayed against their assertion of states' rights. Understandably, the state is not jumping at the chance to defy the federal government again (the fact that its current governor is a Democrat probably influences this as well, although he also cites this history).

I think all this baggage carried by "states' rights" is understandable and it should be acknowledged, but it's also very unfortunate. It hamstrings legitimate assertions of states' rights and valuable progress at the state level. The fact is, there is no inherent reason to believe that everything is best done by the federal government. The federal government doesn't make that sort of blanket claim, of course, but what is a state to do in the instances when the federal government does make that claim for itself? Often, fear or precedent ensure that the default solution is a federal solution. I think this is extremely unhealthy for our democracy. What's even more unhealthy is that the gut reaction of many people seems to be either to (1.) fully acknowledge the darker history of states' rights and insist that all modern assertions of states' rights are racist, or (2.) pretend that the darker history of states' rights doesn't even exist and assume that all assertion of state authority over federal authority is innocent, legitimate, and ideal. Neither of these positions are intelligent or helpful. Unfortunately, you usually hear one or the other.

Last year, I wrote about a specific case in Maryland, in the 1960s, where knee-jerk reactions to the idea of "states' rights" scuttled potentially valuable reform that is near and dear to my heart. You may want to take a look at that as well.

Note: Rockwell's iconic painting depicts an incident in

New Orleans, not the incident in Little Rock

Good Historical Precedent for the Mandate

I've had a couple of posts up recently on misuses of American history to justify political or ideological positions today. The other day I wrote specifically about a liberal abuse of history that attempted to justify the health insurance mandate (which readers know I have major reservations about, despite my strong support for other elements of health reform). This morning, I noticed that Brad DeLong links to Paul O'Rourke's much, much better example of historical precedent for an insurance mandate (DeLong was also the source of the less convincing example I critiqued earlier). The legislation in question comes from the early Republic - the Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen, of July 1798 (the Adams administration). The act laid a tax on all privately employed sailors, collected by their employers, of 20 cents a month (a lump sum payroll tax, essentially) to provide hospital care for the sailors. O'Rourke provides the full text of the law. Of course there are some differences - there is still no "mandate" per se (then again, there was nothing to mandate, as there was no health insurance at the time) - but the more fundamental point is the tax imposed on all sailors, whether they want the hospital care or not. This is the same mechanism that is being used to implement the mandate today.

I don't think this answers all the Constitutional questions. After all, I actually went in to the text of the Constitution to debunk the last attempt to justify the mandate, which I don't do here. I would think this one would be justified with the Article 1, Section 8 power to lay taxes and appropriate funds for the general welfare. One argument I could make is that this is really more of an example of a public option than it is a mandate (after all, no one is forced to purchase anything, they are simply taxed and provided a social service - just like Medicare). I think that's a valid argument to make about how far we should take this historical precedent. Nevertheless, I still think it is important to acknowledge, because this example is a lot sturdier constitutionally and as an analog to the current situation than the last one shared by DeLong about the militias.

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Some people talk as if the Constitution were just the Articles of Confederation with lower voting thresholds. All significant additional powers granted to the federal government are downplayed. We spin this story that the commerce clause and "necessary and proper" and the General Welfare clause are inventions of FDR in the 1930s, or at the very earliest perhaps Progressives and trustbusters a few decades earlier. This simply wasn't the case. The Constitution is not another Articles of Confederation and we need to take that seriously.

Daniel's Top Ten Books

Several prominent bloggers have been publishing a list of the top ten books that influenced them most. Recently, Greg Ransom at "Taking Hayek Seriously" has produced a similar interesting list of F.A. Hayek's biggest influences (many of which are available for free online). I thought this whole exercise was kind of dumb when people started doing it, but ever since whenever I've thought of a book I've liked I've had a nagging desire to publish a list, so I put most of this together this weekend. I'm still pretty young, and I hope my ideas are still being formed - so I hope this list changes over time. But for now, here it is, in no paritcular order:

1. The End of Laissez Faire, by John Maynard Keynes: I like to tell people that The End of Laissez Faire is a geneaology of Liberalism. Over the years I've been familiarized with tidbits of a lot of political philosophy, but this book pulled them all together for me and showed me the big picture: how the various strains of liberalism are connected, and how many intellectual movements in the late 19th century bastardized liberalism (primarily Marxism and laissez faire fundamentalism).

2. Micromotives and Macrobehavior, by Thomas Schelling: This showed up on a couple bloggers' lists, and I agree. I didn't really get the importance of macroeconomics before this book (which is pretty impressive, since it's not even about macroeconomics proper). Schelling opened my eyes to the pervasiveness of the "fallacy of composition"/"ecological fallacy" in economics. You simply cannot generalize from individual to group behavior.

3. Durable Inequality, by Charles Tilly: Strongly influenced the way I think about inequality and discrimination. I'm eternally grateful to Deirdre Royster (formerly of William & Mary) for introducing me to this book.

4. The Elusive Republic, by Drew McCoy: Shaped my understanding of the founding fathers. Convinced me that (1.) they viewed the world in a completely different way than we do today, (2.) they were not of one mind - there is no position of "the founders" on anything, and often individual founders changed their positions over time, and (3.) the Hamilton-Jefferson dichotomy we always think of today is caricatured almost to the point of uselessness.

5. Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, by Garry Wills: Shaped my understanding of Jefferson and human liberty. It goes line by line through the Declaration of Independence, and discusses the intellectual origins and background of each position taken in the document. It ends up being a history of the revolutionary period, an account of Jefferson's own thought, and an intellectual history of the Scottish Enlightenment all in one volume.

6. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, by John Maynard Keynes: Doesn't get everything right, but provides the basic framework for how I think about the economy. Keynes made many technical innovations on the classical model, but he also emphasizes the importance of caution and empiricism, as well as common sense in economic policymaking. Easily the greatest economist since Adam Smith. Possibly greater than Adam Smith (if for no other reason than Keynes innovates where Smith synthesizes... although Keynes synthesizes some too).

7. The Origins of Virtue, by Matt Ridley: I learned Dawkins through Ridley. This has powerfully shaped my understanding of evolution and the human condition, particularly as it applies to human social organization. I know evolutionary psychology isn't accepted in all quarters, and I don't take Ridley's arguments hook, line, and sinker. But I do think they are generally good arguments.

8. Marxism: For and Against, by Robert Heilbroner: A big influence on how I think about intellectual movements that I disagree with. Heilbroner demonstrates the right way to dispute a position without villifying the proponent of that position, and how to acknowledge good arguments while maintaining a more foundational disagreement. On top of all that, it simply helped me to understand Marxism better.

9. A Leap in the Dark, by John Ferling, and Washington's Secret War and The Perils of Peace, both by Thomas Fleming: These are all histories of the revolutionary period and aren't notable in and of themselves, but Ferling and Fleming both write about history in a way that has strongly influenced the way I think about history: specifically, they take seriously the fact that historical actors don't know what is going to happen in the future, and that this has an enormous impact on their decision making. It seems simple, but when it gets pointed out to you in specific instances, you realize how often we analyze things with 20/20 hindsight. More historians need to think like this. Ferling highlights this phenomenon more explicitly than Fleming (you can practically derive that thesis from his title - A Leap in the Dark).

10. Underwriting Democracy, by George Soros: Soros, for all the combustibility of his political and financial activities, taught me a lot about how humans think and how that shapes society - specifically, what he calls "reflexivity". It's not a concept original to him, but I think he explains it especially well (I believe Robert Merton has written a lot on it, and Soros specifically cites Kurt Godel and Karl Popper as his influences - he studied under Popper at the London School of Economics). The idea is essentially that markets and society in general tend towards disequilibrium and reorganization because prediction and action can lead to changes in market or social fundamentals that alter what is being predicted or acted upon. You can think of it as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle applied to society. Others have remarked on it, I learned it first and best from Soros. Soros himself wrote about reflexivity more exlcusively in his 1987 classic, The Alchemy of Finance, which I haven't read. But he does devote a good third of Underwriting Democracy to the theory. Much of the rest of the book is about how he's supported civil society in Eastern Europe.

Misuses of American History and the Mandate

I've been frustrated recently with abuses of American history in pursuit of ideological ends, a topic I've opined on even more extensively in other fora. It frustrates me for two primary reasons: first, it's often just very bad history. As someone that spends a lot of my free time reading history, that's bothersome. But perhaps more importantly, it's very conceited to speak as if you own America's history and everyone else has abandoned it. America's tradition of liberty and self-government is a very broad tradition. It's perfectly legitimate for all sorts of people to find inspiration from that tradition: tea partiers, libertarians, liberals, conservatives, etc. What I think is illegitimate is for a select group to claim that they are the sole inheritors of the legacy of the founders and that the others are illegitimate.

Needless to say, the Tea Party movement has given me a lot of ammunition lately. Their abuse of history has been by far the most conspicuous, and they use it to buttress one of the most radical political positions on the market today. So when I stumbled across a liberal abuse of history in defense of a narrow legal position, I felt an obligation to share it, simply because I've been pointing to the Tea Partiers so insistently.

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Ian Millhiser at Think Progress argues that there is precedent for the individual health insurance mandate. Virginia Attorney General Cuccinelli, and others, have argued that the Constitution gives the Congress no authority to force people to buy a good or service. In his rebuttal, Millhiser points to the Second Militia Act of 1792 (HT - Brad DeLong), passed during the Washington administration. This act required able bodied men to purchase all manner of equipment so they could defend the country if called upon. Washington requires people to buy guns; Obama requires people to buy health insurance - what's the problem?

The problem comes in when you dig a little deeper into what gave Washington the authority to demand those purchases. The first place to look - the first place you should always look - is Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, which lists the powers of Congress. Other powers of the government come up in other places, but this is the mother lode. Several relevant military powers are included, but for brevity I'll note the most important for this case:

"To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the Militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States"

There are also various powers for making rules governing land and naval forces, which can also be mentioned. The point is, our most important question today is "what gives the federal government the right to force us to buy health insurance". A historic example of a legitimate past forced purchase may indeed be enlightening, but only if the legitimacy of that past legislation is derived from a power that can also be applied to health insurance (i.e. - a general power to mandate purchase of goods or services). That's not the case here. Nobody has pointed to such power, they've simply pointed to the Second Militia Act. And I would contend that the Second Militia Act is derived from the authority of Congress to govern and regulate the militia. Governance of the militia means telling members of the militia (able bodied males) what is incumbent upon them as militiamen, such as staying well equipped. This power is perfectly legitimate, but I don't see how it carries over to health insurance at all. It's a misuse of history.

I personally think of myself as a Constitutional originalist. I do think it's a meaningful document that needs to constrain government today. I don't think we can just invent new rights a la FDR. Nevertheless, I take issue with a lot of other people who also call themselves "originalist", because I think that these "originalists" discount the extent to which the Constitution gives discretion to future generations and future Congresses for their own self-government. For example, Congress has the explicit authority to appropriate money to provide for the General Welfare. That power is vague. It is "elastic". It is entirely constitutional. Many "originalists" get frustrated with the application of this power, but I don't understand why. If the Congress had intended "General Welfare" to mean anything other than "General Welfare" they wouldn't have written it that way. We need to be judicious and deliberative about exactly what a wise appropriation for the General Welfare might be - but that is a question for public and Congressional debate, not a question for constitutional lawyers. The power is very clear. So I'm an originalist, but I'm an originalist that reads a great deal of deliberate inclusion of discretion into the text of the Constitution. I simply don't see any other way of reading the document.

No reading of the Constitution, in my mind, provides a general authority to mandate the purchase of goods and services. Certain powers - such as the militia powers - give some scope for such mandates. But I find no power that could justify the health insurance mandate.

Liberty or Death

The misuse of American history for ideological ends has bothered me a lot recently. Thankfully, I haven't seen anything so far abusing the auspicious event that happened in Richmond, Virginia, 235 years ago today. On March 23rd, 1775, Patrick Henry delivered his "Give me Liberty, or Give me Death" speech before the House of Burgesses, awakening Virginia to the fact that Boston's hardships were cause for concern in the Old Dominion as well. It was an outcry in a deliberative, representative body (the first in the New World), to take collective action in the defense of liberty against a leader that asserted power over the Americans, rather than receiving assent to govern from those Americans. Henry did not emphasize taxes or the size of the state in his speech. He focused on the impending threat of war and the revocation of the right to self-governance.

There's a bit of a historical mystery that I don't have time to look into, but am curious if readers can help me with. Richmond was only designated as the capitol of Virginia in 1780. Before then, Williamsburg remained the capitol as far as I can tell. And yet in 1775, Henry delivered his address to the House of Burgesses in Richmond. Does anyone know why? Williamsburg was under no direct military occupation or threat as early as 1775 (and if they were, it's not like Richmond would be considerably safer). So why were they in Richmond? If anyone knows, please let me know in the comments - I'm curious.

Dresden: February, 1945

The Dresden Historians' Commission just released a report suggesting that 25,000 Germans died as a result of the Allied bombing of Dresden over February 13-15, 1945. Der Spiegel reviewed the issue here two years ago, and especially highlights the question of whether the bombing was militarily justified. This estimate is lower than earlier estimates, which approached death tolls in the hundreds of thousands, but it is quite consistent with more recent estimates. As a matter of context, 90,000-166,000 died in the bombing of Hiroshima, and 60,000-80,000 died in the bombing of Nagasaki, both in August of 1945, six months after the bombing of Dresden and three months after the German surrender.

This news reminded me of an interesting debate between A.C. Grayling and Christopher Hitchens about the Allied bombing, with Grayling expressing reservations about the practice. The first of eleven videos covering the debate is here. You should be able to click through to find the rest.

Thinking critically about events like Dresden, as well as Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is very important in an open society. Even if we conclude that such actions were justified, it is vital to entertain the possibility that they weren't. Emotions cloud judgement in war, and nostalgia and idealism cloud judgement in the task of writing history. We can't make the right decisions now or in the future if our judgement is clouded, or if we've granted ourselves the advantage of an imagined justification in historical precedent.

Brown vs. the Board of Governors?

Talk about hyperbole.

I've been struggling a lot lately with some really, really challenging economic policy questions, and I've shared some of my thoughts on this blog. One issue I've been grappling with is the efficacy of nominal wage cuts. A little further back I struggled with the unconventional monetary policies that have been suggested recently, specifically whether they would be efficacious in a "liquidity trap" (however you want to define that - and there are lots of definitions floating around... don't just blindly trust someone that tries to tell you "so-and-so misunderstands the idea of a liquidity trap" - because there simply is no consensus on what the term even means). I honestly am still agnostic on both of these questions - still groping my way around. The issues are very complicated, and we simply don't have a lot of empirical experience to draw on to understand how either works in an environment where we would need to know most: namely, abnormal depressionary conditions.

Scott Sumner isn't nearly so timid. Today, he wrote of Janet Yellen:

"her failure to understand that monetary stimulus was still possible at
zero rates should be an automatic dis-qualifier for the Board of Governors,
roughly equivalent to a Supreme Court nominee who opposed Brown vs. Board of
Education"

Wow. I don't have much to add to this, except to say that I always appreciate Sumner for his extremely intelligent and unorthodox perspective on these issues. I don't usually expect hyperbole from him (I go elsewhere for that)! There are unconventional monetary policies that might work. Others argue that they won't work and that we now need to turn to fiscal policy. Granted, there's a lot we don't know about fiscal policy - but we know a hell of a lot more about fiscal policy than we do about the unconventional monetary policies Sumner is refering to. Even if you buy into quantitative easing in theory, that lack of experience alone is a justifiable reason to be skeptical. Is it really fair to compare caution and skepticism to embracing segregation?

And they say Krugman is shrill!

Sumner also notes that Yellen is a "dove", and he sorta says this is a good thing at a time like this. That's a little disconcerting for me to hear too. Yes, I agree that now we need a very dovish Federal Reserve Board. But what about several years down the road? It may come back to bite us. I'd personally prefer more people like Bernanke - people with a strong price stabilization bias, but who are intelligent enough to act like doves when the situation calls for it, and who are enough in touch with everyday people to recognize that they have a responsibility to rein in unemployment as well as inflation. The balance that Bernanke strikes will probably serve us better in the long haul than a Board full of doves. That having been said, I am very supportive of Obama's selection of Janet Yellen and wish her the best of luck.

There's Something about Rudy (but I'm still not quite sure what it is)

Rudy Giuliani was recently interviewed by the Washington Post for their "On Leadership" series. As expected, most of the interview dealt with 9/11. The obligatory Churchill reference was thrown in the mix. What I'm trying to understand - what I've been confused about for a while actually - is why Giuliani emerged as some sort of "hero of 9/11". As far as I can tell, his leadership consisted of his TV appearances where he comforted Americans, and of course calling the shots of the rescue effort. I don't want to belittle that, but it seems like an odd thing to highlight, to continue to talk about a decade later, or to call him the "man of the year" for.

What, exactly, did Rudy Giuliani do that Jay Fisette, the Chair of Arlington's County Board in 2001, didn't do in response to the Pentagon attack? As far as I can tell the difference is that Jay didn't talk on TV as much, and Jay didn't have the national name recognition. That's meaningful, but does it justify the singular identification of Giuliani with 9/11? What's even more off-putting about the Giuliani cult is how often it is framed as "Giuliani comforted the nation when Bush was nowhere to be found". It reeks of being a deliberately constructed cheap-shot at Bush. I was not a big fan of the Bush administration, but this strikes me as unjustified. If Jay Fisette of Arlington could have been said to have matched any substantive accomplishment of Rudy Giuliani, George Bush certainly surpassed both of them in his response to 9/11. Was he where he should have been in the hours after the attack? Maybe, maybe not. But his response was measured and deliberate (remember the criticism of the administration for actually waiting too long to go into Afghanistan?). He responded with lethal (and well justified, non-impulsive) force against al Qaeda and the Taliban. He created a new Department of Homeland Security which, despite its inevitable implementation problems, represented a meaningful shift in the way that government thinks about national security. At least for the fall of 2001, Bush did far more than appearing on TV and offering comfort. He addressed the problem.

It all eventually went downhill, of course. My first real hesitation about the Bush administration occured when they refused to finish al Qaeda off when they had the chance at Tora Bora. It was the first real sign that the faith we had put in this president to defend the nation was probably misplaced. That suspicion was repeatedly confirmed throughout his tenure. An intelligent reorientation of national security policy quickly degenerated into unconstitutional public surveillance, secret prisons, and torture. And then of course there was Iraq - the most objectionable distraction from fighting our real enemies of all. In the middle of a war on Islamic terrorists, the administration decided that it was time to divert our attention elsewhere and spread democracy out of the barrel of a gun. What's more, there are indications that they always wanted to do this and only used 9/11 as an opportunity to get it done. So I want to be clear: my kind words for Bush in the previous paragraph aren't an embrace of the administration. But in 2001, Bush was genuine, Bush was courageous, and Bush seemed to do far more to justify the title of "hero of 9/11" than Giuliani ever did.

The other problem with lifting up Giuliani for something like this is that it minimizes the far more substantial efforts of ordinary citizens. Giuliani has been criticized by rescue workers for saying that he had been at ground zero "as often, if not more, than most workers" (a claim that was easily demonstrated to be ridiculously inaccurate). The average soldier in Afghanistan did more to make sure such an attack never happened again than Giuliani did, and the average citizen riding on a plane could do more to stop a future attack than Giuliani ever could. Obviously we can't highlight every single one of these people (that's sort of the point), but why do we feel the need to highlight anyone? Who was the "hero of Pearl Harbor"? Nobody. We just remember it as a day of infamy. Nobody pulled December 7th out at every stump speech. Insofar as Roosevelt did reference it, it would be a reference to real accomplishments and decisions in response. Giuliani is essentially being recognized by the media for being recognized by the media in the hours after the attack.

There is no "hero of 9/11", it was simply a horrible, horrible day. Everyone thinks that "there's something about Rudy", but I just don't get it - and now that I've gotten the chance to actually write this out on paper it turns my stomach even more than it did before. Many leaders did at least as much as Rudy did. Some, like George Bush, did much more good in the months after the attack. And in addition to these leaders, countless anonymous citizens did even more than that to respond and recover. What's so special about Rudy? And why does he seem to be using this so opportunistically?

I don't often get to say this, so I'll take the opportunity: Al Sharpton said it best. Here's what he had to say about the issue -

"You didn't bring us together, our pain brought us together and our decency brought us together. We would have come together if Bozo was the mayor"