Saturday, November 13, 2004

Government-Expenditure Economics Is A Dynamic Study, Not A Wish Upon A Star

The usually sensible John Hawkins lays a goose egg in discussing federal budgeting:

Question: “Given that a Balanced Budget Amendment was #1 on your priority list for the Republican Congress’s domestic agenda, what programs you would support cutting in order to get the budget balanced? We are talking about $350-$400 Billion worth of cuts (and that # excludes off-budget spending for the War On Terror)to make this happen. There would have to be some significant programs go by the wayside.

Most Republicans I’ve asked can’t list enough programs to cover the difference without ending up sounding like Libertarians… just want to see if you can.”—President_Friedman

Answer: While of course there is an enormous number of things in the Federal Budget that needs to be cut, all you have to do to get to a balanced budget and to eventually wipe out the deficit—and even the debt—is control spending.

Excuse me? Isn’t this a bit like saying “C’mon, Mike, just put three hundred-mile-an-hour fastballs knee-high on the outside corner and you’ve got him,” or “Geez, Tiger, if you’d just slam home those ninety-foot putts you’d win the tournament easily”—?

The gargantuan spending of the federal government has defied control for a long, long time. Every dollar we give to Washington triggers about $1.20 in spending. This pattern has held for a long time now. It’s not because there’ve been no attempts to control spending. It’s because the economic dynamic of a government permitted to borrow (and to monetize its debt, but that’s another exposition) favors deficit spending, even unto disaster.

Deficit spending is not a “primary;” it’s a resultant. The cause is a phenomenon called public choice economics.

The short explanation is that federal spending decisions are the aggregate of 535 legislators’ spending decisions. Each of the legislators who approves of an item of expenditure, no matter how he fan-dances it for public consumption, votes “Aye” because he sees it as the best decision for him personally. That is, his “Aye” will do more for his career in the legislature (and perhaps afterward) than a “Nay” would do. He’s buying either votes, legislative cooperation, or good will.

The citizenry hasn’t got a prayer against this dynamic, because the excess funds are borrowed. Being “from the future,” and therefore not immediately felt as taxation, they’re actually politically more spendable than current revenues. When unease about borrowing mounts and the citizenry demands that it be curbed, the Washington Monument Defense is deployed: A cry for a reduction in federal spending is met by cutbacks in those areas of expenditure that people value most intensely, and that will most reliably create counter-pressure to restore the cuts.

It’s not utterly obvious, but it’s not rocket science either, John. Did you think there was no reason for the Constitution’s limitation of the powers of Congress?

Wise up.

Well, Yeah, But Still, It Was Pretty Cute…

The beautiful and brilliant Michelle Malkin has posted a quick squib about a most unusual illegal-immigration gambit. Go have a look—and don’t think about what people usually do with pinatas.

Friday, November 12, 2004

A Study In Passion And “Cool”

Your Curmudgeon had a strange experience this morning. His group is part of a larger, project-oriented software department which meets every Friday for general status review. Now and then, the department head will use that meeting to introduce some question or topic for general consideration and input from the troops. Today was such a day. The question was: “Do employee appreciation events (e.g., company parties and comparable special events) have a positive effect on employee morale?”

As you might expect, most of the other engineers there mumbled something ambiguous and noncommittal. Your Curmudgeon did not. Almost without intending to, he lit off on a grand and passionate tirade about how “employee appreciation events” missed the whole point of employee morale, that morale is not about time-delimited events intended to compensate for the travails of one’s job, but rather about the time one spends actually doing it, and whether the holistic experience is interesting, exciting, and comfortable—in short, whether the employee can be induced to love his work.

The reactions were mind-expanding. The department head was stunned—wide-eyed, open-mouthed, speechless, and unable to continue. The other engineers and group leaders were distributed across a spectrum that ranged from baffled to resentful.

Probably the most piercing reaction came from one of your Curmudgeon’s own group members, an older man about a year from retirement. He characterized the meeting as “a complete waste of time, pure bull****.”

In some ways, this seems consistent with what your Curmudgeon knows of himself and of most other working people. As a rule, engineers are embarrassed to admit their enthusiasm for their work. Most employees of any sort would be unwilling to tell their supervisors that they love their jobs and have committed to them voluntarily; it would seem a stick to beat them with at some unspecified future time. But there’s more, apparently stemming from the societal worship of “cool.”

Passion of any sort is widely regarded as embarrassing. A raised voice is an unacceptable disordering of the social norm. A Juggernaut-like charge into difficulty, with the intent of smashing obstacles flat by sheer power of will, is considered disrespectful toward one’s more restrained colleagues. It’s “uncool.”

The “cool” phenomenon is a promotion of disengagement over enthusiasm. “Be cool, man.” Don’t commit yourself. Don’t invest your emotions. Don’t let anyone know that there’s something that lights your boilers, charges your condensers, or gets you greased and ready to kick ass.

Your Curmudgeon, despite his scholarly demeanor, is anything but detached, anything but “cool.” He has much more animation and much less inhibition in him than the average guy. He’s a fighter and a lover. He’s most definitely “uncool,” and always has been.

But it’s not “in” to be “uncool,” to pledge one’s life, fortune and sacred honor, to lead charges and build barricades, to declaim on subjects such as love, commitment, and passion for one’s work. Such a recognition can leave a passionate person feeling very much alone.

Do the “cool” folks have any idea how they’re shortchanging themselves?

Your Curmudgeon is an old man by the standards of the engineering trade. Most of his departmental colleagues are in their twenties and thirties. It feels massively wrong to outmatch them so on the field of passion. But there’s no denying the facts.

Peer pressure might have had something to do with it. In sober retrospection, it almost certainly did. Large meetings are like that. Embarrassment at being lifeless and unexceptional when an oldster was an uninhibited firebrand probably had something to do with it, too.

In one sense, it was saddening, but in another, it reminded your Curmudgeon how much he has to be thankful for.

Our passionate moments are the times when we’re most alive. The rejection of passion in favor of the slightly bored, can’t-arouse-me demeanor known as “cool” that’s held the favor of the youth culture for God knows how long now is a poorly disguised rejection of life itself. Its incongruity against the surging fire of life that burns in the body and brain of a young adult is an irony that defies capture in a net of words.

Your Curmudgeon will continue to engage himself. He’ll continue to sing in the car. He’ll charge up the hill with his torch and his pitchfork whenever the fit takes him. And he’ll be glad that his is a personality unmarred by “cool.”

Let the Limbo people, the willfully disengaged and uncommitted ones, the gray souls who prefer a twilight world in which there’s neither true life nor true death, have their “cool.” They’ll never know what they’ve missed. More’s the pity.

Would Our Silence Have Suited You Better?

The New York Times just can’t make up its mind about this Internet business:

The e-mail messages and Web postings had all the twitchy cloak-and-dagger thrust of a Hollywood blockbuster. “Evidence mounts that the vote may have been hacked,” trumpeted a headline on the Web site CommonDreams.org. “Fraud took place in the 2004 election through electronic voting machines,” declared BlackBoxVoting.org.

In the space of seven days, an online market of dark ideas surrounding last week’s presidential election took root and multiplied.

But while the widely read universe of Web logs was often blamed for the swift propagation of faulty analyses, the blogosphere, as it has come to be known, spread the rumors so fast that experts were soon able to debunk them, rather than allowing them to linger and feed conspiracy theories. Within days of the first rumors of a stolen election, in fact, the most popular theories were being proved wrong - though many were still reluctant to let them go.

Geez. People will talk. They have a new way to talk today, a way that gives their statements more persistence and faster circulation than they’ve ever had before. But “Ninety percent of everything is crud,” as Theodore Sturgeon has told us. It was crud before the Internet, and it’s crud now. We just have to be aware of it, and get better at threshing the kernels of wheat free from the huge volume of chaff around them.

Your Curmudgeon can’t help but think that what really ticks off the Times is the loss of its heretofore unchallenged monopoly on disseminating crud—oops, excuse me, “news.”

A Fine And Effective Civil Servant Has Resigned

Jonah Goldberg says exactly what your Curmudgeon thinks about the resignation of John Ashcroft. Goldberg touches on Ashcroft’s worthiness as an Attorney General, the shameful treatment he received from Democratic Party mouthpieces and the Old Media, and the tragedy of his departure. Read it.

Parse Carefully, Please

It’s protection against the little escape hatches folks like the sheik below always leave themselves:

California Sheik Hamza Yusouf, who has not always been known for moderation, recently spoke to followers about terrorists invoking the name of Islam for their murders.

He said, “And I feel that we as Muslims are suffering all over because of the acts of a handful of people. And we must, in one voice, condemn and completely reject the concept of indiscriminate killing in this religion …This is not our tradition and we must recognize this it is doing untold damage to Islam because we cannot be so shortsighted that we do not see the eyes of history looking upon us as a community.”

If enough Muslim leaders were as clear in their condemnation of terrorism, the terror cells of Fallujah would find no quarter in the hearts and minds of the Islamic world.

Note well: the sheik condemned indiscriminate killing. The killing sprees of Islamic madmen are quite discriminate: there’s the Islamist true believer, and then there’s everyone else. Only people in the latter group are under their crosshairs. It’s a bit like the Palestinian Authority saying “we condemn terrorism” and then classing what Hamas and Hezbollah do as “legitimate resistance against oppression.”

Until major Islamic authority figures condemn all violence done in the name of Islam, their statements will be meaningless or worse. Trust a Muslim at your own risk.

Alternate Universes Abound

The whole article is rather strange—especially for Fox News—but the lead paragraph had me thinking I’d stepped into an interdimensional transporter without noticing:

Following defeat four years ago, many political observers expected the Democratic Party to re-evaluate its priorities and message following the stunningly close finish between then-Texas Gov. Bush and Al Gore, a scandal-free vice president who served in peacetime during a period of dizzying economic growth.

“Scandal-free” Al Gore? Al Gore of the Buddhist temple nonsense? Al Gore of the “no controlling legal authority” and “I wasn’t in the room at the felonious fund-raising-in-the-White-House moments because I was passing iced tea” incidents? The Al Gore who claimed to have created the Internet? The Al Gore who claimed to have done a combat tour in Vietnam, to have been the inspiration for Love Story, and whose upbringing in a suite in the Watergate Hotel somehow involved him in endless laborious farm drudgery?That Al Gore?

PLEASE!

UPDATE: Mark LaRochelle has informed me that Al Gore grew up in a suite in the Fairfax Hotel, not the Watergate. Apologies. I’m forever getting my scandal hotels mixed up. And for anyone (that means you, Rick) who is still in doubt or denial at this late date, this is the exact text of Gore’s Internet-creation claim, from a CNN television interview with Wolf Blitzer, aired on March 9,1999:

“During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.”—Al Gore

For more details, see this.

Going Nuclear?

According to this Washington Post report on a recent speech by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, it might just have come onto the table:

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist urged Democrats yesterday to stop blocking President Bush’s federal court nominees and hinted that he might try to change Senate rules to thwart their tactics.

“One way or another, the filibuster of judicial nominees must end,” Frist (R-Tenn.) said in a speech to the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group.

But according to the New York Times, liberal darling Charles Schumer has threatened unacceptable consequences:

Democrats have also threatened to tie up the Senate in knots if they lose their right to filibuster in that manner.

“To implement it would make the last Congress look like a bipartisan tea party,” Senator Charles E. Schumer, the New York Democrat who is on the Judiciary Committee, said. “For the sake of country and some degree of comity, I would hope and pray that the majority leader would not take away the Senate’s time-honored, 200-year-old tradition.”

A 200 year old tradition, Senator? You mean, like the right to keep and bear arms? Who would have thought you’d be so hung up on such an old idea?

Should this brouhaha really start to brew, the coming Senatorial sessions will feature very few ha-has.

Thursday, November 11, 2004

Backlash, Part Two: Disharmony On The Right

As long as your Curmudgeon is in the mood to kick ass and take names, he might as well dispense a long-withheld whack across the chops to those of his colleagues on the Right who’ve made a practice of deriding an important line of thought, and no less contemptibly than the Left has done to conservatism.

No names will appear here. You know who you are, and it’s time you faced your sins.

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The intellectual history of Man is a fascinating, multi-textured thing. Its written record extends more than two millennia into the past, and all along its track we can see people making a small number of categorical errors over and over and OVER again.

Making mistakes is, of course, how we learn. It appears to be the only way we learn. Your Curmudgeon sees this as the cornerstone of Thomas Sowell’s “tragic vision”: his brilliant articulation, most lucidly expressed in his books A Conflict Of Visions and The Vision Of The Anointed, that all courses of action involve costs, and that some things which are obviously desirable are priced beyond our means, not by some evil, conspiratorial force, but by the immutable laws of the universe.

Nevertheless, we learn. But what is learning? What is knowledge? Do these things have categorical meanings—definitions? Is epistemology—the study of learning and the pursuit of better ways to learn—anything but a collection of handy tricks for coping with a known array of practical challenges?

Allow your Curmudgeon to be flip about it, for once: You’d better BLEEPing hope so.

Knowledge is not merely information; it’s the arrangement of information into categories and patterns that will support useful deductions and predictions. Learning is not merely the acquisition of information; it’s the absorption of the causal patterns whose apprehension transforms information into knowledge.

Knowledge need not be unconditional or eternal. When a man walks across the floor of a room in an ordinary house, he does so in confidence that the floor will support his weight. Sometimes, he’ll be wrong. Sometimes the floor will give way beneath him, occasionally with mortal consequences. But he acted on the best he knew:

• That the floors of houses are built to support a human body’s weight and far more;
• That others have walked across this particular floor in the recent past, without incident;
• That damage enough to render the floor unsafe will usually be visible to the naked eye.

Were he required to verify the immediate soundness of a floor before crossing it, our man would never enter any house. He must act on his knowledge of floors, both theoretical and practical.

Yet there are some who heap scorn on those who concern themselves with theory. Plainly, they fail to grasp how much theory is embedded in every decision they make, all the way down to the least of them. It is to laugh.

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In the physical sciences, an articulated hypothesis that’s gained sufficient experimental confirmation to be taken seriously is called a theory. When enough time has passed, if there have been no experiments whose results have disproved the theory’s causal propositions, it’s called a law. Even if later theories that deal with inadequately explained phenomena at the margins of a law should be confirmed by experiment, the “law” appellation normally remains. “Law” status normally derives from the range of observable conditions and measurements technologically possible at the time the theory was proposed, and for some years after. Thus, even though Newton’s three Laws of Mechanics have been “superseded” by Einsteinian relativity for very fast and very massive objects, and by quantum physics for very small objects, we continue to call them laws. In the realm of the mundane—objects not too distant from human scale, moving at speeds below about ten percent of the speed of light—they produce admirably accurate results with only a small exertion of effort.

No odium accrues to Isaac Newton, the greatest genius the physical sciences have ever known, simply for not having lived at a time when the kinematics and dynamics of infinitesimal or supermassive objects, or objects moving near the speed of light, could be measured and studied. But if Sir Isaac were reincarnated in our time, and after having been educated in the measurement and investigative techniques available today were still to claim that his Laws were complete and absolute, we would be right to wave him aside.

Knowledge is like that. Its possessor can never be sure that it will always and everywhere be right. There will always be unexplored domains and conditions—and every idea, however appealing, however widely it seems to apply, will fail if dragged beyond its proper sphere. But we cannot know this until we’ve tried it.

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Your Curmudgeon is a physicist by education, and an economist by avocation, but when he earns his daily bread, he’s an engineer.

The engineer’s mission is to solve “practical” problems by the application of technologies based on physical laws. But, as should be clear to anyone who gives it a moment’s thought, some solutions that are perfectly plausible by the laws of physics are less than useful, for reasons that have nothing to do with technology and everything to do with economics. In short, we can’t afford them.

• Cell phones were technologically possible thirty years ago. We didn’t have them.
• Electronic stored-program computers became technologically possible in 1945. Five years later, there were only five in existence in the entire world.
• Vladimir Zworykin invented the television in 1927. Television remained a stranger to the American home for nearly thirty years more.

The physicist always runs ahead of the engineer. That’s the nature of the relation between theory and practice. The immediate use of some theories simply costs too much. That doesn’t make the theory invalid. Neither does it guarantee that the balance of economic forces will not someday change to allow the theory’s practical use, as most certainly happened with cell phones, computers, and televisions.

Physical law determines what we can do; costs determine what we will do.

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By now, gentle reader, you’re probably asking yourself, “What the hell is he talking about? Will he ever come to the point and tell us?” Apologies. Your Curmudgeon considers the subject too important not to lay a proper foundation for it.

The subject is the theory of natural-rights liberty, which goes most commonly under the sesquipedalian moniker “libertarianism.” A one-sentence summary of this theory would run as follows: The individual man is free by his nature, which confers upon him a right not to be coerced by other men, and a reciprocal responsibility not to coerce them.

This theory has enormous practical implications. A number of very smart men have given their careers to its furtherance. A few of the names are Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Jan Narveson, Robert Higgs, Leland Yeager, Loren Lomasky, Murray Rothbard, Tibor Machan, and John Hospers. Some approached the matter from a philosophical vantage; others became interested because of its legal or economic implications. As with all human beings, now and again they’ve gone wrong. All the same, they’ve made highly valuable contributions to human thought—and not because their conclusions were all immediately applicable.

Political libertarians are a mixed lot. At one extreme, Party Libertarians—note the capitals, please—tend to be a scruffy bunch: loud, abrasive, dogmatic, and frequently unemployed. At the other, pro-freedom conservatives make excellent neighbors and in-laws, and usually return borrowed power tools, but are often inconsistent in their pronouncements and their desires for the law. At the midpoint sits the libertarian-conservative, whose interest in the theory and its application is tempered by:

• Respect for the borders around the theory’s domain of applicability,
• Appreciation for the costs of implementation,
• Realism about what will “fly” politically,
• Wariness about the dangers inherent in the radical destabilization of an existing order.

The libertarian-conservative is the pinnacle of the species, exceeding all others in insight, percipience, wisdom, tolerance, prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude, charm, good looks, and sexual potency. Your Curmudgeon is such a one, of course; just ask the C.S.O.

Yet on the Right, there is an inexplicable tendency to disdain libertarian thought and to denigrate those who steer by it, no matter how carefully they remain within the bounds of knowable costs and good sense. Your Curmudgeon says “inexplicable” because:

1. The fundamental premises of American conservatism are and have always been essentially libertarian;
2. The whole concept of limited Constitutional government, so neatly summed up in the term “republican”—note the lack of a capital, please—is libertarian in nature;
3. On topic after topic within the political and legal domain, conservatives have found themselves drawn into the libertarian orbit—sometimes even after a long and determined struggle to remain outside it, or to depart from it.
4. The only other evaluation of conservative hostility toward libertarian thought in light of the three points above would be “stupid,” and your Curmudgeon would never dream of calling his fellow conservatives that.

This tendency must be curbed, and not merely for the sake of general amity.

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The physicist and the engineer have more than one relation. Yes, the physicist provides the theories by which the engineer builds his technological marvels, but equally important, the engineer builds the laboratory in which the physicist investigates his conjectures. Sometimes the engineer has to tell the physicist that he can’t have what he wants, either because the equipment doesn’t exist yet, the costs are too great, or the mere suggestion would bring the peasants charging up the hill with torches and pitchforks. The physicist will sometimes pitch a snit upon being so informed, but that doesn’t alter the facts on the ground. The engineer, if he’s a responsible sort, will simply shrug and remind himself that physicists can be like that.

So it is with political theory and political practice.

In this regard, neither we who call ourselves libertarians nor our mainstream-conservative brethren are without sin. But the fusillades between the two camps have gone from mildly amusing to potentially devastating for the future of our combined movement and for freedom in America.

We cannot afford to be enemies. When conservatives such as Jonah Goldberg, Orrin Judd, and Stephen Bainbridge heap scorn upon libertarians, they’re cutting the ground out from under conservatives’ feet. Sound political practice, ultimately, must rest upon sound political understanding: theory well proven in both scholastic and practical crucibles. When libertarians insist upon the application of some theoretical conclusion regardless of whether the popular sentiment would stand for it or the public purse could bear it, they’re asking to be shoved into irrelevance and ignored for a long time to come. There are enabling conditions for the utility and affordability of any idea; libertarian ideas are not exceptions.

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Each of our sub-communities on the Right has contributions to make. Each has made mistakes. Each has appreciated some important truth that critically conditioned the political environment, whether recently or in the documented past. Each has failed to appreciate some such truth, and has brought down ruin thereby.

The great Frank Meyer, most prominent of all libertarian-conservative fusionists, told his conservative brethren that unless the traditions and virtues they cherished were compatible with human freedom, they would devolve into just one more species of totalitarians. Similarly, he reminded his libertarian brethren that to push theory at the expense of the values and virtues their fellow citizens held dear was not only self-defeating but unnecessary.

It’s time we honored Meyer’s wisdom. The sniping must stop:

• Criticize ideas, not people or personalities.
• If you have a rational objection to some proposal or policy, make it calmly, not in a sky-is-falling scream.
• Remember that those who disagree with you have their own reasons, their own perspectives, and their own fears. These are no less important than your beliefs.
• Admit that your knowledge is limited. Your adversary could be right and you could be wrong. Admit this especially to those who disagree with you; it almost always prompts a reciprocal admission from them.
• Respect the borders of the known and the record of experience. Strive to know these things as completely as you can.
• If a man treats his position as an unfalsifiable one—an article of faith that cannot be disproved no matter what evidence might be marshaled against it—don’t argue with him at all. There’s no point. Smile and change the subject, or walk away.
• Live right. There’s nothing so persuasive as a human exemplar.

That is all. Oh, one more thing: Don’t make your Curmudgeon angry. You won’t like him when he’s angry.

Yet Another Piercing And Courageous Robert Spencer Column

From his emission of today:

[The mainstream media’s] continued misapplication of conflicts as “racial” interferes with realistic appraisals of what they really involve—most notoriously in a Netherlands still reeling from last week’s murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a jihad terrorist on an Amsterdam street.

The Times of London did this last Sunday with an article entitled “Jihad wrecks Dutch race harmony.” After noting evidence of a “‘brigade’ of Dutch jihadists preparing to murder ‘the enemies of Islam’ in a terror campaign,” the Times worried that all this jihadist activity has “prompted some to rethink their faith in a multiracial society.”

[...snip...]

But why exactly must the killing of van Gogh prompt some to “rethink their faith in a multiracial society”? ... If the mosques of the Netherlands and Italy were populated by people like John Walker Lindh (“Johnny Taliban” from Marin County, California), Adam Yehiye Gadahn (a.k.a. Adam Pearlman), Richard Reid (the “shoe bomber”) and Jack Roche (the Australian Muslim convert who met Osama bin Laden and thought he was a “very nice man,”) would Holland and Italy be safe today?

The Old Media harp on “race” as obsessively as they do because it would be the death of their reputations to admit (at long last) that the conflict is an ideological one—that the Islamic ideology is as vicious, as supremacist, and as utterly uncompromising as Nazism was. So they fan-dance the thing as yet another outbreak of fair-versus-dark bigotry. Ironically “racism” requires that one believe in the practical existence of the races, which the regnant ideology of the Old Media disclaims.

But then, the Old Media have used “racism” as a cover-charge for a long time now. They’ve repeatedly invoked it to discourage or dismiss objective assessments of crime statistics and social pathologies. Why break a winning habit?