The Affluent (and Downgraded, Debt-Laden) Society

Tim Kowal 16 Comments

The late preeminent liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith once complained in The Affluent Society that where Democrats once stood for an issue of great importance in emphasizing production, they lost that issue by misunderstanding why production was important.  For Galbraith, production was central to the modern American economy not to sustain impressive arrays of consumer goods but instead to provide economic security for its citizens.  Liberals failed to grasp the distinction, believing instead that “increased production remains the touchstone of political success even when it involves additions to an already opulent supply of goods.”  Half a century later, it might be argued that even if liberalism still insists it has no fixed principles, it now acts like it understands the distinction: Democratic alignment with anti-competitive and anti-democratic union agendas, labyrinthine regulations that stifle businesses and cramp innovation, and corporate income taxes among the highest in the developed world strongly suggest modern liberalism has de-prioritized production as the touchstone of progress.  Instead, today’s liberals speak a different language when they talk about the economy.  “Production,” though still widely traditionally understood as the economic activity that delivered man from scarcity to affluence, is for liberals today the economic activity that delivers man from the fear of unemployment into economic security.

The distinction is anything but hair-splitting.  Production in the first, traditional sense has been exceptionally good to Americans, improving our quality of life in ways previously thought unimaginable.  Compared to 1950, according to W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm, to earn the cost of a half-gallon of milk today we work only half as much; for the cost of a kilowatt of electricity, a third as much; an hour of air travel, a quarter; a refrigerator, a fifth; a three-pound chicken, a seventh; a home air conditioner, a tenth; and for the cost of a coast-to-coast phone call, just one-fiftieth the work it once required of us.  And yet it is sometimes suggested that industrialism has yielded little more since the 1950s than to underscore an increasingly garish display of affluence.  That suggestion is deeply counter-intuitive in light of the deep reduction of the instances of poverty also afforded by the low cost of production.  According to Wendell Cox of Demographia, from 1971 to 2001, the average income of the least affluent quintile of households rose 26 percent adjusted for inflation.  Not to mention the introduction of products such as home computers and microwave ovens, and innovations in medical science and technology that did not exist in the mid-twentieth century.

Still, those remain the two options on the menu: forsake or embrace productivity as the benchmark of a healthy economy. The establishment left’s unashamed support of poorly performing labor unions, burdensome and hyper-technical business regulations, and onerous permitting schemes—including making taxi cab operators pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for medallions, making florists and other business owners take detailed exams that have nothing to do with public safety, and shutting down children’s lemonade stands—leave little doubt as to modern liberalism’s tack.  Thus, if as Galbraith said “we are ruled by our ideas and by very little else,” it may be helpful to understand the ideas that have chilled our commitment to production and introduced us to debt-facilitated spending for the objective of “economic security.” 

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Air Force Ends 20-Year Nuclear Ethics Program

Tim Kowal 63 Comments

An interesting story broke a few days ago when truthout.org released an Air Force PowerPoint presentation used in an ethics training program given to its nuclear ballistics personnel.   The Air Force promptly withdrew the materials after truthout.org’s complaints of the citations to the Bible and other religious sources, as well as a quote from an ex-Nazi SS officer, Wernher Von Braun. 

Particularly after listening to the author Jason Leopold’s radio interview podcast, I was amused—as I always am at anti-religion crusaders—that he could be so irate at the use of religious sources in a discussion about ethics, as well as irate at the use of a quotation attributed to an ex-Nazi officer.  How could he condemn Nazism else by some objective moral standard?  If there are no fixed moral laws, neither Nazism nor nuclear holocaust has any moral quality.  They are simply matters of preference.  If that were the case, we might as well rig the launch sequence to a Facebook poll. 

Clearly, however, Mr. Leopold subscribes to an objective moral standard.  The world is more than mere matter in motion.  There are truths beyond mere observable reality.  But in the strident secularist’s world, such topics are off limits. 

The injustice of under-punishment

Tim Kowal 31 Comments

Democracy in America shares this story about Norway’s “plush and unusual punishment” of its most violent criminals—including flat screens, private restrooms, and a recording studio.  However, the author chokes back what he suggests is an irrational sense of moral offense at the over-indulgent treatment of criminals in order to offer tacit endorsement of this aspect of Norway’s “morally superior” criminal justice system:

If we are able to approach the matter rationally, which is hard, I think we will see that a society’s main imperative is to guarantee the safety of its members by taking the criminal out of commission and then by punishing wrongdoers to the extent necessary to deter similar future crimes. I think we can be sure that Mr Breivik will not be left in a position to kill again. So the main question, to my mind, is whether a comfortable (and possibly relatively short) detention is sufficient to deter similar crimes. Though I do think the severity of punishment has some effect on the frequency of crimes, I doubt the severity of Mr Breivik’s punishment will have anything at all to do with the future incidence of elaborately plotted massacres.

. . . .

[T]he point of a criminal justice system in a civilised society is not the mental peace of those collaterally wounded by crime.

This conclusion surely is not a settled point that can be asserted so confidently.  Indeed, it is undermined by the very fact of our deep resolution to ensure humane treatment of prisoners:  The way we treat prisoners is a reflection of our values.  Locking people up is about more than merely determent.  While its “main imperative” is indeed the guarantee of safety, that is a far cry from positing that the people’s sense of moral justice and “mental peace” is of no moment.  Indeed, a people’s moral precepts are the foundation of any system of law in the first place.  Under-punishment disserves those moral precepts just as over-punishment does.

Conservatism: Defender of the Modern Welfare State?

Tim Kowal 2 Comments

I am grateful for the incentive Jason’s rebuttal provides to study conservative thinker Michael Oakeshott.  However, I respectfully disagree with Jason’s conclusion that “esteem[ of] the present … on account of its familiarity” suffices to establish conservatism.  Thus, I stand on my assertion that there is something more to the idea of conservatism than unthinkingly defending the status quo. 

Oakeshott’s basic point about conservatism—that it is primarily concerned with “conserving” what is present and familiar—is similar to Russell Kirk’s, who in What Is Conservatism? stated:

Strictly speaking, conservatism is not a political system, and certainly not an ideology. . . . Instead, conservatism is a way of looking at the civil social order.  Although certain general principles held by most conservatives may be described, there exists wide variety in application of these ideas from age and age and country to country. 

However, Kirk acknowledges, as I believe Oakeshott does to a degree, that the conservative man has not failed to discern certain principles of governance and right conduct and social ordering from his humble study of custom and convention.  For Oakeshott, conservatism observes certain fundamentals of social and political order not because they are “familiar,” but because they are necessary preconditions of the sort of society that conservatives can bring themselves to admire and defend in the first place. 

“[W]hat makes a conservative disposition in politics intelligible … is the observation of our current manner of living combined with the belief (which from our point of view need be regarded as no more than an hypothesis) that governing is a specific and limited activity, namely the provision and custody of general rules of conduct, which are understood, not as plans for imposing substantive activities, but as instruments enabling people to pursue the activities of their own choice with the minimum frustration, and therefore something which it is appropriate to be conservative about.”

(Emphasis added.)

For his part, Kirk explains conservative principles by reference to a source that Oakeshott rejects: antiquity.  Oakeshott holds that man will forsake antiquity in favor of the familiar.  Kirk acknowledges, correctly I think, that antiquity engenders familiarity.  Drawing from Edmund Burke’s “wisdom of our ancestors,” Kirk emphasizes conservatism’s reliance on “‘prescription’—that is, of things established by immemorial usage.” 

There exist rights of which the chief sanction is their antiquity—including rights in property, often. . . . Conservatives argue that we are unlikely, we moderns, to make any brave new discoveries in morals or politics or taste.

A recent upheaval of long-recognized rights or principles of limited government, it would thus seem, does not automatically command the observance of the faithful conservative.  Specifically, defending the New Deal and its legacy is not “conservative” for at least two reasons.  First, as suggested above, it undermines familiar ideas long and closely held concerning economic rights and limited government.  Irrespective of the post-New Deal regime’s “substantive activities,” it is credibly regarded as having undermined the “instruments enabling people to pursue the activities of their own choice with the minimum frustration.”  Thus, even an Oakeshott conservative will not regard the modern enlarged federal government as “something which it is appropriate to be conservative about.” 

Second, the New Deal replaced the old ideas of limited government with enumerated powers with no coherent idea of its own.  Instead, it ushered in a regime of endless experimentation.  As Richard Hofstadter put it, “it would be fatal to rest content with [FDR’s] belief in personal benevolence, personal arrangements, the sufficiency of good intentions, and month-to-month improvisation, without trying to achieve a more inclusive and systematic conception of what is happening in the world.”  The New Deal legacy thus offers conservatives neither familiarity nor antiquity. 

[Cross-posted at the main page]

“Carmageddon,” Car-Culture, and Conservatism

Tim Kowal 1 Comment

The LA region is preparing for the weekend closure of the 405 freeway, one of the area’s main thoroughfares, for the planned demolition of the Mulholland Bridge to add carpool lanes to a 10-mile stretch connecting the west side to the San Fernando Valley.  LA officials have been working with “celebrities with large Twitter followings” to notify the public (no, really):

The LAPD said it is making contact with representatives for Lady Gaga (nearly 11.3 million followers), Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore (7 million and 3.7 million respectively) and Kim Kardashian (8 million followers). None of the celebrities have sent out warning tweets yet, but officials hope they will do so closer to the closure dates.

Area residents have dubbed the closure “carmageddon.”  Because the auto-centric Los Angeles region offers few viable alternatives to highway travel, locals are anticipating the disruption of services and the closure of several area business.  Many desperate Angelinos rushed to take advantage of JetBlue’s $4, 20-minute, 40-mile air shuttle between Burbank and Long Beach airports, just to get them through the weekend.  

Alternative transportation advocates have seized on the opportunity to underscore the vulnerability of auto dependency.  They have a point.  To the extent this is an ideological question, I am probably an outlier—a conservative who leans in favor of more robust public transportation solutions.  (Then again, I am often turned off when urbanism proponents couch their arguments in ideological terms.) 

While discussing “carmageddon” with a friend today, I wondered if she thought it strange that I did not reflexively defend our car-culture like most conservatives do.  Does the correlation of conservatism and car-culture suggest causation?  Perhaps, but I don’t think that is why the association exists.  Instead, there is an impression—mistaken, in my view—that people who advocate to maintain existing policies are “conservatives,” and people who advocate to change them are “liberals.”  Paul Krugman suggests this in The Conscience of a Liberal, urging that the left’s defense of the new status quo effected by the New Deal makes them the “conservatives” of this generation.  Erik Kain has suggested the same thing here at the League. 

This approach, however, renders political theory mere sport, turning “liberalism” and “conservatism” into stand-ins for “offense” and “defense.” There must be something more to those terms.  Defending our current use of automobiles, for example, as socially conservative would require more than simply arguing in favor of the status quo.  It would require more, even, than arguing that we depend upon it, or that change would be tremendously difficult, or that many of our other social and economic structures would be impacted.  A truly conservative defense of a social policy or institution primarily involves the argument that the social policy or institution comports with human nature, with right behavior, and with a proper ordering of society.  This is why, ultimately, the conservative defense of slavery made by the likes of John Calhoun was ultimately defective:  it simply did not comport with human nature or right behavior, and because of that—and despite the spirited and impassioned defense that slavery was actually good for the slaves because it taught them “their place”—it certainly was not a proper ordering of society. 

Accordingly, can it be said that maintaining a car culture of the magnitude seen in Los Angeles is properly considered a conservative position?  I would be very curious to hear that argument.

[Cross-posted at the main page]

“What’s the constitution among friends?”

Tim Kowal 1 Comment

Contemporary political cynicism is nothing new under the sun.  Here are some of the juicy bits from George Washington Plunkitt’s caustic and hilarious political rhetoric in The Curse of Civil Service Reform in 1903: 

This civil service law is the biggest fraud of the age. It is the curse of the nation. There can’t be no real patriotism while it lasts. How are you goin’ to interest our young men in their country if you have no offices to give them when they work for their party? . . .

This ain’t no exaggeration. I have good reason for sayin’ that most of the Anarchists in this city today are men who ran up against civil service examinations. Isn’t it enough to make a man sour on his country when he wants to serve it and won’t be allowed unless he answers a lot of fool questions about the number of cubic inches of water in the Atlantic and the quality of sand in the Sahara desert? There was once a bright young man in my district who tackled one of these examinations. The next I heard of him he had settled won in Herr Most’s saloon smokin’ and drinkin’ beer and talkin’ socialism all day. Before that time he had never drank anything but whisky. I knew what was comin’ when a young Irishman drops whisky and takes to beer and long pipes in a German saloon. That young man is today one of the wildest Anarchists in town. And just to think! He might be a patriot but for that cussed civil service.

. . . .

Let me tell you that patriotism has been dying out fast for the last twenty years. Before then when a party won, its workers got everything in sight. That was somethin’ to make a man patriotic. Now, when a party wins and its men come forward and ask for their rewards, the reply is, "Nothin’ doin’, unless you can answer a list of questions about Egyptian mummies and how many years it will take for a bird to wear out a mass of iron as big as the earth by steppin’ on it once in a century?"

Why we must define, not merely defend, our politics

Tim Kowal 24 Comments

Tim Sandefur writes:

The pro-slavery argument was very much what we would today call “communitarianism”—the argument was that the society of status was more human and spiritually rewarding than the allegedly cold, commodified, alienating society of industrial capitalism. . . . There’s a reason why the term “dismal science” (describing economics) was coined by Thomas Carlyle in a pamphlet arguing in favor of slavery. Economics was liberal, artificial, atomistic, alienating, individualistic, and therefore dismal, in Carlyle’s eyes—as opposed to the warmth of a static, hierarchical, communitarian society of mutual bonds.

. . . .

[A] slave society will relieve the poor slave of the grueling, alienating feeling of having to work and provide for himself; it will provide him with life, home, and health. After all, the classical liberal just stands for an empty, bourgeois freedom—an unreal freedom, since the poor man won’t have access to the things he needs. A slave society, by contrast, will give him positive rights to life, home, and health—the things he really wants—instead of freedom.

Amazing how these arguments persist to this day. On one hand, those who argue for liberty, with all its joys and hardships—and on the other, those who scoff at such filthy, mean rights as liberty and the opportunity to choose for oneself, and promise instead to give us life, home, and health, if only we will give up such freedom.

The whole post is interesting and worth reading, particularly the recitation of a Confederate poem.

It is worth observing, with some humility, just how closely the political principles that support and condemn slavery run together.  The social conservatism of John Calhoun, and to a lesser extent George Fitzhugh, was one of the central defenses of the pro-slavery cause.  And the social liberalism of today is often defined not by any special devotion to freedom but rather to a devotion to entitlement, and this at the expense of freedoms deemed less worthy or as acceptable casualties.  The political traditions of both the left and the right, then, share uncomfortable proximity to justifications for America’s most immoral institution. 

While it may be in poor taste to compare another’s political philosophy with the pro-slavery cause, it is never acceptable to be without a defense of one’s politics that identifies articulable, non-arbitrary limits between legitimate government action and totalitarianism.  It will not do to suggest simply that “there is something deep within liberalism [or conservatism, or whatever], from its earliest beginnings, that prevents it from degenerating into fascism.” 

[Here’s an example.  Teddy Roosevelt remarked that “the spread of the English-speaking peoples over the world’s waste space” was “the most striking feature of the world’s history,” and that only “a warped, perverse, and silly morality” would condemn the American conquest of the West.  This muscularity might be serve as ready support of a muscular foreign policy, for example, encouraged by modern conservatives.  Before doing so, however, one would have to contend with Roosevelt’s accompanying observation that “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth. The most vicious cowboy has more moral principle than the average Indian.” 

If one wishes to find support for a muscular foreign policy, it will be necessary to do more than quote Teddy Roosevelt.  It is not enough to roam through history looking for friends.  One must look also for underlying principles.]

The Conscience of a Liberal

Tim Kowal 78 Comments

Despite modern liberalism’s sweeping scope, no one seems to know quite what it is. Liberalism appeared somewhere in the sixteenth century—“St. George, in the guise of Rationality,” as Kenneth Minogue puts it—to slay the dragons of despotic kingship and religious intolerance. Centuries later, liberalism slew the dragons of slavery, poverty, and later “the inert scaliness of privilege, vested interest, or patrician insolence.” When an ideology is defined by fighting for causes, however, its success is followed necessarily by its own extinction. With exceedingly few dragons remaining, then, intellectual liberalism faces some level of discomfort.

In response, liberal columnist and economist Paul Krugman proposes in his book, The Conscience of a Liberal, that liberalism be defined by a commitment to preserving and extending the objectives of the New Deal. Specifically, Krugman’s liberalism is principally concerned with the task of reducing wealth inequality. Krugman, Paul (2009). The Conscience of a Liberal (p. 267). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition. More important than liberalism’s ends, however, are the means Krugman proposes to achieve them. Neither society nor economics fit the bill, according to Krugman.  No choice is left, then, but to employ coercive government action: “Middle-class societies don’t emerge automatically as an economy matures, they have to be created through political action. . . . It took FDR and the New Deal to bring [a relatively equal] society into being.” Id. at 18.

However, Krugman fails to establish that the substantial federal government intervention of the New Deal and its legacy was or is necessary to bring about a healthy and diverse middle class. At most, he argues the New Deal accelerated those changes—not that they were otherwise impossible. In fact, although Krugman acknowledges that the New Deal could not have been successful without World War II, he fails to discuss whether World War II’s profound stimulative effect on the economy could not have been successful without the New Deal.

More importantly, Krugman also fails to establish that the animal he proposes to slay is even a dragon at all. Despite Krugman’s emphatic denunciation of the top one percent of this country’s earners, he offers no analysis of the increase in wealth and improvement in living standards in absolute terms for the rest of Americans. Krugman thus fails to establish that current wealth distribution is either procedurally unfair or substantively problematic.

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Amazon Shuts Down Affiliates in Response to California’s Use Tax Law

Tim Kowal 12 Comments

As you probably know, sales tax is typically not assessed on internet sales crossing state lines.  Under the Supreme Court’s Commerce Clause doctrine, states are generally prohibited from requiring out-of-state retailers from collecting “use” taxes for sales to in-state residents.  However, an exception exists where such retailers have a sales force, plant, or office in the state.  While it is not entirely settled whether independent contractor “affiliates” such as those Amazon uses establish the requisite “nexus” permitting a state to mandate retailers to collect use taxes, California is giving it a go:

Gov. Jerry Brown has signed into law California’s tax on Internet sales through affiliate advertising which will immediately cut small-business website revenue 20% to 30%, experts say.

The bill, AB 28X, takes effect immediately. The state Board of Equalization says the tax will raise $200 million a year, but critics claim it will raise nothing because online retailers will end their affiliate programs rather than collect the tax.

Amazon is already shutting down its California affiliates. Amazon attempted to fight the state of New York on the constitutionality of a similar use tax a few years back, but lost in the trial court because of the existence of New York affiliates.  Governor Jerry Brown and Senator Hancock and Assemblyman Skinner obviously knew this was coming.  This is a power play.

Here’s an interesting comment from a small Amazon affiliate about the practical impossibility of collecting use taxes:

I am a tiny online retailer. In order to collect sales taxes for jurisdictions outside of my own, I would have to do the following:

1. Setup an account with each and every state, county, and municipal jurisdiction with a sales tax.

2. Report sales taxes monthly or quarterly with each and every jurisdiction even if my sales in that jurisdiction during the reporting period is $0.

3. Determine all of the jurisdictions that every shipping address I have is contained in.

4. Understand all of the tax rates and exemptions and exemptions to the exemptions.

5. Keep up with the changes in tax rates, exemptions, exemptions to the exemptions, and arbitrary boundaries that form jurisdictions for each and every jurisdiction in the country.

This is effectively impossible.

Similarly, as Patrick Byrne, Overstock.com’s CEO observes:

There are 7,200 taxing jurisdictions in the United States. In some jurisdictions, cotton candy is candy. In some, cotton candy is food, and food and candy have different tax rates. A company in Utah, for example, cannot sit here and know the right way to tax every possible product in Paducah, Kentucky. It is impossible.

Some legal analysis on this story is in the works.