Where has Wealth Discrepancy Come From and Where is it Going?

Where does the inequality come from? Could it be that the saying "The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer" is right? It has happened in virtually every age and every country. Obviously the dynamic has taken many different forms -- the economy of the middle ages was not that of the "gilded Age" which was somewhat different from the (American) economy of the 1920s, which was somewhat different from that of today. The economies of 18th century France, of the Pharaohs, the Chinese Mandarins, the Aztec lords -- all no doubt substantially different. When power of any sort (including that of money) reaches some critical mass, it will snowball unless there is some counteracting force. The economic dynamic of recent decades (at least) is that if you have a large enough pot of money to invest with appropriate diversification, in periods when the market is rising 20-30% a year, it is obvious what can happen. If you are well enough connected, when the market crashes, you can be one of the early ones to pull out. Then, until the market starts to move again, you sit on your money, or invest in the least risky (and least growth-producing) sectors.



These dynamics have not changed without some kind of intervention. We can look to Britain and the U.S. for cases of orderly intervention, as opposed to spasms of violence (which tend to produce something as bad or worse then the prior regimes).



In the late middle ages, illiterate peasants lived in mud huts while barons lived in drafty stone castles, and were almost as likely as anyone to die of the plague or childbirth. I am no master of how we got from there to today's world, but am pretty sure it involved the barons giving up some of their treasures in a way that lead to public roads and canals (in the early days), and widely available free or subsidized education, and postal systems (in the American case, these from the very beginning subsidized the spread of printed matter). In the nations that followed this policy, the rich were rewarded by having an educated healthy populace available for the development of more and more technologically brilliant and powerful enterprises. The rising tide of welfare of the "99%" lifted all boats, including those of the very rich. The nations that didn't follow such policies, where the rich and powerful tried to hang onto everything, suffered a huge decline in relative strength and succumbed to colonization.

Another saving grace, in the case of the U.S. – the U.S. was exceptional alright; it had a huge public domain — the vast preponderance of potential capital, consisting of public lands belonged to the government, and unlike Russia in the 1990s, a newly minted democracy in a similar position, we did not say “This is terrible — all this property in the hands of government — we have to get rid of it, putting huge chunks into private hands or something terrible will happen”; instead we calmly, or the course of 100 years or so, sold it mostly in small plots to individual farmers, and sometimes even give it free to homesteaders, and we also set aside portions as assets to pay for educational institutions. Why? Because our government had the “general welfare” of the people in mind.


But omigod, that sounds like a welfare state! Well yes, the "welfare state" as conceived by people who see value in it, is not about "welfare", which has curiously become another word for the dole. It is about a state which takes positive actions for the welfare of its citizens. Unfortunately, we have become so unimaginative as to think the only way to do that is to dole out money to those out of work. And the U.S., and even more so Europe, have suffered by creating a class of people with nothing to do and no sense of purpose, which is not in the interest of anyone's welfare.

I'm Making Some Progress on "Knowledge in a Social World" Despite My Ridiculous Isolation

I am ridiculously isolated; isolated enough to go crazy.  This comes partly from being self-employed in the business of selling (mostly used) books via internet and the mail.  It wasn't always like this.  At my wedding about 25 years ago, there were two large groups of friends, maybe 20-30 in each category: A folk-dance circle based in Redbank NJ, and another group of volunteers for a subgroup of something called "Breakthrough Foundation - Youth at Risk" that I was leading.  Back then I spent a few nights out most every week which involved hanging out and talking with friends.  I won't try to deal with how I got from there to here -- just giving a sort of "full disclosure".  Maybe I'm a social person; maybe not so much.

But I can't remember a time when I didn't see knowledge as a very social phenomenon.  What kind of firm foundation for knowledge is it to crawl into ones head wondering "How do I know anything? How can I know anything?" and then to say "Hey I sense these words going around.  What can that be but myself, and therefore 'I think, therefore I exist'".

Thomas Berger, The Social Construction of Reality  has been an idea in the wind for at least half a century.  My reaction to the title was "Yes, of course!"  My reaction to the book a big disappointment.  I never tried to summarize that book and it's been a long time since I read it, but my first posting in my first attempt at a blog, "The Ontological Comedian", on the author's 's other famous book, was "Berger's Sacred Canopy". I wrote it in December 2005.  It was short, and like so many of my other postings, ended with [to be continued].

My second idea for a blog was called "The Real Truth Project".  Its manifesto, as presently stated, is:

 What is "The Real Truth Project"?
Understanding of the world around us is a survival need -- as much so as food or shelter. Yet we seem barely concerned by the fact that all but the tiniest portion of what we think we know comes packaged and delivered to us from .. other realms that we hardly know even exist. I don't mean some kind of supernatural realms -- I just mean hundreds of thousands (at least) of academics, reporters, teachers, government spokesmen, and sometimes friends, family, and neighbors.

Considering this, it is remarkable that our sense of reality has protected and served us to the degree that it has. In North Korea, to take an extreme example, people are totally controlled through the picture of reality they receive. It is such a radical distortion of reality that a mini-encyclopedia of basic facts about the rest of the world has been made to present to those few who get out, or who visit China. It is called "Welcome to the World", and generally comes on a PC thumb drive or memory card. (SOURCE LINK)

Philosophers of truth/knowledge ("epistemologists") have long debated what we know and how we know it - but under the unconscious unquestioned assumption that we must act as individuals and must take the world just as we find it.

Today, I think we must ask "How can we adjust the world so we might tell at least the most important truths from falsehoods? As an ultra-simple metaphor, think of adjusting a telescope to bring something into focus. It sounds presumptuous, but otherwise, I fear, we are headed toward a brave new world of perfect counterfeiting of reality which will make it far more difficult to maintain our freedom.

I named this blog the Real Truth Project because "The Truth Project" was already appropriated -- by TWO entities. One, a "Focus on the Family" project to promote a "biblical world view"; the other advocating a sort of leftest paranoia -- that the 9/11 attacks were faked by the U.S. government. They call themselves "truthers". It is strange how the phrase the truth is made to serve one or another particular (often obsessive) idea, rather than suggesting the whole staggering business of making words reflect what is going on around us.

 It certainly has not to date turned into a "project", and it sort of largely drifted into debunking of political nonsense, esp on forwarded emails, sort of summarized in "My Not-really-right-wing Mom and her adventures in Email-Land".

I also wrote a longish rant about "Epistemologies of the Right - a slapdash prospectus", a much more ambitious attempt at profundity.

Finally, about a year ago, I felt I was maybe zeroing in on something with an "Epistemology of Consensus".  Partly, it was Daniel Boorstin who opened my eyes with Daniel Boorstin, The Discoverers; in particular revelatory comments on the Enlightenment as a cluster of social phenomena one of which centered around the Royal Society [of London for Improving Natural Knowledge], and its "Transactions", the prototype of all peer-reviewed scientific journals.  Getting to know the "Early Modern Period", esp. the English, as key to understanding the ideas of the American Revolution, and some classes at Rutgers in the History of Ideas kept some of my thinking circling in the same vicinity.

When an odd concept pops into my mind which I think may be a useful distinction, yet I've never heard anyone use it, I have from time to time experimented with "googling" phrases that attempt to express it, to see if what if anything has been said about it, and see if I might join in the conversation.  So far joining in the conversation hasn't worked out too well.  "Ontological Comedian" was one such phrase.  I think there might have been only 1 or 2 hits, but it lead me to accidentally discover Ricky Gervais, creator of the original "The Office" series and the IMHO better series "Extras".

And Then Something Happened

My interest in "Epistemology of Consensus" was growing, in part due the Climate Deniers' (some people are infuriated by the associations they make to "Holocaust Deniers" when the phrase comes up.  I can only say that there are all sorts of deniers: evolution deniers, God deniers, consciousness deniers, ..., and it is useful to distinguish the deniers from the true skeptics.) frequent use of the meme "science is not based on consensus".

When I tried "Social Epistemology", voila, there was something there.  Prior to discovering the Wikipedia article, I found it was the name of a book and a journal by Steve Fuller, and I got the book Social Epistemology. I was disappointed with that book, however.  Fuller seemed to be, despite his protestations, too close to a post-modernist.  Post-modernism has, by the way, some popularity with religious intellectuals, and, wouldn't you know it, Fuller is a defender of "Intelligent Design".

I was learning that "social epistemology" had been taken in "two divergent directions" by Fuller and Alvin Goldman, and have just today started to look into Goldman and
                       this really seems like what I've been looking for!!

 The decription in its Amazon entry says he creates

"a thoroughgoing social epistemology, moving beyond the traditional focus on solitary knowers. Against the tides of postmodernism and social constructionism Goldman defends the integrity of truth and shows how to promote it by well-designed forms of social interaction. From science to education, from law to democracy, he shows why and how public institutions should seek knowledge-enhancing practices. The result is a bold, timely, and systematic treatment of the philosophical foundations of an information society."

 [to be continued]

Meanderings - 1

OK, instead of me telling you "what's so" like John Travolta in Get Shorty, might the process of meandering around the web trying to make better sense of the world through it, be more engaging?  OK, I'm trying that now.

Ezra Klein's economic blog (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein) leads me to a book titled Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy.  Kindle edition $4, which kind of illustrates the point.  Amazon may be replacing most aspects of publishing, as well as book stores.

When the next really radical change comes, how will we be able to deal with it? and if it's beyond the capability of most people to understand it, how will we be able to trust those who will make the decisions?

I don't say "will we", but "how will we", not out of a happy confidence in the future, but because only if we can is there any real point in thinking and talking about it.  Otherwise it's just idle, if possibly entertaining, talk like "Who do you think will win the game?"  I don't have a happy confidence in the future, but really don't know.  So many parts of the world have been put through so many catastrophes that they couldn't have imagined previously.  The U.S. hasn't had a catastrophe on a fraction of the scale of World War II (the way Europe and Russia experienced it) since 1865.

So the chances may be a billion to one (there's no way to know what they are really), but I can only find any sense of dignity in living as if I, with others, can find a way to cope with whatever crisis may come along, in large part by having accountable leaders such as I don't believe we have at present.  I don't  believe the quality of the leaders is as big a problem as the lack of a real and effective linkage between us and them.

Although I haven't been a human resources executive, or any executive involved in hiring employees for business, it seems safe to say that the process by which we hire our leaders is ludicrous.  The process isn't usually referred to as "hiring", but why not?  It seems like a reassertion of our dignity to do so.  We tend to see them as gods or heroes, or scoundrels or worse.

[to be continued]

The Benefits of Economic Freedom Require (guess what?) An Economy

In 2003, Iraq was turned into a nation of people with no jobs and no way to get jobs, no daily routine, and essentially nothing to lose. However, the existence of an occupying power, and a few fanatic demagogues filled the void for many of those newly directionless people, and what happenned next is pretty well known.  It should have been predictable


Let me take a stab at a rough division into sectors of economies in the modern world:

• Government proper - military, police, courts, postal service, tax collection, ...
• Government-industrial complex - i.e. most manufacturing in the USSR as well as in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, but should we also include road building and maintenance in the U.S.?
• Education - may well belong to some larger category - to be determined.
• Private goods-creation (industry but also building, restaurants, ...)
• The business of exchange of everything else
• The Primordial Soup, from which new political life forms are apt to emerge. The people with nothing to do and nothing to lose.

So you could say one factor in Iraq was that half or more of the population got thrown into the primordial soup overnight. A similar thing happened in post-Soviet Russia.

Iraq seems to have been approached with the simplistic idea that, with the help of the "invisible hand":


  Toppling the dictator ==>
          Freedom and Democracy ==>
                  Things will be "normal" like in the U.S.

Had our government instead done a sober analysis of the institutions that kept peoples' lives from falling apart, and tried to preserve their continuity (with improvements to be made over time), we would not have set up such a breeding ground for both plain criminality (first looting and trashing the infrastructure) and later, a multi-headed beast of a terrorist insurgency.

These institutions included "inefficient" state run industry (by the quotes I'm not asserting it was efficient, but compared to what? To nothing being manufactured, and people having no place to go to work?), which I gather the occupying forces tried to disband overnight, as well as the military, which was either disbanded or non-functional during the period when most of what was left of Iraq's infrastructure was destroyed, which made it far more difficult to bring back any sort of normal economic life, which in turn multiplied the number of people being dumped into the primordial soup.

The disbanding of the state industrial complex was done in the name of Free Marketism, but it took the Iraqis further away from the ideal of a humming society of people producing and exchanging goods.

"Free marketers" tend to be fixated on noninterference and nonparticipation by government to the point of overlooking the destruction of the closest thing to a market that there was, and leaving a chaotic vacuum, as happened in Iraq and Russia.  The Russia case is well described in Sale of the Century: Russia's Wild Ride from Communism to Capitalism.

[this is an update of a previous post]

Bipolarism vs Radical Centeredness

"There are two kinds of people in the world,
     people who think there are two kinds of people in the world,
     and people who don't."
                    --source unknown

"You're either with us or against us".  --George W. Bush

"You're either part of the solution or part of the problem." --Eldridge Cleaver

Usually, when you hear "There are two kinds of people in the world...", you can expect to hear two characteristics one of which the speaker approves of and thinks he or she has, and the other is bad in any of an infinite number of ways (lazy, greedy, stupid, elitist, ...).

When confronted with a problem, our minds are always tempted to find out who is to blame, and, if possible, do something to them -- in the mild case, maybe putting them out of office.  When we can't do much directly, we take inordinate pleasure in labeling, ridiculing, and disparaging those we think are to blame; we often compete to see who comes up with the best zinger, or put-down.  Frequently, I read comment sections of blogs, and that is practically all that I see going on -- clever and not so clever put-downs of some favorite target or class of people.

What is the purpose of all this labeling, ridiculing or satirizing of some perceived villain or fool, that goes on when like minded people get together?  I think it sharpens the consensus on who the people to blame are.  They are the people with nice clothes and their noses in the air, or the people who pay us too little, well no, they are the rich, or a further refinement: they are the capitalist ruling class or especially the defense contractors or oil magnates or bankers or the international Jewish conspiracy.   Or we may start out talking about rude, lazy and immoral teenagers, well particularly the, you know, inner city type, or well it's them, but what's behind them are the "politically correct" teachers, and "Did you know that political correctness is really cultural Marxism, and really, it is the Marxists and other totalitarians (Fascists, Marxists, they're all the same) who are behind everything, and anyone who wants government to solve problems has at least one foot in their camp?"

How likely is this to really solve our problems?  It may be that for most of the last 100,000 years of human existence, it worked really well (for reasons that we might consider later), and even in modern times it may have served well - when the world was rapidly being conquered with brute force by a German Nazi and Japanese militarist coalition, and it was feasible to totally demolish that juggernaut.

But what if the threat propagates not through brute force, but through ideological or religious seduction, and is diffuse, with small outposts and cells in friendly and neutral countries, and even our own country.

And what if the problem is a breakdown in the smooth functioning of the economy, and any analogy to invading armies with distinct geographical bases or anything remotely like that only occur because our minds just leap to that sort of image when we feel threatened or anxious?

Political and other belief systems tend to be more than belief systems.  Like fashion statements among teenagers, they become inseparable from our identities.  And at the same time, a counter-identity is formed in our minds, especially in troubled or anxious times, of those people that believe that other thing.  And you can tell them by the way they talk, dress, what they eat, what sports they enjoy if any, and so on.

In times of fear and anger at least, most people go around mentally dividing the world into good (or sane, or calm, or clear-headed, or angry-as-they-should-be) people like me vs those others who are screwing things up -- acting as if that was their purpose in life -- that they were absolutely born for the purpose of screwing up the world.

There are many stories of people going around confused, their lives having no meaning until that aha moment when one realizes "I am a proud member of group A, and the noblest thing to do in life is to battle those other people, of group B".

The more alarmed and fearful we are, the more clear and distinct we want the distinction to be.

[to be continued?]

Extremism is a Boring Rut. Try Radical Centeredness

Why centeredness, and not, say Radical Centrism?  Part of my sense of something pulling me towards "the center" is just that it doesn't pretend to some sort of ideological purity, when I see "-ism", especially some fresh "ism" whose corners have never gotten worn and smoothed by reality, I am on the lookout for the sort of fervent ideology that can lead to disaster, such as Bolshevism in Russia in 1917, and free market fundamentalism in Russia in the 1990s.

Funny thing.  In the comment section of a Jonah Goldberg column, (one which vividly illustrates my point in "Intimations of Bipolarity" about taking "inordinate pleasure in labeling, ridiculing, and disparaging [the other side]" and competing to comes up with the best zinger/put-down ... 60 comments and counting, a real zinger-fest at the expense of Joe Biden.  To be fair, it reminds me of Dan Quale, and all the silly unproductive ink spilled over him) Um, as I say, in the comment section of a Jonah Goldberg column, I read "After [somebody's debunking of Biden] isn't this just one more nail in the coffin of liberals' self-regard as rigid empiricists?".  Yeah, just poll 100 liberals and see how many of them confirm "Yes, I'm a proud rigid empiricist."

Except for the 100% faith based types, don't all stripes like to say "Just look at the facts".  That's "rigid empiricism" in case you weren't familiar with the phrase.  But "rigid empiricist" sounds so much more pompous, and somewhere there must be a style sheet that says "Right-thinking patriots should be presented as wanting to 'just look at the facts' while Leftist rascals should be quoted as wanting to take a "rigidly empirical" approach to the world.

Um, did I just change the subject?  Well, I was thinking of the 50s especially when "consensus" and "pragmatic" were words used fondly to describe the traits of early Americans, as in the work of  Daniel J. Boorstin, especially in his The Americans series.  Back then it was the far left who had no use for lily-livered pragmatism.

Nowadays, the right coalition is more prone to attack "pragmatism" (Not that the Trotskyites wouldn't, but they are down in a deep well where no one can hear them).  Jonah Goldberg has done a good job of this.  I picked up my copy of his Liberal Fascists, and though I haven't touched it in weeks, it happened to be bookmarked to page 52, where he says: "Crudely, Pragmatism is a form of relativism which holds that any belief that is useful is therefore necessarily true.  Conversely, any truth that is inconvenient or non-useful is necessarily untrue.  Mussolini's useful truth was the concept of a 'totalitarian' society ... The practical consequence of this idea was that everything was 'fair game' if it furthered the ends of the state".  By this (crude indeed) definition, I would say there is a tremendous amount of pragmatism in movement conservatism.  For examples, see The Integration of Theory and Practice: A Program for the New Traditionalist Movement by Eric Heubeck.

[to be continued?]

Why Subsidize Solar, etc? Fragment of debate on Grist.org

The debate is on grist.org at http://www.grist.org/politics/2011-10-18-conservatives-end-support-americas-fastest-growing-industry.

Q: if this industry is so great, why does it need governmental support?

A: The space industry got billions in government support for years
before it began to make huge contributions to weather prediction,
communication, GPS.  The first computers were built for government
applications.  The Transistor, laser, micro-circuits and much more came
out of Bell Labs, a sort of R&D mega-university that would only have
existed in the regulated world of the old AT&T.  Jet planes were a
product of government military investment.  The Internet was a purely
governmental creation, developed as a robust worldwide platform that
happened to be able to support an open networked marketplace while
Microsoft and AOL were developing centralized command and control based
networks.

Sun-based (including wind and hydro) power will succeed
in time even with no support.  Solar is largely a product of
semiconductor physics and materials science which have huge momentum if
only more of it would be focused on photovoltaic capture, and we already
see solar power cost-effectiveness growing much much faster then the
GDP.  If it takes a decade or two longer for it to make a big impact,
due to lack of gov't support, we will be asking ourselves why we had to
blow up so many mountains, and keep pumping up the accidental and
inordinate powers of Saudi princes, and Venezuala, Russia for those
decades, and maybe fight a couple more avoidable wars, and yes maybe
accidentally transform the climate system in disastrous ways.

Trickle Up Economics - It's Not a Joke

I thought of the phrase  "trickle up economics" at least as far back last June, when I wrote about it in More on my sad state PLUS Trickle up Economics.  Others have thought of it before me, but only now do I see the phrase used much in public debate, as we hear it from the "Occupy Wall Street" and its associated movements.  I have no idea if that movement will do any good.  I do notice the right is having a field day scaring people with "Class Warfare" talk.

But as Warren Buffet said “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”  The remark was noted in 2006 by Ben Stein, who in many ways seems far-right, but here he was favorably recalling a conversation with Buffet about guess what?  The fact that he pays so much less tax percentage-wise than his secretaries and other staff (apparently Buffet has been on this subject for at least 5 years)  And here is Stein providing a fact-check on the claim that lower taxes are sure to bring in more revenue by stimulating the economy:

This is supposedly proved by the history of tax receipts since my friend George W. Bush became president.

In fact, the federal government collected roughly $1.004 trillion in income taxes from individuals in fiscal 2000, the last full year of President Bill Clinton’s merry rule. It fell to a low of $794 billion in 2003 after Mr. Bush’s tax cuts (but not, you understand, because of them, his supporters like to say).

But enough on the "fair share" argument.  I want to talk about examples of the ultra-upper-class relaxing some of their tight grip on wealth improved the lives of the poorer classes, and how that "trickled up" to the ultra-upper-class in the form of tremendous improvements in their quality of life.

Once upon a time, Barons and such were vastly richer than the common people who were illiterate and lived in squalid huts.  But these Barons still had to live in drafty stone castles, and be subject to the black plague and the most awful lingering diseases of old age that started at around age 40.  Also, due to the scarcity (and indivisibility) of privileged positions, they tended to get murdered by their peers.  They could certainly not eat strawberries in the winter or fly to warmer climates.

Why do today's richest .01% live so much better lives?  Why can they live in climate controlled houses bigger and more comfortable than the old castles?  Why do they enjoy all the exotic and wonderful food of the world, fly all over the world, suffer so little from disease; enjoy life to the age of 80 and older, with new hips and knees when they need them?  It is because over the last several centuries, the nations of the world (sometimes to the dismay of their 18th, 19th and 20th century counterparts) found ways to educate most; perhaps the vast majority of people, not just the rich few who could have multiple tutors.  And the nations invested in public works, and public transportation, and finally in the 19th and 20th centuries, limits were placed on the working hours of the laboring classes which allowed the creative and energetic to better themselves.  All of this involved the nation spending for the common good

What's that got to do with improving lives of Barons? Some of the former peasants with the help of literacy became printers producing more books than had ever been seen before.  With the Industrial Revolution, some of them rose to be manufacturers, inventing new mechanisms for efficiency and far better transportation.

Also, quite recently, in the U.S. in particular the GI bill and highly subsidized state colleges helped make the technological explosion of the last few decades possible, which has benefited everyone's quality of life, including the lives of the richest .01% -- probably benefited them far beyond what they gave up in taxes.

Around 1970, I went to college in my home town and paid $150 tuition (state subsidized) for a semester.  Now their tuition is over $4,000.

It takes a huge educated middle class to create the world that we in the most developed countries live today.

That is trickle up economics.  I hope to see the day when thousands of right wing think tanks and movement and pseudo-movements stop waging war to bring about a government that can be "drowned in the bathtub", and allowing the advantages of the rich to snowball and snowball (by the way Snowball is the title of a book by Warren Buffet) until they are in a totally different world from the rest of us.  I believe broad based prosperity (not the widening gap between rich and poor of the last several decades) is in everyone's interest, and think there has to be some way this will penetrate even the minds of most of the inhabitants of Richistan, and their political allies.

How Consensus is Shaped by Pivotal Events and How Consensus Defines What is Possible

The consensus view of reality generated in earlier times by the much maligned mainstream media, or MMMSM (esp. in the days of the big three television networks) had massive flaws and deficiencies, but at least they never stampeded Americans into the sort of madness that German culture and institutions underwent during the 1930s, which lead to World War II.

I'm afraid this faint praise may represent an achievement far more difficult and fragile than we would imagine or wish.  My impression is that most of us had a "good enough to get by" sense of who or what institutions to trust, more or less, and our institutions were structured such that trusting them would not lead to civilization's collapse.

Very recently, I learned something new about the structure of the institution which would become the Nazi Goebbels' propaganda ministry, which shaped the worldviews of true believers prior to 1933, and soon after that, shaped the worldviews of the German people as a whole.  According to Prof. Thomas Childers, in his course of lectures on tape, Europe and Western Civilization in the Modern Age, at Goebbels' direction, the Nazis went to taverns and beer halls and got people to talk about what issues they were angry about, in order to fine tune the Nazi message.  Goebbels said "That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is bad which fails to achieve the desired result .. It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success."  The ideas the Nazis put in their speeches and newspapers were mostly about Germany's humiliation, the idea that the whole world was out to get Germany, the sense of humiliation and outrage of ordinary Germans, including their being looked down on by elites, and unemployment and the like.  Even when in power, some early attempts to go after the Jews had to be rolled back until the German people were better conditioned.  It was not until 1938, 5 years after Hitler became Chancellor that the Nazi government launched Kristallnacht, which was the real beginning of  a relentless centralized policy of persecution (after years of centrally encouraged thuggish persecution).

[To be continued]

Elizabeth Warren, George Will, Social Contracts, and Paying it Forward

Elizabeth Warren's unplanned YouTube appearance ("nobody in this country ... got rich on their own" and "you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along") has gotten George Will, the Von Mises Institute, (I seem to get 17,900 hits googling "Elizabeth Warren" + site:mises.org -- your mileage may vary), and the right from coast to coast quite steamed up.  It looks as if they think they've found a "teachable moment".

George Will draws on a William F. Buckley quip ("a pyromaniac in a field of straw men"), and says she "refutes propositions no one asserts", then refutes a proposition that Warren never asserted: "that the collectivity (Warren’s 'the rest of us') is entitled to take as much as it pleases of the results of the striving".  Much of this is pure spin - some creepy thing called "the collectivity" vs the "rest of us", but there is one clear-cut and bold distortion: "entitled to take as much as it pleases"? Where does that come from?

Amartya Sen, in The Idea of Justice breaks with the idea of the social contract (mentioned elsewhere by Warren), which, according to Sen, anchors our ideas of justice to some grand view of the ideal state and/or society in which contradictory impulses must be rigorously resolved. By "grand view" I do not especially mean one of "big government", but one rigorously based on some theory (whether of of "big government" or government which "gets out of the way").

Will seems to view any concept of "fairness" as incompatible with freedom to create and exchange.

Often, there are two or more values that would appeal to most people's common sense, but there are always situations where one value can only be favored at the expense of the other.  In this situation, people who want everything to be governed by a simple and absolute set of axioms (from Ayn Rand and von Mises to Karl Marx) have embrace one value and treat the other as nonexistent or wicked.

Anyone but a highly doctrinaire socialist can see value in the empowerment of individuals to produce and exchange freely, and not to have possessions taken away arbitrarily.

On the other hand, I think that anyone whose mind has not been closed would see a great deal of arbitrary injustice in the world, and feel some urgency about addressing the most exceptional cases.  Such closed mindedness can have many origins:

• rigid ideology,
• excessive fear that "the path to Hell is paved with good intentions" (Good intentions frequently don't lead to Hell, and sometimes the path to Hell is paved by obviously bad intentions, like those of Adolf Hitler)
• fear of putting ones foot on the "slippery slope".
• the natural human tendency (often cleverly manipulated) to dismiss people unlike us as not really human.
• the tendency to think "there must be a good reason for it", often assisted by clever rationalizations (e.g. Malthusianism, Social Darwinism, and much religious thought).

Suppose you are walking along a path by a river, and on your left you spot a man a couple of dozen feet off shore, drowning, and to your right, on someone else's lawn, a length of rope, and no owner in sight.  Do you grab the rope and throw one end to the man?  Or do you say "no, I can never commandeer someone else's property that way, because that is the slippery slope to socialism and the Gulag.  I think common sense dictates the former.  On the other hand, if you happened to be carrying a gun to assert your support for the second amendment, and a gang of kids was passing by watching the man drowning and laughing (and no rope) would you point your gun at them, and say "You have to help me save that man", and threaten to shoot them unless they formed a human chain in the water to reach out and grab him?  Probably not.

What I am saying is, without even imagining the grand social contract that everyone ought to agree to for making the world as just as possible, you can see cases of unwarranted suffering and dying where common sense and common humanity demand you take some action.  I have used the provocative word demand in an emotional sense, meaning to express some disapproval of a person who passed by the drowning man and the rope and did nothing, not that I imagine some ideal world in which that person would be punished as a criminal.

There are so many exceptional cases of people suffering and dying through little or no fault of their own (and yes, the man in the river might have done something stupid to get there), and I think it is wrongheaded and foolish not to vote for (because I believe in democracy, not Big Brother) some actions to help the very unlucky, whether they are born in a desperately poor country, or are children with poor, uncaring, or foolish parents.

Property is a wonderful thing, but it is not a god to be worshiped, as some people do, in my opinion.  Like it or not, the reason we can call something "our property", is due to social agreement and to enforcement by a democratic state, and a secure and respectful society which makes it possible to create and exchange, and largely keep what is acquired in that manner.  But there is some cost of maintenance of the government and civil society that makes this possible.

Education can assist the children of the poor (through no fault of their own, that is, of the children) to prosper and take part in a flourishing economy.  But we all ("liberals" especially), get carried away with patting ourselves on the back and thinking that the things we believe in are virtuous.

Education of our own and other people's children (and for some of us, only other people's children) is also our insurance for not growing old in an ignorant and uncivilized world.  Some of us should be wondering if we bought too little insurance, or paid too little attention to its nature and effectiveness.  At one time, everyone was solely responsible for the people who would take care of them as they grew older.  When this is the case, people will have many children to give themselves better odds.  All in all, I don't think it worked very well, and I think some system (which could certainly differ in many ways from the present one) for keeping up the quality (moral and practical) of the children we will have to live with as adults in 10-20 years is a completely practical thing.  But if it was completely voluntary, and I could choose whether or not to contribute (and obviously very little would be effected strictly by my choice), we might well, through millions of individual choices, give up on the idea.

There is a very good case, with which I at least 90% agree with, for setting up a world where the hardworking productive adult has more than the lazy or those who want to produce something nobody wants.  But what a child deserves is not a function of the quality of their parents.  And unless we want to practice enforced eugenics (which I don't and almost nobody does today), we will have to live in a world where the children of the very poor get only as much education (moral and practical) as we are willing and able to provide. 

Failing this, we might at worst get a society where no amount of money can pay for "good help" (so much for insuring ourselves by saving gold).  Or we may have to keep millions of badly raised and educated adults in prison (We might wish them away -- execution was at one time so much cheaper than having a prison system, but it always had its problems, and now, with so many safeguards in the form of appeals, I think it is the most expensive kind of punishment).

Desperately Seeking Radical Centeredness - Intro

FROM THE SECOND COMING by William Butler Yeats

    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
          ...
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

                                         --or?--

   "Extremism in the name of liberty is no vice."  --Barry Goldwater


"Dissing" the center is an old game.  To many people it seems to be about lacking conviction, "flip-flopping", going with the flow, "triangulation", etc.  There is that kind of centrism.  But there can also be a resolute stand, on a given issue or set of issues, that the right answer isn't all of one thing or all of another -- that no simple set of axioms will tell us just what to do about everything; that maybe only by painstakingly studying the results of our actions will we over time discover what works best.

Then again, maybe there is a right set of principals, but we don't know what they are, and won't for a very long time.  The tenacity of people's desire to understand and get mastery is a marvel.  For thousands of years people tried to understand the body and how to correct its problems.  In all that time, there were some people looked to as medical experts.  Yet until 1-200 years ago, they had next to no really useful, applicable knowledge.

All the same, we had to have a theory, so for a long time we had the theory of humours, four bodily fluids whose imbalance caused illness.  One of the few things we could do about the balance of these fluids was remove blood.  We certainly had no safe means to add it.  The other humours, black and yellow bile, and phlegm weren't so easily removed or added.  The practice was shaped to the available tools.  To the man with only a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.  Maybe shibboleths like the liberal "Help the needy" (too often with a lack of creativity and empathy that dooms the "help" to failure) or today's Conservative/libertarian battle cry of "No new taxes!" could be usefully compared with the "medical" practice of bleeding.  There are, in fact, conditions that can be helped by reduction of the amount of blood, but far far fewer than doctors at one time imagined, when that was the only thing their theory could prescribe.

Maybe I'm for the center, and for conviction and passionate intensity.  But where do we find that?  My own reactions to political events and people has long lacked any clear explicit system.  Yet I think they are grounded -- mostly in diverse studies of history, and in study of what is reportedly going on in the world today.  Humans are very prone to close linking of belief systems with our identities, and identifying those who disagree with some kind of elemental evil.  All competent propagandists know what to do with this.  Our tendency to focus heavily on some theory or simple model of the world has often helped pave the way to mad tyrannies, such as Nazism or Communism.

When people speak of "conservatism", they nearly always mean a particular conservatism for a particular time.  But we could define a general (moderately) conservative position for any place and time by saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".  I.e. it is the sentiment that we have something that is working reasonably well, and we are afraid that radical (usually big-idea based) changes will make it worse.  And this sentiment is very often right.

What draws me to the idea of the political center? And what is it, or what could be made of it?  I have been thinking about this, and looking for books, people, articles, web sites, and the first thing that dawns on me is that different people draw very different pictures of it.  Conservatism and liberalism can come to mean (to most people who use them) positions almost opposite of what they once stood for, and centrism might be even harder to pin down.

So we can look at centrism as a general idea, or identify it as a set of positions that seem centrist in a given political situation, or with respect to the dominant party system at a particular point in time.

Just looking at centrism per se, and not the positions it seems to imply to one person or group at one place and time, what seems attractive about it (to me)?

• The personal quality of being "centered", is often viewed as positive, although on close examination, I think its meanings vary.
• It has a positive aspect if viewed as the opposite of being "out on a limb", though sometimes being "out on a limb" may be seen as bold, even heroic.

Like it or not, groups often have to find a more or less central position in order to accomplish anything in cooperation.  When a group becomes less prone to explor varied possibilities, and is pulled to an extreme position, it is often by a forceful or charismatic leader.

When legislators on different sides of an issue are close enough, or respectful enough of each others' points of view, debate and compromise can have at least two big positive effects:

• The person arguing an opposite point can uncover flaws in ones position and lead to its improvement.
• A majority based governing structure, with two closely matched (in strength), and rigid parties may project an inconsistent face to the world.  The U.S. has suffered from many radical oscillations between policy extremes, such as a policy of strength and force vs. one of engagement, and empathy with the grievances of other peoples.  These and other extreme oscillations and avoidance of the center have resulted in projects started by one party and dismantled by the other, costing much and achieving nothing.

Perhaps we can get some insight from informed speculation about how human nature took shape.  The environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA) is a biology concept useful for explaining peculiar actions of animals living in a different environment from that in which their traits evolved.  A very good example (though involving human-assisted evolution) is the Australian cattle dog, bred to drive herds of cattle by biting at their heels.  In a human social environment, if not very well trained, they will nip at the heels of guests, and be distressed and aggressive unless people stay in a compact group, which may make it hard for anyone to go to the bathroom.

Knowing this breed's EEA gives a trainer knowledge of what tendencies must be modified for them to be agreeable and safe companions.  What about people?

Human beings are adaptable like no other species, but in the last few hundred thousand years, in order to live off the natural produce of the land (being "hunter-gatherers") we know at least that they had to live in small scattered groups or "bands".  This based on observation of how remaining (or recently surviving) peoples living off the land actually live(d), and reasoning that larger settlements would take more territory to feed them, so that expeditions in search of food must go too far.

E.g. we often face threats to our dignity, position within an organization, or financial well being which are not at all physical, yet our bodies have a highly emotional "fight or flight" reaction which can cloud our thinking or endanger our health.  If we anticipate this, we may cope with it by meditating or going for a run for example to satisfy the desire to act in some physically vigorous way.

Are there social and emotional tendencies that helped human settlements, in our almost forgotten EEA keep roughtly to the "right" size? Looking at how we in fact tend to factionalize, could it be that an unconscious or barely conscious sense makes us irritable and less tolerant with one another as group size grows, and could it be that when the group dynamics, after a succession of messy and unpredictable results of this irritability and tendency to find fault, fall into a pattern that looks like a split down the middle, this feels right, the split occurred cleanly, and the two groups move apart.

Consider where we are today.  What would our system of responses recognize as "the group" (or band)?  In evolutionary time, the group consisted of basically everyone a member was very familiar with -- everyone we ever spoke to or heard speak, except on a few extraordinary occasions.  If that is how it works, then modern humans may constantly live with whatever sort of sense arose from a "too large" group whose tendency would be to somehow bring about a split.  Perhaps given our current situation, we experience that response all the time, possibly in the form of a nagging sense that it's time for a "split" and looking for a set of differences that would guide us in making the split.


Could this hypothetical "splitting" tendency help explain, along with our love of team sports, the very widespread pattern of societies with fairly well matched parties (that go on without much change for decades), accompanied by the strong sense (which I suspect is illusory) of this being a very fundamental and "real" division?

If my speculations are right, it is certainly not serving the purpose it evolved to meet.  For the split to produce two groups of more optimal size, it is way, way too late for that.  And the two groups can never move apart and forget about each other, but are perpetually stuck in the moment just before that split should occur.

To live in this world, which sprung up far too fast for evolution to follow it, I suggest it is useful to have some mantra like "We are less divided than we appear to be" or "Much of this apparent division is illusory".

I am strongly inclined to make "Desperately Seeking Radical Centeredness" an ongoing series within "Owning Our Democracy" or maybe eventually a separate blog.  I have been exploring the idea for a long time, and have discovered many promising resources to share.

What is "Owning Our Democracy" About?

Democracy appears to be in trouble. A lot of people agree, but can't agree on how it is in trouble, much less what to do about it.

Actually, many people have taken to proclaiming the U.S. is "a republic, not a democracy".   The line has been heavily pushed by Pat Buchanan and Glenn Beck, as well as libertarians.  Ron Paul, in an online essay, says "The Founding Fathers were concerned with liberty, not democracy".  This is particularly convenient with the current alignment of ideologies, and naming of parties.  Convenient, that is, for those who want to demonize the Democratic party and make if effectively disappear.

The "party of Jefferson", however, were for the first few decades referred to sometimes as "democrats", sometimes as "republicans", and sometimes as "democratic republicans".

Around the time that Andrew Jackson was elected, they seemed to settle on calling themselves Democrats, and they were distinctly the party of small government and states rights.

I'd like to set aside history for a moment, and just examine the terms used by Ron Paul, "democracy" and "freedom".  My impression is that most Americans would have little to say if asked to explain the difference between democracy and freedom, so they miss the tensions that sometimes exist between democracy and freedom, and also miss how they support each other.

Democracy means "people rule", and has come to mean some form of majority control over ... what?  If the people rule it, then it is something held in common.  And that is just what the Latin root of republic, res publica means.  In the 17th century, when much of the American founders' political thinking was formulated, it was anglicized to "commonwealth".  Perhaps res publica (public thing or public matter) suggests the possibility, at least, of rule by the best, or wisest men rather than universal democracy; it suggests the possibility of property requirements for voting, which many of the founders believed in.  But I don't see how republic has any more to do with liberty or freedom than democracy does.

Samuel Johnson asked

"How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" (meaning, of course, slaves).

Edmund Burke said, more sympathetically of the slave-owning south

"Those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of their freedom. [It] is to them ... a kind of rank and privilege ... In such a people, the hautiness of dominion combines with the spirit of freedom, fortifies it, and renders it invincible."

Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina quoted the Burke statement, framing it with these words:

"I will acknowledge the fatal effects of slavery upon character, if any one can say, that for noble disinterestedness, ardent love of country, exalted virtue, and a pure and holy devotion to liberty, the people of the Southern States have ever been surpassed by any in the world."

I.e. slave holders are the greatest defenders of liberty, according to Hayne, and to many other Southerners of his time (Quotes are from the Hayne-Webster debate; the relevant paragraph is HERE(LINK).)


Over the last few years, I have seen quite a few hints and suggestions from movement conservatives and libertarians that "too much democracy" is a threat to liberty (I apologize for having none of these references at my fingertips).

While that really can, in extreme cases, occur, it is also true that democracy is the only plausible guarantee of (universal) liberty, and (as I just illustrated) that a self-absorbed obsession with (ones own) liberty has often posed the gravest threat to (universal) liberty.  So, I would feel less anxious about the future of our country, if those who speak so often of liberty,  and how it is threatened by Democrats, would add the word universal in front of liberty.