I find myself largely in agreement with Freddie’s list of first principles, in spite of our various political and economic disagreements. This is interesting to me, because Freddie is very much an economic leftist, and I am very much a free-marketeer.
But we both believe in a robust social safety net; we both believe that civil liberties are the cornerstone of – not just democracy – but of a flourishing human society; we both believe that a broadly non-interventionist foreign policy is the best policy for America and the world; we both believe in some form of Keynesian countercyclical economic policy; we both believe in worker’s rights, though I find myself more and more of the opinion that workers need to organize and stand up for their own rights without the express backing of the state, which has historically only hampered and hobbled unions. We both believe in progressive taxation, though we may disagree on the particulars.
Freddie’s last point is not so much a first principle as it is a jab at the president:
I finally believe, on a purely tactical level, that rewarding bad behavior inevitably reinforces that behavior and ensures that it will continue. I don’t open the door when my dog whines to come in; I wouldn’t give a child throwing a tantrum the toy he is asking for. Capitulation to terrible behavior sends the unmistakable message that terrible behavior is rewarded and should be repeated.
This last one is hard. It could be applied to A) big banks who did not deserve to be bailed out or B) many state governments who badly mismanaged their money or C) the Republican Party who did not deserve to be elected back into office after the eight years of disaster under George W Bush or D) countless pundits who helped steer us into the dark waters we’re in today. The list goes on and on.
What’s interesting to me is that I largely agree with just about everything Freddie says in this post, though I know we have many disagreements as well. Which puts me to the left of Barack Obama. At the same time, I’m a big advocate of deregulation and a hands-off approach to the economy. Deregulate healthcare, let markets work, get government out of the economy. This, as I noted yesterday, can make me sound like a rightwinger in the current American context.
I think are political labels are terrible at identifying not only what we believe, but what sets of beliefs are possible in the first place. Barack Obama on war, on civil liberties, on the war on drugs, on austerity policies, on all of these is way to the right of me. But I’m probably much more rabidly free-market than Obama is. I am much more of a libertarian than Obama is. I’d say Freddie is more of a libertarian than Obama.
But the label I hate more than anything is ‘centrist’. This is the laziest of all possible terms. Am I a centrist because I believe in free markets and the welfare state? Does that put me at the center of two extremes? Which extremes are those, and how do they define the ‘center’? The worst policies are almost inevitably the centrist ones, brokered in the halls of power between the old vanguard of the status quo.
I don’t want centrism. I want radically more free markets including an end to all US trade barriers and tariffs, an end to all corporate welfare, a drastic drawdown of the defense budget and of our presence overseas, the complete decriminalization of all drugs, an end to the PATRIOT Act and all domestic surveillance programs (see, up to this point I sound like Ron Paul…) universal healthcare, a carbon tax to help combat global warming, more aggressive stimulus spending, the breaking up of big banks, etc. etc. etc.
I know plenty of people with similar views and I wouldn’t call any of them centrists. Centrists want to preserve the status quo. They want small wars and small changes to entitlements. They want to keep fighting the war on drugs, and more and more laws to stay tough on crime. They want to keep sending out favors to their well-guarded districts.
If there’s one thing I’m grateful to the Tea Party for, it’s the fact that they’ve upset the centrists, and put the fear of God into these powerful men and women who have dominated government for so long. We need more radicals, even if we disagree with them. How else can we keep government honest?
I really liked Freddie’s post also. I also had a problem with his last point since it implies the Prez is more like a dad who can dole out punishment or rewards for good or bad behavior. He has to deal with his political opponents and the behavior they offer not the people he wishes he could deal with.
I’ve known plenty of conservatives who would agree with some of Freddie’s principles as long as the label “liberal” or “left wing” wasn’t to closely associated with them.
We keep gov honest by paying attention not be having various groups of wing nuts stamping their feet. Radical is fine, but you have to know what you are talking about and not be filled with self-righteous infatuation with getting your way about everything. Radicals make good news copy but don’t accomplish much unless they have a coherent plan they can actually implement. To many Obama followers naively thought just electing a good guy would fix everything so they are in a massive snit because compromises had to be made and some battles were lost. A quick burst of radical energy doesn’t keep an eye on gov since they energy ebbs quickly.
Here’s the thing, I’m a self-identified libertarian and I can sign up for most of Freddie’s first principles.
I’m good with 2, 3, 6, and 7.
I can go with 1 up to the point where he specifically mentions Medicare and Social Security, since I consider these policies fundamentally ill-conceived (their central function is to transfer money from the young to the old, not from the rich to the poor, and old people are on average richer than young people). Sure, critics of these programmes should stand ready to offer an alternative, but Medicare and Social Security aren’t fit for purpose and are going to collapse under their own weight without major reforms. That’s not an attractive feature in a welfare system.
My objections to 4 are Freidman’s objections. Which is not to say that the theory is necessarily wrong, but rather that it is really hard to do right, and can be worse than useless when done wrong. But automatic stabilisers (like unemployment benefits and taxes that rise and fall with incomes) and perhaps temporary tax holidays and increased transfer payments are not unreasonable tools to use. But I think the evidence on austerity is much less clear than Freddie thinks.
My problem with 5 is that make-work jobs programmes can become a serious drain on a government. That kind of jobs programme was one of the major factors that induced fiscal collapse in the New Zealand government in the 1980s so I can’t recommend that. And beyond that there’s little a government can do to affect the unemployment rate (outside of recessions, but that’s covered in point 4).
Incidentally, I agree with you about centrists. People like you (and I) aren’t centrists just because we don’t fit on the left-right scale well, It’s just that left-right (however its defined in a given time and place) is just a 1-dimensional subset of the multidimensional space that covers all possible ideological preferences.
I think we’re very close on this one, James. My quibbles are similar to yours on both #4 and on Medicare/Social Security which I agree are poorly designed. Specific programs have no place in first principle debates anyways, so I would just stick to social safety net. I prefer direct transfers for stimulus, either through payroll tax cuts or checks in the mail. Make-work programs are usually inefficient when direct transfers would do.
This is off the topic of thread but SS is not a huge problem. Some relatively minor fixes and its good for decades. Medicare is a problem because all our health care spending is a problem not because the program itself is unworkable. We can fix Medicare without fixing HC costs in general. The difference between a make work program and good infrastructure spending is often more about personal preference and taste then any objective criteria.
Yeah, I was just about to post this. Coupling Medicare and Social Security together as entitlements make the small issues with Social Security seems even worse than they really are. Social Security in the long-term, really isn’t a huge problem even if we did nothing.
Yes, benefits would be lower than promised, but the program wouldn’t be ‘bankrupt.’ But, Social Security is easily fixable. Remove the FICA cap and 98% of the problem is fixed. Of course, this is raising taxes, so it’s socialist and evil. 🙂
I’m fairly good with most of his principles, too, and agree that the current vague definitions of ‘left’ and ‘right’ don’t work very well (and completely agree with everyone on the fundamental bogosity of ‘centrism’).
On #1, others already pointed out the flaw with the claim that SS and Medicare are on the verge of collapse due to poor design, and I completely agree that it’s the burden of critics of the programs to offer a viable alternative. I continue to disagree with E.D. that massive deregulation and elimination of Medicare would result in a better health care system (the private sector portions of our current system are often the most screwed up and inefficient, and not due to over-regulation).
With #4, again the question becomes “what’s a better alternative?”
On #5, I didn’t read Freddie as advocating old-school make-work programs, just counter-cyclical hiring like what we saw with the better parts of the stimulus bill in juicing infrastructure spending at times of high unemployment.
Whoa…who said elimination of Medicare? When I talk about deregulation I’m talking about something *entirely* different than abolishing Medicare…
I was reacting to your suggestion that we “Deregulate healthcare, let markets work, get government out of the economy.”
This seemed to imply getting government out of the health insurance business. Apologies if I misunderstood.
No worries, but you absolutely do misunderstand. I say “let government pay the bills” for healthcare. But get them the hell out of regulating the healthcare market. Get rid of regressive drug patents, the cartels and monopolies that protect so many supply side players, etc.
Okay Leaguers, lets see you top this. After severe, painstaking work, I’ve dug the only known film footage of Hitler dancing with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Eva Braun. You want same-sex marriage, well here you go. You can’t deny it Chris–Wittgenstein and Hitler were lovers and at least on this date, May 3, 1945, they were husband and wife. A day or so later, Eva became the third husband/wife/child/German shepherd Nobel, here I come! You’re all invited to my soiree in Sweden. I’ve been told by a few committee members that I’m a cinch for at least four Nobels. And you all thought I was just an Austrian penniless vagrant selling my paintings of Christ.
First off, I have to say I have that shirt, but my wife won’t let me leave the house while wearing it.
I agree with Freddie’s principles (except maybe 7 seems to me to be less than a First Principle), though something seems missing that encapsulates the gap in my worldview and his.
It’s sad that we have a Democratic president that can’t lay claim to any one of these, all we can say is he’d probably be less bad than the guy over there about most of these.
See, I guess my opinion on Obama is a little more nuanced. I think he is probably more conservative than he let on throughout his Senate career and during his Presidential race. However, I also think he’s totally bought into the Washington Consensus on things like the deficit, debt, and such, but in his perfect world, he’d be far more liberal than he even was when the DNC nominally had 60 votes in the Senate.
But, that’s not a popular opinion on the Internet. Either he’s a super-secret progressive who’s playing 11-dimensional chess or a secret worshiper of Ronald Reagan who is in thrall to Goldman Sachs.
Where I diverge is on the whole “society” thing.
It seems to me to be so much more important that the individual be the atom, if you will, of discussions of morality rather than “society”. It seems to me to be trivially easy to start removing various rights (civil, human, whatever) in the name of The Greater Good (for example: look). Freedom of speech has been attempted to be wiped away for the good of society, Freedom of the press, rights to privacy, the rights protected by the 4th, 5th, and 8th Amendments… think about the arguments that are given for Prohibition. All of them had to do with society. Prohibition 2.0? Society. Any number of laws that remove rights from individuals and give them to the corporations that have captured the legislatures? “It’s for the good of society.”
When “society” is held as more important than “the individual”, then it becomes easier and easier and easier to violate the rights of the individual in the name of helping society.
The true irony is that when the individual is seen as, at least, as important as society, society benefits as a whole.
Heck, the idea of a social safety net isn’t incompatible with this viewpoint… but the social safety net that we actually have sure is. It doesn’t foster dignity and turns a helping hand into some offensive amalgam of nannyism and paternalism that actively arrests the development of those it pretends to help.
When it comes to civil liberties, the idea that, well, we have to protect “society” allows for any number of awful, awful things to be done to individuals. Look at Jose Padilla. Why was he put away? Because, we were told, he was planning on building a dirty bomb. What would that have done to us, as a society? So soon to 9/11? Surely we agree that, maybe, a long detention without charges being pressed is a small price to pay in order to keep our society safe, no? Hey, if you think “Homeland Security” is intrusive now, just imagine what the government would do if a dirty bomb went off!
And so on and so forth.
When the individual is made secondary, society will end up being poisoned by the various groups that will end up capturing various groups of minorities and squeezing them in the name of protecting society, protecting the culture, and so on.
Nobody is saying society is more important than the individual. That’s ya’ know, full bore Marxian socialism. But, we’re not saying the individual is more important than society eithe . Thus, civil liberties and a social safety net.
But on a side note, I always love conservatives telling my development was impeded because I got food in my belly and a roof over my head. I just love that. And you wonder why you’re not getting so much of a headway into some communities.
Thus, civil liberties and a social safety net.
From where I sit, we have SWAT teams kicking down the wrong doors of houses in the service of busting people for marijuana. We have children being patted down in airports. We have presidents claiming to have the right to call for assassinations of American Citizens without oversight.
Much like with the “security” we get at the airport, we don’t have civil liberties as much as a show of civil liberties.
But on a side note, I always love conservatives telling my development was impeded because I got food in my belly and a roof over my head.
Multi-generational poverty is, in fact, a problem in this country despite your admirable position where you no longer require help from others to put food in your belly or a roof over your head. The help that we are giving is not really doing much to address that particular problem.
I’m glad that you were able to get out, though. Good on you.
First, I have no doubt you’d be happier with civil liberties under a DeBoer/Ewiak/stillwater regime than either the current Republican or Democratic administrations. 🙂
In fact, Freddie said in his post that Obama had failed on pretty much all of his first principles, including the civil liberties one. So, that’s not a failing of those of us who believe in the society/individual balance, but a failing of others. Now, I realize that sounds like a No True Scotsman defense.
Second, multi-generational poverty is indeed a problem. That’s why I’m sad the Great Society was strangled in it’s crib by Vietnam, hit in legs by a baseball bat by Nixon, and threw down a well by Reagan. But, you and I obviously disagree on how to fix poverty.
I’m just saying, remember when you say that current anti-poverty measures don’t offer any dignity (and I’d even agree they don’t, but in a totally different way than you probably believe), that there’s likely a couple dozen people you pass by daily who were able to become a part of ‘society’ thanks to those measures.
It seems to me that the most important thing we can instill is, for lack of a better word, “virtue”. I’m not going to bother giving you a list of things my grandfather said (I’m sure that your grandfather (or analogue) said similar and that you can easily create a list that looks very much like mine). Culture is oh-so-very important and it is not well addressed by the social safety net (nor, may I add, can it be).
The best things you had had nothing to do with the help you were given by the net but with the help given you by the people who gave you speeches and books that contained speeches and then, when you wrote down your own speeches, they corrected and graded your grammar.
Right?
Here’s the thing. At the end of the day, you and I probably do want a different culture than currently exists. But, we want different cultures at the end of the day.
Because, I want a culture where accepting help from the government when you need it is virtuous and you aren’t treated like a common criminal when you apply for food stamps. Also, I’d like a culture where laying off 50,o00 for a 1/4 point jump in your stock price isn’t considered virtuous. I want a culture where we have a commons that isn’t under assault from corporate interests.
Second, yes, of course, the education (public I might add) I got was important. But, it was just as equally as important I didn’t go to school in the morning with an empty belly, had access to free lunch at school so I wasn’t hungry during my afternoon classes, and I wasn’t too worried that I’d wake up some morning with the heat turned off during the winter. Without that access to the safety net, I wouldn’t have been able to write those speeches or correct my grammar.
Which is why I always say the most important thing when it comes to public education is reducing the child poverty rate. But again, that’s involves a policy prescription. Which we probably disagree on.
“Food stamps” strike me as part of the problem.
“Here is help… but it can only be of the following kinds of food, and it has to be good for you, but not brand name good for you, oh, and people behind you in line have to know that you’re on food stamps too.”
I’m not going into the circular argument about what people should/shouldn’t be allowed to buy with food stamps, but I will simply say that the switch from actual food stamps to debit cards that look like regular debit carts from a few feet away is a positive change from the last few years.
To bring us back to first principles, I think that instilling a sense of self-ownership is one of the most important things that “society” ought to be cultivating in the individuals that compose it.
It seems to me that the vast majority of the arguments about what “society” ought to be doing take the individual as a *MEANS* rather than as an ends in him or herself.
The government is just as bad as the corporations when it comes to this. Worse, if you want to get into the expectations game.
Does anybody know when the new iphone os being provided?