Conservatism, Liberalism and Our Future
The Dots Connected
By
Jay B Gaskill
January 2, 2012 ◄
2012 is a year of major transitions, some of which will not be immediately apparent to the casual observer and many clueless policy makers. Three major economies will begin tectonic shifts. America will set the stage for its reemergence as the world’s exemplar of progress:
Europe will begin the painful shift away from its incoherent blend of highly productive, self-sustaining economies linked at the aorta to unsustainably underproductive, dependency economies. The new European model, whether the euro survives as a unitary currency, in a two tier form or not at all, will have one key feature: The failing entitlement models will be decoupled and made more accountable for their own misallocation of resources. There is just not enough free-floating altruism in all of Europe for the highly productive economies to voluntarily carry the entitlement load of the highly unproductive ones. The governing institutions of the EU cannot operate as an uber-government over the strong objections of its members. The forms of governance may remain, but the reality of an EU super-state will not gel in its present form.
China will be forced by internal pressures to move from what is essentially a slave labor, subsidized-production economy to something closer to the current American one – a credit-fueled consumption model. The pressures to increase wages and to relax restrictions on consumption cannot long be resisted in China, especially when its sovereign lending represents unspent money-in-the-bank that can be used to ease the conditions of Chinese labor. An important caution: China’s model, a mix of police state executions, wealthy, oppressive party elites, de-facto local autonomy for high tech areas, masses of rural poor trying to migrate to cites, and the collapse of communism as a unifying moral paradigm, cannot be sustained. Chinese communist party leaders do not sleep well these days.
The USA will be forced by external circumstances to abandon its decades-long credit-driven consumption binge in favor of the more sober investment-driven production model. In the short and midterm this means “work harder, consume less”. In the long term, America’s success will be, once again, the exemplar that leads the world into a better place
The common thread in all these shifts is the breakdown of the command economy model (whether socialist, communist, mercantilist, or crony-capitalist) and the collapse of the various liberal subsidized-idleness models. As a result, what we now think of as liberalism and conservatism will change. All in all, I am cautiously optimistic. Let me introduce my optimism with two recently published letters of mine. After that, I will connect the dots.
Among my favorite sources of information and analysis, I particularly enjoy two intelligent conservative-leaning publications, First Thingsi, which reflects an interreligious, catholic-centered perspective, and Commentaryii, that exemplifies a Jewish point of view. Both are driven by a shared concern for the advancement of human dignity in the context of our common moral heritage, the ongoing struggle for human freedom, and a belief in American exceptionalism.
And both have recently published letters from me – one defending Ayn Rand from an ideological/religious attack (in the form of a movie review), and one containing my take on a Symposium on America’s future.
First, from the journal,
First Things:
First Things is published by The Institute on Religion and Public Life, an interreligious, nonpartisan research and education institute whose purpose is to advance a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society.
…my letter as published in the August/September 2011 issue….
“I’ve been reading First Things for more than a decade now, and David Bentley Hart’s takedown of Ayn Rand (“The Trouble with Ayn Rand,” May) stands out, but not in an admirable way. Many conservative Christians, among them Roman Catholics, will be offended at such a vitriolic attack on a famous conservative humanist author, and I use the term vitriolic advisedly (“just a little spiteful,” in Hart’s confession).
“I grant you that Rand, an autodidact Russian émigré (the daughter of a commercial family whose property was confiscated by the Soviets, and an anticommunist intellectual who fell in love with America) was indeed an atheist. But unlike Phillip Pullman, she did not attack or brutally caricature the Church, and unlike Nietzsche, whom she actively disliked, she did not attack Christianity.
“Taken as a whole, Ayn Rand’s creative output is a celebration of life and human creative powers. I suspect that she is on David Hart’s personal Index Librorum Prohibitorum because she embraced “greed” over self-immolative sacrifice. Rand’s passion for creative freedom as a moral imperative was a specific commitment that transcended “mere” greed and belies the parodic attempts to marginalize an original, serious ethic, relevant to the modern human condition and, at least to this believer, something that represents a valued addition to the larger Christian worldview.
“Ayn Rand’s fiction and philosophy is not Christian by any stretch, but it is an expression of life-affirming, anti-tyrannical humanism. God forbid there would be a movie of one of Eric Hoffer’s books.”
Second, in the magazine,
Commentary:
From its founding in November 1945, COMMENTARY has been “an act of affirmation.” It remains an expression of belief in the United States, perhaps most of all in America’s central role in the preservation and advance of Western civilization and, most immediately, the continuing existence of the Jewish people.
…as published in the January 2012 issue…
“From reading COMMENTARY’S [November] symposium on America’s future, it became clear to me that short term and long term optimism are easier to achieve than that pesky midterm variety. Humanity’s long-term optimism has a venerable history, based on the enduring affirmation of human life. Our species’ moral compass points us there.
“The 960 Jewish warriors and loved ones who stood against the Romans at the fortress on Masada two millennia ago – refusing to surrender, killing themselves rather than giving the attackers the satisfaction of victory – were realistic optimists. Their optimism was not unlike that of the struggling immigrant parents who work themselves into bone deep weariness day and night so their children will have better futures. It is the same as the optimism of the inventor, the creative artist, and all others who understand that in the sacrifices and rewards of their personal creative struggles, it is actually possible for a few to lift up the lives of the many who will come after them.
“The reasonable optimism of the entrepreneur with a potentially valuable innovation is grounded in the creative experience, in contrast with the unreasonable optimism of the obsessive gambler. It is the optimism of those who understand that setbacks and failures are built into the processes of creation. It is the essential optimism of all of us who believe in the future.
“It seems that, early in the 21st century, the utopian liberal game has run its course. But the power of post-modern liberalism in all its forms, within the academy and the larger intelligentsia, is robust. That power has flowed from the prevalent credibility of the “leveling” ideologies as the primary agent of ameliorative change. This was cemented by the historical association of conservatives with the repressive right wing defenders of kings, tyrants, royalty and other malefactors of unearned privilege.
“Short term optimism flows from the reasonable prediction that there will be a conservative surge – “fire truck” conservatives are typically brought to power when the excesses of liberalism become too painful. The pending sovereign debt crisis will inflict pain sufficient to discredit liberalism in all its forms for some years to come.
“But midterm optimism is another matter. What happens after the fire is extinguished? What sort of enduring political and intellectual leadership will emerge from the ashes? The answers to these and the related questions critically depend on two things: one, whether the coming crisis will be widely recognized as the result of fundamental contradictions within “liberalism”; and two, whether a new conservatism can address the future with a simple, powerful philosophy that unites its core precepts with a theory of human progress. If the answer to the second question is yes, then so will be the answer to the first.
“Conservative intellectuals like John Podhoretz have their work cut out for them, even before the new garments are ordered.”
Jay B Gaskill
Connecting the Dots
It is clear to me that contemporary political liberalism has lost its way, and that conservatism in some form is needed to provide the necessary corrective, hopefully in time to prevent more damage. As I observed several years ago in a popular essay, Liberalism is a secular religion, there is an important sense in which most of us, whether we are classic or modern conservatives, are all liberals. I began that piece with the disclaimer, “All thinking people who respect human life and dignity are liberals in the larger sense. So that makes me and most thinking conservatives liberals, too.” I went on to identify the illiberal elements of the political liberalism of the hard left. My purpose was “not to debate the merits of the public policy issues that make up the catechism of the left, but to explore the notion that, collectively, these views are a catechism. There is no better explanation for the extreme resistance of the ‘political liberal’ group to all rational argument.”
Liberalism’s enduring project – currently overshadowing its historic commitment to liberty – is to mitigate the harshness of Darwinian competition on the people. Conservatism’s enduring project – formerly superseding its waning commitment to inherited privilege – is to protect the legitimate earnings of the people. In former times, neither ideology evidenced a particularly robust focus on the truly greater project: fostering the special conditions of ordered liberty in which creative human enterprises thrive – the very enterprises that constitute the fountainhead of all human progress, whether in the arts, technology or our social arrangements.
This was the core insight led me to connect the major dots. The immediate problem, as I put it in my Commentary letter, is “whether a new conservatism can address the future with a simple, powerful philosophy that unites its core precepts with a theory of human progress.”
I believe that new variety of conservatives (a type that I’ve referenced in an article below as “Renaissance conservatives”) will quickly adapt and connect core conservative values to the project of fostering, protecting and anchoring the human creative enterprise.
This adaptation proves to be a natural fit. As a bonus, it also supports the resumption of a fruitful dialogue with the subset of enlightened, freedom-loving liberals who understand that the creative project, writ large, necessarily requires protected freedoms that have always been closely associated with the conservative project. These are the very freedoms essential to the functioning of creative communities throughout history. They include the right to uncensored, unregulated expression, to the legally protected retention of one’s legitimately acquired property and earnings (particularly intellectual property and the fruits of one’s innovations and inventions) and the protection of voluntary mutual exchange, whether of ideas, art, goods, services or any other value that free men and women, working for themselves, can generate.
These notions are the bedrock of the creative civilization imperative. It is a powerful idea, one that has the potential to transform both liberalism and conservatism. And, not coincidentally, the special conditions for a large scale, ongoing creative efflorescence have strongly rooted themselves in the New World, protected by the American constitutional structure of governance. The American experiment is at its very core the first modern example of a creative society grounded in protected liberties. As the force of this idea spreads and the policy implications sink in, the stage will be set for the Great American Recovery. Once again, our example will lead the world.
These ideas are developed in the following articles, available on The Policy Think Site:
The American Creative Surge (PDF download -75 pages)
http://www.jaygaskill.com/ACS2011.pdf
Political Liberalism as a Secular Religion
http://jaygaskill.com/liberalismasreligion.htm
Living in the Ayn Rand Universe
http://www.jaygaskill.com/InTheAynRandUniverse.htm
The Dialogic Imperative (PDF download, 41 pages)
http://www.jaygaskill.com/i2i.pdf
Copyright © 2011 and 2012 by First Things and Commentary Magazine, respectively, as to the quoted letters that were edited and published by those two periodicals, and Copyright © 2012 by Jay B Gaskill, Attorney at Law as the author of those letters and of the additional material herein. As always, links and forwards are welcome and encouraged. For other permissions or comments, contact the author via e-mail: law@jaygaskill.com .
January 2nd, 2012
WE ARE THE TITANIC
Analysis
By
Jay B Gaskill
“In part, what would happen in the wake of a Greek default would depend on whether European leaders could create a firewall* to control the damage from spreading widely-”.
Greece Nears the Precipice, Raising Fear, New York Times 9-20-12
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/business/global/as-greece-struggles-the-world-imagines-a-default.html
*Hint- There is no firewall. Read on….
SINKING THE TITANIC … AGAIN
The Unintentional Conspiracy That Almost Destroyed American Banking And May Yet Do More Damage…
CARELESS CONSERVATIVES & CLUELESS LIBERALS
The essence of the traditional conservative project is the preservation of boundaries – social, political and economic; and the essence of the liberal project is to seek the elimination or amelioration of the same boundaries. Both seek the improvement of the human condition – but conservatives lean towards less tinkering and more evolution, while liberals favor more social and economic engineering; liberals usually, but not always have less concern for the boundaries between private and government action. History is full of examples in which each of these approaches has worked better than the other one…for a time.
Now let’s turn to the banking mess, where invisible boundaries are crossed all the time, often with damaging consequences. In the financial world there are several such boundaries: between borrowing and owning, for example, between consequential failure and subsidized failure, and between high risk and low risk banking operations.
THE TITANIC AND THE CONTAINMENT OF FAILURE
The design of the Titanic included below-deck watertight compartments; these were steel walls designed to contain flooding so that the entire ship could escape capsizing as long as any leak was confined, leaving enough undamaged compartments to provide net positive buoyancy. The concept was sound, though poorly executed using the technology of the day. The practice is now standard in the large vessel shipping industry using improvements in design and execution such that large vessels almost never capsize anymore.
THE FALSE FIREWALL OF EUROPE
Greece is only the first and most visible of the EU’s basket-case economies. The firewall reference in the opening quote from the New York Times betrays a fundamental misconception about the very concept. There was no firewall between the European economy and the Greek economy. What the author apparently means by the term is a bailout in the form of a capital infusion as an emergency substitute for the lack of a firewall. As in the Titanic, a firewall – or sealed watertight compartment – is to avoid having a bailout. As the Titanic taught us, bailouts sometimes cannot work. A robust Greek firewall would have either prevented the Greek government from misusing European borrowing power to run up an irredeemable level of indebtedness or insulated the other EU members from the damage to the common currency.
THE NO-FIREWALL BANKING EXPERIMENT
There once was a working failure-containment strategy that allowed commercial banking to weather the storms that periodically buffet the investment side. The strategy, partly cultural and partly regulatory, had two key elements: (1) keeping a sufficient number of separate banking institutions so that several failures among them would not bring down the entire system – or stress the FDIC guarantees past the breaking point; (2) maintaining a robust wall between high risk investment banking operations and the conservative banking services used by the day-today consumer and business depositors.
We are still suffering through the ripple effects of the 2008-9 US banking crisis (the scope and severity of which cannot be overstated). That crisis was a direct result of operational and organizational changes in the finance industry during the last 15 years. Over those years, propelled by the “dot com” bubble and other high profit lures, investment banking institutions began ramping up profits by taking greater risks, ultimately trading in bundled mortgage-secured debt instruments to create the illusion of financial soundness. These instruments were, in fact, faux assets that had been leveraged as much as 50-1 then used to pad the balance sheets of a number of major financial institutions, to support more risk-taking.
Then, in a breathtaking change of policy, American commercial banking systems simply abandoned protective compartments and firewalls altogether. Speculation in bundled mortgage debt packages, shot through with negative value assets, was allowed to contaminate traditional banking services. But during the banking crisis, Canadian banks and the more conservative commercial banks, like US Bank, were largely unaffected. Those few conservative, traditional banks were like a handful of immunized families during the black plague.
The failure of America’s mainline banking institutions to honor the boundaries that would contain bank speculation-engendered failures was a failed experiment with liberalism enthusiastically embraced by conservatives. Among the many, otherwise intelligent conservative voices, the scholars and analysts of the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute joined with the liberal Brookings Institute in praising the change. Consumer bank fees were reduced, American banks became more “world competitive”. It was a win-win for conservatives and liberals alike. Or was it?
As a research fellow from the Heritage Foundation recently wrote, “Prohibiting banks from engaging in certain types of financial activities is an old and discredited concept that was once embodied in the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933. Before its repeal in 1999, Glass–Steagall limited banks’ ability to meet the needs of their best customers as new, cheaper financing products developed that were outside the scope of their allowed activities. Some banks were weakened through their inability to compete with other types of financial institutions, while eventually other banks found ways around those restrictions.
“…[attempts via] misguided legislation to reestablish the Glass–Steagall Act assume that a bank should be essentially a utility limited to taking in deposits and making certain types of safe loans. They reason that if banks are protected from risky activities, other types of financial services firms can be allowed to fail without causing problems to the overall financial system. However, these proposals completely miss the point that as far back as the 1998 failure of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, systemic risk to the financial system is less likely to come from banks than from non-banks.
By David C. John, Senior Research Fellow in Retirement Security and Financial Institutions in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
Heritage Foundation Web Memo No. 2810, February 22, 2010
That piece spoke for the conservative establishment.
Background: The Banking Act of 1933 that first established the FDIC and inaugurated depression era banking reforms, was also known as the Glass–Steagall Act. Among other things, it barred any bank holding company from owning other financial companies. These and other firewall protections of commercial banking were repealed in 1999 by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. This one measure took down the wall between investment banks that issued securities and the commercial banks (classic deposits and loan). And it repealed conflict of interest restrictions on investment bankers who simultaneously served as commercial bank officers.
It was a bipartisan orgy – liberals and conservatives banding together in the heady days of the dot com boom to erase some pesky, antiquated, profit-impairing boundaries. The House passed the first version the act 343-86 when republicans rolled a few nay-saying conservatives and most democrats. But the democrats jumped on board when the House voted 241-132 (most republicans opposing, most democrats supporting) to instruct negotiators to insert provisions against redlining. You may recall that redlining is what liberals called the practice of mortgage lenders who used strict borrower-criteria in poor (read minority) neighborhoods, based on the quaint notion that anyone would ever have to actually pay back a mortgage loan!
The final bill incorporated strong anti-redlining provisions. It passed the Senate 90-8, and by the House 362-57, and was signed into law by President Clinton in late 1999.
As it turned out, this would be a key ingredient in a toxic stew. The anti-redlining provisions led to political pressure on mortgage lenders, Fanny May and Freddy Mack (The Federal National Mortgage Association and the Federal Home Mortgage Corporation) to make more and more questionable loans. This led to a cultural watershed: The practice of making loans that depended on the expectation of appreciation instead of the borrower’s actual ability to repay the borrowed money became the norm. Thus the seedbed for the real estate lending bubble that would dominate the 90’s and the first eight years of the 21st century was planted, watered and fertilized.
We had been warned. Three years earlier, in 1996, Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan had given a famous speech before the American Enterprise Institute (recall this was during the height of the dot com bubble) in which he asked “How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions?” The final answer would come in with a shock in late 2008.
The recession that immediately followed the dot com bubble became dramatically worse in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of 9-11-01. But the real estate speculation bubble was able to fill the void, replacing the dot com froth with toxic asset fizz. American investment banks jumped into the risk pond and frolicked for seven years in a state of uncritical, irrational exuberance. When the inevitable banking collapse finally took place in 2008, the damage could not be confined to a few, compartmentalized risk-takers. The “toxic asset” problem (really faux assets, un-payable loans on overvalued properties – leveraged by a factor or 50-1 in some instances) had infected Wells Fargo, Citibank, Chase, Bank of America and hundreds of other major banks, including their day-to-day main street commercial operations.
But not all banks were among the hundreds receiving bailout money in 2008 and 2009.
Worldwide Financial Crisis Largely Bypasses Canada
“Canadian banks have not gone shaky like their American counterparts, economists and other experts said. There is no subprime mortgage or home foreclosure mess. And while the United States fears a prolonged recession, Canadians have remained relatively sanguine…”
“Strict rules also govern mortgage lending. By Canadian law, any mortgage that will finance more than 80 percent of the price of a home must be insured. Two-thirds of all Canadian mortgages are insured by the quasi-governmental Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corp. As a result of the tough standards for insurance, ‘people tend not to get mortgages they cannot afford,’ Gregory said.
“’Defaulting on a loan is also more difficult in Canada than the United States, Gregory said. ‘You can’t just drop off the keys and walk away.’
“For Canada’s seven biggest banks, the percentage of mortgages at least three months in arrears was 0.27 percent in July, close to historic lows, according to the banking association. Also, few Canadian banks got caught holding large numbers of toxic American mortgages.
“Amid this relative health, there have been reports that American companies, needing cash and credit, have been turning to their Canadian subsidiaries for short-term loans.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/15/AR2008101503321.html .
CNN Money published the initial bailout list of US Banks – there were hundreds – http://money.cnn.com/news/specials/storysupplement/bankbailout/ .
LESSONS
Old fashioned conservatism and sane liberalism tend to respect the essential boundaries on which day-to-day commerce depends. Those are simple boundaries, such as those between assets and liabilities, between secure loans and speculation – the boundaries that ensure reasonable safety and dependability, and they include the institutional boundaries that enable the compartmentalization of risk.
Who would tether a fully loaded 707 passenger jet to somebody’s experimental rocket plane? Common sense and ordinary folk wisdom are not rocket science. But to the politicians and mavens with the hubris to think that a country’s economy can be “managed” by experts using techniques and algorithms that even financial advisors can’t penetrate, common sense might as well be the type I, types IIA and IIB, and heterotic SO(32) and E8XE8 superstring theories of cosmological physics.
Without the profit incentive and the discipline of failure, government’s well-meaning ventures are usually expensive failures, frequently they are one-off gestures, and rarely are they free of malign unintended consequences. This is because government failures never punish those who engineered them. [Read my popular article, Legislative Malpractice, and weep - http://jaygaskill.com/CongressionMalpractice.htm .]
Government, especially at its well-meaning best, breeds bureaucrats as fast as a warm pile of manure breeds flies. And mindless bureaucracy (the phrase is a redundancy), whether it infects banks, or regulatory agencies, or real estate sales agencies, or congress or the executive branch, or investment firms, is the enemy of creativity, individual judgment, and personal accountability. The fatal attraction of pyramid schemes (and that was the housing market from 1988-2008) seduced both liberals and conservatives alike. But only the naïve liberals and complicit unthinking conservatives were reckless enough to entice poor people into that game. Of course, we need government, but we need insurance against its good intentions.
Spare me the elites who can’t seem to understand why the ordinary people of this country are angry at therm.
JBG
For further reading, see The American Creative Surge, also by the author, linked at http://www.jaygaskill.com/ACS2011.htm.
This article, published on The Policy Think Site and its Linked blogs, is Copyright © 2011 by Jay B. Gaskill, Attorney at Law, All rights Reserved.
Forwards and links are welcome, with attribution. For all other permissions, your comments and suggestions, contact the author via E-mail at law@jaygaskill.com.
September 22nd, 2011
Re-hire Me, Please
September 20, 2011
To all my employers:
Yes, I know now that I applied for this position with too little experience and even less competence. And I know that my performance has been a disappointment to a lot of you… okay, most of you.
But it is with hope, bordering on great confidence, that I can now assure you: Not only have I learned a lot from my mistakes, there are going to be improvements – big ones – they are coming any day now.
Every week or so, I am learning a lot more.
Yes, I know that 31 months and 3 weeks on the job was a long time to wait for improvement, but when you think about it… it really was only 26 months when adjusted for my training and vacations.
Now that I am finally ready, I really need another couple of years, at least, to begin to deliver some improved results.
So please rehire me when my contract runs out. You probably won’t be sorry.
Sincerely yours,
B (POTUS) O
Copyright 2011 by jay b Gaskill, as published on The Policy Think Site and its linked Blogs. Forwarded links to this piece are welcomed with appropriate credit. Reprinting requires the author’s permission.
This letter was not actually written by anyone that the author actually knows. Any resemblance to reality is the product of parodic synchronicity or mean spirited common sense.
The author, believe it or not, is a lawyer. Contact law@jaygaskill.com
September 19th, 2011
This article is also posted in the Dot 2 Dot blog and at http://jaygaskill.com/PickPotUS2012.html
Picking POTUS 2012
The Debate and the Hole
Analysis
by
Jay B. Gaskill
If on November 2, 2012 the economy looks a lot like it does today, the country will be electing President Perry or President Romney. It will not be electing Governor Christie, nor Congresswoman Bachmann or Congressman Ryan. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that former Governor Palin enters the race, it will not be her, either.
Money and organization dominate at this comparatively late stage in the process. Remember that the GOP convention takes place in Tampa, Florida on August 27th next year and that the nominee must be locked and loaded for a national campaign at the post-nomination starting gate, and should have already planned and staffed a transition team. The nation and the world are in a crisis, the depth and scope of which guarantee that the next administration must be prepared to swiftly assume executive responsibilities under very challenging circumstances.
Conventional wisdom holds that in yesterday’s debate Governor Perry, having seized center stage, just needed to avoid a major gaffe. I disagree. As the smoke settles, it will become clear that Rick Perry’s tendency to pithy and forceful rhetorical candor borders on the scary at a time that calls for bold policy changes delivered with calm reassurance. The electorate is grumpy to be sure, even angry and frustrated, but most Americans are emotionally fragile in a way that most Texans are not.
President Reagan wisely decided not to charge into the social security thicket and President Bush II, having responsibly put social security reform as a top priority for 2001, hit a brick wall on that issue even before the Twin Towers came down. That wall still stands.
Governor Perry and Governor Romney both understand that social security in its present form is a dramatically underfunded form of welfare. The term Ponzi scheme may actually fit (as in Perry’s book, Fed Up), but Governor Perry’s attention-getting rhetoric will dog him now and may cost him later in the general election, assuming he is nominated.
Whatever problems that social security funding presents this country, they are far from urgent when compared with the problem of funding day-to-day government operations during a deep and dangerous recession. This is not the optimum time to talk about the prospective bankruptcy of a program that will not become acute for a few years, not when we are facing the de facto bankruptcy of the federal government in the near term.
The deeper problem is the bankruptcy of the conventional economic wisdom that has brought us to this place. Look at the European mess. You are looking in a mirror. No one with access to the facts on either continent, in his or her right mind, seriously maintains that the entitlements enjoyed by the Greek rioters are sustainable, or that spending and benefit austerity can be avoided via monetary manipulation magic. It is too late for that in Europe and here in the USA.
We are in a trap. The way out consists of a mix of hard-headed spending adjustments coupled with a creative surge on the economic side. Mr. Obama dimly grasps this, but clings to a dead development model. The British economist John Maynard Keynes argued in the last century that the secret to continuing prosperity was a generous supply of money. He actually used the example (as a thought experiment) of an English village in the throes of high unemployment and deep depression. In his story, someone buries a treasure trove of currency in a deep hole. Full employment results when the villagers begin digging out the money.
It is actually frightening to me that someone as intelligent as Fed-head Bernanke still clings to a version of the Keynesian model. The villagers in Keynes’ example will starve unless the rest of the world feeds them, agreeing to accept the money the villagers have dug up. If everyone buries money and digs it up, over and over again , the depression never ends. One of President Obama’s pet showcased enterprises, a heavily subsidized, much publicized solar panel manufacturer has just gone bankrupt. Subsidized production fails without consumers. Subsidized consumption fails without production and a valuable currency to exchange for that production. Governments have never quite got it when it comes to commerce.
The centerpiece of the US recovery is a concerted, serious attack on the vast constellation of petty rules, unreasonable tax polices and crippling regulations that together constitute the political load on commerce. Ronald Reagan talked about that shining city on the hill. We need to be thinking about a different image. Imagine a soaring eagle. Now imagine a tethered one, hobbled at the feet, entangled in a web of failed good intentions.
You will know that someone is finally serious about getting us out of the trap when the talk gets seriously specific about how to lift the regulatory burdens on profit-making commercial activities in the USA.
As a thought experiment, imagine a country in which all of the various governmental regulatory agencies and commissions were made subject to a deregulation commission, tasked and empowered to strip away the regulations, petty tariffs and rules that curb economic development, hinder profit-making enterprises and inhibit new hiring. Imagine, if you will, that in lieu of an environmental impact report, we required only a shorter, swifter, more objective human heath and safety report. Imagine, also, a country in which new commercial and business regulations could not go into effect without first doing a commerce and jobs impact report. Protect snail darters or people’s prosperity? Suddenly the well -intentioned burdens on economic activity that have been imposed over the last three decades look a lot like luxuries we can no longer afford.
JBG
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September 8th, 2011
FOREIGN POLICY
In the Context of Renaissance Conservative Thought & Theory
Supplement to “The American Creative Surge”, July 2011 Version
Link - http://www.jaygaskill.com/ACS2011.htm
A Free Nation among the Nations
Renaissance Conservatism holds that the overriding concern of all free nations, prominent among them the United States of America – the leading model, should be the mutual support, promotion and protection of creative civilization, in its manifold forms. Such an ambitious project requires more of us in the current international environment than passive attention. After all, we are foremost among those rare free, stable, creative countries, all of which find themselves hampered, assailed or attacked by authoritarian bureaucracies, kleptocracies and various, quasi or predominantly socialist economic states. Much of the world – not excluding many free countries – hovers on the cusp of economic and political collapse. With all our flaws, America is freedom’s best, real-world hope.
The focus on life-affirming creativity (in the broadband sense that folds in exploration, artistic and technological innovation, and incorporates the necessary conditions of stable freedom) is the 21st century’s answer to the 20th century’s failed authoritarian socialist model. Creativity in the expanded sense just described is as essential to the survival of civilization as the capacity for fruitful adaptation is to any biological system. Productive nodes of creativity tend to surface in protected zones of comparative freedom and security. Inovative creative accomplishments flourish among small cells of highly creative individuals. Authoritarian bureaucracies attempt to capture and control these nodes, inevitably smothering them and destroying their value.
Creativity is a bottom-up phenomenon. Authoritarian bureaucracies are its systemic enemy. Nation states historically have provided protected cells in which creativity has been allowed to flourish (examples abound from Renaissance Florence to Silicon Valley). Recognizing their value, modern authoritarian regimes often try to appropriate, bleed or control all of the creative communities within their reach. The suppression of creativity inevitably results. It is instructive that whenever a truly authoritarian regime takes power anywhere in the world, its creative communities seek to relocate themselves by moving to other, freer states.
In the current international environment and for the foreseeable future, efforts to enforce a sort of general homogeneity among the nations, withering away the protective benefits of national boundaries, all in the service of dangerously vague notions of cooperation, are deeply counterproductive. The abolition of the nation state will not serve the larger goal of promoting the life-enhancing human creative enterprise
My use of the term cell in the context of nation states and their creative communities was intended. In any multicellular organism, the integrity of the cell walls is essential to the survival of the organism. The capacity of individual nations to enjoy differential success or failure is essential to human survival. To be sure, we need nation states to cooperate peacefully, when possible, but we really need states and their creative communities to protect themselves separately. Consider that in the utopian world order wherein all national boundaries will be absent, all human communities will become equally vulnerable to economic, political, cultural and biological pathogens.
It follows that the sovereign nation state remains the fundamental player in all international relations, starting with the USA. But as a sovereign free country, the United States must deal with all the players. But we need acknowledge as fully legitimate only those freedom-respecting states that follow the pattern of consensual government, under law, that protects the core set of liberties essential for a creative civilization. Our participation in robust treaty arrangements between and among such free states is appropriate when that is in our national interest and otherwise prudent. But it necessarily follows that no essential part of US sovereignty is ever to be surrendered to any presently constituted international agency or institution. US membership in the United Nations (a primitive, Third World dominated construct), is necessarily provisional, reserving not only our plenary right to withdraw at a moment’s notice, but a bright line demarcation of US sovereignty such that no incursion by the UN, its agencies (including the International Criminal Court) in derogation of US sovereignty or the rights thereby guaranteed to its citizens will be accepted as even nominally legitimate, and no such incursion can be ever be tolerated on a practical level.
So…history has made us a beacon of freedom in an imperfect and unstable world. The world will not go away. The world will not leave us alone. And our foreign policy cannot be conducted without teeth. This was true at the time of our nation’s founding; it was true when we were attacked at the onset of World War II; it was true during the Cold War; it was true when we were attacked on 9-11-01. It is true now. We are not the world’s police force, but without the military capacity to occasionally stand up as the biggest cop on the block when our interests require it, we will become the world’s biggest failed experiment in sustained freedom.
The most serious mistake we can ever make would be to assume that our nukes make us safe. Our second most serious mistake would be to assume that we can do without nukes as long a single such weapon exists in the world within reach of an enemy of freedom. The overarching goal of our foreign and national security policy is not to achieve a peaceful world – though we welcome the intervals of real peace as providence allows. Nor is it a world in which everyone lives together in the drear harmony of the defeated, dispirited and uniformly oppressed. No, the goal of our policy is to bring about a world that is safe for the exercise of life-affirming creative freedom; and pending the arrival of that day, to provide and expand the safe havens of freedom wherever and whenever we can, starting with in own backyard.
The ABC’s of Military Intervention
[A] Bulls Eye Analysis
Every military intervention, short of a self-defense emergency and the category of clandestine, short-term special operations, gets a careful convergence analysis: Three sets of policy norms must agree before wars are undertaken.
The large circle: This circle hold only those military undertakings that protect and further US national interests in concrete, real-world terms, i.e., access to resources, protection of vital allies (vital in the same real-world sense) and threat abatement to the US proper and our core allies.
The included circle: Our military undertakings must be consistent with the Moral Law (see the author’s article, Thugology 101 at – http://www.jaygaskill.com/THUGOLOGY101.htm), to wit – (1) that set of clear moral restraints, including no enslavement, no theft, no unnecessary damage to innocent civilians and no genocide; and (2) the set of moral imperatives appropriate to any robust creative civilization, especially the duty to oppose evil (especially as it threatens creative life-affirming freedoms in the world), to promote and protect all safe nodes of creative civilization whenever and whenever otherwise consistent with this analytic model.
The Bulls Eye: US wars must be prudent and practical as opposed to those disastrous grandiose gestures of history (thinking of Woodrow Wilson’s grossly oversold, “War to end all wars”). All such undertakings present unintended consequences, and the attendant risks need to be minimized. So the final included circle contains a set of hard-nosed constraints, including the commonsense prudential concerns, among them undertaking the necessary pre-intervention mobilization, a wise management of popular expectations, carefully avoiding ineffectual gestures, and above all a realistic capability assessment – guarding against the misallocation of limited resources and minimizing the risk of self-defeating blowback. Note that urgent self-defense of the homeland is an exigent variant in which these considerations are condensed much as EMT’s condense fine medical judgments in the field.
Only when all three circles clearly overlap should any serious military intervention be undertaken by the USA. As noted, the task of direct self-defense against any urgent significant existential threat to the USA is an exercise in triage, the first step of which is to muster the most robust and effective response possible in order to buy time for mobilization and the following steps.
[B] Plenary US Sovereignty
Ultimate strategic control of any military intervention must unambiguously rest with the USA as a truly independent sovereign power. Cooperation with allies, as in the WWII tradition, is a permissible model. But yielding any meaningful operational and strategic control of US armed forces to a foreign institution is the anti-model. The Korean War was a problematic hybrid, taken at a time when the UN was essentially a US puppet, but the necessary compromises presented constraints on US action and complications in military decision making that foreshadowed the disastrous mismanagement of the Vietnam War.
[C] The Credibility and Honor Imperative
Real world wars always present changed circumstances that sometimes can lead to the premature end of any military intervention. Three principles must govern any such withdrawal:
1. Retain the credibility of United States armed force, avoiding the appearance (or reality) that our military can be driven from the field by intimidated politicians, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Recall the maxim that winning an unwise war is still preferred to losing one. And note how these concerns affect the prudential layer of analysis undertaken before initiating military involvement. And also note that the delayed “end game” of an unduly protracted military conflict may require levels of force that were rejected at the outset as morally or practically unavailable. President Truman’s necessary use of nuclear weapons in WWII is instructive here.
2. Retain ally credibility, i.e. – never forsake those who risked their lives in our common cause.
3. Preserve military honor, as in the US Marine ethos – until they are home, no warrior is left behind and as in the suffer no final defeat spirit of Douglas (I will be back) MacArthur, and Winston (blood, sweat & tears) Churchill, whose weaponized rhetoric steeled an entire generation to endure the long course to – victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.
Jay B Gaskill is a California Attorney. His website, The Policy Think Site (www.jaygaskill.com), links to his profile, articles, books and blogs.
August 24th, 2011
OBAMA vs. CANDIDATE X
Go to –
http://jaygaskill.com/ObamavX.htm
July 7th, 2011
The Wicked Witch is dead.
Osama bin Laden
March 10, 1957- May 2, 2011
As posted on the Policy Think site in htm format: http://jaygaskill.com/OsamaSwims.htm
Welcome to
411 Renaissance
And as Published On
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Copyright © 2011 by Jay B. Gaskill
LINK TO THIS ARTICLE OR FORWARD IT TO OTHER READERS, AS YOU WISH.
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“Ding Dong! The Witch is dead. Which old Witch? (Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden) The Wicked Witch! Ding Dong! The Wicked Witch is dead.”[1]
The Wicked Witch is dead. But unlike Dorothy, we can’t click our heels, and go home to Kansas.
The homeland has changed.
The infamous mass murderer’s denouement was accomplished by a team of US Seals brilliantly deployed by the US Special Operations Command under the very noses of the Pakistani officials who were “oblivious” to this mass murderer’s presence on their soil.
President Obama’s televised statement last night announcing the termination of the alpha terror leader of the day was pitch-perfect.
Having worked the problem since last fall when the Intel first emerged, rapidly maturing to an “actionable” quality, our new president eventually gave the green light, and America got lucky.
Osama bin Laden’s death is symbolically significant in the war on terror (more accurately the western resistance to jihad). If it is to be more than that, this president’s run of good luck will need to continue.
A cautionary note to democratic politicians: The first Iraqi War, a brilliant diplomatic and military accomplishment by President G H Bush, left the first President Bush so high in the polls in 1991, that he seemed unbeatable.
But unemployment was “high” at 7.5%l and Bush 41 became a one term president.
Into the Briny Deep
Osama’s cold body was dumped into the cold sea, reportedly submerged with all appropriate dignity…and gravity.
Why there, you ask? [I would have preferred a HALO drop over his birthplace, but that’s just my nasty side talking.]
Keep reading.
Osama’s Life Accomplishments
Founded al-Qaeda on August 11, 1988 to carry out a terrorist jihad against the decadent, infidel Western democracies.
While in hiding, directed scores of attacks on the USA and its interests, four of which were notably “successful”:
- 1993 World Trade Center Bombing
- 1998 Bombing of US embassies in Africa
- 2000 USS Cole bombing
- 2001 September 11 attacks – World trade Center, Pentagon and the aborted attempt to destroy the White House (or Congress).
But it seems that under Osama’s inspiring leadership al Qaeda has repeatedly exploited and murdered children. The victims of the 911 attacks averaged 40 years old, but the body count included toddlers from 2 though kids 11 years old. A recent Freedom of Information act Disclosure to Judicial Watch revealed a deliberate campaign by al-Qaeda to recruit juveniles and launch terrorist attacks against children. This information was pried out of the Obama administration’s bureaucracy, when the FOI request by Judicial Watch yielded two Joint Task Force Intelligence Information Reports compiling debriefs of detainees at Guantanamo.
What would Jesus Recommend?
The most widely known Jewish sage of all time, a certain first century rabbi (Jesus of Nazareth) counseled that we love little children; and he warned that anyone who would break the trust of “the little ones” would better have a great millstone fastened around his neck and drowned in the depths of the sea.” [Compare Matthew 18:6, Luke 17: 1-2, Mark 10:13-16.]
The practice of dumping a body at sea is allowed by Islam in extremis, but not preferred. Any earthly interment of this evil monster would have been a jihad pilgrim magnet, so the disposal at sea option may have been motivated by practical considerations alone.
But I prefer to think of it as the uniquely Christian option. If a millstone was not available, I’m sure the US Navy found an adequate substitute.
JBG
The author is a well known California attorney who served as the Alameda County Public Defender before he left his “life of crime” to write pieces think this one. His “Lost Souls Coffee Shop” is available as a downloadable e-book from Amazon or Barnes and Noble — http://jaygaskill.com/AboutTheLostSoulsCoffeeShop.pdf .
[1] Minus the Osama insert, the quoted lyrics are from the 1937 film,
The Wizard of Oz, song composed by
Harold Arlen, lyrics by
E.Y. Harburg.
May 2nd, 2011
Introduction to
Recovery 101
An Exercise in Realistic Adaptation
By
Jay B Gaskill
Attorney at Law
Welcome to
The DOT 2 DOT Blog
As Published On
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Copyright © 2011 by Jay B. Gaskill
LINK TO THIS ARTICLE OR FORWARD IT TO OTHER READERS, AS YOU WISH.
Also feel free to PRINT IT FOR YOUR PERSONAL USE….
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This article is posted on The Policy Think site at http://jaygaskill.com/Recovery101.htm
Disclosure One:
I am a fan of David Brooks, not because he is always right, but because he almost always makes sense in the way that smart, reasonable minds make sense when they are being intellectually honest.
David Brooks is an ecumenical centrist who – like many intellectuals of a certain age – are highly susceptible to the attentions of other intelligent people, provided they are charming and sincere.
Therein hides the trap: I believe Mr. Brooks has been overly charmed by our charming, but sophisticatedly disingenuous president
In today’s New York Times, (Ultimate Spoiler Alert), he praises both House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan and President Barak Obama, and laments that these two charming, intelligent people cannot locate the common ground that would yield the Grand Compromise needed to save the republic.
Disclosure Two: I am a disenchanted democrat of the Scoop Jackson bent, a realistic optimist (see Optimism 101[1]) who believes in American exceptionalism[2], entrepreneurial capitalism and a social compact that mandates honoring our contractual obligations, especially to our own citizens, among other things.
And I am a fiscal hawk for two primary reasons:
(a) Debts must be eventually paid or they will crush the debtor, gravely damage the debtor’s credibility, usually both.
(b) Evading debts by devaluing the currency with which debts are paid, especially using the mechanism of significant, protracted inflation, is a violation of the social compact (see above) bordering on theft.
Keep this disclosure in mind when reading Mr. Brooks’ piece.
Here is that link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/opinion/15brooks.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
David Brooks proposes that Congressman Ryan, whom he admires greatly, believes in five things that President Obama, whom he admires greatly, does not, to wit:
(1) Demographic trends make the current welfare state model unsustainable, therefore fundamental reform is necessary.
(2) Seniors and the middle class cannot be exempted from the needed cuts.
(3) Health care costs cannot be curtailed without market based reforms.
(4) Tax increases are off the table because of the damage they do to recovery.
(5) Government can’t effectively stimulate economic growth with targeted investments.
David Brooks agrees with Obama only on tax increases and the efficacy of targeted investments, but he agrees with Ryan on emtitlement reform, the realistic assessment that benefited groups cannot be exempted from cuts, and that consumer-driven market-based reforms are necessary to hold down health care costs.
Referring to Mr. Obama’s Washington University Speech[3], he gives the president credit where I believe it has not yet been earned.
“These are exactly the sort of vague but well-intentioned policies that have sold well in election after election. The president is not being cynical about this.”
With one critically important qualification, I do agree with David Brooks’ assessment of the stakes:
“After the next election, though, interest costs on the national debt are likely to rise ruinously, global markets might lose confidence in America’s debt, with catastrophic consequences.”
Here is my qualification: If the next election fails to produce a sharp about face in the general direction of Congressman Ryan’s position (a direction that –IMHO- a hard-nosed realist liberal like Harry Truman would take), then there will be catastrophic consequences.
We are squarely in the Fiscal Trap situation I’ve been writing about in this and other Policy Think Site spaces for the last three years.
Yes, there is a realistic way out, but first:
▼
▼
▼
▼
Recovery 101
Recovering from the Conventional Wisdom
The first element of an economic rebound is the recovery from the conventional wisdom that got us into this mess.
Here are the key ten lessons on which any actual recovery (instead of one last bubble) must be constructed.
- There is no viable US economy without the productive sector.
- With the exception of a few public utilities, mostly operating at the state and local level, the US productive sector is private, not public; in the real sense, the productive sector consists of that part of our in-country economy that produces energy, food, goods and services that other productive economies would preferentially purchase from us.
- The notion that federal spending always stimulates economic growth is obsolete; it applied to a time when the USA had a far more robust productive sector; but our real productive sector is now pathetically hollowed out.
- The manipulation of asset prices in a closed economic system, whether in speculative financial instruments, in the stock market or in private transactions with a criminal Ponzi schemer like the infamous B. Madoff, can create bubbles, but almost never directly stimulate real production.
- Federal spending that has the net effect of transferring wealth from the productive to the non productive (however noble and humanitarian its objectives) operates as a net drag on the productive sector.
- Political management (an oxymoron) and political regulation operate to generate a growing load on the operation of commerce; over time, the political load on commerce cripples the productive sector.
- We are in a very dangerous slump; the US economy teeters on the edge of a protracted economic malaise that might actually mutate into a full-on depression.
- The US government is flat out of real money to throw at the problem (borrowing almost half of it ongoing expenditures, including the money to service its increasing debt); worse, it is at risk of postponing the necessary fiscal correction so long that its day-to-day essential operations would be placed at risk.
- There are trillions of dollars parked in private hands (some here, some offshore) waiting for opportunities to safely invest in new productive, commercial enterprises.
- Jobs tend to follow, not lead new productive enterprises; productive enterprises seek business-friendly environments, minimal political interference and the opportunity to retain and enjoy earnings and profits.
↓
↓
↓
THE WAY OUT
A Thought Experiment for Obama Liberals
I invite you to entertain the possibility that these ten observations collectively capture the main truth of our situation. If that is so, it should be apparent that the creative heavy lifting needed to extricate this still great nation from the morass necessarily includes a multi-level, multi-focal, practical and proactive effort to → ▼
…lift the political load on commerce.
I do agree with David Brooks that targeted investments can be effective, but only when they are not paid for by further borrowing and are done in the context of a truly credible full-on attack on the fiscal problem. This would by no means represent the utterly irresponsible squandering of precious resources on shovel ready public works attempted by the last congress. Instead it would represent something more fine-tuned, non-bureaucratic and intelligent, like the DARPA-seeded efforts to start a private sector space launch capability.
As a polity, we need to inhale and incorporate into our national DNA the primary lesson of entrepreneurial creativity: Empowered bureaucrats are the blood enemies of the creative enterprise.
And I also agree with David Brooks that tax changes that increase revenue can help mitigate the transition to fiscal soundness (a position that is actually shared by Congressman Ryan) provided that they are carefully and responsibly crafted so that:
(a) The tax burden is more widely shared.
(b) The net increase in the burden does not negatively impact production.
(c) The tax changes do not differentially punish or burden success.
Mr. Obama does not support (a) or (c) and betrays no sign of understanding what (b) entails.
The bottom line: Over several decades, many thousands of petty and not so petty approval processes, licenses, regulations, “public input” mechanisms, bureaus and commissions and boards staffed with unelected ideologues, tariffs and other politically motivated obstacles to commerce have accrued like barnacles on an otherwise sleek sailing vessel. The result replicates a third world crazy quilt of irrational regulations and interferences that have driven foreign corporations to outright bribery just to get something done. Buried in this regulatory nightmare are some reasonable rules necessary to assure transactional transparency and to safeguard protect public health and safety. This subset is miniscule compared to the far greater political load on commerce.
This is actually good news because it represent something real that we can do to help restart the productive economic engine without spending more borrowed public money.
Unpeeling the political load on commerce in a timely manner is the key to our escape from the fiscal trap. The most plausible mechanism, as I have argued in other articles[4], is to achieve comprehensive regulatory relief by empowering regional deregulatory commissions, the actions of which are subject to congressional review, the authority of these commissions having been given a statutory sunset. These commissions would harness the very “commerce clause” authority that allowed the regulations to accrue in the first place to selectively and intelligently peel them back, in order to free up economic growth. And, yes, the devil is in the details – business knowledgeable and growth friendly commissioners who are sensitive to core health and safety issues will be needed.
Thereafter, all new regulations would require an economic impact report that, in the style of the environmental impact reports, would address the business, commercial and employment impacts of any new regulations, and would require a congressional green light before they could become effective.
There you have it. The task ahead requires courage and honest by both liberals and conservatives. The stakes could not be higher.
Here is David Brooks’ spoiler:
“What’s going to happen is this: We’re going to raise the debt ceiling in a way that fudges the issues. Then we’re going to have an election featuring these rival viewpoints, and Obama will win easily.”
I disagree. We Americans are writing this story and the narrative is under our control. Public opinion polls tell us that a majority of Americans actually understand the gravity and scope of the fiscal crisis. The most of us still believe in American exceptionalism. A majority of voters are out of synch with Obama 1.0, the arch liberal who pushed through a hugely costly health care reform scheme that rank and file Americans strongly opposed.
The remaining questions are these three:
- Will the country be in a plausible economic recovery in late 2012?
- Is there really an Obama 2.0?
- Will the GOP nominate an electable candidate?
I don’t pretend to have the answers, so there is no Gaskill spoiler here. But I have the audacity to hope that the answer to the third question is, yes. And that the answer to a fourth question, “Will the next election produce a sharp about face in the general direction of Congressman Ryan’s position?” is also Yes.
Stay tuned.
JBG
[1] http://jaygaskill.com/Optimism101.pdf
[2] http://jaygaskill.com/CreativityAndSurvival.htm
[3] http://jaygaskill.com/BackToTheFutureWithBarak.htm
[4] http://jaygaskill.com/Breakout1.0.htm and http://jaygaskill.com/Breakout2.0.htm and http://jaygaskill.com/BREAKOUT3.0.htm
April 15th, 2011
WARNING!
FORCING MOMENT AHEAD
As the stall point gets closer and closer, any minor change in airflow or the pilot’s ascent angle can be the “forcing point” that results in a stall…or a prudent leveling off for the long haul. Of course, the ultimate stability of any aircraft is reached on the ground – ideally in one piece. Economies, like airplanes, defy gravity only by a safe landing, not by flying forever.
LINK-
http://jaygaskill.com/WarningForcingMomentsAhead.htm
March 23rd, 2011
Read this on line as a HTM file at http://jaygaskill.com/RenaissanceReformation.htm
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THE RENAISSANCE 411 BLOG – Ground Zero for the Renaissance
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THE COMING LIBERAL-CONSERVATIVE RENAISSANCE
YES, THERE IS A PATH….
Politics, Polity and Progress Reexamined
Liberalism and conservatism are such ancient parts of us that we have lost a sense of what they really represent in the human condition. They are so embedded in our minds that we forget who they are: They are the enduring and valuable voices within our own personalities.
We all came equipped with an inner conservative; this is our inner advocate for conservation – of our most cherished values, relationships, the elements of stability without which life descends into chaos.
And we all were each issued an inner liberal; this is our interior advocate for liberation – from all restraints, our parents, traditions, from all of those annoying boundaries. In childhood, the inner liberal voice is often dangerous, leading little Alice to touch the hot stove and adult Steve to touch little Alice.
Life’s follies consist of the periods when we silence one of our inner voices, lose the dialogue and with it, our balance. Whatever your personal situation-of-the moment, a simple glance at the world outside is a picture of a culture that has lost its balance.
We all came equipped with an inner philosopher, although we rarely allow that sage to wake up and look around. In the deep background, we all form a world view that emerges from our life choices, a working philosophy of life, more often than not, an unexamined one. So I am asking you to wake your inner philosopher for a moment with a question. What do liberalism and conservatism really represent at their most general and universal?
Liberalism is our innate tendency to challenge boundaries, social, political and economic, while conservatism is our equally innate tendency to defend the very same boundaries.
History is the perspective supplied by an understanding of how things were before we were born.
For example, the Republican President, Abe Lincoln was a conservative who abhorred the violation of human dignity inherent in the long standing, traditional institution called slavery (well tolerated in the time of Jesus). But Lincoln also valued the American union as a bastion of ordered liberty and was deeply reluctant to ignite a brutal war that could easily result in its dissolution, not to mention the deaths of millions. Lincoln internalized a dialogue between the liberal voice, the conservative voice and, in his case, the divine voice.
The Democratic President Harry Truman was a liberal who was thrust into national leadership in the midst of a war that threatened the foundations of Western civilization. He integrated backs and whites in the military, supported the foundation of Israel as a refuge state against the opposition of some Republican isolationists and anti-Semites from his own party. Truman pushed hard for social welfare programs. He helped end World War II by preempting an invasion of Japan that would have killed millions Japanese and Americans, by authorizing atomic bomb attacks on two Japanese cites. As a liberal he opposed communism because he saw it for what it was – a profound threat to liberal values.
In the present day, Truman is considered a conservative and Lincoln a liberal.
Now let’s take a snapshot of the attitudes that prevailed in academia as recently as 2000. Conservatives were still backed into a corner as the last-ditch defenders of privilege and intolerance, relegated to the backwater supporters of royalty and its modern equivalent, the uber-wealthy. And liberals still occupied their unchallenged position as the vanguard of progressive social evolution, seen as leading a reluctant humanity to the ultimate equalization of the stations of all people – at least in the social and economic realms (but not necessarily in the political elites, because, after all, the masses sometimes have to be led to enlightenment).
Enter Dr. Jonathan Haidt, professor of social psychology at the University of Virginia. At the annual conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, he asked for a show of hands.
[The article about this ran today in the New York Times Science section, cited below.]
“Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.
“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal.”
Then, “Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a ‘tribal-moral community’ united by ‘sacred values’ that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.
“’If a group circles around sacred values, they will evolve into a tribal-moral community,’ he said. ‘They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value.’ It’s easy for social scientists to observe this process in other communities, like the fundamentalist Christians who embrace ‘intelligent design’ while rejecting Darwinism. But academics can be selective, too, as [Democratic Senator] Daniel Patrick Moynihan found in 1965 when he warned about the rise of unmarried parenthood and welfare dependency among blacks — violating the taboo against criticizing victims of racism.
“’Moynihan was shunned by many of his colleagues at Harvard as racist,’ Dr. Haidt said. ‘Open-minded inquiry into the problems of the black family was shut down for decades, precisely the decades in which it was most urgently needed. Only in the last few years have liberal sociologists begun to acknowledge that Moynihan was right all along.”’
“Can social scientists open up to outsiders’ ideas? Dr. Haidt was optimistic enough to title his speech ‘The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology,’ urging his colleagues to focus on shared science rather than shared moral values. To overcome taboos, he advised them to subscribe to National Review and to read Thomas Sowell’s ‘A Conflict of Visions.’”
LINK: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/science/08tier.html?_r=1&ref=science
Dr. Haist’s proposal is a good start, but we should to heed a caution here. Hitler’s architect and Reich minister was Albert Speer. He was, by all accounts a cultivated man, not a thug…at least until he fell under Hitler’s spell. As a war criminal writing from Spandau prison, Speer described how the Nazi regime exploited the amoral enthusiasms of the technicians and scientists. “Basically, I exploited the phenomenon of the technician’s often blind devotion to his task. Because of what seems to be the moral neutrality of technology, these people were without scruples about their activities.” (Albert Speer. (Inside The Third Reich, Simon & Schuster 1970).
The Nazis demonstrated that even physicians could be persuaded to devise ways to more effectively kill people, especially when they were freed of the moral constraints that got in the way of useful experiments that required live subjects. Speer might have added that the scientists and technicians who proved most useful to the Reich were blind to the reality of evil.
So the caution is a simple one. Science, as such, does not contain moral values. When scientists are divorced from morality – or rendered morally incompetent – science itself can be appropriated for evil purposes. Dr. Haidt might have pressed a related point; it would have been a harder sell, perhaps, but more apt: Neither a closed bubble of liberals nor one of conservatives holds all of the moral wisdom necessary to resolve the most difficult and important moral challenges we face.
Is there a larger moral scheme? Is there an overarching perspective that tempers and enlarges both liberalism and conservatism? Yes. I’ve introduced that topic in an article, Creativity and Survival, and I am developing its political and policy implications in a forthcoming study to be released in March. The Creativity and Survival article can be downloaded as a PDF file at this LINK: http://jaygaskill.com/CreativityAndSurvival.pdf
It is also the immediately preceding post on this Blog.
Here’s an executive summary of the core idea:
Long term human survival will depend on our ability to nurture and protect major centers of constructive creative activity everywhere feasible. This will require the conservation of the life-affirming moral order, because creative innovation, when it is untethered from all morality, can and will be misappropriated by the next generation of tyrants. It will also require the conservation of the institutions that protect and foster general conditions of freedom. All creative enterprises require this, whether they are artistic or technological. Creativity is an equal-opportunity disrupter of things as they are. It produces inequalities. The partisans of left and right each have a blind spot where creative activities are concerned: The paleo-left, in it’s infatuation with artistic creativity, tends to marginalize or ignore the technological innovation side while the paleo-right is almost a mirror image. But life-affirming creativity resists compartmentalization, and the liberties that sustain it are indivisible. As it happens, the American experiment was and is the single most important exemplar and model of a creative civilization that has emerged to date.
Stay Tuned.
JBG
To read Creativity and Survival on-line, use the HTM link: http://jaygaskill.com/CreativityAndSurvival.htm
February 8th, 2011
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