The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy
Ever a man for all crises, Judge Richard Posner has yet another new book out, this time on the failure of representative democracy to properly handle the storm and stress of the current economic malaise. I haven’t read it, but Niall Ferguson’s review in this Sunday’s NYTimes piqued my interest:
For Posner, the American system of government is “cumbersome, clotted, competence- challenged, even rather shady.” He confesses himself “perplexed by how government . . . has managed to escape most of the blame for our current economic state.” Well, maybe because his fellow Keynesians have relentlessly lauded government as the solution…
Posner makes it clear that he understands the risks the United States now faces as the crisis of private finance continues its metamorphosis into a crisis of public finance: an exploding debt relative to gross domestic product; larger risk premiums as investors prepare for higher inflation or a weaker dollar; rising interest rates; a greater share of tax revenues going for interest payments; a diminishing share of resources available for national security as opposed to Social Security. “As an economic power,” Posner concludes, “we may go the way of the British Empire.” Indeed. It seems not to have struck the judge that British decline and the rise of Keynesianism went hand in hand.
Posner’s born again Keynesianism always seemed a bit of a put on to me. I’ll have to read the book. It’s interesting to see him investigate the tensions between capitalism and democracy. But in his prescriptions, it sounds like he’s all theory, while willfully disregarding the practice he himself condemns. He diagnoses a serious problem inherent in the very fabric of U.S. governance–sluggishness, demagoguery, ineffective policy–but then assumes those problems away in his suggested remedies. Stimulus spending, bailouts–this is chum in the water for political sharks. How could he not see these two go hand in hand?
What would you get if you combined chaotic, bottom-up urban development in Nigeria with seasteading? Perhaps something like Mokoko, a region of Lagos built on the water. Residents pay to have trash delivered to their doorsteps to build landfill. In a city of 10 million, about 100,000 live on water. Watch this excerpt below from the BBC special. It’s astounding–I’m mean just heroic, to see these entrepreneurs who specialize in squeezing everything they can out of such difficult circumstances. Layers and layers of ingenuity and relentlessly resourceful people. Think about their process to create land, discovered when they realized how quickly wooden plank bridges rotted: they pay about 30 pence per pile to have rubbish diverted their way from a local dump. They collect it and pile it and wait six months for it to settle. Six months! They then cover it with sawdust (collected from nearby saw mills) to mitigate any repugnant smells. Finally, once it’s stable, they cover it yet again with sand and stomp on it. Voila–land! Trial and error at its best.
New Threats To Freedom
Always the purveyor of sugar free pessimism, David Brooks once lamented that we’ve become a culture that prizes aggregation above creation. Instead of embracing single creators, Brooks said we now pile the long tail of cultural debris on a pedestal and call it king.
But there’s an artistry and philosophy to aggregation that Brooks overlooks. Not only can collections possess a strange beauty (for example, WALL*E’s collection of knickknacks or T.S. Eliot’s heaps of broken images) but they also can be useful. I have here a new book edited by Adam Bellow. It’s called New Threats to Freedom: From Banning Ice Cream Trucks in Brooklyn to Abandoning Democracy Around the World. Bellow has put together a remarkable collection of essays by an eclectic group of professors, journalists, intellectuals, and other wordsmiths, all on the topic of what’s corroding the mainstays of liberty in America. I mention the artistry of the aggregator because Bellow’s collection would not be mine. Instead of a disquisition on democratically induced sclerosis, it at times reflects different, more conservative concerns, but of course that is why I find the book so useful. I suppose a handful of chapters in this book will irritate “libraltarians.” But Bellow can draw me in with essays from our own sometime contributor, Max Borders, or Richard Epstein on excessive and oppressive regulation, and by doing so, get me to stick around to read about ingratitude (Mark T. Mitchell) or self-absorbed single women who vote for progressive policies (Jessica Gavora). These last two aren’t what I would consider to be dire threats to freedom, but it’s interesting to me that there are people who do.
The essays are arranged alphabetically but this leads to some interesting pairings and felicitous contrasts. Right after reading Mark Helprin’s essay on the intolerance of the new atheists, you can follow that up with new atheist Christopher Hitchens’ musings on the thought police of multiculturalism. Or again, after reading Katherine Mangu-Ward’s nicely drawn survey of democratically supported paternalism, you can read Tara McKelvey’s misgivings about America’s reluctance to promote democracy abroad. For a book of this kind, these kinds of philosophical tensions are a good thing on the whole, I suppose. Freedom is a nebulous concept and its friends are a diverse bunch.
Bellow by no means suggests that his collection is exhaustive. But I can’t help but raise a few points about threats left off the discussion table–democratic sclerosis and the decline of nations, increasing centralization of power, democratic fundamentalism, the church of unlimited government and its psychology, xenophobia, and so on. The main criticism I have is that it doesn’t examine the tensions between democracy and liberty. As in many other books, the words democracy and freedom are treated as near synonyms when they ought to be treated as potentially conflicting concepts.
Of course there are other ways of aggregating information about threats to freedom. A prediction market would do a better job ranking the importance of these threats and their likelihood. But then we’d be left without the eloquence of David Mamet–“The first amendment ensures not that speech will be fair, but that it will be free. It cannot be both.” And the status-affiliation of associating ourselves with such people. Maybe in the best of all worlds we’ll have both–solidarity and facts. In the meantime, give Bellow’s collection a read and decide for yourself.
Advertising In a World of Competitive Governance
Flying on Singapore Airlines has its virtues: superior service and exposure to ads for people who vote with their feet. Frederic Sautet writes:
On long-haul flights, one can watch ads before the on-demand movies (you can actually skip the ads if you want). One of the ads is for Silversea which is a luxury condos company aimed at expats. The ad shows a video of the place with gorgeous Westerners doing some shopping, sunbathing, and having a good time. And the caption reads: “No capital gains tax; no currency controls; no restriction on foreign ownership; no inheritance tax; no withholding tax for sale of properties; no value added tax”. That’s all. Nothing is said about the place itself. Clearly, businesses in Singapore know what a difference the island-state’s tax system can make to foreigners desiring to invest their money. This is global tax competition at work for you. Actually, one should rather call it “institutional competition.” This is the way Singapore Inc. establishes its name and reputation. I can’t imagine such an ad on Olympic Air, Air France, Iberia, Alitalia, British Airways, or United, just to name a few.
I’ve written about similar ads for Free Economic Zones in Korea and elsewhere here. Btw, it’s interesting to compare these ads with yesterday’s Pennsylvanian tax ad. Differences in tone reflect the underlying political philosophies.
The Economist says a mobile Europe would segregate itself into like-minded philosophies:
What would Euro-seasteads do?
Orwellian Pennsylvanian Tax Ad
This is so creepy and obviously stupid it feels like a set-up. But it looks real and here we are:
Victims of Communism Day Blogging
Communist Relics: A Portion of the Berlin Wall That Now Sits on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles
Our own Jonathan Wilde has organized a day in remembrance for those who perished and suffered under communist rule. Some links:
- Jonathan’s main page at Distributed Republic, with a collection of links, to be updated as more come in.
- Bryan Caplan takes a shot at some counterfactual history: What if Lenin had died in 1917?
- Ilya Somin at Volokh
- Michael Strong here at LATNB
Stay tuned for more.
“The Soviet system, according to Malcolm Cowley, the American writer, ‘was capable of supplying the moral qualities that writers missed in bourgeois society: comradeship in struggle, the self-imposed discipline, the ultimate purpose . . . the opportunity for heroism and human dignity.’ Leon Feuchtwanger, the German writer, rejoiced in the ‘invigorating atmosphere’ of the Soviet Union where he found ‘clarity and resolution.’ John Dewey compared the ethos prevailing in the Soviet Union to ‘the moving spirit and force of primitive Christianity,’ and Edmund Wilson confessed that ‘you feel in the Soviet Union that you are on the moral top of the world where the light never really goes out.’ J.D. Bernal, the British scientist, found ‘sense of purpose and achievement’ and was persuaded that ‘the cornerstone of the [Soviet] Marxist state was the utilization of human knowledge, science and technique, directly for human welfare.’”
–Paul Hollander, “Judgments and Misjudgments,” in Lee Edwards, The Collapse of Communism
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins, my sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
–Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
Romance is no excuse for evil.
The slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” stimulates our atavistic moral impulses much as the sight of a woman’s body stimulates a man’s primitive reproductive impulses. Both impulses can be perverted.
Marxism conflated the desire to help those in need with an intellectual system and political agenda based explicitly on violence and deceit. This redirection of primitive moral desire towards an evil end is just as much a perversion of human nature as is the redirecting of sexual desire towards a child. Romantic illusions, such as
“you feel in the Soviet Union that you are on the moral top of the world where the light never really goes out”
or
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins, my sin, my soul.”
are not an excuse for evil.
The lingering effects of this romance corrupt the intellectual world to this day. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I should not need to remind readers that communism explicitly celebrated the idea of violent revolution leading to a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and according to which most known forms of morality, including human rights and justice, were dismissed as merely “bourgeois morality.” Respect for human life was regarded as a bourgeois prejudice that could be overcome for the Marxist cause at any time, as Lenin stated explicitly in a speech published in Pravda in 1920:
“We say: morality is what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the working people around the proletariat, which is building up a new, communist society.”
If killing human beings “served to destroy the old exploiting society” then killing human beings was regarded as moral. The subsequent actions of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and other Marxist leaders made it perfectly clear that the idealistic goal of building up a “new, communist society” led to the justification of mass murder. Ideas have consequences.
Marxist communism was based on an intellectual system that openly justified dishonesty, violence, and murder in countless public writings that were debated as respectable intellectual material in universities around the world throughout the 20th century. More than a hundred million people died as a result, and easily a billion more are unnecessarily poor today. Thousands of years of cultural capital – trust, work ethics, craftsmanship, traditions, civility, and morality itself – were cheerfully obliterated in an unbelievably stupid, sadistic, and ineffective system. We will never know the full human cost of Marxist communism.
Absurdly, when I bring up the crimes of communism to many people, they often respond with comments such as “we all have blood on our hands” or “capitalist wars have killed millions as well.” But while the theory of communism explicitly advocated violence and dishonesty, the theory of classical liberalism was explicitly based on voluntary consent and honesty. Advocates of classical liberalism in both the 19th century and 20th century have been among the leading opponents of imperialism and war precisely because they saw imperialism and war as betrayals of classical liberal principles. Violence is unambiguously a betrayal of classical liberal principles. Violence was unambiguously a legitimized element of Marxist theory and practice. It was not an accident.
The intellectual reputations and moral credibility of Martin Heidegger and Paul De Man are forever tainted by their support for the Nazis. They are still influential intellectuals, but their judgment is questioned, they cannot be taken as intellectually or morally authoritative insofar as their intellectual prowess failed to prevent them from making a horrible mistake in moral judgment.
Leading 20th century intellectuals advocated communism, were “fellow travelers,” or apologized for communist crimes, and yet more than twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall there has been no reckoning of this failure of moral judgment. While there were certainly people who innocently allied themselves with communism who were ignorant of the Marxist endorsement of violence and deceit, there were plenty of intellectuals who were fully aware of comments such as that of Lenin above. The conspiracy of silence around this particular romance of evil continues.
What can one do when one lives in a world in which the accomplices of evil are living peacefully all around us? What can one do when the iconography of Che and Mao remain fashion statements? How does one communicate the revulsion that we all ought to feel towards an ideology of violence that was beloved by many of the most respected thinkers of the 20th century?
A woman I once dated had an uncle who exposed himself to young girls in her family. In the social climate of the 1960s, everyone knew that he did it, but no one talked about it and no one stopped it. I had a great uncle, a drunk, who hit on all the nubile young girls at family gatherings, and only much later did I hear about it from various cousins who had been hit on by him. Many families had such an uncle, or cousin, or friend, or whatever, and the tradition was not to talk about it.
A sea change in moral perspective has occurred, thanks to feminism, in which we now realize that these issues must be addressed openly and directly, or else they will continue to take place and the perpetrators will continue to walk among us. The pope is currently under scrutiny for allegedly allowing pedophile priests to escape condemnation and prosecution. Roman Polanski was recently arrested for raping a thirteen-year old girl nearly thirty years ago. Teachers are liable for criminal prosecution for not reporting suspicions of child abuse. Our society has created a bright moral line around the issue of pedophilia; there is nothing funny, charming, or romantic about it.
And yet Nabokov’s Lolita creates a sympathetic narrative in which the reader experiences pedophilia as romance. The morally mature reader is expected to transcend the narrative created by Humbert, and realize what a moral monster he is. Yet no doubt countless less morally mature readers are drawn into the erotic fantasy of Humbert’s world without realizing the moral monstrosity they have thereby become.
The romance of communism stimulated the political fantasy life of intellectuals for more than a hundred years. A few morally mature intellectuals realized what a moral monster communism was, and yet countless less morally mature intellectuals were drawn into the political fantasy of communism without ever realizing what moral monsters they had become.
John Kenneth Galbraith was one of the most celebrated intellectuals of the 20th century. A PEN prize was recently named after him. And yet he celebrated Mao’s cultural revolution in his 1973 account of his trip to China (All Galbraith quotations below are from Theodore Dalrymple’s excellent article in City Journal).
Milton Friedman was one of the most hated intellectuals of the 20th century. There were protests when he won his Nobel Prize in the 1970s, and more recently when the University of Chicago proposed a Milton Friedman Center for Economic Research, more than a hundred faculty members protested the creation of such a center.
Friedman’s crime was that he provided economic advice to the military dictator Pinochet, whose regime is responsible for the deaths of several thousand people. As Friedman pointed out, he also advised the Chinese government, which even post-Mao was certainly responsible for more deaths than was the Pinochet regime. Mao was responsible for four orders of magnitude more death than was Pinochet:
- 4,000 * 10 = 40,000 * 10 = 400,000 * 10 = 4,000,000 * 10 = 40,000,000.
For those who are not math majors: Forty million is a LOT more than 4,000.
Friedman did not endorse the Pinochet regime or the Chinese communist regime. He was only interested in helping to alleviate poverty in both regimes, not in supporting the regimes themselves. He is analogous to a health care worker who is aware of an abusive situation that he cannot stop, but who continues to provide health care for the child despite awareness of the ongoing abuse.
Yes, Friedman sat down with Pinochet and with the post-Mao Chinese dictators, both of whom were murderers. But he did so in order to help the poor of both nations, and in both cases he succeeded in helping millions of people escape poverty by means of the more sensible economic policies that he proposed.
Galbraith, on the other hand, actually praised Mao’s policies. In the midst of the Cultural Revolution, after his visit to China, he managed to support the following claim by Sinologist John K. Fairbanks:
The big generalizations have all been agreed upon: There has been a tremendous betterment of the material life and morale of the common people.
Compare this with the description by Jung Chang, who actually lived through the Cultural Revolution:
“Relaxation” had become an obsolete concept: books, paintings, musical instruments, sports, cards, chess, teahouses, bars – all had disappeared. The parks were desolate, vandalized wastelands in which the flowers and the grass had been uprooted and the tame birds and goldfish killed. Films, plays, and concerts had all been banned . . . The atmosphere outside was terrifying, with all the violent street-corner denunciation meetings and all the sinister wall posters and slogans; people were walking around like zombies, with harsh or cowed expressions on their faces…
As an indication of the terror of the day, no one dared to burn or throw away any newspapers. Every front page carried Mao’s portrait, and every few lines Mao’s quotations. These papers had to be treasured and it would bring disaster if anyone saw you disposing of them. Keeping them was also a problem: mice might gnaw into Mao’s portrait, or the papers might simply rot – either of these would be interpreted as a crime against Mao…
A tremendous betterment in the morale of the people? Galbraith’s own descriptions of violence reveal a fond romanticism, “The workers were rather proud of having confined their fighting to the morning…Sadly some windows did get broken.” After the deception and sadism of Stalin’s Soviet Union, which was widely known by the 1950s, why did Galbraith and other intellectuals blindly fall in love with Mao’s China all over again in the 1960s and 70s?
Galbraith is the moral equivalent of a man who goes around telling everyone how much the girl enjoyed her “date” with Polanski (“a tremendous betterment of her morale!”), and who writes a book on how beneficially Polanski had used hot tubs, champagne, and Quaaludes to enjoy the company of young girls (“The girls rather enjoy the tussle . . . Sadly one may have to use a bit of force in the end”). From a Humbert Humbert perspective, such a book might be a good read, but some of us have the moral maturity to realize that anyone who praised Mao’s China is as much of a moral monster as Humbert was. Romance, even sincere romance, is no excuse. Humbert really did have romantic feelings for Lolita, just as Galbraith really believed his own romantic fantasy version of Maoist China.
There are cultures in which pedophilia is normal and accepted; there are tribes in New Guinea, for instance, in which young adolescent boys are taught that the more semen they swallow the stronger warriors they’ll become. There are cultures in which Marxist communism is normal and accepted; most of twentieth century academia.
When should we let bygones be bygones? The New York Times believes that the pope’s neglect of pedophiliac priests in the past is a story worth writing today. But one can’t imagine The New York Times doing an expose on academics (or reporters) who failed to report communist crimes, or who actively excused communist crimes, because there were too many, it was too normal – and The New York Times itself was too complicit in the crimes.
Marxist communism was more culturally accepted, and thereby more seductive, than pedophilia, while in sheer numbers far more human lives have been harmed. Yet its advocates live proudly among us to this day, and many of those advocates and apologists who have died continue to be honored as the leading intellectuals of the 20th century.
When will the culture of intellectuals, academia and the media, be morally mature enough to repudiate this evil, and end this conspiracy of silence?
Romance is no excuse for evil.
A Mediterranean Hong Kong
One of the more amusing bits of Paul Romer’s interview on EconTalk was about how he spends his days schmoozing the uncertain network of leaders in poor countries. He’s always talking to a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy. Evidently the President of Madagascar was on the verge of moving forward on a Charter City, but a coup put the kibosh on it. That nasty set back of regime uncertainty…so difficult!
Now maybe if you can’t persuade them, then you can buy them. I just read about two German ministers who have proposed that Greece ought to sell some of its islands to cover the costs of its debt. Near Africa, under the belly of Europe, west of the Middle East, great views, and weather, shipping lanes to kingdom come…what’s not to love?
The Dark Side of Competitive Government?
Lawrence Auster, the curmudgeonly traditionalist conservative blogger (who you should probably be reading – he’s very intelligent, a great writer, and you will disagree with him 90% of the time) has a spring in his step after reading an AP story about immigrants who are planning to leave Arizona due to the new immigration law:
Most of the illegals interviewed by the AP are planning to go to other states in the U.S., such as California, Texas, and Utah. Excellent. The Arizona law, if it survives court challenges and goes into effect, will create a competitive market among states based on enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws. Those states that don’t pass a law similar to Arizona’s will end up with all the illegals, which will lead most of the illegal alien-attracting states to pass such a law…
(bold mine)
The implications of changes in immigration levels in other states, I fear, may work out exactly as Mr. Auster predicts. The problem is heightened by the fact that many states are facing massive budget crises, that probably aren’t going to get any better anytime soon – Megan McArdle wrote an excellent post arguing that the sovereign debt crisis will be the next one to blow up. So what if all the predictions of conservatives are correct about the detrimental effect of immigration on state budgets, and 2-3 years from now Arizona’s budget is in fantastic shape, and the surrounding states are even deeper in debt? A few things can happen. One is that states could realize that maybe, just maybe, it’s their social democratic policies that are the problem, and not immigrants. (I know, I’m hilarious.) So then these states are left in a situation where they can either a) go bankrupt or b) throw all out all the immigrants. And really, a) will almost certainly lead to b), as a group of legislators that would choose bankruptcy over immigrant-bashing will soon be a replaced by a group of legislators happy to take the other side.
There is a silver lining – any situation in which a large number of states were to put in place Arizona-like laws would lead Congress to undertake immigration reform with urgency. The federal government (especially a democrat-led federal government) and the state government have very different incentives with regard to immigration – the Democrats get votes, better relations with Mexico, and increased revenue from immigration, whereas the states are generally bearing the costs. So, we would expect to see massive guest-worker programs, and also a massive expansion of H1-B visas and the like, in order to circumvent the enforcement of the law. Which might actually leave us with a non-insane immigration policy, where it’s very simple to get into the country legally.
But I don’t necessarily see a reason to be too optimistic. Betting on the rationality of Congress is, as always, a good way to end up in the poorhouse. Because while states may be able to compete on the basis of law enforcement, there’s no competition with regard to the law itself – and it’s that competition that would actually put pressure on governments to act rationally.
Let A Thousand Nations Bloom 