Communicating the difference between public and private debt

Yesterday afternoon I was doing something I usually avoid - listening to a lot of the Congressional debate on C-Span. Both sides were depressing because both were demanding deficit reduction. The Democrats were a smidgen less depressing because they at least kept pounding the position that maybe reforming some tax credits was a better way to close the gap than cutting into student loans. But overall, it was not what you wanted to hear during what is now increasingly being called the "Little Depression".

One of the things that just about every Republican said was that "Washington needs to do what families do and not spend more than they take in". It's powerful rhetoric that is electoral gold. Getting tough on the deficit is good for politicians - analogizing it to family values is even better.

What's bothersome is that no one challenged this view, which among economists is almost universally considered to be fallacious. Even those economists who don't think deficit spending is good macroeconomic policy do not claim that government has to, on average, run a balanced budget. The people demanding austerity ultimately have a better stump speech than the people who understand public deficits and debt, and this is a problem.


So my question to readers is - what is a good, succinct way for politicians to communicate that (1.) public debt is different from private debt, (2.) it is not fiscally responsible to cut public debt during downturns, and (3.) we can run deficits from now until the Sun burns out and everything would be just fine, so long as their magnitude is manageable over long periods.

Let's put together a good stump-speech phrase and then spread it over the internet - get Paul Krugman, Matt Yglesias, Brad DeLong, Mark Thoma, Menzie Chinn, and lots of others saying it so politicians might start saying it. What should our representatives say when Republicans or others analogize government to families?

[A note on comments - I know I have a large libertarian readership, but I'm not at all interested in challenges to these three points. While (2.) is admittedly a fair topic for debate, the other two simply aren't. I'm really interested in generating a good stump-speech phrase, so comments trying to challenge the premise are just going to get deleted. I'm not interested in a debate on this particular post. Obviously this comment policy doesn't carry over to other posts].

The Stability of Democracy

Michael Singh at Foreign Policy (HT - Kate):

In kayaking, you can choose one of two types of stability, but you cannot have both. A flat-bottomed kayak has high "initial stability" -- it appears to ride smoothly in the water, with little rocking back and forth. But it has low "final stability" -- in rough seas, it tends to quickly and catastrophically capsize. An angled-bottom kayak is just the opposite. With low initial stability, it takes more effort to guide and is prone to constant shifts from side to side. But these kayaks are faster and more efficient, and their high final stability means that they remain upright in stormy seas, and can recover even when turned nearly upside down.

Things are not so different with democracies and dictatorships. Democracy is messy -- look at the United States, where in the last five years alone we have experienced swings from right to left and back again, and where political discourse can often be raucous. Dictatorships, on the other hand, often possess a superficial stability -- until they reach the tipping point, which often comes more quickly than expected. Such was the case in Tunisia, which seemed an oasis of calm until a small spark quickly grew to consume the longstanding rule of Zine el Abidine Ben Ali.

Dictatorships lack the self-righting mechanisms and institutions which provide democracies with their deep stability. Free expression, free assembly, multiple and accountable political parties, free and fair elections, and independent courts -- all of these form the vital structure of a democracy and provide an outlet for people's grievances. In a dictatorship, people are denied these outlets and anger simmers beneath the surface, occasionally bursting through society's calm veneer in violent fashion.

Assault of thoughts - Politics/polling edition - 11/4/2010

"Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking" - JMK

I don't usually get too invested in politics unless there is a historical, ideological/philosophical, or policy issue to talk about - but there are a few interesting electoral/polling things to go over:

- Andrew Sullivan ponders how the new Republicans will react to raising the country's debt limit. He predicts there may be enough votes against it, and quotes Tim Rutten who says that would be "apocalyptic". I'm not entirely sure if that's true. So what would happen if they refused to approve it? Marginal spending cuts, tax increases, and accounting gimmickry to cover it. It would not be good for the economy at all, but I'm not sure it would send shock waves. Our creditors are going to have the first lien on our revenue, and until that changes I can't imagine "apocalyptic" is the right word to describe what would happen. Certainly it wouldn't be good, but Republicans are interested in halting spending, not snubbing creditors.

- Paul Krugman argues that nobody cares about process and chides the Obama administration for spending too much political capital on health reform and too little on stimulus. This is similar to a lot of the far left complaints that Obama lost because he was too centrist, but I think it's a little more sensible. The Krugman point is more that Obama didn't do macroeconomic policy right, which leaves us with a bad economy, which is ultimately the biggest factor in this election loss. Populists grow out of bad economies, and it would be a lot harder to spin Obama as a socialist if employment was lower. This I can agree with, although I disagree with a lot of other far-left critiques of Obama that complain about his centrism. Krugman ties it up nicely and probably pretty accurately, albeit perhaps a little optimistically: "If Obama had used fancy footwork and 2 AM sessions to pass a big public works program, and this program had brought unemployment down, Republicans would be screaming about the process — and Democrats would have comfortably held control of Congress."

- Jonathan Catalan blogs his reaction to the failure of Proposition 19 in California (the most exciting ballot measure I got to vote on was a bond initiative...)

- Evan shared with me the unfortunate loss of a candidate and acquaintance of his, Ben Lowe in Illinois's 6th district. Lowe is a twenty-something graduate of Evan's very well-regarded evangelical undergraduate alma mater, Wheaton College, who ran an uphill battle against Peter Roskam - a Republican with a firm grasp of the district that actually attends Evan's old church. The updates of the race that Evan sent me really drove home how dumb and ironic some of the Republican rhetoric has been. Roskam went on and on about Washington insiders and bureaucrats and the people rebuking politicians, and elitist Democrats, etc. - and the guy is running against a young kid that raised less than three percent of the money he did. Roskam's biggest donor? Goldman "we own Washington D.C." Sachs. Lowe's biggest donor? No-name, private, Presbyterian, Whitman University. Lowe frequently mentioned the environment and working families in his campaign... Roskam harped on the "liberal agenda" and even used Bible stories as a political prop to attack "the left". And all the while Roskam refused to debate and wouldn't even acknowledge the fact that he had an opponent. Every time Evan would update me on this it would piss me off in the same way that it pisses me off when a millionaire former-governor or a tenured university professor has the condescension to call me an elitist that doesn't understand regular Americans. Anyway, Lowe lost but it may not be the end of his political career. Who knows. Thanks to Evan for the regular updates on this particular campaign.

- Andrew Sullivan shares the age composition of the 2008 and 2010 election cycle. Republicans and Tea Partiers often try to claim that they are looking out for the interests of future generations... well the future generations themselves seem to beg to differ.

- Finally, Andrew Sullivan identifies a Keynesian (that's KEYNESian, not Keynan) majority of the electorate. Forty percent of the electorate favors deficit reduction while 54 percent of the electorate favors tax cuts and stimulus spending (the problem, of course, is that the share of the 54% that support tax cuts and the share that support stimulus spending don't like each other very much).

UPDATE: I did want to mention one election I just learned about last night that I'm very happy with - Alan Grayson (D-Florida) lost to his Republican opponent. Grayson has been bothering me long before he got the attention of the Daily Show crowd... with Ron Paul he's a big threat to central bank independence, which is an important defense against irresponsibly inflationary monetary policy. He's also just an old-style demagogue - slandering his political opponents rather than marshalling real arguments. We haven't seen that much (certainly some) of that on the left lately but Grayson represented a disconcerting example of it that I was a little worried about. I'm glad he's out after only two years. Actually, this election wasn't quite as bad as a lot of people are making it out to be - quite a few of the Republican demagogues lost too, which is nice. It's still probably going to be a pretty rough Congress in these next two years.

Thoughts on the Election

Not this one, of course... I'm speaking of 1932/1936/1940/1944:

Bryan Caplan writes a review of V.O. Key's classic The Responsible Electorate (1966) which argues that "democracy works well because the electorate rewards success and punishes failure". This obviously doesn't sit well with Caplan, author of The Myth of the Rational Voter, and regular opiner that voters aren't that enlightened (which strangely enough never wins censure from his co-blogger, Arnold Kling, who regularly criticizes liberals for thinking the electorate is dumb even though, (1.) I'm not aware of any liberal save Bill Maher who has made such a claim, and (2.) Caplan makes the claim regularly). One thing that Caplan remarks on is the case of FDR. Caplan writes: "Key's passage [about Roosevelt] is bizarre on several levels. The most glaring: Roosevelt is the best U.S. counter-example to the thesis that voters reward politicians for delivering prosperity and peace. FDR's track record is bizarrely bleak: Nine years of uninterrupted depression, followed by four years of war that left half of Europe in the hands of Stalinist Russia - one of the two original aggressor nations. And the American voter loved him anyway!"

I did a double-take when I read this. The Depression was deep and it stayed deep, of course. But the economy grew through Roosevelt's entire first term! The recovery was far too slow, and we know more now why, but the only major blemish on the recovery and Roosevelt's record was 1937, and that happened after the 1936 election (so it makes sense it didn't do that much to his re-election prospects). How is Caplan missing this Roosevelt growth period? It wasn't an ideal economy, but it seems like American voters are better at thinking in terms of counter-factuals than we give them credit for (and better than a lot of economists today).

I'm also not sure why Caplan thinks the war is a mark against Roosevelt and not for him. George W. Bush waged war against a fascist too, but a relatively inert fascist (at least as far as world affairs are concerned - certainly not if you lived in Iraq). Roosevelt waged war against a fascist across the Atlantic that was taking over Western civilization and bombing the hell out of our ally Britain, and a fascist across the Pacific that had taken over China (mother-$%^&ing CHINA!) and was impinging on our ally Australia. Oh ya - and they bombed us too and destroyed a substantial portion of our fleet. What the hell is Caplan thinking? He really thinks this is something Roosevelt should be punished at the polls for?!?!? Why - because the enemy of my enemy is my friend and so we had Uncle Joe for a few years? I'm no war-monger and I think nationalism is a disease (although an improvement on feudal fiefdoms), but I don't think those views give me or anyone else license to turn a blind eye to what it was we accomplished in the second World War.

I know libertarians have an acute distaste for certain presidents. Lincoln was a protectionist and took liberties with the Constitution. Wilson was a racist and a progressive egghead. OK. I draw the line at Roosevelt, though. Come on! Dispute specific policies, fine - be my guest. But don't play dumb as to why the American people sent him to the White House twice as many times as any other president in our history and why he is the only president in the twentieth century that has really, substantially, unequivocally joined the pantheon of great American leaders that is usually reserved for the Founders.

Boettke on Climate Change

Peter Boettke has a good post on climate change this morning. Here is an excerpt:

"Even if you make an argument about a "global public good" it seems to me you still would need to worry about "demand-revealing" mechanisms, etc. In other words, if you grant many of the strongest arguments to the climate change alarmists, they would still have to worry about (a) identifying what the correct policy response would be, and (b) figuring out how to implement such a policy in a cost effective manner."

This sounded on-target in many ways, but had an odd flavor of assuming his own conclusions insofar as he did not apply the same concerns to his own position. First, of course interventionists have a demand revelation problem. The idea is to make carbon users bear the full cost of carbon, but the question is "what is that cost?". Where do we set a carbon tax? It's a big problem and there's no easy way to solve it.

But the thing is, the only reason why anyone is proposing a carbon tax in the first place is precisely because we are saying that there is a "demand revelation" problem in the market. There is an externality - people are using carbon without bearing all the costs of that use, and people are bearing costs of the use of carbon without compensation. There is no market for "comfortable climate" where people can trade-off costs and benefits, so those costs and benefits are externalized from the market transaction for carbon. The market has no way to reveal demand, in other words. So we say "well, it's not like we're not aware of the consequences as a society, so let's put a Pigovian tax on carbon that at least improves (albeit probably doesn't solve) the problem".

Demand revelation problems don't just go away, as I said. You still have to price carbon. But if you "grant many of the strongest arguments", as Boettke claims he does, presumably you're granting the argument that the market has a serious demand revelation problem in this case. That's the heart of the public goods/externalities argument, after all, so it would be hard to "grant many of the strongest arguments" without granting that argument. And if the market does have a demand revelation problem, then there's no reason to highlight the demand revelation problems of a government solution. Democratic government is not a perfect solution, but it has one major advantage when it comes to dealing with problems of externalized costs and benefits where there are no property rights, namely that people without property rights do have voting rights. Not a perfect solution, obviously - but if we assume the existence of externalities, it seems to me it's probably the better solution.

This all gets back to my old point that too often we talk past each other because we confuse "calculation problems" with "incentive problems". I have no disagreement at all with Boettke on the "calculation problem" facet of this issue. My disagreement comes in with the "incentive problem".

Democracy, the State, and the Web of Power Relations

Jonathan Catalan has a brief post with an extensive comment section that works through the classic critique of democracy and "social contract" ideas more broadly. I concur with a lot of these critiques of the social contract, and I've said as much in the past. I've been meaning to flesh out my thoughts on this in more detail for a while, but I'll mention it briefly here as a sort of response to Jonathan.

1. Human beings are social beings and they are constantly interacting. These interactions are sometimes voluntary and consistent with human liberation, and sometimes involuntary and inconsistent with human liberation. Voluntary and involuntary interactions can both be either private or corporate. In Truth and Power, Foucault talked about an idea that I think is very similar - the "web of power". We are caught in a web of involuntary impositions on our liberty. It is the human condition.

2. There is often recourse for these impositions. Sometimes we have institutions like courts, or we have parents that arbitrate disputes between siblings. We can always revolt or strike back (self-defense is almost universally considered an appropriate justification for violence). But the ability to respond to an imposition doesn't make that imposition voluntary. Recourse to courts does not change the fact that pollution is an assault on personal liberty. Recourse to revolt does not change the fact that a tyranny is an assault on personal liberty. It is very good that we have recourse in many situations, but it doesn't make the involuntary act voluntary.

3. The state is involuntary. A social contract is distinct from other contracts precisely because the parties to the contract don't necessarily agree to their inclusion. However, the state can evolve or be designed (or a little of both... and after all, when it comes to human institutions what is "evolution" and "emergence" except for an accumulation of designs over time?) in a way that deliberately privileges citizen participation, control, and decision making. So yes it is involuntary, but that does not mean it is the equivalent of slavery. We need to be careful not to embrace sentimentalism that confuses the issue in either direction: the state is involuntary, but it is also an institution that is controlled by the people (at least the kind of states I'm concerning myself with here are).

4. The purpose of the liberal state is to minimally impose itself on human liberty but act as a bulwark against private tyrannies that emerge in the "web of power" that is natural to the human condition. The reason why non-libertarian classical liberals still embrace the state is precisely because they are concerned about private tyrannies that would threaten liberty in the absence of the state, and they conclude that in the optimal balance between private tyrannies and the public tyrannies implicit in the social contract, there is a role for the state. This brand of classical liberalism is not libertarian precisely because we consider libertarian restrictions on the state to threaten human liberty. Libertarians act like we don't care about human liberty, but the whole point of why we're not libertarians is because of what we perceive to be the libertarian threat to liberty. Libertarians downplay or ignore private tyrannies for some always unexplained reason. Tyranny is almost always public for them, and discussions always come back to government. Why? I still don't know. But because they see things that way they are always going to have a blind spot and they will always be an inadequate defense of human liberty. I don't really care about the etymology of their label - I'm not a libertarian because of how much I value liberty. There are definitely worse things to be than a libertarian if you value human liberty, of course. Libertarianism is definitely high on the list of second-bests. But it is not ideal.

5. This conception of the liberal state excludes non-liberal states as surely as it excludes libertarian states (and libertarians almost universally embrace the existence of some form of state). I don't have to answer for Nazi Germany or some other tyranny any more than any other non-anarchist, non-Nazi does. Slippery slopes are legitimate to talk about, but (1.) don't ignore the slippery slopes of libertarianism, which slide to anarchy on one side and crony capitalist oligarchy on the other, and (2.) don't think you'll get away with convincing me that the liberal state is on the road to serfdom. Libertarians love to bring up the slippery slope but they hate to apply it to themselves. Whenever crony capitalism emerges it's never the bottom of their own slippery slope. They won't even consider the possibility.

6. I'll also note that my thinking on this has been influenced by John Dewey's political writings as well. There's a piece where he talks about freedom in the same way that Foucault talks about the "web of power". I'll track it down, but he basically points out the path dependence of our ideas of freedom. Often (not always) when people complain about violation of their rights as a result of a state action, that state action has relieved a violation of other people's rights. When people complain about state imposition on BP and violations of liberty, what they forget is that this action helps to relieve impositions on the liberty of people suffering from the spill. Bastiat might call it the "seen and the unseen". Defenders of BP ignore the "unseen" violations of the liberty of the people the state is helping. In other words, we're dealing with a dense web of freedoms and rights, just like Foucault's dense web of power. Often it's a trade-off between competing liberties, and often we accept involuntary state action because it is less pernicious than involuntary private action.


So that's a long sketch, but believe me it's still just an outline. I think you get the gist, though.

Everybody Draw Mohammed Day

So what do readers think of this "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" business? A couple weeks ago, I had a quick post supporting the creators of South Park after they were threatened with violence for their satire. Evan was a little concerned about it (I reproduced one of the Danish cartoons in the post), but as a good skeptic of censorship (self-imposed and externally imposed), he was fine with me putting it up. And since the South Park incident the threats and violence keep coming. However "provocative" these artists and writers may be, the worst they provoke is angry words. They are indeed provocative - that's obviously the point. But that doesn't mean this violence is what they've provoked. They have provoked anger, but the violence I think needs to be considered unprovoked, because there is nothing that can even begin to justify it.

Anyway, it's not like I'm going to doodle a cartoon and post it. I have no real objection to that, but no inclination either. However, I am curious what people think about this. Some perspectives are deserving of ridicule. Nobody is plastering mosques attended by peaceful Muslims with these ridiculing cartoons (that I'm aware of). The people involved here - Vilks, van Gogh, Parker, Stone, Rushdie, etc. - aren't trying to marginalize or intimidate Muslims in general. I think they're quite clearly singling out a particularly totalitarian and illiberal segment of Islam, and because they're doing that it's natural for me not only to take their side, but also to have a degree of respect for continued deliberate satirical efforts, like Draw Mohammed Day.

But maybe I'm just a jackass. What do readers think of this effort?

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan linked to this about a month ago. It shows depictions of Mohammed in art by Muslims. Muslims haven't always had the hang-ups that some do today.

Democracy Posts

Lots of people have been pessimistic about democracy lately:

- Khaled Haroub on what has deterred democracy in the Middle East.

- A new NBER working paper finds that joblessness leads people to question the efficacy of democracy and demand "rogue leaders".

- People over at Crooked Timber fault Dani Rodrik's recent piece suggesting that democracy, globalization, and the nation-state do not play nicely together and that we have to pick two of the three at any given time. I had some reservations about the Rodrik post too, btw.

Hans Hoppe would be thrilled at all these democracy fears!

Note: that last line is a deliberate attempt to draw out Curt Doolittle, who recently admitted in the comment section that: "I found you via my daily search for the term "hans hoppe" because I prowl the web defending him from those who fail to understand him. You seem to understand him perfectly". I want to (1.) check out how thorough this guy is, and (2.) maybe even get some thoughts from him on Hoppe's views on democracy - which I do genuinely find problematic, but would freely admit I might not entirely understand. Curt suggested that I understand Hoppe's views on property rights - let's see how I do on democracy.

Wikigovernance

Eric Cantor (R-VA) started up an interesting project called YouCut, where people can vote for what they want to cut from the budget.

In its current form, it's beyond ridiculous. As many have noticed, it's nothing short of gimick. Not only will these votes have no impact at all on what Congress does, but the "savings" Cantor presents don't amount to much at all next to the entire budget.

But I think it's an interesting tactic. You could call it "common law 2.0". Simply voting on issues is only the most obvious thing to do. Presumably, though, we could have a Wikipedia-like site where actual legislation could be posted and amended. An obvious problem would be internet trolls that sabotage a potential wikilaw, but a solution might be to have self-policing communities with membership requirements and reviewers produce many different laws. You could have, for example, a conservative wikilaw community, a libertarian wikilaw community, and a progressive wikilaw community each with hundreds of users. Each could set up its own rules (that's kind of the point), but we could a imagine a situation where an aspiring wikilaw participant could apply for membership, and have an application reviewed and approved or disapproved by current members. Current members could also elect a review committee that keeps an eye on wikilaw revisions and on all the members in an effort to identify trolls. Each wikilaw community could have its own rules for arbitrating differences of opinion on changes. And ultimately, the community could vote on a wikilaw they think they've perfected. They could even have two circles of membership - one for people who would actually have a hand in crafting legislation, and a more open circle for wikilaw voters. Perhaps a potential wikilaw would have to be approved by both communities.

Once a wikilaw community builds a law in this way, they could submit it to an overarching website where anyone could vote for it. Or, the wikilaw text could be passed on to legislators would would then submit the law in Congress. Amendments in Congress to the original wikilaw could be highlighted by the wikilaw community.

The reasons why direct democracy can be dangerous, and why a republic can be preferable, are well understood. However, there can also be legitimate concerns about the extent to which an opaque republic can do away with the very real benefits of democracy. User-generated legislation in the context of a republic can overcome some of these concerns, I think.

There would be bugs to work out. "Technocrat" is often thought of as a dirty word, but the fact is there are a lot of things that the state does that are very technical and hard to understand. Budget policy is one of those things, particularly insofar as the budget plays a role in macroeconomic policy. Part of me sympathizes with the Bryan Caplan school of thought about democracies making bad policies and "The Myth of the Rational Voter". Then again, part of what Caplan ascribes to poorly informed voters is probably simply a difference of opinion (but of course it's harder for him to sell a book highlighting the fact that there are differences of opinion out there!). I think quite a bit of what Caplan himself would put in place would be "bad policy", but that doesn't mean that I think he's poorly informed or unworthy of voting. This is largely why we have democratic institutions - because the voters that Caplan would exclude aren't necessarily the voters that I would exclude (if I were to accept the underlying logic of a more limited suffrage).

The Fascist Octopus Has Taken The White House!

Bryan Caplan has urged "grateful bloggers" to "dance on the grave of Marxism" this May Day [please also see update at the bottom of this post]. It seems to me to be a very appropriate dance floor. Caplan offers his own contribution in a counter-factual history of what could have happened if Lenin had his fatal stroke in 1917. I raise some issues with the counter-factual he poses (fifth comment down), but all in all it's interesting.

I was going to offer insights from my favorite anti-Marxist, John Maynard Keynes. But then I saw an Atlantic post on accusations of Obama's Marxism, and I decided that I needed to stamp that out instead. I think Keynes would have approved. He spent much of his career critiquing both laissez-faire and Marxism, and in pointing out to people how Marxism was anti-thetical to his own ideas and threatened the cause of liberty. Back to Obama. On his tour of the Midwest, Obama said something that agitated the hyper-sensitive, hyperbolic, and self-righteous Right. He said: "I do think that at a certain point you've made enough money." Mark Levin said that the sentiment has "strong shades of Marxism". Seems like a pretty reasonable interpretation...

Except that I've misquoted Obama. I added a period, where he had a comma. What Obama actually said was:

"We're not trying to push financial reform because we begrudge success that's fairly earned. I do think that at a certain point you've made enough money, [<-- COMMA!!!!!!!] but you know part of the American way is that you can just keep on making it if you're providing a good product or you're providing a good service. We don't want people to stop fulfilling the core responsibilities of the financial system to help grow the economy."

Yes, when you start switching around commas and periods, and when you don't restate the entire sentence you can make it sound like just about anything. What's sadder, though, is that you know this is going to get traction.

It's like that infamous Chicago radio interview where Obama explicitly said that the courts were not the right place to pursue economic justice, and yet somehow the message that came out of that was that we should pursue economic justice in the courts. It's the same thing here with this "enough money" statement. He explicitly said in the sentence quoted above that people should continue to earn money - more money than they even need - if they're providing a good or service that people want. That's the epitome of market capitalism. How the hell does that get turned into Marxism? It's bizarre to see people do these mental gymnastics to take a grammatically simple sentence and turn it into what they wanted him to say.

At least in the Chicago radio interview, Obama elaborated his idea over the course of several sentences. He spent quite a bit of time explaining why the courts failed to achieve all the aims of the Civil Rights movement, why they weren't the right place to achieve all the aims of the Civil Rights movement, and for that reason why the leaders of the Civil Rights movement were wrong to put so much emphasis on the court process when they should have put more emphasis on community organizing. It took him a while to lay that thesis out - it's a complicated thesis after all! But this point about "enough money" is just one sentence. Can't people read all the way to the period at the end of the sentence? A couple years ago I would have said "can't people listen to the end of a radio interview before forming your full opinion?". Since then I've realized we really don't have that much attention span - but I would have thought we could at least finish the end of a sentence. Apparently not.

In the Chicago radio interview, Obama laid out a strong case for (1.) negative rights, and (2.) a limited role for legislating from the bench. Willful misreading or involuntary ignorance twisted that into a case for (1.) positive rights, and (2.) an expansive role for the courts. By the same token, Obama is here making an explicit case for market capitalism, where people can continue to earn money beyond what they could possibly need if they're providing a useful product. But willful misreading or involuntary ignorance is turning it into precisely the opposite message. What's most striking is that they're twisting his words where they have common ground with him! They presumably agree with him on this point. So why not agree with him on this point and then disagree with him on the details of the finance reform where you legitimately disagree with him? The answer, of course, is simple. Claiming that Obama doesn't want you to make any more money after you've "made enough" plays better in a campaign ad than detailed disagreements on the financial reform bill. And these people - like all politicians - are all about winning power. They're all about the next election. So they choose to do and say what is most advantageous for winning power.

If the Lincoln-Douglas debates were held today, Douglas would have won hands down. People simply don't have the attention span to listen to an entire point. They form their opinion ahead of time and hear only the snippets that buttress that opinion. That is not a good sign for free society.

UPDATE: When I had read Bryan's initial post, I got the impression that this was just an opportunity for a bunch of people to discredit Marxism and celebrate the (relative) lack of Marxism that we've enjoyed as a planet since 1989. The Distributed Republic, which is aggregating many of these posts, has something more specific in mind - remembering the victims of Marxism. This is also an important thing to do today. I'm not sure what exactly to say on the matter - the facts speak for themselves. Millions died at the hands of this ideology. But why was the ideology so powerful? Ultimately, I think it was powerful because of human hubris. We place a high premium on our own intelligence and ability to figure things out. We are pretty smart creatures - it's not an entirely inexplicable hubris. But ultimately it's fallacious. We make mistakes. And our failures can be especially damaging when we get too wrapped up in extended, logically deduced megaprojects like Marxism. Logical deduction is very enticing. In theory, it's air-tight. It's a fantastic way to discover truths. But deductive logic is contingent on two pillars: accurate axioms or assumptions, and a valid chain of deductions. Human frailty often misleads us on both those points. However impressive logical deduction is on paper, we always manage to mess it up. Marxism emerged from this supreme confidence in man's ability to figure things out. When the early Marxists first devised their socialist framework, they relied on their ability to figure out the determinist contours of human society. That was hubris. The practitioners of Marxism added to that initial hubris the mistake of assuming that they could actually plan something as complicated as the economy. The Marxists were so confident in their deductive reasoning and so unwilling to test their ideas against experience that they felt justified in immolating countless innocent human beings. Hubris breeds confidence in our own logic, and confidence in our own logic leads us to violently defend logically deduced megaprojects that we've convinced ourselves can solve all the problems of the world. This hubris is the underlying failure of all megaprojects based on deductive logic: from Communism to libertarianism. Human reasoning is a powerful tool, but it has to be tempered and tested with experience. Anyone who tells you that they've figured everything out and by their logic Communism works is a fool. You can't figure out in your head some silver bullet form of social organization. By the same token, anyone who tells you that they've eschewed empirical testing and through their deductive logic they have concluded that libertarianism is a fool-proof silver bullet for social organization is also a fool. I'm bringing libertarianism into this, because I think the debate over Marxism is often skewed and distorted. Superficially, many ideologies are stark opposites - but unless we see their common underlying fallacies we inevitably threaten life and liberty. Verification, falsification, and empiricism dictate that people square their understanding of the social and political world with the understanding and experience of others. With these priorities, you cannot have the mass death that we experienced at the hands of Marxism. That sort of thing is only possible if you close your mind to experience and rely only on your own logical abilities (or, I suppose, if you are both an empiricist and a sociopath). The crimes of Marxism originated in the hubris of its deductive reasoning, which was cantilevered out to undergird an alien ideology.

Threats to American Democracy

Two pieces in The Atlantic recently got me thinking broadly about threats to democracy as an institution in America. The first was this (somewhat melodramatic) response to the State of the Union by Andrew Sullivan, and the second was this article on "American decline narratives" in the most recent print edition of The Atlantic. I want to clarify that I don't think that our republic is collapsing. I firmly believe that we will not only continue to maintain our super-power status (albeit probably sharing it with others) over the decades to come, but that we will also shape the future of the human race in the same way that Rome's legacy reverberated through the centuries, long after the Italian peninsula devolved into a collection of squabbling city-states. However, I do think there are a few very real threats to American democracy. The first two are quite recent developments, emerging over the last decade or two. The second two are more long-standing, but still disconcerting.

1. The Filibuster and a Dysfunctional Congress

Under Senate rules, three-fifths of the Senate must vote to limit debate (cloture) before a bill is voted on. This amounts to a requirement that any legislation controversial enough to raise the ire of the minority would require 60 votes, rather than 51, to pass. It's not a completely unreasonable rule. It helps defend against the "tyranny of the majority" by requiring broader agreement - certainly a good thing. It prevents an overbearing majority leader from preventing Senators from saying their piece on a piece of legislation. All in all, it doesn't have to be a bad rule. But in the hands of the modern Senate, it has swiftly become not a defense against the "tyranny of the majority", but a tool for the tyranny of the minority. In the 1960s, no Senate term had more than 7 filibusters. That pace had increased by over seven-fold in the first decade of the 21st century, when no Senate term had less than 49 filibusters. The 110th Congress set a record of 112 filibusters against the Democratic majority, a huge spike in activity. While recent Republican filibustering has been most notable, the modern increase in the utilization of filibusters is unequivocally bipartisan. While the filibuster can certainly be justified in any given situation, it's modern use has hampered representative self-government. Judicious application of idiosyncratic rules is not undemocratic, but persistently applying a super-majority standard on legislation is. Trends in the confirmation of presidential nominees are comparable. According to the Alliance for Justice, every administration since the Carter administration has seen a lower percentage of its judicial nominees confirmed by the Senate than the previous administration. As of November, less than a quarter of Obama's nominees have been confirmed. Once again, taking a principled stand against judicial nominees is fine, but nobody can reasonably claim that Bush's nominees were less than half as qualified as Reagan's (91% confirmed vs. 44%), or that Bush's nominees were about twice as qualified as Obama's (44% vs. 23%). In the end these practices don't simply obstruct an opposing party; they obstruct American self-government.

2. Mandatory Expenditures in the Federal Budget

The year 2009 was the first in American history in which every dollar of federal revenue was dedicated before Congress voted on a single spending bill. Whether it went to Medicare, Social Security, interest on the debt, or prior defense appropriation bills, every dollar of federal revenue was allocated without a single vote from the Congress elected to office in the fall of 2008. Naturally, that didn't prevent the new Congress from continuing to appropriate money - they simply borrowed money to cover their expenses. Gene Steuerle has tracked the growth of mandatory spending through his "Fiscal Democracy Index", which is the percent of government revenue not allocated for mandatory programs. This index has declined markedly over the last several decades, and like the rise of the filibuster it is a bipartisan failure. Also like the filibuster, the problem isn't mandatory spending or entitlement programs per se; the problem is that these things have gotten so out of hand and out of proportion to our revenue collection that once again, they prevent us from governing ourselves. We collect taxes to pay for the projects and decisions of previous Congresses. That isn't self-government, that is the tyranny of the past. An increasing share of our budget also goes to interest payments to foreign creditors. There is nothing wrong with borrowing money from abroad. It is a practice that has gone on for centuries. But as it increases we lose our influence of our domestic policy making.

3. The Misuse of American History

One of the trends that has bothered me recently is the use of the Boston Tea Party as a symbol for the Tea Party movement, as well as the broader populist-libertarian fusion movement spearheaded by Ron Paul. I've previously opined on this phenomenon here, but in a nutshell my point is simply that the rallying cry "no taxation without representation" has effectively been truncated after the first two words, when the Founders had placed considerably more emphasis on the second two words. Many of the Founders did obviously embrace a much smaller government than we do now, but this observation is misleading for two reasons: (1.) many of them were not supporters of small government in the first place, particularly the Federalists, who included some of our most honored patriots. (2.) Social and economic life has changed considerably since the 18th century. New public goods have emerged and the characteristics of American civilization have changed. We do know that Thomas Jefferson was, in his lifetime, what we would now call a "libertarian". We have absolutely no way of knowing whether Thomas Jefferson, observing the conditions of the twenty-first century, would be anywhere close to being a libertarian today. His approach to public goods issues in his writings on publicly supported education suggest that he may have been staunchly opposed to modern libertarianism. Particularly in the cry "no taxation without representation", but repeatedly elsewhere, the Founders demonstrated that the crux of the American revolution was not necessarily small government, but representative government. This isn't to say that small government isn't an important part of American civilization. It was extremely important in the 18th century, and it still is an essential value today. Broadly speaking, all Americans still share the sentiment that "the government that governs best governs least". The point is, it must be the people who decide what those parameters on government are. Recent misuses of American history don't simply provide fringe political movements with cover for their ideologies: they purge our history of it's emphasis on self-government, just as the abuse of the filibuster prevents my Senators from representing me, and just as excessive mandatory spending prevents my representatives from appropriating my tax dollars.

4. The American Imperium

I had a very hard time finding good data to capture the extent of the American military empire, but I still believe this is worth noting. The first thing that I found very quickly was that the absolute number of troops stationed abroad is currently lower than it had been mid-century. With the end of the Cold War and Vietnam, our only substantial deployments are in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, I think there is still cause for concern. First, current military operations are considerably more capital-intensive than previous operations, which were quite labor-intensive. Therefore, deployment might not be the right metric. We are also on a war footing in Iraq and Afghanistan in a way that we weren't in Europe during the Cold War, and we started these wars in a way that we didn't in Korea or Vietnam. Another qualitative difference is our unequivocal military superiority, which far surpasses any advantage we previously had over the Soviet Union. If you add to this our proxy-powers (Israel, Egypt, etc.), the American military empire, spread out in over 700 international bases, is formidable. Once again, empire in and of itself isn't necessarily a bad thing. Our security umbrella over Western Europe (which arguably still exists) was a force for good that fostered democracy. Some of our territorial occupations are justified as a temporary means of stabilization after a necessary war. But empire nevertheless introduces risks. Overextension, the militarization of foreign policy, and unjust occupation of foreign territory can serve to weaken self-government here and abroad. Lethal force is an appropriate policy tool in certain circumstances, but it is a dangerous tool because it is also the primary method of squelching liberty and democracy. At least since the Enlightenment, human beings rarely willingly acquiesce to subjugation. It must be forced upon them. And the more we extend our military empire, the more likely we are to be the instrument of that subjugation.

Conclusion. None of these threats make the failure of American democracy inevitable. I personally think such a failure is highly unlikely. But that doesn't make these problems any less threatening. The point is, they have to be overcome. Some positive developments are already apparent. The Gang of 14 admirably prevented excessive dysfunction in the Senate for a brief period. No end is in sight to the rise in mandatory spending, but policy makers are definitely cognizant of the problem, and there has recently been discussion of more reasonable revenue policy. In addition, entitlement reform has been featured in health reform legislation. Our misuse of our own history is obviously a much harder trend to fight, and our military empire seems equally irreversible. Nevertheless, General McChrystal has recently indicated that he wants to begin negotiations with the Taliban, and President Obama has already drawn down troops in Iraq. Nothing is ever certain, and as I hope I've emphasized there is nothing inherently wrong in many of these trends. The problem is unsustainable excess in each of these areas. A solution is attainable, and worth fighting for because it will define the legacy of the United States of America for centuries, if not millenia, to come. Greek and Roman statesmen and thinkers still influence the way we live today: an absolutely humbling realization. And yet the American Republic is more expansive and powerful than Rome could have ever dreamed of being. We need to maintain an American Republic that will beget a civilization in 4010 A.D. that we can be proud of, just as Rome laid an admirable foundation for civilization today.

Untangling the Popular and the Democratic in Iran

I think Evan is very good to caution us not to take a cookie-cutter Western approach to Iran, at the same time that we unequivocally support the protesters there. This is essentially the conclusion that I've come to as well.

When we address the issue of how America and Americans should be involved, I think we need to pay very close attention to history. In the U.S., 1979 is remembered as a black year for democracy in Iran. In that year, a theocrat overthrew the existing government, which was credited with modernizing Iran. Americans were held hostage until Ronald Reagan - the strong-man of Western liberalism - ensured their safe passage home. Since 1979, Iran has been perceived as an enemy force in the region; threatening Israel, funding terrorism, and opposing secular democracy. This is all true...

...and yet at the same time it really isn't.

Khomeini was a theocrat, with all the autocratic pronouncements of the old caliphate, and none of it's assimilating Oriental spectacle. Nevertheless, the Iranian Revolution of 1979 was a thoroughly popular revolution. Khomeini did not empower the Iranian people, but he did liberate them from what was popularly perceived to be a Western client state. This is no reason to laud the changes that occurred in 1979, but it should help us to understand that the protests happening now are an outgrowth of the 1979 revolution, not a repudiation of that revolution.

As Andrew Sullivan has pointed out (and, I should note, the Daily Dish has been offering absolutely exceptional coverage of the protests) the leaders of this current movement are not the "next generation" of democratic outsiders, rather "the leading faces speaking out — Mousavi, Rafsanjani, Montazeri — are figures who were among Khomeini’s inner circle in 1979". I think, to put it very roughly, we may be witnessing the transition from a popular regime to a democratic government. This is not the fall of the Berlin Wall, in other words, so much as it is the fraudulent, bloody, and haphazard transition of a long revolution.

I think a lot of people, out of rightful outrage at Ahmadinejad and the spawn of the 1979 revolution, are too quick to assume that those elements need to be forcibly replaced or challenged by an outside force. In my mind this would take us out of the frying pan and into the fire. In 1953 the Central Intelligence Agency, on the order of President Eisenhower, replaced the duly elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh, and allowed the Shah to consolidate his power and banish all prospects of a constitutional monarchy, which Mossadegh had been trying to establish.

More forceful American intervention right now wouldn't introduce a new Shah. But that really doesn't matter. The point is, from 1953 to 1979 American and British intelligence ultimately decided who would rule the Iranian people out of a fear that popular government would privilege the communists. In many ways, 1979 replaced one autocracy for another; nevertheless, it replaced an imperial autocracy with a popular autocracy. For those concerned with the advance of liberal democracy, that's small consolation. For the Iranian people, I imagine that is a much greater and more positive shift than the American public generally supposes. And clearly, the seismic changes occurring now are positive from both the American and the Iranian perspective, and we should support them. But we need to remember that this long march to democracy started in 1979, not 2009, and that it is certainly not a reassertion of some imagined liberal orientation that reigned in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, only to be repressed by the dark Khomeinian cowl.