Political update for January, 2013

So much for soaring rhetoric.  Read in a vacuum, that is, absent a political context, Obama's second inaugural sounds almost  moderate. But, placed in its political context -- and why would you read it otherwise -- the mask has slipped. Other than the hope for gays to be treated equally under the law, I found the president's inaugural speech unsurprisingly distressing, as I did the first one where he casually implied that spending was just peachy.  Obviously, he now feels he can afford to make his political intentions more plain, whereas the first speech was the first day of the second campaign. And with that came the greatest spending and most brash liberalism since the Great Society.

They are going for the brass ring here, and, their being victorious in a second election, some might see that as their due. And, there can be little doubt but by his conservative adversaries that more voting Americans seemed to agree with him than did otherwise.  Political parties rarely feel they need to remember that with public office is SUPPOSED to come duty and responsibility, not privilege or the right to usurp anyone's liberty, property or life without due process of law. In reality, it is always degraded into a quest for power coupled with the fear of losing it (“The real terrors of both Parties have all ways been, and now are, the fear that they shall loose the Elections and consequently the Loaves and Fishes; and that their Antagonists will obtain them." - John Adams).

Obama's  duties are the same under the Constitution now as they were before - to see to it that the laws are executed, not to change our culture or redistribute income. Yet along with the pop culture history lesson, this was the speech.  Of course, it would be disingenuous to suggest that he is the first president to shoot for more than to exercise his constitutional authority.  

Though it is either a parlor game or foolishness to predict what will happen in anyone's term as president, I suspect with little fear of embarrassment that Obama and Biden will continue to try to remake the country into one that looks more like Sweden and Belgium than it does Pennsylvania and Colorado in line with the Social Democratic philosophy that best describes their policies.  How they think this is even remotely possible when we also have by far the most expensive military in the world, I cannot imagine (although some think that is precisely the reason Chuck Hagel has been nominated for SecDef in order to scrunch it down - I doubt it).  But,  trying to do both is like trying to serve both God and Mammon or riding two donkeys with one ass (a phrase I learned in a wonderful pseudo-Western, Support Your Local Sheriff, starring James Garner, said by the mayor, played by Harry Morgan, to his daughter, Garner's love interest) or making an omelet without breaking some eggs.  Try as you may, you just can't do it.

While I do not for a second believe the hyperbole that President Obama is a Communist or Marxist as some like to suggest (you could make the argument that even modern conservatives are Marxists), and wants the government to control all production, I do believe he is an ardent, as opposed to reluctant, democratic-socialist who has the "fatal conceit" that he or others under him can manage our economic success despite every evidence that we have never been capable of it except to live fat while devaluing our currency.  

Central to his speech was the idea that there can be some kind of economic parity among all of us (I was going to quote from it, but there is too much else I want to get to and you can read it yourself online - but his use of the charged word "collective" is a little scary).  What this really means is that markets don't matter, the "invisible hand" does not matter so much, a person reaping the fruits of their labor or ingenuity does not matter so much either. That they can simply force people to give more and more of what they have for the benefit of those who do not have it to make up for some kind of group historical guilt for slavery and Jim Crow, male domination and other aspects of our history/culture, is a central tenet of liberal thinking. That this is the dreaded income redistribution cannot rationally be denied.  Though he does not go around using the phrase anymore, just prior to this past election a prior public statement in his belief in it surfaced, and the White House acknowledged it.  No one much paid attention or cared other than the conservative radio hosts and their fans because so many people agree with him, and not just the 47%.

These are not new ideas.  It has always been at the center of all socialistic, progressive, liberal agendas - money and property are at best on lend to people - it belongs to the government, and, the  economy can be manipulated by masters (the phrase Obama used early on was "the pointy heads").  This always fails, though it can occasionally made to look like solvent. Lloyd Bentsen, a former VP candidate in 1988, is famous for saying to opponent Dan Quayle in their debate - "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy." But, the more important thing he said in the same debate that goes largely ignored these days by spenders on both sides was "You know, if you let me write $200 billion worth of hot checks every year, I could give you an illusion of prosperity, too."  We can only wish it was but $200 billion dollars. We would all be so happy if it was only $200 billion dollars. Just the interest on our debt alone was over $200 billion in 1988 but last year was nearly $360 billion. That's not even new debt. We spent about $664 billion on defense in 2011. Don't even start with entitlements, which are about three times are national security spending.
The notion that coercively equalizing incomes or assets among people, which I would have in my youth and ignorance thought the most worthwhile goal, is, it turns out, not only impossible, but terribly foolish.  Most of our technological wonders that give so much comfort and make our lives so much easier are around not just because they were invented, but because rich people got to use and enjoy them first or had the capital and ability to manufacture, market and distribute them at a price most people can afford.  This was explained to me best by Friedrich Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty -- one of those books I wish every president and every senator and congressperson would read before they took the oath, but know that can never be, because, frankly, it is not easy reading and they wouldn't do it.  I excerpt it below, but to make it more readable and cull the sense of what he wrote, I've cut and pasted, leaving out here all the asterisks and stars that I would need to separate the selections, as well as all the abundant notes that were included to back up his conclusions. In other words, I made a much shorter essay (long as it is) than what he wrote by cutting a lot of it out.  I put this in bold because I would not want anyone ever making an internet search on Hayek or this book to quote from it as if the paragraphs ran together this way in his book.

"If today in the United States or western Europe the relatively poor can have a car or a refrigerator, and airplane trip or a radio, at the cost of a reasonable part of their income, this was made possible because in the past others with larger incomes were able to spend on what was then a luxury. . . Many of the improvements would indeed never become a possibility for all if they had not long before been available to some. If all had to wait for better things until they could be provided for all, that day would in many instances never come. Even the poorest today owe their relative material well-being to the results of past inequality.

[A]s long as the graduation is more or less continuous and all the steps in the income pyramid are reasonably occupied, it can scarcely be denied that those lower down profit materially from the fact that the others are ahead.

In the long run, the existence of groups ahead of the rest is clearly an advantage to those who are behind, in the same way that , if we could suddenly draw on the more advanced knowledge which some other men on a previously unknown continent or on another planet had gained under more favorable conditions, we would all profit greatly.

There can be little doubt that the prospect of the poorer, “undeveloped” countries reaching the present level of the West is very much better than it would have been, had the West not pulled so far ahead.

That even countries or groups which do not possess freedom can profit from many of its fruits is one the reasons why the importance of freedom is not better understood.

Equality of the general  rules of law and conduct, however, is the only kind of equality conducive to liberty and the only equality which we can secure without destroying liberty. Not only has liberty nothing to do with any other sort of equality, bit it is even bound to produce inequality in many respects. This is the necessary result and part of the justification of individual liberty: if the result of individual liberty did not demonstrate that some manners of living are more successful than others, much of the case for it would vanish.

Modern advocates of a more far-reaching material equality usually deny that their demands are based on any assumption of the factual equality of all men. It is nevertheless still widely believed that this is the main justification for such demands. . . It is of the essence of the demand for equality before the law that people should be treated alike in spite of the fact that they are different.

From the fact that people are very different it follows that, if we treat them equally, the result must be inequality in their actual position, and that the only way to place them in an equal position would be treat them differently. Equality before the law and material equality are therefore not only different but are in conflict with each other; and we can achieve either the one or the other, but not both at the same time. . . Our argument will be that, though where the state must use coercion for other reasons, it should treat all people alike, the desire of making people more alike in their condition cannot be accepted in a free society as a justification for further and discriminatory coercion.

We do not object to equality as such. It merely happens to be the case that a demand for equality is the professed motive of most of those who desire to impose upon society a preconceived pattern of distribution. . . We shall indeed see that many of those who demand an extension of equality do not really demand equality but a distribution that conforms more closely to human conceptions of individual merit and that their desires are as irreconcilable with freedom as the more strictly egalitarian demands.

f one objects to the use of coercion in order to bring about a more even or a more just distribution, this does not mean that one does not regard these as desirable. But if we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability  of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion.

There also seems no reason why these widely felt preferences should not guide policy in some respects. Wherever there is a legitimate need for government action and we have to choose between different methods of satisfying such a need, those that incidentally also reduce inequality may well be preferable.

Though either may greatly affect the value which an individual has for his fellows, no more credit belongs to him for having been born with desirable qualities than for having grown up under favorable circumstances. The distinction between the two is important only because the former advantages are due to circumstances clearly beyond human control, while the latter are due to factors which we might be able to alter. The important question is whether there is a case for so changing our institutions as to eliminate as much as possible those advantages due to environment. Are we to agree that “all inequalities that rest on birth and inherited property ought to be abolished and none remain unless it is an effect of superior talent and industry”?

The most important factors to be considered in this connection are the family, inheritance, and education, and it is against the inequality which they produce that criticism is mainly directed. They are, however, not the only important factors of environment. Geographic conditions such climate and landscape, not to speak of local and sectional differences in cultural and moral traditions, are scarcely less important. We can, however, consider here only the three factors whose effects are most commonly impugned.

So far as family is concerned, there exists a curious contrast between the esteem most people profess for the institution and their dislike of the fact that being born into a particular family should confer on a person special advantages. . . Yet it is difficult to see why the same useful quality which is welcomed when it is the result of a person’s natural endowment should be less valuable when it is the product of such circumstances as intelligent parents or a good home.

Though inheritance used to be the most widely criticized source of inequality, it is today probably no longer so. Egalitarian agitation now tends to concentrate on the unequal advantages due to differences in education.

For the present we shall only point out that enforced equality in this field can hardly avoid preventing some from getting the education they otherwise might. Whatever we might do, there is no way of preventing those advantages which only some can have, and which it is desirable that some should have, from going to people who neither individually merit them nor will make as good a use of them as some other person might have done. Such a problem cannot be satisfactorily solved by the exclusive and coercive powers of the state.

It is instructive at this point to glance briefly at the change that the ideal of equality has undergone in this field in modern times. A hundred years ago, at the height of the classical liberal movement, the demand was generally expressed by the phrase la carrière ouverte aux talents. It was a demand that all man-made obstacles to the rise of some should be removed, that all privileges of individuals should be abolished, and that what the state contributed to the chance of improving one’s conditions should be the same for all. That so long as people were different and grew up in different families this could not assure an equal start was fairly generally accepted. It was understood that the duty of government was not to ensure that everybody had the same prospect of reaching a given position but merely to make available to all on equal terms those facilities which in their nature depended on government action. That the results were bound to be different, not only because the individuals were different, but also because only a small part of the relevant circumstances depended on government action, was taken for granted.

The conception that all should be allowed to try has been largely replaced by the altogether different conception that all much be assured an equal start and the same prospects. This means little less than that the government, instead of providing the same circumstances for all, should aim at controlling all conditions relevant to a particular individual’s prospects and so adjust them to his capacities as to assure him of the same prospects as everybody else. Such deliberate adaptations of opportunities to individual aims and capacities would, of course, be the opposite of freedom. Nor could it be justified as a means of making the best use of all available knowledge except on the assumption that government knows best how individual capacities can be used.

When we inquire into the justification of these demands, we find that they rest on the discontent that the success of some people often produces in those that are less successful, or, to put it bluntly, on envy. The modern tendency to gratify this passion  and to disguise it in the respectable garment of social justice is developing into a serious threat to freedom. . . This would, of course, necessarily mean that it is the responsibility of government to see that nobody is healthier or possesses a happier temperament, a better-suited spouse or more prospering children, than anybody else. If really all unfulfilled desires have a claim on the community, individual responsibility is at an end. However human, envy is certainly not one of the sources of discontent that a free society can eliminate. It is probably one of the essential conditions for the preservation of such a society that we do not countenance envy, not sanction its demands by camouflaging it as social justice, but treat it, in the words of John Stuart Mill, as “that most anti-social and odious of all passions.”

While most of the strictly egalitarian demands are based on nothing better than envy, we must recognize that much that on the surface appears as a demand for greater equality is in fact a demand for a juster distribution of the good things of this world and springs therefore from much more creditable motives. . . The proper answer is that in a free society it is neither desirable nor practicable that material rewards should be made generally to correspond to what men recognize as merit and that it is an essential characteristic of a free society that an individual’s position should not necessarily depend on the views that his fellows hold about the merit he has acquired.

The difficulty in making the point clear is due to the fact that the term “merit,” which is the only one available to describe what I mean, is also used in a wider and vaguer sense. It will be used here exclusively to describe the attributes of conduct that make it deserving of praise, that is, the moral character of the action and not the value of the achievement.

There is little a man can do to alter the fact that his special talents are very common or exceedingly rare. A good mind or personality are in a large measure as independent of a person’s efforts as the opportunities or the experiences he has had. In all these instances the value which a person’s capacities or services have for us and for which he is recompensed has little relation to anything that we can call moral merit or deserts. Our problem is whether it is desirable that people should enjoy advantages in proportion to the benefits which their fellows derive from their activities or whether the distribution of these advantages should be based on other men’s views of their merits.

In conclusion we must briefly look at another argument on which the demands for a more equal distribution are frequently based, though it is rarely explicitly stated. This is the contention that membership in a particular community or nation entitles the individual to a particular material standard that is determined by the general wealth of the group to which he belongs. This demand is in curious conflict with the desire to base distribution on personal merit. There is clearly no merit in being born into a particular community, and no argument of justice can be based on the accident of a particular individual’s being born in one place rather than another. In a wealthy community the only justification its members can have for insisting on further advantages is that there is much private wealth that the government can confiscate and redistribute and that men who constantly see such wealth being enjoyed by others will have a stronger desire for it than those who know of it only abstractly, if at all."

I leave it off there.  What Hayek wrote about was not what I or many people I know were raised to believe, even if it was the tradition of our culture for a long time, and it took a long time for me to accede to his logical force.  Nor, of course, did Hayek start on square one (nor was right about everything), but stood on the shoulders of those he quotes in his work. I give him credit for making very difficult and sometimes counter-intuitive arguments extremely cogently, without trying to overly popularize it. Call me cynical, but I seriously doubt most people who claim to have read his celebrated The Road to Serfdom have actually read it. It's just so dry. But his disappointment that his Constitution did not become as well known as The Road to Serfdom is a little laughable, as the latter was at least relatively short and largely unadorned with notes, and the latter dense and filled with them. Hence, my distillation. There is much more I would like to include, especially Hayek's explanation of what government is capable of doing that it should do, and what it cannot and should not do.  But, I think you have a few other things to do today.

Nor, of course, is Hayek the only writer to dwell on these topics and it might be a post some day to discuss his influence on modern thinkers, like with his friend, Karl Popper, his influence being much deeper than his own popular recognition. But, below, just because these are the things I spend my time reading and thinking about, are a few quotes from others on the same topic.

The second biological lesson history is that life is selection. . . Since Nature (here meaning total reality and its processes) has not read very carefully the American Declaration of Independence or the French Revolutionary Declaration of the Rights of Man, we are all born unfree and unequal: subject to our physical and psychological heredity, and to the customs and traditions of our group; diversely endowed in health and strength, in mental capacity and qualities of character. Nature loves difference as the necessary material of selection and evolution; identical twins differ in a hundred ways, and no two peas are alike. - Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History.

Inequality is not only natural and inborn, it grows with the complexity of civilization. - Alexander de Tocqueville, Democracy in America.

Nothing can enter the public treasury for the benefit of one citizen  of one citizen or one class unless other citizens and other classes have been forced to send it in. . . The law can be an instrument of equalization only as it takes from some persons and gives to other persons. When the law does this, it is an instrument of plunder.  - Frederick Bastiat, The Law.

Each of these parties has its chief, and these chiefs are, or will be, rivals. Religion will be both the object and the pretext of some; liberty, of others; submission and obedience of others; and levelling, downright levelling, of not a few.  - John Adams, Discourses on Davila.

Last, from Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution, with whom I must say, even more so than the others quoted, I often find myself in great disagreement, and scholars have a hell of a time deciding what to make of him. But, like the Devil, who may quote scripture for his purposes, so can I:

Believe me, Sir, those who attempt to level, never equalize. In all societies, consisting of various descriptions of citizens, some description must be uppermost. The levellers therefore only change and pervert the natural order of things; they load the edifice of society, by setting up in the air what the solidity of the structure requires to be on the ground. The associations of taylors and carpenters, of which the republic (of Paris, for instance) is composed, cannot be equal to the situation, into which, by the worst of usurpations, can usurpation on the prerogatives of nature, you attempt to force them.

None of any of the above is meant to suggest anything but that equal opportunity and equal rights under the law are of paramount importance, but the attempt to artificially eradicate the natural forces of capitalism, which includes that some will be better off than others, or to legislate the success of some to improve the economic lot of one or more groups -- even with the very best of intentions, will not only fail, but cause the society to fail.  Conservatism, so effective to combat the excesses of modern progressivism, is often fatally flawed by its holding on to a status quo or tradition of privilege beyond its cultural life for the comfort of some  (hence, Hayek's essay, Why I am not a Conservative at the end of The Constitution of Liberty). But as effective as liberalism has been in many pursuits to eradicate a rigid class and racial system and bring about more equality in the law in some regards (and it has succeeded in America in most of its goals) the extremes of its program utterly fail in its "fatal conceit" of economic planning and efforts to artificially level the playing field, making the law in fact less equal, with consequential economic disaster.