Musings Of An Indie WriterThursday, March 30, 2006
The Great Implosion Part 3: A Curmudgeon’s Program For Immigration Reform
Innumerable objections can be -- and have been -- raised to every proposal for better controlling ingress to these United States. A few of those objections even contain a scintilla of fact or merit. But if taken as a group to imply that nothing can be done, or that nothing should be done, to improve our border control, they constitute an abrogation of American sovereignty, and the invalidation of the Constitution itself.
It is not your Curmudgeon's intent to review and refute all the objections to every border-strengthening proposal. Rather, today he will present his own preferences, arguably no better or worse than anyone else's, but bearing the unmistakable stamp of crankhood that guarantees that you, Gentle Reader, have received a genuine Curmudgeonly product.
1. Direct Management Of The Border.
As others have noted, America's immigration problems, such as they are, arise from the proximity of populous, impoverished Third World nations. One such nation, Mexico, abuts the United States along a long and indifferently defended border, easily "wetbacked" by anyone sufficiently determined to do so.
Is it simply too obvious that this border is at the heart of the illegal immigration problem? Is it simply too obvious that it must be barricaded, and that the barricade must be manned, if we'd prefer that would-be immigrants present themselves at our designated ports of entry?
The border must be fenced, preferably in the Israeli defense-in-depth style: two stout, widely spaced physical fences enclosing a no-man's-land. The fences must be sturdy enough that a "silent" penetration of either one is all but impossible. The no-man's-land must be patrolled by armed border guards pre-authorized to shoot anyone who attempts to cross it.
The well-publicized authorization to shoot is critical to the management of the barrier. Persons illegally entering the United States from the south are largely desperate. That desperation will not be overmatched by anything but the prospect of death. It might not be necessary to kill everyone who attempts to violate the border, but if the border guards are known to be unwilling to kill to enforce the border, migrants will know that in sufficient numbers, they can break the guards' determination to do so -- and they will.
No physical barrier, even if heavily manned by armed guards, will prevent all illegal entry to the United States. But as the Israelis have demonstrated, a good one would reduce the flow substantially, to the immense benefit of our other efforts to stanch the illegal tide.
2. Changes In Admissions Procedures.
As for persons who do enter the country legally, but who are determined to disappear into its population and remain despite the terms of their visas and the dictates of the immigration law, the solution employed to enforce house arrests upon persons under judicial detention is applicable: the locator bracelet, fastened about ankle or wrist, which cannot be removed without triggering an alarm and a manhunt.
Such bracelets are easily and cheaply made. Experience indicates that they're not easy to fool. More, the requirement that every visitor be fitted with one would discourage a substantial fraction of visitors, to the dismay of the tourist industry, which has deserved "one in the eye" for quite some time now.
The use of locator bracelets would have many spinoff benefits. One of the biggest would be their use to identify concentrations of illegals. If a great number of bracelet transponders were to report from a particular area, it would earn the attention of the immigration authorities. If a great number of bracelets were to cease reporting from within a particular area, the implications would be the same.
Traditionally, we've made no attempt to track persons who enter the country from the north. Given the increasing concentration of Muslims in Canada, and the known cases in which terrorists and would-be terrorists have been located there, this policy should be changed as well.
3. Changes In Immigration And Naturalization Law.
Our existing laws specify only that an applicant for citizenship in these United States must certify that he's been here for five years and pass a relatively basic test on American civics. More, anyone fortunate enough to be born here earns citizenship by that act alone, regardless of his parents' status, which gives rise to the phenomenon of "anchor babies." Obviously, the law must be altered to undo the perverse incentives it creates:
- A child born within our borders shall be granted citizenship if and only if his parents were citizens or legally recognized resident aliens at the time of his birth.
- No one shall be eligible for citizenship who has not first been granted resident alien status (i.e., the "green card").
- No one shall be eligible for resident alien status who cannot prove that he entered the country legally, at a legal port of entry, with one category of exceptions described below.
- The immigration laws shall incorporate a statute of limitations of twenty years. That is, if an individual who cannot prove that he entered the United States legally, at a legal port of entry, can satisfy a naturalization court that he has been an otherwise law-abiding resident of these United States continuously for the past twenty years, he may, at the discretion of that court, be granted resident alien status.
4. The Pursuit Of Existing Illegal Immigrants.
There is no need to increase the penalty for illegal immigration; detention and deportation are quite bad enough. However, there is a need for vigorous enforcement of the immigration laws upon those who knowingly subvert them: knowing, willing employers of illegal immigrants.
The problem here is one of sufficient proof. Persons within the borders of the United States are not required to carry identification as a blanket rule. Thus, if Juan maintains that he's an American citizen, the immigration authorities have no statutory standard by which to prove the reverse. No document issued by a state or local government will suffice. This point has often been used to argue for the issuance of compulsory federal identification cards, which a peace officer would be authorized to demand from anyone, given cause.
This is probably the stiffest of all the problems involved in the immigration mess. To institute a documentation standard would go against two centuries of American tradition; to be perfectly legitimate, it would probably require a Constitutional amendment. Not to do so would leave the authorities incapable of proving a deportation case by objective means; it would be entirely a matter of accusers and accused. However, the implementation of the other measures described here, plus the passage of time, would probably reduce the problem to tolerable levels.
5. Guest Workers?
Instinctively, your Curmudgeon would oppose a guest worker program. He would prefer a rescission of those welfare state measures that have conditioned so many Americans into thinking that some jobs are beneath their dignity. But that stroke would be politically unpalatable in the extreme, at least for now. So some sort of well-regulated program for short-term guest workers, who would be required to wear locator bracelets just as would all other visitors to the United States, is probably necessary for now -- not because the labor is indispensable, but because such a program would substantially divert the residual pressure against our borders into an acceptable channel.
Employers found to have assisted guest workers in violating the terms of their visas would be subject to felony prosecution.
6. Coordinated Foreign Policy.
As the control of its borders is the prerogative of a sovereign nation, any statement or action that denies that prerogative, or compromises it in practice, constitutes a denial of its sovereignty or worse. Therefore, the United States must announce that as a matter of fixed policy, it will not engage in any sort of intercourse with a government that denies America's right of border control. Further, any act by a foreign power that intentionally undermines America's control of its borders will be treated as a declaration of war.
7. Summary.
The above will strike some readers as harsh. Indeed, it is harsh; it was intended to be. However, the problem the country faces is approaching catastrophic dimensions, as is evident from the open, angry demonstrations by illegal hordes in major American cities these past few days.
The demonstrators believe they can flaunt their status in our faces, because we desire their labor so intensely. Ultimately, the desirability of their labor is irrelevant; they do nothing Americans could not do in their place, albeit at a higher cost. The true crisis is the undermining of the connective tissue of American culture: our common language, our adherence to a single set of laws, and the transmission of American values of individual liberty, private property, and free enterprise from each generation to the next. Just possibly, the multitudes that jammed the streets of Los Angeles, Chicago, and other cities have demonstrated that to the greater, previously passive, American public.
We have been invaded by persons of foreign birth and foreign ways, who believe it's their right to be here. The ideas promulgated by our educational and cultural institutions have cemented them into that belief. Those institutions are near the root of the problem; they can and must be reformed. However, the immediacy of the problem demands that we also address their symptoms: the ten-million-plus persons who have made America their home yet deny its sovereignty, and grant its laws no legitimacy, when those things impinge upon their personal desires.
Let's start now.
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
The Great Implosion Part 2: The Genesis Of Accommodationism
In yesterday's essay, your Curmudgeon reviewed the existing state of economic, cultural, and political affairs touching on the illegal immigration problem. His conclusions were on the pessimistic side, but that's sometimes inevitable when one strives to be realistic about human weaknesses.
However, there's more juice in this lemon. Perhaps if we could comprehend the currents and pressures that gave rise to our acceptance of and problems from illegals -- the mindset your Curmudgeon calls accommodationism -- we could contrive a more effective strategy for stemming the human tide.
1. Accommodationism Defined.
He who confronts an unpleasant situation can do one of three generic things:
- He can apply himself to changing it.
- He can retreat from it, leaving it to others to deal with it.
- He can attempt to accommodate it: i.e., to persuade himself that it's not that bad after all, and can be tolerated without unacceptable suffering, cost, or inconvenience.
The third choice implicitly accepts the situation as unchangeable.
Sometimes there are moral arguments for accommodation. For example, one could not deny that New York City's "homeless" (i.e., its free-ranging bums and panhandlers), during the years when that problem was at its worst, were a difficult mess to deal with. Given the state of the law, there wasn't much the city could do. Incarcerating them was deemed politically unacceptable, even though they were in violation of vagrancy statutes that had been on the books for many years. Committing them involuntarily to one or another therapeutic institution had been decreed a violation of their legal rights. Gunning them down on sight was considered an overreaction. Until the political climate changed with the coming of the Giuliani Administration, there was nothing a decent New Yorker could do but strive to avoid them -- very difficult, given their ubiquity and their legendary aggressiveness -- and accommodate himself to the nuisances they caused.
Whether or not there are justifications for accommodation, the core fact about it remains that it accepts a set of unpleasant conditions as unchangeable. In the social and cultural realm, this translates to a demand for forbearance shown toward persons whose behavior is widely felt to be offensive.
It is very seldom the case that the offensive ones are required to show a reciprocal forbearance toward those they offend. At any rate, they seldom do.
2. Seeds Of American Accommodationism.
Accommodationism is at odds with other characteristic American attitudes. Therefore, it's not surprising that it should be a relatively recent development. Your Curmudgeon considers its germination to be a post-World War II phenomenon.
The World War II generation, once the war was over, had to set about reorienting themselves to peace, to family and economy building, and to the changes attendant upon the demographic shift of America's black population from the rural South into the cities of the North. In some ways, they performed admirably well; in others, less so.
The parental burden upon the Greatest Generation was accompanied by factors not previously in evidence in American culture, most notably the flood of "professional helpers" who stood ready, often for a fee, to tell them how to rear their children. Because no one ever got rich from telling his audience to do as they were minded to do anyway, these self-nominated experts tended toward approaches quite different from what parents of a previous generation would have recommended. The overarching concept was that the parent's duty to his child is not to raise him to conform to any particular standard, but to make and keep him happy.
This, to be blunt, was a recipe for disaster. Children do not arrive in this world pre-civilized, ready to share it amicably with others. Until properly disciplined and educated about what's acceptable and what's not, a child's response to accommodation of any sort is to demand more. Enough of that will convince him, subconsciously, that what he wants is his by right. By corollary, if he doesn't get what he wants merely by demanding it, he has the right to take it for himself, the contrary opinions of others notwithstanding.
Similarly, the concentration of large numbers of poor blacks in the major Northeastern cities gave rise to conflicts that were almost always resolved the wrong way. The sole sound solution to poverty is individual enterprise, but the public response to concentrations of poverty was invariably to pander to it with redistributionist programs, whose effect was to dampen the inclination to enterprise among their beneficiaries. Simutaneously, the entrenched economic interests of the urban Northeast pressed for all manner of ordinances designed to armor them against competition. In particular, major retailers lobbied successfully for laws that criminalized most types of street commerce. Yet street commerce was the engine that lifted the immigrant ghettoes of the nineteenth century into economic parity with the rest of the country. Thus, poor blacks, who had migrated in large numbers from the low-opportunity rural South to the commercially vital North, were simultaneously discouraged from following the pattern of earlier migrants in two ways -- while self-nominated black "leaders" ceaselessly preached to them that they were owed all that they were being given and much more besides.
That pattern, reinforced by residual racist inclinations among whites to treat blacks as an inferior species -- children in adult bodies -- was a powerful parallel to the parental paradigm pushed by the pediatric accommodationists. It had much the same effect.
In those two trends of the Fifties and Sixties, we can see the germ of the accommodationist mindset. It spread thence to many other venues. The most visible of these were the many campus disturbances of the late Sixties and Seventies, when Baby Boom children employed the same behavior patterns toward their colleges as they had toward their parents, and received roughly the same degree of accommodation.
3. Accommodationism Regnant.
If one can spare oneself the less pleasant consequences, accommodation can seem like the most rational choice. For example, the consequences of not confining a rambunctious teenager to the house at night would be a lower volume of noise in the house, which his parents would appreciate. If they accede to his desire to tomcat around in the dark, they can avert his noise production from their own ears...at the cost of inflicting him, and whatever he might do, on unknown others. Similarly, ponying up through the tax system for redistribution programs averts the short-term consequences of insisting that the lower economic strata learn to carry their own weight...at the cost of confining them and their progeny behind invisible fences of low competence, within which they must endure the predation of the criminally inclined.
The third-party effect is significant here. When we can shift our costs and difficulties onto others' shoulders, we will always be inclined to do so. To the extent that we can avert or evade the longer-term consequences, we will become more accustomed to doing so, and to expecting to be able to do so, as time passes. In many cases of accommodation these past fifty years, the third party has been government, which has been deployed with increasing frequency, and increasing futility, to relieve us of hard duties and soothe the ruffled feathers of the habitually aggrieved.
Government institutions all possess a built-in dynamic of expansion of scope. They constantly seek to expand their missions. When they succeed in doing so, they then demand increased authority and increased resources with which to deal with their new responsibilities. No matter how the expansion in scope turns out -- whether or not they address their new responsibilities competently; whether or not the dilution of their mission causes their performance of their older duties to degrade -- they will continue to seek new frontiers. A government department will never willingly relinquish an authority or a responsibility once gained, and will fight to the death to prevent the emergence of private alternatives.
The providers of government "solutions" not only make accommodation thinkable; they encourage it as stridently as possible. The past half-century has demonstrated the power of this effect.
Today, whenever an interest group of any sort demands anything, politicians' immediate impulse is to offer it to them -- at public expense -- as the purchase price for electoral support. Other influences occasionally countervail that tendency, but not nearly often enough: politicians are powerfully drawn to the purchase of votes, and the general public is seldom adequately aware of the stakes in the game. Thus, accommodationism has become the prevailing attitude toward collective claims of any sort.
4. Accommodationism And Immigration.
The most visible manifestations of accommodation relevant to immigration are in matters of language, "antidiscrimination" laws in the labor market, and the tolerance of exclaves into which even heavily armed police sometimes fear to go.
The Americanization movement of the Twenties was the exact reverse of this. Immigrants and their children were expected to learn the English language, and were treated coldly if they did not. Employers would unabashedly reject applicants who could not communicate in English. Similarly, they would reject those whose dress, demeanor, or hygiene did not conform to prevailing non-immigrant standards; culture was deemed to excuse nothing. The public schools' demands were similar; their curricula included English proficiency, civics, and American history requirements far more stringent than those of today. Though communities of concentrated nationality were tolerated, the notion that they could assert independence of law or resist entry by police not of "their own kind" was not.
Above it all was the unquestionable premise that an immigrant to these shores had better intend to become an American of relatively standard profile. If he did, he would receive the support and encouragement of his new countrymen and their public institutions. If he didn't, he would quickly find that the country had no place for him.
That attitude, shorn of its uglier outcroppings, was entirely correct. It was the antithesis of accommodationism. Its reinvigoration is the one and only stroke that could put an end to the non-uniformed invasion of the United States by persons determined to make it over.
More anon.
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
The Great Implosion
The past few days have been rich with reports of, and commentary on, the massive demonstrations in multiple cities over immigration law. (For one of the most pungent imaginable specimens, visit American Digest, for the observations and thoughts of master wordsmith Gerard Van der Leun.) Clearly, the time has come for all sober-minded Americans to think hard about what uncontrolled immigration means to our country -- and about what sort of country we want our children and grandchildren to inherit from us.
It's not necessary to theorize extensively. For a contemporary case of a liberal civilization being overrun by persons hostile to its norms and values, we need only look to Europe. Our attention ought not to be fixed exclusively on the tides of immigrants; it should also take note of the dwindling of the numbers of those whose roots here are deep.
1. "Perverse" Immigration.
We must begin by recognizing some immutable truths:
- All other things being equal, population will flow from areas of lesser economic opportunity to areas of greater economic opportunity.
- All other things being equal, population will flow from areas of less freedom to areas of greater freedom.
If the above seems too obvious to linger over, Gentle Reader, allow your Curmudgeon to pose you a pair of related questions:
- Given #1 above, why would an immigrant to these shores content himself with a standard of living little or no better than what he endured in his country of origin? For it is observably the case that many do.
- Given #2 above, why would an immigrant to these shores approve the reduction of the freedoms of this country to those of his country of origin? For it is observably the case that many do.
One answer is that some of those who immigrate for economic reasons fail to appreciate that our economic vitality is a consequence of our political freedom, while those who immigrate for freedom are not always interested in money. That would cover a portion of the thorny cases. Yet your Curmudgeon is convinced that the greater part of the phenomenon remains to be explained.
In our time, immigration to the United States is far easier than ever before in history. It's cheaper, physically less difficult, and more reversible. More, if the immigrant has targeted a supportive community of expatriates, it's a far less wrenching cultural experience. One might say with some justice that it's become possible to leave one's homeland geographically yet retain it culturally. Because humans tend to value things at their costs, the lessened difficulties result in more casual decisions to move, and a lessened degree of commitment among immigrants to their new home, its norms, its traditions, and its values.
That lessened commitment, and the back-pocket option of reversing the move, make it possible for an immigrant to decry, even to work against, the very characteristics that one would have assumed an immigrant would value about the United States. An immigrant who has strong cultural reasons for doing so, and who lands in an expatriate community that perpetuates that culture, will be reinforced in that tendency. More, he will tend to view those outside his cultural enclave dismissively at best, contemptuously at worst.
2. Multiculturalist Madness.
Among the destructive trends of the past thirty years, the doctrine of cultural relativism, and the associated gospel of multiculturalism, are the very worst. The protestations of some of its promoters notwithstanding, cultural relativism implies moral relativism: the notion that morality is a sociocultural construct unfit for use as a standard for judgment. More, it's never enforced upon members of violent, squalid, or intolerant cultures. It seems to apply solely to nonviolent, tolerant, liberal-minded Americans.
That was bad enough when it was used to argue for a hands-off attitude toward the thuggish culture of the inner-city ghettoes. With waves of immigrants flooding across our borders and demanding that we accommodate them, the multicultural attitude amounts to the surrender of every one of our civil norms. Yet there has been no slackening in the stridency with which multicultural nonjudgmentalism is urged upon us, most particularly upon our children. The government-run "public" schools are the point of this spear aimed at our hearts.
It could be argued that without the ravaging effects of multiculturalism, the United States might resurrect the old assumption of assimilation. Under that assumption, newcomers to these shores were expected to learn English, conform to the laws and norms of American society, and strive to integrate themselves into what they found, rather than expect our society to adapt itself to them. The multiculturalist ethos has largely destroyed that premise; perhaps it could be revived with the destruction of multiculturalist assumptions. But the process would likely take some time, and incur significant adjustment traumas.
3. Welfarism And The Demographic Race.
No one much wants to speak of the terrible consequences the welfare state has had on the work ethic of the lowest cohorts of American workers. Yet without those consequences, the "demand side" of the immigrant wave would differ greatly from what it is.
Welfarism must be understood to include not merely government supports for the long-term unemployed and for single mothers of minor children, but also every measure introduced to restrict the economic and commercial latitude of Americans, most particularly in employer-employee relations. Many such measures were believed entirely beneficial when first introduced; some were even benevolently intended. But legal restrictions on economic freedom can have only negative effects; that is, they reduce our opportunities for creating and amassing wealth. In a supreme irony, the effects almost always fall most heavily on those least able to bear them.
Minimum wage laws are an excellent example. Such laws cannot compel an employer to pay anyone a certain amount. The most they can do is face the employer with a choice of evils:
- Hire "off the books," so as to evade the law;
- Restrict employment to those worth at least the minimum wage in value returned to the employer;
- Substitute capital (e.g., robots) for low-skill labor;
- Go out of business;
- Pay the minimum wage at a loss: i.e., pay it even to employees who don't return sufficient value to justify it.
Persons in greatest need of a "leg up" onto the ladder of capitalism -- i.e., they who need jobs, but who aren't yet able to justify the legal minimum wage -- would be harmed by alternatives 1 through 4. Indeed, it's arguable that alternative 5 would be good for them in the long run. Nor is the minimum wage unique in its perversity. Any legal mandate laid upon employers creates or elevates the "labor cost plateau," and thus narrows the window through which his employment practices and the products he sells must pass. When his unavoidable costs raise his products' prices above what the market will accept, his business fails and everyone involved with it loses, benevolently inclined or otherwise.
As has been observed so many times, illegal immigrants usually survive in the forbidden interstices of law and commerce: those zones in which a nominal crime is being committed, but the employer and the employee have agreed to keep it quiet for their mutual benefit. Needless to say, the immigrant's position in such a relationship is not enviable, as his employer has much less need of him than he has of his job. Worse, the pressures that arise from his illegal status can be transformed into threats to the well-being of his family. It doesn't matter whether the "crime" involves wages, benefits, hours, working conditions, or anything else.
American youths have been taught by many conduits, the "public" schools first among them, that it's their right to work at handsome wages, under pleasant conditions, with a thick wad of noncash benefits to cushion them against the occasional unpleasant developments of life. Therefore, they pose no competition to the illegal who, coming from conditions of privation and hardship, regards his "forbidden" job as a great improvement in his lot. In any case, with the birth rate among native-born Americans barely at replacement rates, the demand for low-skilled workers of many kinds could not be met solely by our native progeny.
4. What We Can Foresee.
It's not too risky a prediction to say that Americans' behavior as individuals will continue to vary from their behavior as political aggregates. We will continue to hire illegal immigrants to work at various trades even if popular sentiment should swing overwhelmingly toward the complete closure of the borders and the expulsion of every illegal the immigration authorities can find.
The pattern that suggests this is South Africa under apartheid. The racial labor laws of that nation were intended to restrict blacks to a set number of trades, and to limit their percentage participation in those trades -- obviously, to the intended benefit of white workmen. But large numbers of employers skirted those laws, bribed their way around them, or simply ignored them, to obtain the economic benefits of lower-cost black workmen. The South African government tightened those laws several times, but was completely unable to enforce them, and for a long time could not repeal them except at a ruinous cost in public prestige. Similarly, the Jim Crow laws of the post-Civil War Southern states were aimed at privileging white labor, but well before their ultimate nullification were honored mostly in the breach.
Yet it is also safe to say that illegal immigration in the current political and cultural climate poses a threat to the future of the United States. A man who's been defined as a criminal is unlikely to feel any allegiance to the political structure that's defined him thus. He'll have little reason to conform to the laws or the norms of the land. He'll have strong reasons to encyst himself among other defined criminals, a process that gives rise to exclaves culturally and politically at odds with the "normal" culture of the nation.
Of course it's easy and safe to predict these things. All of it is ongoing as we speak.
5. The Problems To Be Solved.
Were we to list symptoms associated with illegal immigration that we'd like to dispel, they would be:
- Our uncontrolled borders.
- The proliferating cultural exclaves in our cities.
- The irredentism and pressure for political accommodation those exclaves engender.
- The types of crime (other than the fostering of further illegal immigration) associated specifically with those exclaves.
Note that Europe, which has been heavily penetrated by Islamic immigrants these past thirty-five years, has had no success in dealing with any of these phenomena. Clearly, whatever the Europeans have tried, it hasn't worked. But to the extent that they've tried anything at all, it's been to treat the symptoms rather than the underlying disease.
It becomes ever more apparent that illegal immigration, as blatant and threatening as it is, is a resultant. It will not be quelled without addressing the dynamics that propel it.
The dynamic that draws the illegals here is a desire for something this country can offer: more often than not, employment. The dynamic that makes them dangerous to us is the multiculturalist-accommodationist stance by which we require ourselves and our public institutions to accommodate them, rather than demanding that they adapt to us.
6. What We Can Do And What We Will Not Do.
We will not make large changes in our welfare state.
We will not cease to hire illegals for low-skill labor.
We will not cleanse our public institutions of their accommodationist mindset.
We will not enforce the ejection of multicultural doctrine from the curricula of the "public" schools.
We will not take a notably firmer or more demanding line with our young people.
We will not produce children of our own at a faster rate.
Unfortunately, these things we're all but certain not to do are the things that would be most effective at damming the human tide. The things we might stir ourselves to do are second-class defensive measures at best:
We can reinforce our borders with men and materiel, and we might.
We can make greater demands on employers to certify the legality of residence of those whom they hire, and we might.
We can put political pressure on the Mexican government to assist us in policing our common border, and we might.
We can institute a "guest worker" program that would draw off some who would otherwise immigrate illegally, and we might.
Your Curmudgeon is certain of the above. The things we should do but won't would take too much effort, would involve too much personal sacrifice, and would in some cases put us into adversarial relationships with groups more dedicated to maintaining the status quo than we are to changing it. The things we might yet do, though politically palatable, are unlikely to do more than trim the immigrant tide. But complete flaccidity is not an option, at least not for the cadres of politicians in Congress being barraged by steadily intensifying demands from their constituents that they "do something."
We shall see.
Monday, March 27, 2006
Money, Money, Money: Defensive Measures
In the previous essay on this subject, your Curmudgeon endeavored to frighten you, Gentle Reader, out of the notion that in these days of low inflation and interest rates the dollar has become a completely trustworthy store of value. Granted that matters look better today than they did in the late 1970s. Granted also that as rich as we are, it would take a terrible setback indeed to destroy all we've accomplished and accumulated. Even so, there are unpleasant fiscal possibilities against which a prudent man would want to assure himself he had prepared as best he could.
1. A Dismissible Fear.
One prospect we may dismiss at once: the possibility of a complete financial collapse. There are two reasons we may refrain from worrying over such an event:
- Even were the dollar to be so grotesquely inflated that its value went to zero, that could not destroy the immense physical and intellectual capital of the United States. Neither could it eliminate our desire to do business with one another, to mutual advantage.
- A non-fiscal calamity that would have the same effect would also kill most of us and render the greater part of the country uninhabitable. So why worry?
Other countries at other times have experienced inflationary meltdowns: post-revolutionary France; Weimar Germany; Uruguay in the early Twentieth Century and Argentina later on; China under Chiang Kai-shek. Except for France, each of those countries had a host of other problems that contriubted to the fiscal disaster:
- Weimar Germany suffered intense political and social unrest, and labored under an enormous burden from the reparations fastened upon it by the Treaty of Versailles.
- Uruguay, a supply region whose entire economy relied upon the export of agricultural goods, tried to erect a welfare state that would have rivaled that of present-day America.
- Argentina shared Uruguay's characteristics, and added a fascist government to them.
- While Chiang Kai-shek was trying to stabilize China's war-ravaged economy, he was also straining to pay a large standing army and counter the revolutionary thrusts of Mao Tse-tung.
It is barely conceivable that a comparable constellation of calamities could come upon the United States. The energy required to worry about that eventuality would be better used on more likely developments.
2. The Paths Of Greatest Probability.
"Trees do not grow to the sky." -- Baron Philippe de Rothschild
The most likely developments in any area are always:
- The continuation of the current trend;
- The reversal of the current trend.
At all times except the exact moment of reversal, both of these are equally likely.
The continuation of our fiscal trend is a steady deterioration of the dollar at a rate of between 2% and 4% per year. Fifteen years of such deterioration would rob the dollar of 50% of its current value. Those whose earnings kept pace with or exceeded the deterioration would probably not be badly discommoded. Those whose incomes had ceased to increase might find themselves skimping on progressively less skimp-able items: ultimately, food, clothing, shelter, and heat.
The reversal of our fiscal trend is a deflation: a contraction of the volume of dollars that, while it would be welcome to persons with substantial savings, would badly hurt wage-dependent persons who've saved little or nothing. (Indeed, inflation so discourages savings that the trends of the past fifty years came near to eliminating the practice.) The latter group, which makes up the majority of our working age population, would be hard hit by the business contractions that a currency contraction would provoke.
Thus, if "modest" inflation continues, those with savings and those on fixed incomes will suffer; if inflation is replaced by a contraction, those who depend on their wages will suffer. Whether the more fortunate group would run to the other's aid cannot be foreseen.
3. Soft Landings.
There have been no known cases in which prolonged inflation was brought to a halt without engendering a serious contraction. The Federal Reserve Board's attempts to engineer such a "soft landing," while well meant and impressive, have run afoul of the dynamic that propels inflation: political cupidity.
Political cupidity comes in two general flavors: the desire of special interest groups for the advancement of their interests, and the desire of politicians for power, prestige, and security in office. It is an unfortunate fact of our time that these groups are not much inhibited by questions of morality or the wider national interest. The mad rush of supposedly limited-government-oriented Republican legislators to spend on ever more blatantly self-serving projects has put permanently to rest the notion that either party can be trusted with the public purse.
Neither can growth at any imaginable rate outrun the demands of this dynamic. The Reagan years saw federal revenues nearly double, a testament to the soundness of supply-side economics and the truth of the Laffer Curve. Yet Congress's appetite for funds accelerated even more sharply, and the deficit increased still further; despite the torrent of new revenue, with each year Washington was deeper in debt than ever. Since the overwhelmingly greater portion of the new spending was on redistributive programs whose target beneficiaries were the middle class, it cannot be argued that the spree was in any sense desirable, much less obligatory; it was merely legislators doing what they do in their ceaseless attempts to secure and extend their power.
Since deficits are the impetus for inflation, there will be no enduring "soft landing."
4. Is It Possible To Defend Against Both Continued Inflation And Its Reversal?
Yes. In fact, the same tactics apply to both.
Inflation is made possible by the unbacked dollar, whose volume in circulation the Fed can expand or contract at will, and to any degree desired. The major threat is to dollar-denominated savings and investment vehicles: unless they grow at least as fast as inflation robs the dollar of its purchasing power, such assets will shrink in real terms.
Deflation threatens him who is dependent on his income. Its effect on business is to brake it sharply, causing employers to shrink their payrolls, whether by pay cuts or layoffs, and sharply revise their plans for the future. A severe deflation turns ordinary people into misers and hoarders, such that trade of all sorts slows to a trickle. Under such conditions, savings are the sole protection a wage employee would have.
Simultaneous defenses against these two threats appear impossible, until one realizes that one need not keep one's savings exclusively in dollars. The key to defending against inflation and deflation at the same time is:
- To minimize one's regular expenses, most especially installment debt payments. This allows one to save.
- To keep a substantial fraction of those savings in a secure, uninflatable form. The most reliable vehicle for that is the money metals.
Investment advisors with an eye on the steady weakening of the dollar have recommended that one keep from 10% to 25% of one's savings in the money metals, with the preponderance of that fraction in gold. (WARNING: Gold futures, and shares in gold-producing or gold-trading institutions, are not the same as gold and should not be used for this purpose.) Young people in good health with few obligations can tend toward the lower end of that range; older persons approaching the end of their earning years would be advised to seek the higher end. But no one with savings should be without some holdings in the money metals; to "go bare" is a bet on the honesty and self-restraint of politicians, both those in office and those yet to gain power.
5. Arguments Against The Golden Shield.
Probably the most frequently heard objection to the golden shield against inflation is that it sacrifices the prospect of growth. This is true; gold is not an investment vehicle. But then, no one has suggested that one keep 100% of one's assets in gold. Only one who expects never again to participate in the financial arena would dream of doing so, which eliminates approximately everyone under the age of 70 and a goodly proportion of those above it.
The next most common objection is that gold is illiquid. This is also moderately true; at least, merchants don't routinely price their goods in grams of gold. But again, it would only be a consideration of importance if the whole of one's wealth were kept in gold, which no one has recommended.
The third most common objection is that there's no guarantee that an unforeseen huge gold strike won't cause gold to plummet in value. No, nor is there a guarantee that the Sun won't go nova at 6:35 AM tomorrow. But it hasn't happened yet, and considering the intensity with which prospectors have sought gold over the centuries, it's not likely to happen in the future. The total world stock of above-ground gold has expanded by about 2% per year for the past three centuries; given gold's physical properties, that's about the most we can expect in the foreseeable future.
All other arguments against a golden hedge are fatuous or worse.
6. A Typical Approach.
Let's have a peek at the finances of our old friend Smith, and see what he can do to construct a golden shield for himself.
First, Smith avoids financing a lot of his desires through debt. His income is sufficient to his family's needs, and he doesn't have a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses fixation that drives him to spend for show. So he can save.
Smith has arranged to save 10% of his after-tax income. Let's imagine him to be a typical white-collar worker, just entering the workforce this year at age 22, at a typical starting salary: $30,000 before taxes, which at current rates would come to about $20,000 after taxes. Let's assume he can avoid unemployment, get a 3% raise once a year, save 10% of what he earns after taxes, and earn 3% after taxes on what he saves. Over his working years, in constant dollar terms, his position would look like this:
| Age | $Salary | $Saved |
| 27 | 23,185 | 11,420 |
| 32 | 26,878 | 26,505 |
| 37 | 31,159 | 46,137 |
| 42 | 36,122 | 71,386 |
| 47 | 41,875 | 103,549 |
| 52 | 48,545 | 144,197 |
| 57 | 56,277 | 195,221 |
| 62 | 65,240 | 258,908 |
| 67 | 75,631 | 338,905 |
That's the power of savings and compound interest even at very modest rates. Has Smith made himself wealthy? No. But he's put aside a substantial after-tax nest egg; he's nicely protected against a deflation. If he receives Social Security payments, the combination is likely to support him in moderate comfort for the remainder of his life -- if his savings continue to earn 3% after taxes per year, and if they're proof against inflation.
But dollar-denominated savings aren't proof against inflation. At any time in that 45-year period, if Smith keeps the whole of his nest egg in dollar-denominated assets, a significant spurt of inflation could set him back rather seriously. When his income-producing years are over, inflation could cripple him utterly. However, if Smith keeps 25% (about $85,000) of that final amount in gold and silver, it would enable him to ride out even an inflationary period as long and severe as that of the Carter years, because his precious-metal holdings would rise in price as inflation cut into the dollar. The same logic would hold for any intermediate period in Smith's career.
Many Americans are doing this or more through their 401(K) plans, but without a golden shield. The typical 401(K) account holder is heavily invested in stocks or mutual funds, and has few to no hard assets. Should a fiscal dislocation strike, he'll be unprotected.
7. Other Vehicles For Inflation-Proofing.
Other approaches to fending off inflation abound, but all share this characteristic: they save a substantial fraction of one's earnings as physical commodities, rather than as dollar-denominated savings. Some people buy real estate or precious gems; others, more speculatively inclined, prefer collectibles such as stamps or coins. The central characteristic of a hedge against dollar instability must be that it's independent of the dollar.
As for protecting against a deflation, the answer is always a single word: save.
There's more to be said about a prudent attitude toward fiscal instability, but this essay has gone on long enough. Your Curmudgeon will return to the subject at a later time.
Sunday, March 26, 2006
Fran’s Sunday Ruminations: Faith, Doubt, And Lent
1. "The God Business"
Maudsley looked thoughtful and said, "To my way of thinking, the existence of a God or Gods is obvious and inevitable; and belief in God is as easy and natural as belief in an apple, and of no more or less significance. When you come right down to it, there's only one thing that stands in the way of this belief.""What's that?" Carmody asked.
"It is the Principle of Business, which is more fundamental than the law of gravity. Wherever you go in the galaxy, you can find a food business, a housebuilding business, a war business, a peace business, a governing business, and so forth. And, of course, a God business, which is called 'religion', and which is a particularly reprehensible line of endeavor. I could talk for a year on the perverse and nasty notions that the religions sell, but I'm sure you've heard it all before. But I'll just mention one matter, which seems to underlie everything the religions preach, and which seems to me almost exquisitely perverse."
"What's that?" Carmody asked.
"It's the deep, fundamental bedrock of hypocrisy upon which religion is founded. Consider: no creature can be said to worship if it does not possess free will. Free will, however, is free. And just by virtue of being free, is intractable and incalculable, a truly Godlike gift, the faculty that makes a state of freedom possible. To exist in a state of freedom is a wild, strange thing, and was clearly intended as such. But what do the religions do with this? They say, 'Very well, you possess free will; but now you must use your free will to enslave yourself to God and to us.' The effrontery of it! God, who would not coerce a fly, is painted as a supreme slavemaster! In the face of this, any creature with spirit must rebel, must serve God entirely of his own will and volition, or must not serve him at all, thus remaining true to himself and to the faculties God has given him."
"I think I see what you mean," Carmody said.
"I've made it too complicated," Maudsley said. "There's a much simpler reason for avoiding religion."
"What’s that?"
"Just consider its style -- bombastic, hortatory, sickly-sweet, patronizing, artificial, inapropos, boring, filled with dreary images or peppy slogans -- fit subject matter for senile old women and unweaned babies, but for no one else. I cannot believe that the God I met here would ever enter a church; he had too much taste and ferocity, too much anger and pride. I can't believe it, and for me that ends the matter. Why should I go to a place that a God would not enter?"
The above passage, from Robert Sheckley's classic Dimension Of Miracles, has stood me in very good stead for a long time -- not as a condemnation of faith, but as a meter stick by which to measure the distance that lies between any particular religion or church and true ministry in the name of God.
"God businesses" have been numerous in the history of Mankind. From one vantage, it would seem inevitable; as a human desire must underlie any business, every aspiring entrepreneur looks for under-served desires to cater to, and what desire has been more constant or ardent over history than the desire to know the mind of God? From another, the thing looks quite as reprehensible as Sheckley has painted it: something to be avoided at any cost, and condemned whenever and wherever found.
No religion has gone through time untainted by "God business." Prelates from my own denomination, the Catholic Church, practically invented one of the worst of all God-business crimes: that of selling indulgences and holy offices, which we call simony. It is to be hoped that those who desecrated their offices in that way either repented fully or have paid in the afterlife.
The horror of the "God business" is how effective it is at inducing cynicism in those who might otherwise have responded to the call of faith. For it is well known that even a tiny fraction of the practitioners of a trade, whether it be garbage collection, plumbing, lawyering or ministry, can utterly ruin the reputation of the whole, if their conduct is low enough.
2. The Inexorability Of Doubt.
There is no escaping doubt. No faith is strong enough to exclude it; indeed, the more ardent a man's faith, the more likely he is to suffer from his doubts.
Pope Benedict XVI has written to this effect. Faith being a pledge of belief in something that, by its nature, cannot be proved or disproved on this side of the veil of Time, it is necessarily one face of a coin whose other face must be uncertainty -- ambiguity -- doubt. A time-bound creature with no doubts is either a mindless fanatic, or he is one with no faith, who entertains no beliefs he cannot confirm within the temporal realm.
The final days of Christ's life on Earth exhibited the human capacity for doubt as it existed even within the Redeemer Himself. While he walked among men, Christ was both divine and human; he possessed all the attributes proper to both states. His wringing agony on the eve of His trial, condemnation, and execution, in which He prayed for "this cup to pass away from Me," gives testimony not only to the magnitude of His Sacrifice, but also to how His divinity had been blended with our human frailty.
If the Son of God had to experience doubt and dismay, why not we?
3. Lenten Thoughts.
Christians are exhorted to treat Lent as a time for reflection and self-assessment. We're supposed to ask ourselves, and God, "How am I doing?" And of course, we're supposed to make some constructive use of the answers. The theme is, of course, the approaching commemoration of the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus, by which He confirmed His teachings and freed Mankind from the burden of sin. To ask how one might better conform to His teachings is merely the appropriately grateful response to that momentous event.
Let's be candid: there's no one scuffing up the dust on this rock who can't improve himself in some fashion. But how many persons ever ask themselves consciously, sincerely meaning to act on the answers, how they might become better? I haven't conducted a survey, nor am I about to, but my sense for the thing is that the great majority even of believing Christians use their religions as a reason for self-approbation, rather than as a gauge for how well they're doing and how they might yet do better.
To be gentle about it, the Redeemer might not approve. But in keeping with the "God business" theme above, many a Christian minister promotes the hallelujah-we-are-the-saved mindset among his congregants even during Lent. After all, exhorting people to dwell upon their shortcomings might induce them to change churches -- or denominations. There's money at stake!
Speaking of money, one of the irritations I've long had with the contemporary practice of charity is its competitive aspect. It infuses everything from United Way drives to local marathons for this or that worthy cause. The point of charity is not to outperform anyone, even if "anyone" just means yourself at this time last year. Neither is it to garner the approval of others. The point of charity is:
- To ameliorate undeserved human suffering;
- To strengthen the giver's bond to his community.
A disturbing fraction of contemporary charity either fails to achieve these objectives or treats them as two among many.
Hey, you! Yes, you with the checkbook in front of you. Is that check you're about to write to the United Way going to strengthen your bond to your community? Are you even certain that it will relieve anyone's undeserved suffering? If not, why would you do such a thing? Are there no ill-fed, ill-clothed, or ill-sheltered persons in your neighborhood? Persons whose plights you could ease with confidence, while simultaneously improving your knowledge of, and immersion in, the common lot of Man?
To write a check might salve the conscience, but it's unlikely to mend an open hole in the soul.
It would be well for Christians to eschew the corporatized style of so much modern charity. Prefer rather to go among men personally and open handed, rather than to conceal oneself and one's alms behind a checkbook and a quarterly report.
May God bless and keep you all.
Saturday, March 25, 2006
Money, Money, Money: The Grand Illusion
The phrase "the grand illusion" was once used in reference to the "illusion of victory" in World War I. In that conflagration, the nations of the victorious Allies lost, on average, about 4% of their populations -- nearly 20% of their young manhood -- and an unknown but very large fraction of their productive capacities, their spirit of enterprise, and their belief in their own ways of life. The sociopolitical collapses and transformations that followed have been attributed, justly, in your Curmudgeon's opinion, to the psychological effects of that "victory." The nightmare years of the Thirties, and the Second Round kicked off on September 1, 1939, had their genesis in the armistice of November 11, 1918 and the Treaty of Versailles signed a year afterward.
But there are other illusions to beware than the illusion that war can be an uplifting or profitable enterprise. Some have the same root: that government, whose sole tool is violence, can somehow be a productive force. Others entwine that root with yet another seductive, extraordinarily dangerous notion: that the State can meddle with the money supply to good effect.
Ludwig von Mises utterly destroyed the notion that governments can "manage money" to public benefit in his 1912 opus The Theory of Money and Credit. Among works of the intellect it ranks as one of the most thorough and devastating ever penned; Mises left not one stone of the inflationist thesis standing on another. But it's not enough to show the fatuity of an idea if that idea can be made an instrument for the intensification of State power; one must contrive to keep it permanently out of the State's reach.
Some persons, well-meaning but without understanding, are willing to allow the State to control our money, the lifeblood of our economy, on the grounds that it's been that way for a while, and we're doing all right so far. This is a serious error. The fortunes of elected officials depend upon fostering the perception that their labors "on our behalf" have been good for us, regardless of how much they've pinched at any moment. There is nothing more dangerous than allowing them to control our money, the instrument by which we measure our progress and security. Money's power to delude us by its quantity -- to deflect our attention from what we must do to acquire that which we want or need -- makes the political control of money too dangerous to vest in anyone's hands. A copious currency can cast a veil of illusion over an economy that only a Weimar-like collapse will throw aside.
1. What Is Money?
In 1913, the great financier J. Pierpont Morgan was invited to testify before Congress on fiscal matters. Early in the proceedings, a Senator asked him point-blank, "Mr. Morgan, what is money?"
Morgan might have leapt into a discourse on the theoretical properties of money, how it had emerged from the operations of primitive barter markets, and how advances in technology had made it possible for Mankind to improve money over the centuries of its use. He was certainly knowledgeable about all these matters, having been instrumental in the protection of the American dollar during the Cleveland and Roosevelt Administrations. But the financier recognized that some of his questioners -- legislators whose constituencies were net debtors eager to be relieved of their burdens -- had an agenda beyond the improvement of their educations. So he answered somewhat differently:
The United States had come through a transition, managed not entirely skillfully, from an unstable bimetallic money standard, in which the dollar was defined as being two different things at the same time, to a stable monometallic standard based entirely on gold. The dislocations of the Nineties and the Panic of 1906 had resulted in part from the reverberations of that transition. However, Morgan knew that the gains from the thing -- a stable commodity basis for foreign exchange; a price regime in which earning power slowly escalated even if dollar-denominated wages did not; a firm limitation on government's power to spend -- were too important to be thrown aside. So with his answer, he excluded ab initio all discussion of alternatives to the gold standard, with the result that the pro-inflation forces in Congress came to see him as their principal enemy in the contests that followed.
Unfortunately, we of the Twenty-First Century have lost the knowledge that undergirded Morgan's brilliantly concise answer.
2. The Properties Of An Emergent Money.
A money is a functional entity. In a free order, people will make use of a commodity as a money only if it possesses two critical properties:
- It must be widely accepted as a medium of exchange;
- It must be trustworthy as a store of value.
These properties are necessary to a money candidate. But they may not be sufficient.
At any given point in time, certain commodities will possess the necessary properties in greater degree than any others, and will therefore be the preferred monies of the period. Technology plays a part here, as does the size of markets, the evanescence of physical goods, and the degree to which State coercion can influence men's abilities to retain what they produce. Whatever the balance of forces, those money candidates will predominate which offer the best balance of the following attributes:
- General recognizability -- i.e., easy validation as genuine.
- Value density -- i.e., a little should be worth a lot.
- Durability over time.
- Divisibility without loss of its other properties.
- Stability of quantity.
NOTE: Money is not the same as currency. A currency is almost always devoid of the properties of money; indeed, that's a currency's principal justification. It circulates in place of money, as a money proxy, so that money itself should remain out of circulation, safe from wear and tear. The paper dollar is a currency, not a money.
American monetary history, starting from the wilderness period, has featured tobacco, liquor, buckskins, seed grain, and of course gold, silver, and copper, the traditional money metals. By the time of the Civil War, the money metals had predominated, owing to their superior durability, divisibility, and stability. Indeed, one of the lasting lessons of the Revolutionary and Civil Wars was that "fiat" money -- paper currency issued by a government in government-dictated quantities, elevated by law to "legal tender" but not redeemable in some commodity money such as gold or silver -- is a great danger to the polity and the people. ("Not worth a Continental"; Lincoln's irredeemable "greenbacks"; "Save your Confederate money, the South shall rise again!" etc.)
3. The Emergence Of The American Gold Dollar.
During the post-Civil War years, the economic maturation of the country was uneven, owing to the political predominance of the Eastern Seaboard, most particularly the North; the manufacturing centers' exploding enthusiasm for exports, with their consequent dependence on the Bank-of-London-dominated international financial system; the haphazard financial systems in the Western territories; and the weakness of the federal government at pursuing and punishing monetary frauds perpetrated by the "wildcat" banks.
In the Northeast, the attractions of pre-Adam Smith mercantilist thinking -- that a nation's economic well-being is best measured by how much gold it has on hand -- competed with the slow recognition that in an international system of trade, the function of exports is solely to pay for imports. In the Southern and Plains-agrarian regions, the success of the neomercantilists at erecting tariff barriers to imports that would compete with domestic manufactures gave rise to sectional resentments toward the manufacturing centers, comparable to those that had helped to fuel the Civil War. The Western regions suffered cruelly from bank frauds, as local and regional financiers created their own paper currencies, unbacked or inadequately backed by precious metals, and cheerfully disappeared at the signs of an impending "run."
Among the presidents, Grover Cleveland was first to recognize the critical importance of a uniform, stable monetary standard. Against great opposition from within his own party -- opposition that would eventually give rise to the Jennings Bryan "Progressives," the first outright inflationist partisans in American fiscal history -- Cleveland engineered the transition to a monometallic, gold-based standard, in which the dollar was defined as 0.0484 Troy ounces of gold (1 Troy ounce == $20.67), silver coinage was limited in quantity and relegated to small change, and paper currency was legally defined as a promise to pay in gold or silver.
Cleveland's fiscal stabilization of American money ranks as one of the greatest and most courageous political acts in all of history. It cost him his presidency and the affection of many of those who had elevated him to office. Yet it is almost unknown to those of our time.
4. The Fiscal Debacles Of The Early Twentieth Century.
The Panic of 1906 gave rise to much discussion of how to guarantee the stability of the dollar. As usual, public officials wanted more power; they biased their statements and their proposals in that direction. At the inception of the Wilson Administration, the president's socialist tendencies, powerfully reinforced by his chief advisor, Colonel Edward House, caused him to throw his weight behind the imposition of a centralized scheme of federal currency management: the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.
It would be somewhat misleading to say that Wilson had been captured by the proto-inflationist sentiments of the Jennings Bryan "Progressives" he had defeated to gain the Democratic presidential nomination in 1912. Yet it is not impossible that he sought to placate them in some measure. He also sought to widen the gulf between his own policies and those advocated by the Republicans, who in acquiring the allegiance of the former Cleveland Democrats in 1896 had pledged themselves to the gold standard.
Regardless of the motives of its proponents, the Federal Reserve Act gave the federal government, hidden discreetly behind the veil of the pseudo-private Federal Reserve system, the power to expand or contract the currency at will. That power was almost immediately put to use, first to finance World War I, and later to fuel the irrational waves of stock-exchange speculation that produced the Great Depression.
The greatest irony of American fiscal history ensued upon Franklin D. Roosevelt's election to the presidency in 1932. The American economic crash was entirely the product of government-mandated inflation. The speculative waves that came so suddenly to a halt in the fall of 1929 had been made possible, indeed had been encouraged, by repeated injections of brand-new currency and credit into the system by the Federal Reserve Bank. Because people tend to measure their financial standing according to the dollar amounts in their purses and bank accounts, the public was steadily led away from actual production into stock-market speculation. Those speculations were founded on nothing more than the illusion that it is dollar amounts and dollar-denominated prices that make us wealthy. The illusion had served the Wilson and Coolidge Administrations well.
When equities prices collapsed, all of American business, so heavily dependent upon credit pyramided on those equities, took a body blow. The effect upon the economy was exacerbated by the ruinous Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 and the retaliatory tariffs erected by our major trading partners in Europe and Japan. It caused Herbert Hoover to be ejected from office. His replacement, who had campaigned against Hoover's tacit endorsement of continued inflation and strongly in favor of a return to strict observance of the gold standard, immediately nationalized all gold and set about robbing the dollar of 40% of its value.
America has not had money, in the strict and preferred sense, since that day.
5. The Triumph Of The Inflationists.
Thirty years of hot and cold war, much jockeying for international position, and the swelling of our Welfare-Warfare State brought us, in 1968, to a point where the official value of the dollar at $35.00 per Troy ounce of gold could no longer be sustained. This was not because Americans would not accept the dollar, for Americans had no choice; they had been robbed of their gold and, by "legal tender" laws, could not refuse the paper dollar as a payment for anything. However, to maintain the dollar's position in international finance, Washington had allowed foreign holders of dollars to redeem them in gold, as the promissory notes they originally were, at $35.00 per Troy ounce. Because American military forces had spread throughout Europe and the Far East, and were financed by dollars spent in those places, they had created a "dollar overhang": a huge volume of foreign-held dollars for the redemption of which insufficient gold remained in Washington's hands. The rate of redemption of those dollars was increasing with alarming speed.
President Johnson took the first step, by decreeing the redefinition of the dollar from its $35.00 per Troy ounce value to $42.25 per Troy ounce, a reduction in redeemable value of nearly 21%. This move, as might be expected by sensible persons, accelerated the wave of demands for redemption; the pressure on Fort Knox's gold hoard increased. In addition, steady currency inflation here at home had created the expectation of continual price and wage increases -- the "cost of living" effect that had been unknown during our times of fiscal soundness. But shortly thereafter came the Nixon Administration, whose agenda put other matters ahead of the soundness of the dollar for nearly three years.
In the summer of 1971, the "overhang" loomed large again. Paradoxically, the administration's successful efforts to balance the budget in 1970 had increased the instability of the economy; federal creation of new currency had slowed, and credit had tightened uncomfortably around the necks of many "debtor industries," particularly agriculture. The resulting dislocations would have been temporary, if prices had been allowed to adjust according to market forces. But among the legacies of the pre-war period were several shackles around prices, most notably the notion of "farm price parity" and the pervasive controls on interest that existed at the state level throughout the country. Legally, prices could not adjust rapidly through ordinary means. Extraordinary means -- bankruptcies and other severe contractions of enterprise -- accelerated.
President Nixon, whatever his preferences, did not have sufficient political capital to rip the Roosevelt and Wilson Era controls off the economy. The deterioration of the dollar against other currencies had become alarming to the administration and its largest external backers, most particularly the oil powers of the Middle East. So on August 15, 1971, the president announced in a televised address that the United States would no longer redeem the dollar in precious metal, regardless of the identity of the requestor. He slammed the gold window shut on the fingers of foreign holders of dollars.
Immediately, the prices of those commodities Americans had become accustomed to importing cheaply, most notably oil, rocketed upward in price. Over the next decade, fixed-rate home mortgages became ever more difficult to obtain, even at historically unprecedented rates, until finally they "bumped the ceilings" of the state usury laws and became unobtainable in absolute. It was the consequence of setting the dollar free of all meaning.
6. Currency Without Money.
What has come of the "liberation" of the dollar from the constraints of physical redeemability? In recognition of the exigencies of war, let's restrict ourselves to the years after World War II.
| Year | M2 ($billions) | CPI (1982 dollars) | Public Debt ($billions) | Household Financial Obligations (% of income) |
| 1950 | 123.9 | 4.15 | 256.1 | N/A |
| 1955 | 144.2 | 3.73 (-10.2%) | 272.8 (+6.5%) | N/A |
| 1960 | 152.9 | 3.37 (-9.7%) | 284.1 (+4.1%) | N/A |
| 1965 | 184.3 | 3.17 (-6.0%) | 313.8 (+10.5%) | N/A |
| 1970 | 236.7 | 2.57 (-19%) | 370.1 (+17.9%) | N/A |
| 1975 | 1023 | 1.86 (-27.4%) | 533.2 (+44.1%) | N/A |
| 1980 | 1600 | 1.22 (-34.4%) | 907.7 (+70.2%) | 13.73% |
| 1985 | 2496 | 0.93 (-23.8%) | 1823.1 (+100.8%) | 14.32% |
| 1990 | 3278 | 0.77 (-17.2%) | 3206.3 (+75.9%) | 15.41% |
| 1995 | 3640 | 0.66 (-14.3%) | 4920.6 (+53.5%) | 14.71% |
| 2000 | 4933 | 0.58 (-12.1%) | 5628.7 (+14.4%) | 15.23% |
| 2003 | 6071 | 0.54 (-6.9%) | 6760.0 (+20.1%) | 16.03% |
Columns 2 through 4 in the above were taken from the Statistical Abstract Of The United States. Column 5, which measures the percentage of household income that must go to obligatory payments to others, was taken from the Federal Reserve Board's most recent report on household debt. (Column 1 was, of course, taken from the calendar.)
In aggregate, using the Consumer Price Index figures given above, the dollar has lost 87% of its purchasing power since 1950, while debt, both public and private, has exploded. Gold's nominal world price in 1950 was $35.00 per Troy ounce; today it hovers around $550.00 per ounce: a deterioration in the dollar's value relative to gold of 93.6%. For a constant basket of commodities available both then and now, we must pay approximately ten times today what we paid in 1950.
Though the goods and services available a century and a half ago were quite different from those of today, the changes in the price index over those years, the years of the return from Civil War inflation to gold-based money, are nonetheless revealing:
| Year | CPI (1913 dollars) | Public Debt ($billions) |
| 1879 | 0.87 | 2.299 |
| 1889 | 0.88 | 1.249 |
| 1900 | 0.80 | 1.263 |
| 1905 | 0.87 | 1.132 |
| 1910 | 1.00 | 1.147 |
| 1913 | 1.00 | 1.193 |
Apologies, Gentle Reader, if being informed that a century ago, the Consumer Price Index was steadily rising, and the federal government owed only a mere billion dollars, has unsettled you. Yes, that was the point: from 1879 (the end of Reconstruction) through 1913 (the institution of the Federal Reserve system and the progressive income tax), the dollar gained 14.9% in purchasing power.
7. The Present Danger.
The federal debt ceiling now stands at $9,000 billion: nine thousand times what it was in 1913. Moreover, Congress has used almost all of it, and no doubt will be nudging it upward again very soon. Government debt is an inducement for government to inflate, so as to meet the interest payments with "cheap" money. Given that the Bush Administration has proved wholly incapable of restraining federal spending, and that whatever administration follows it, Democrat or Republican, will face the consequences, it becomes ever more likely that the Federal Reserve will be given the green light to "monetize the debt:" that is, to create new currency and credit with which to buy back the Treasury's debt certificates in the hands of private persons, corporations, and foreign governments.
Debt monetization is the engine of inflation. Each time the Fed creates new currency and credit, it robs the existing currency and credit of part of its purchasing power, degrading the value of all savings and perturbing all calculations performed in dollars away from the reality they're assumed to represent. However, the alternative, to allow those interest payments to consume an accelerating portion of the federal budget, involves either shrinking the Welfare-Warfare State or increasing taxation, neither of which will appeal to politicians anxious to retain the perquisites of power.
The United States will not return to a gold standard, or any sort of physical-redemption standard, in our lifetimes. What remains is for private persons to protect themselves from the nastier possible outcomes of our fiat-currency-enabled profligacy. Your Curmudgeon will address the available tactics in his next essay.
Friday, March 24, 2006
The Bellwether Effect: A Coda
“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.”—Gautama Bodhisattva (the Buddha)
Thursday, March 23, 2006
The Music Of The Icosahedrons: Beautiful Bellwethers
One of Harlan Ellison's better short stories, "The Face Of Helene Bournouw," focused on a (seeming) woman of unexampled physical beauty, who by the exploitation of that beauty deliberately led various culturally influential persons to their destruction. The conclusion of the story revealed that Helene Bournouw was actually a golem designed and built by a race of demons, whose intention was to induce Mankind to commit suicide. It was a striking fictional illustration of a point that had also been made by C. S. Lewis in "Screwtape Proposes A Toast:" many, many people will follow a bellwether wherever it might lead them, even unto death and into Hell.
The Bellwether Effect has become one of the strongest influences on popular opinion in our time. It's not possible to tell whether it's reached its maximum. Yet the emergence of bellwethers, and how they rise to command their legions of followers, are under-addressed phenomena, even today.
Your Curmudgeon's first duty is to be clear about his subject matter. A commentator who puts forth a rational analysis -- even an incorrect one, or one whose conclusions might seem inflammatory -- is not a bellwether. Bellwethers do not persuade by reason; they attract their followers by their allure. The follower does not follow the bellwether because he's said to himself, "This person is knowledgeable and smart, and his conclusions and proposals make good sense." Rather, he follows due to the attractions of the bellwether's glamor, charm, popularity, wealth, or some other characteristic unrelated to facts or reason.
A bellwether's attractions operate below the rational level of our minds. He does not offer analysis; he seduces his followers into eschewing analysis.
Thus, in keeping with the oft-heard and multiply attributed observation that you cannot reason a man out of something he did not reason himself into, the Bellwether Effect is absolutely proof against rational counteraction. Detaching a follower from his chosen bellwether requires other tools, when it's possible at all.
The Bellwether Effect is made possible solely by mass one-way communications and entertainment media. It was born of the modern Celebrity Culture, and will be coterminous with it.
The Celebrity Culture was born when it became possible for us to "invite singers and movie stars into our living rooms," by the graces of television. Television in the Fifties emphasized pre-existent forms of entertainment; the model for "new" programs was vaudeville, as illustrated by The Ed Sullivan Show, Amateur Hour, and similar offerings. Nevertheless, broadcasters were short enough of material that they had to rebroadcast movies to fill in their many unoccupied hours. Thus, television multiplied the effective audience a movie and its stars could reach. This relatively cheap diversion that was accessible to most Americans and required nothing of them but a few cents' worth of electricity, allowed many an entertainer to reach a large multiple of the audience he would have commanded otherwise.
The emergence of made-for-television dramas and comedies pyramided on top of the already established foundations of the celebrity culture. That is, it merely added "small screen" celebrities to those of the "big screen" and the stage. The later explosion of televised sports and other concatenated effects extended but didn't change the underlying model. Television was the mechanism by which people became famous, even beloved, for attainments that had previously been ranked alongside more ordinary trades.
The sort of person who becomes famous through television will almost always be an entertainer. The sort of person who makes his living as an entertainer is emotion-oriented, unlikely to be gifted with large rational powers. Thus, many of our most conspicuous bellwethers follow bellwethers of their own: gurus and cultists, some of whom actively court the attentions of media celebrities. These, though less well known, wield enormous influence over us through the intermediation of their more famous disciples.
The Church of Scientology has been much in the news because of its participation in the Bellwether Effect. Prominent Scientologists are almost exclusively from the entertainment world; indeed, your Curmudgeon cannot name an exception. Yet so great is their sway that thousands of ordinary, un-famous Americans have been seduced into investigating Scientology on that basis alone. Fortunately for the country, the church's doctrines are so bizarre, and its demands on its adherents so extreme, that few sane, stable persons succumb to its pitch.
Emotion-oriented persons are unlikely to analyze what they've been told. Rather, they'll normally gauge how it makes them feel, and accept it or reject it accordingly. If it "feels right," they'll be unabashed about promulgating it. Other emotion-oriented persons will accept it from them. Thus, one who wants to have a large impact on popular opinion can do so by crafting an emotionally seductive message and first infecting a cadre of entertainers as his bellwether-lieutenants. The multiplier provided by their mass-media exposure, and the large number of persons susceptible to their allure, will almost always reward the remote, unseen bellwether-guru handsomely.
Interestingly, on those occasions when the bellwether-guru presents himself to the cameras and the microphones, he usually experiences a sharp fall-off in his influence. He's insufficiently attractive to do what his entertainer-lieutenants do for him, and often quite zany enough to turn off many of those he might have seduced had he remained in the shadows. This suggests a possible counter to the Bellwether Effect to which we shall return presently.
Emotion is quicker-acting than reason; it is also much shorter in range. Thus, the emotion-oriented person is seldom concerned with the more distant effects of his actions, or the courses he recommends to others. It made him feel good when he said or did it; the rest is for the janitors and the maintenance crew.
We observe this aspect of the Bellwether Effect repeatedly when entertainers hold forth on economic matters. Time and again, we've heard entertainers recommend statist and quasi-statist redistribution schemes that would utterly destroy all the conditions required for productive effort. Even the seeming charitableness of one such as Bono, lead singer of U2, is fundamentally destructive, as decades of experience with international "aid" to Africa has shown. But to grasp before they're implemented how these things would work out requires that one set aside the warm glow anticipated from their proposed charities and think through the effects those nostrums would have on human incentives. That dampens the glow, which makes it unpalatable to the emotion-oriented bellwether.
There's little doubt that most such persons really do mean well, but there's just as little doubt that most of them lack both the rational resources and the inclination to work out the consequences of their actions. Those that possess the necessary knowledge and intelligence are usually uninterested in using them. When more rational, better informed persons dare to challenge them, their usual response is emotional: "You don't care about the poor / the downtrodden / the oppressed / the victims of racism, sexism, ageism, etc." Whether the riposte is merely tactical or sincerely meant, it averts the unpleasantness that would come from confronting their rational shortcomings, and the damage they could do (and often have already done) by the exploitation of their allure.
Combatting the Bellwether Effect is one of the imperative tasks of rational persons of our time. The problem is stiff: rational persons prefer to work with reason, to which those susceptible to the Bellwether Effect are generally numb. Our opportunities lie in our ability to reason out the opportunities for and applicability of emotional counteraction.
To be sure, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." Thus, if it's possible to ward a friend or loved one against the Bellwether Effect ab initio, it's always the best course. Raising rational, sensible children, determined to be well informed and to follow the dictates of sound logic, is a primary duty for this reason among others.
But not everyone within one's orbit can be shielded in this fashion. In dealing with those who are susceptible to the Bellwether Effect, one must accept that what's done is done. The emotion-oriented person is seldom re-educable, even when it would be right and proper to try. He must be approached on the same level as did his chosen bellwether: his emotional reactions to what he's been told and shown.
Excepting some short-term effects, the consequences of bad policy are always bad. Those consequences are the rational man's tools for dealing with the emotion-oriented: he must start from the emotional impact of the consequences and work backward.
Does emotion-oriented Smith favor massively increased "foreign aid" to Africa? Rational Jones must work backward from the consequences of the aid to date: the empowerment of dictators, the slaughter and oppression of subject minorities, and the intensification of poverty and misery throughout the Dark Continent. The consequences provide the emotional spearhead; if they penetrate Smith's preconceptions, and if he can be led to associate them with the "aid," Jones has a chance of swaying him.
Does Smith favor a cessation of the American liberation efforts in the Middle East? Jones must work backward from the consequences of other American withdrawals from similarly plagued trouble spots: Iran in 1979, Vietnam in 1973, China in 1948-49. The horrors that followed might lead Smith to question his stance; if so, and if Jones can show that American engagement on behalf of oppressed and threatened peoples doesn't have even worse consequences, Smith might be won over.
Does Smith favor the institution of a Canadian-style nationalized health care system? Jones must work backward from the consequences of those systems already in place: the long delays in obtaining needed treatment, the political favoritism involved in the dispensation of such treatment, and the decline in the quality of care available to all. The notion that persons who would have been capable of buying a high-quality hip replacement in a week must wait two to three years for a replacement of questionable soundness might jar Smith out of his groove.
But your Curmudgeon's focus is not entirely on persuading others to abandon bad policy prescriptions; it's more on the importance of the mechanism by which they attached to those prescriptions: the Bellwether Effect. The follower is emotionally attached, not merely to the policy prescription, but to the bellwether who urged it on him. This attachment is seldom easily severed; indeed, it's questionable whether one should attempt to do so.
If Smith is firmly attached to bellwether Davis, rather than attempting to weaken or destroy that attachment, Jones might prefer to suggest limiting its scope. Glamor, popularity, etc. are assets applicable to particular, limited purposes; they are inapplicable to politics and economics. Perhaps after he's reversed himself on a few specific issues, Smith can be led to see that. Perhaps the ultimate source of Davis's preachments can be dragged out from under his rock and held up to the light; few can withstand such scrutiny. But above all, it's vital that Jones never attack Davis's sincerity; if Smith is to reach the conclusion that Davis is insincere, he must do so himself.
There's nothing inherently wrong with an interest in celebrities, as vapid as they usually are. It's a bit disturbing that so many Americans, particularly young people, revere them as demigods, yet can't be bothered to learn the names of their local legislators or stay abreast of political developments. But this malady doesn't require completely re-engineering the mindsets of millions; it only requires that we broaden their focus.
When Dan Quayle suggested that Candace Bergen's "Murphy Brown" character was hardly the typical pattern for an unwed mother, he was engaging the Celebrity Culture frontally, and received a vicious collective rebuff for it. His experience indicates the power of that culture, its willingness to offer bellwethers to the country, and its displeasure at being depicted as a negative force. Quayle was absolutely right, but he gained no ground for responsible parenthood or role-modeling; indeed, he might have lost some.
Perhaps the effort properly belongs to those of us who have the assets the bellwethers don't possess: the advantages of proximity and the solidity of real life. After all, Murphy Brown didn't really have to raise a baby. Sharon Stone doesn't have to negotiate with the terrorist-insurgents in Palestine, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Bono doesn't have to cope with the consequences of the well-meant money river drowning Africa, whose volume he's worked to increase. None of these celebrities makes house calls to push his point of view.
Gentle Reader, don't suggest it to them, would you please?
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Irritated Oysters Produce Pearls; Irritated Bloggers Produce…?
1. Funny How These Bills Only Appear When There's A Republican In Charge, Eh?
Maryland's Democratic legislative caucus wants two shots at a re-elected Republican governor's cabinet appointees:
ANNAPOLIS, Md. — The Maryland Senate gave early support to a bill Tuesday that Republican lawmakers have labeled a partisan ploy to remove one of Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich's cabinet secretaries who has fallen out of favor with Democratic legislators.The bill, sponsored by the six highest-ranking senate Democrats, would require a governor elected to a second consecutive term to resubmit principal cabinet secretaries to the senate for confirmation. If passed, it would apply to Ehrlich's cabinet if he is re-elected in November.
"If a cabinet secretary is not responsive to the needs of the citizens of Maryland, there needs to be a check and balance," said Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr., D-Southern Maryland, after the session. Approving the governor's appointments "is a very important function of the Senate."...
Opponents of the bill argued that it is aimed at ousting Secretary of Transportation Robert L. Flanagan from Ehrlich's cabinet. Flanagan has recently fallen out of favor with Democratic lawmakers for not providing $28.5 million in highway grants to municipalities and counties around the state.
"This is the secretary of transportation bill, that's what this is," Stoltzfus said.
Miller repeated his assertions that the bill was not targeted at Flanagan specifically, but said that the "hard-nosed, opinionated Irishman" has repeatedly been at odds with the local and state officials.
"He plays ball for himself and nobody else," Miller said. "Pride leads to the downfall of many people and he's a very prideful man."
Pride goeth, eh? The Democrats no longer even blush over this sort of thing. What does that say about them?
2. Not To Treat So Critical A Subject Lightly, But...
John Gibson, FOXNews's other acerbic commentator, dislikes the fact -- and it is a fact -- that her babe-ness can excuse a babe from prison time:
Debra Lafave says there is no double standard.The child molestation case against this beautiful, blond young babe came to an end Tuesday with her walking out of court a free woman, having spent no time in jail for having sex with a 14-year-old student, a boy, in the school where she was a teacher.
No double standard. What a howler that is.
Imagine a young man in the same spot. He's worked as a teacher and has had an affair, had sex with a 14-year-old girl student. No question. He's toast.
Well, yes. And according to the magic numbers written into our laws, that toastedness is as it should be. However, one cannot escape certain facts about incarceration, most noteworthy among them being this one: rape is endemic in our nation's prisons, and those who operate them regard it as a part of the punishment.
(Hey, anyone else remember California Attorney-General Bill Lockyer? and his "My name is Spike, honey?" goodie?)
If a judge exercises discretion and prudence in lifting a prison sentence from an offender's shoulders, because it is his sober conviction that the offender would suffer unfairly -- disproportionately -- in the eyes of the law, on what grounds are we to object? Were the offender a delicate, beautiful 18-year-old boy, the decision might well have been the same.
Granted, there are certain ironies to be respected:
Instead Debra Lafave is toasted. Oh, yes, she says she knows what she did was wrong, and she is remorseful, and she is in therapy.But she flashed a special smile for all the reporters who have brought her through this crisis and said now that she can't teach she wants to become a journalist.
Words have just failed your humble Curmudgeon. Well, the day is young.
3. Toxic Creeds.
Exactly why did America deliver these people from the grip of the Taliban?
The Bush administration issued a subdued appeal Tuesday to Afghanistan to permit a Christian convert on trial for his life to practice his faith in the predominantly Muslim country....The case involves an Afghan man who converted from Islam and was arrested last month after his family accused him of becoming a Christian. The conversion is a crime under Afghanistan's Islamic laws.
...and even more urgently, why do we tolerate a Department of State that implies that such a trial is even thinkable, much less acceptable?
The State Department, however, did not urge the U.S. ally in the war against terrorism to terminate the trial. Officials said the Bush administration did not want to interfere with Afghanistan's sovereignty.
DOESN'T WANT TO INTERFERE WITH AFGHANISTAN'S SOVEREIGNTY?? Isn't this sort of horror part of why the Administration invaded Afghanistan and deposed the Taliban?
International pressure to free the accused, Abdul Rahman, might be having some effect:
An Afghan man facing the death penalty for converting from Islam to Christianity may be mentally unfit to stand trial, a state prosecutor and presidential adviser said Wednesday.Abdul Rahman, 41, went on trial last week in Kabul. He was arrested last month after his family accused him of becoming a Christian. The conversion is a crime under Afghanistan's Islamic laws, and a death sentence is possible.
But prosecutor Sarinwal Zamari said questions have been raised about his mental fitness.
"We think he could be mad. He is not a normal person. He doesn't talk like a normal person," he told The Associated Press.
A typical face-saving gesture on the part of a totalitarian state. It's better than nothing, but it's far from the whole loaf. In this case, it might spare an innocent man's life and return him to freedom -- assuming that the shari'a laws of Afghanistan don't mandate that Rahman be involuntarily committed and "treated" for his "madness" -- but it would leave those noxious laws in place, their blades sharp and ready to swing at the wrists, ankles, and necks of other innocent persons.
Muslims, ever ready to demand respect from others, are providing the world with a steadily growing mountain of evidence that they have no respect for life itself. No wonder they hate the Jews.
4. Foreign Policy Advice From A Government We're About To Topple
Well, they might have something interesting to say:
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Tuesday sanctioned talks with the United States on Iraq, saying Iranian officials would tell the U.S. to leave the country."If Iranian officials can express Iran's opinion about Iraq to Americans and make them understand Iran's views, talks on this issue are not problematic," Khamenei, who has the final say in all state matters, said in the northeastern city of Mashhad.
"But if (talks) mean opening up an arena for deceitful Americans to continue their bullying attitude, talks with America on Iraq are banned," he said in a televised speech.
"Deceitful Americans." Like it? Apparently it's the U.S. that's been operating under cover of darkness, sending terrorists and war materiel into Iraq to destabilize the embryonic republic. Apparently it's the U.S. that's been whipsawing the world about its nuclear-weapons programs. Apparently it's the U.S. that's been claiming that black is white to paralyze the "international community" until it could acquire the ability to destroy the hated country of Israel.
Whoops, wait a moment. We don't hate Israel, do we? Well, most of us don't, anyway.
Your Curmudgeon hopes and prays that Khameini delegates Iranian president and stand-up comic Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to converse with America's envoys. It would give this commentator enough to write about for weeks.
5. Are We Back To That "Testosterone Poisoning" BS?
The Bush Administration certainly has its share of detractors, but until recently, none of them had attacked the president or his lieutenants for this:
I have a new theory about what's behind everything that's wrong with the Bush administration: manliness."Manliness" is the unapologetic title of a new book by Harvey C. Mansfield, a conservative professor of government at Harvard University, which makes him a species as rare as a dissenting voice in the Bush White House. Mansfield's thesis is that manliness, which he sums up as "confidence in the face of risk," is a misunderstood and unappreciated attribute.
It's not misunderstood or unappreciated here at Eternity Road, Miss Marcus.
But the manliness of the Bush White House has a darker side that has proved more curse than advantage. The prime example is the war in Iraq: the administration's assertion of the right to engage in preemptive and unilateral war; the resolute avoidance of debate about the "slam-dunk" intelligence on weapons of mass destruction; the determined lack of introspection or self-doubt about the course of the war; and the swaggering dismissal of dissenting views as the carping of those not on the team.
Well, they weren't -- and aren't "on the team." The sole voice of qualification -- not even dissent! -- was former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who supported the war. With 69% of both the Congress and the electorate behind Operation Iraqi Freedom, what weight should the carpers' views have been given?
The administration's manliness doesn't stop at the water's edge. Pushing another round of tax cuts in 2003, Vice President Cheney sounded like a warrior claiming tribute after victory in battle: "We won the midterms. This is our due," Cheney reportedly said. After the 2004 election, Bush exuded the blustering self-assurance of a president who had political capital to spend -- or thought he did -- and wasn't going to think twice before plunking down the whole pile on Social Security.
Your Curmudgeon has to wonder what Miss Marcus thought of how the Clinton Administration, elected by a minority vote, immediately upon its ascension to power moved to nationalize American health care: 15% of the economy of the richest nation on Earth. Too manly? Naah, couldn't be: after all, Hillary! was in charge.
Mansfieldian manliness is present as well in Bush's confident -- overconfident -- response to Hurricane Katrina (insert obligatory "Brownie" quote here). And the administration's claim of almost unfettered executive power is the ultimate in manliness: how manly to conclude that Congress gave the go-ahead to ignore a law without it ever saying so; how even manlier to argue that your inherent authority as commander in chief would permit you to brush aside those bothersome congressional gnats if they tried to stop eavesdropping without a warrant.
The proceedings of In re: Sealed Case have put this Old Media Big Lie to rest. Perhaps Miss Marcus hasn't kept up with developments.
Mansfield writes that he wants to "convince skeptical readers -- above all, educated women" -- that "irrational manliness deserves to be endorsed by reason." Sorry, professor: You lose. What this country could use is a little less manliness -- and a little more of what you would describe as womanly qualities: restraint, introspection, a desire for consensus, maybe even a touch of self-doubt.
Here, for just a moment, your Curmudgeon must differ from Professor Mansfield. Manliness is not irrational; else, it would not have survived the evolutionary process. Manly virtues sometimes operate automatically, without an interval for thought, because at such times catastrophe is imminent; there's no time for thought. But were those virtues actually destructive of human interests, they would have died out long ago.
Considering that Miss Marcus probably labored over this essay for several hours, while President Bush and his team agonized and maneuvered internationally over the liberation of Iraq for thirteen months before committing to an invasion, the evidence suggests that "restraint, introspection, a desire for consensus, maybe even a touch of self-doubt" are qualities President Bush possesses in full measure. Indeed, they flow from his ardent Christianity. He has a much better claim to them than the primping poseur of the Old Media Punditocracy who deigns to recommend them to him.
File this one under "political irony, gender-related."
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
Pebbles In The Carburetor Of Life
1. Prayer In Schools.
Some wag once said that as long as there are quizzes, midterms, and final exams, there will be prayer in schools. True, true. But don't expect militant anti-religionists to grant those considerations any respect:
A couple in Texas has sued their local school district, claiming the moment of silence started as a compromise with anti-Christians is merely a ruse to get prayer in public schools, according to the AP.David and Shannon Croft said one of their children was told by an elementary school teacher at the Carrollton-Farmers Branch Independent School District in north Texas to keep quiet because the minute is a "time for prayer."
Croft, a computer programmer, says there is no secular reason for a moment of silence. "Is there any study showing a moment of silence helps education?" he asked.
Michael Newdow, call your office! But while we're on the subject, is there any study showing that sending one's children to a "public" school helps their education?
Just askin', is all.
2. Deficits And The Economy.
Several commentators have noted today that despite the elephantine swell of federal deficit spending, the American economy appears to be healthier than it's been in living memory. There's no possible argument about the appearances: modest rates of inflation, essentially full employment, the highest ever standard of living, welfare recipients driving Lexuses...well, they could be legally theirs, couldn't they?...and a growth forecast that would have been called a boom ten years ago. But, as some other wag once said, economic statistics are like a bikini on a pretty girl: what they reveal is fascinating, but what they conceal is vital.
The federal debt ceiling has been raised to $9 trillion. That's nearly 75% of the Gross Domestic Product for 2005: $12,370,000,000,000. With interest rates rising again, if Congress is going to continue to borrow and spend, interest payments on that figure will account for a greater fraction of the federal budget than previously. Enough larger to make a macroscopic difference? No one can say with assurance.
It is possible that the current rapid growth of the economy will obviate our worries about the deficit. However, it would be well to remember that statist economists, who tend to predominate among economists in government service, regard both economic contractions and economic expansions as justification for deficit finance. Indeed, the patriarch of them all, John Maynard Keynes, was so attached to the idea that he imagined that a dollar spent by the State possessed an economic multiplier effect that attached to spending from no other source.
It remains an urgent task for conservatives to contrive to muzzle Congress's insatiable voracity for our money.
3. Wal-Mart In The Orient.
The recent announcement by Wal-Mart that it will be greatly expanding its presence in Red China has a few folks concerned about the giant retailer's allegiance to the United States.
Your Curmudgeon sees no cause for alarm. Wal-Mart's management is simply obeying Sutton's Law ("Go where the money is."). That would logically cause a vendor to focus more strongly on unexploited markets than on those that have already been thickly addressed. As far as anyone knows, no issues of national security pertain to discount jeans, housewares, or jewelry.
The availability of so many more goods, so attractively priced, will cause the Chinese to grow more prosperous. This is all to the good. Prosperous people have a stake in the status quo. They're far less willing to wage a war of conquest, to seek to oppress their neighbors, or to spend their leisure time crafting giant wall posters festooned with ridiculous slogans. Will China's totalitarian government prosper as well? Almost certainly, but what matters more is what the overlords in Beijing do with the new revenues -- and the importance of Wal-Mart, an explicitly American capitalist firm, to those revenues would bias a rational man toward conciliation, rather than confrontation, with the company and its homeland.
Are the rulers of Red China rational? All your Curmudgeon can say on that score is that they claim to be against allowing North Korea to have nukes, and they haven't attacked Taiwan...yet.
Let it be remembered that America didn't have to attack the Soviet Union to bring about its downfall. The combination of the Reagan rearmament program with Soviet citizens' ever-expanding knowledge of the economic gulf between their society and ours did the trick without a need for violence. President Bush's Administration has shown no hesitancy about military spending; perhaps the Wal-Mart venture is the other prong of the fork on which Chinese Communism will finally be impaled and pronounced "done."
We shall see.
