Ron Paul's presidential campaign, while bringing an exciting visibility for libertarian ideas, is also an utter disappointment on several levels. A lot has been said recently about his affiliation with paleolibertarians and courting of the ultra right, and how this old decision of his and of his "handlers" at the von Moses Institute misrepresented and hurt the image of libertarians. However, for those willing to look past his "youthful" indiscretions, his campaign provided an interesting opportunity to talk about distinctions between conservative and libertarian positions on American place in the world. This is a large topic, and here I want to focus on only one issue: American relations with Israel. Apparently, I cannot agree with Paul's anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian position, but I think that his candidacy provided an opening for honest discussion of this issue. Unfortunately, this opportunity has not been seized by the pro-Israel camp, whose attitude was that it is so obviously wrong that there is nothing to talk about.
Unfortunately, for a large part of electorate it is not so obvious as Paul's surge in the polls demonstrate. Candidacy of Ron Paul brought to the surface uneasiness of American population about US foreign policy in general and US -Israel relations, in particular. He essentially gave political cover and the aura of respectability to views, which lurked for many years under the surface of public debate, expressed mostly by both right- and left-wing fringe elements. These views can be shortly summarized in the following statement: America has no true national interest in allying itself with Israel, and America (and the world) would have been better off if Israel somehow disappeared. Proponents of these views believe that USA supports Israel only because American politicians are controlled by all-powerful Jewish lobby empowered by Jewish money and Jewish press.
As repugnant these views can be for supporters of Israel, I believe that they must be openly discussed and refuted on strictly rational grounds by explaining to Americans why allying itself with Israel, USA, first of all, serves its own self-interest.
One can discern several narrative lines of non-Jewish supporters of Israel. The one coming from evangelicals justifies support for the Jewish State by their faith in the coming of the prophet, which is hardly constitute the basis for rational discussion. Another is based of the notion that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and is coming out of the people who do not believe in the possibility of peaceful co-existence with Islam. While this narrative is more rational, it's rationale is hardly sustainable politically and economically. Bush understood it as he went out of his ways to distinguish the war on terror from the war on Islam. However, in the absence of the global war with Islam, the justification for friendship with Israel based upon commonality of the enemy becomes significantly weaker.
Yet another narrative in favor of US-Israel alliance is based on the notion that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East and for this reason alone deserve to be supported by US. This argument, which is not completely without merit, is based on the idea that only countries politically, economically, and ideologically compatible with the North-Atlantic type of societies do not present a threat to US and should be, therefore, be supported. While it is hard to argue that alliances between countries are forged on the ground of common interests, which often, while not always, arise from shared ideas about society and economy, it is not quite obvious how this argument applies to Israel. Indeed, let's us not to forget that Israel was created by socialists with the idea of creating a socialist state. Present day Israel is not of course a socialist paradise of centrally planned economy, but it is also very far from Anglo-Saxon economic model in its American reincarnation. I think that under different circumstances, Israel would have been a darling of left-wing liberals with its supers-strong labor unions, socialized medicine, and extensive social safety net. Why liberals choose to support Palestinians rather then Israel is a different story, which I partly discussed here.
Unfortunately, I am yet to find a satisfactory rational explanation of the US-Israel relationship based upon clearly formulated American interests. I do not fill competent enough in these issues to give here any positive version of such an explanation, but I fell that any attempts to justify US-Israel alliance based upon ideas of "moral obligations" or such are demeaning to Israel, and cannot be used as basis for foreign policy in any region, leave alone the one as controversial as Middle East. I am positive, however, that US does have crucial interest in maintaining friendship with Israel, and I call on those more knowledgeable in this problem to invest time and efforts into actually explaining it to American public.
Friday, December 30, 2011
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Obamanomica or how to get rid of rich people
Latest Obama speech, which I did not have patience to listen in its entirety, but read enough exerts from to form an opinion, once again confirmed lack of intellectual honesty in his approach to problems facing this country. Or may be it is just the lack of understanding of these problems, and it is not clear, which is worse.
So, what are the main points of his speech? First is concerned with disproportion between growth of the incomes between very rich and the rest of us. Is it a valid point? It could have been, if instead of focusing on "income inequality", the President talked about "income stagnation" of the middle class. While the latter is a real economic and political problem, the former is a populist slogan smelling of the class warfare, no matter how many times he denies it. Indeed, the focus of Obama and cheering him progressives on the "inequality" betrays their thinking about economy as a zero sum game, which is the essence of Marxist thinking. Within this framework, the labor and capital are enemies in constant struggle for a fixed amount of resources, therefore, when one side wins, the other side looses. Luckily, the economy does not work this way as any serious economist would confirm. Capital and labor are dependent on each other and their rewards are supposed to grow in sync as they create wealth together. A physicist in me cannot resist to pointing out that there is no law of conservation of wealth; it can be created from productive energy and skills of people or destroyed by their incompetence and stupidity, both of which are much worse offenses than greed - the main enemy of populist charlatans and their cheerleaders.
There is a certain consistency in progressive's use of "comparative analysis" when discussing county's problems. They do not talk about poor quality of American education, they prefer to discuss "achievement gaps" between white and black, rich and poor, boys and girls, etc. The notion of the "income inequality" fits right here in this "comparative" narrative. The main problem with this approach is that it does not deal with real problems while wasting time, money, and public energy on unnecessary discussions of phantoms. The problems formulated in terms of "inequalities" or "gaps" have quite simple "solutions". One just needs to make wealthy poorer, strong students weaker, and the problem of inequalities goes away. In the area of education it is already happening, and Obama's latest speech signifies an attempt to apply the same template to economics. It reminds me of an old joke from Soviet times stating that the goal of Russian Revolution was to create a society, in which there are no rich people.
Joke or not, but the second point of Obama's speech, where he proposes a solution to the problem of inequality is quite consistent with the above mentioned goal of Russian Bolsheviks. Indeed, the main point of his proposal is to reform the tax code, such that rich will pay more. While it is not obvious how this proposal will increase income of the middle class, it clearly will make, if successful, rich people poorer. Thus, I think that I am entitled to believe that this is the main goal of the policy.
But let give the man a benefit of a doubt, and let assume that he does want to help the middle class out by increasing their income rather than by making them feel better because their rich neighbors suffer. The speech was, not surprisingly, devoid of any specifics about how taxing the rich will make middle class better off. While it is easy to imagine, how the redistribution of wealth can benefit poor (extension of welfare and medicaid programs), it is much less clear cut with respect to working middle class who live off the wages. To improve their situation these wages must be made to go up. The question how government can achieve this with extra money, collected from the rich. Government does not yet have a direct control of wages for those of 99% who works in private sector, and the idea that taxing the employers more will somehow induce them to pay better wages to their employees seems somewhat counter-intuitive. This leaves the government with only one option - create more and better paid public sector jobs. This proposition, however, raises lots of objections of philosophical ( Do we want to become a nation, where the State is the main employer?), political (Population of a country, in which most lucrative jobs come from the government cannot be free) and economical nature. I will not dwell on the first two objections, they are quite clear, so let me focus on the last one. Economically speaking, this simply would not work for several reasons. First, being deep in debt, government would not have the money even if it raised taxes on the rich by 100%. Second, let's assume for the sake of argument, that the money is not an issue for now. What can be the result of the government creating more and better paying jobs in public sector? If our economy were isolated from the rest of the word, it could, in principle, put pressure on private sector and force them to increase wages of their workers to remain competitive in the labor market. But we do not live in a closed system. The direct result of the employees run from private enterprises to governmental jobs will be shifting even more private jobs outside of the country. This process will be further exacerbated by the fact that increased taxation of investment income (the main portion of Obama's tax plan) will make domestic investment less attractive resulting in the flow of capital to other ,more attractive markets. This will create a vicious circle, with government having to keep stepping in to compensate for job losses in the private sector. It will end, though, pretty soon, with government going completely broke, and the entire system disintegrating. All rich people will flee the country with their money at the first sign of the troubles, and USA will finally become a country of only poor people, the dream of the progressives, I guess. No income inequality anymore, but is this what we all actually want?
One final note. Invoking T. Roosevelt ghost as a champion of progressive agenda is a bold political move, given a number of controversies surrounding his presidency. One that cut my attention in particular, is Roosevelt's fondness of eugenics (source - Wikipedia article on eugenics, where one will find Roosevelt in a fitting company of Keynes). Now we might find this attraction unbecoming, but at that time, where ideas of planned economy were on everybody's mind it was quine a natural sympathy. After all, if one can plan economy, why not to plan humans as well? Another popular idea of that era has also found its way to Obama's speech. It is not good, says he, than everybody plays by its own rules. Everybody will be better off if we all act together. This is, obviously, a poorly disguised attempt at promoting collectivism, from which it is just a small step to any kind of collective type of economy, be it socialism or fascism (not to confuse with Nazism). This part of his speech is wrong on so many levels, that it is even difficult to decide where to start. Interpreting individualistic philosophy as a game where "everyone is playing by its own rule" shows a gross misunderstanding of the nature of American individualism. It does not imply that there are no commonly accepted rules, it means people use their own individual judgements based upon their individual preferences to choose which moves to make in the game. And mantra of "we will be better off if we do it together" has never been anything more as a disguised attempt to force most productive part of society to work for the benefits of the less productive one. I hope that people will see right through this demagoguery.
So, what are the main points of his speech? First is concerned with disproportion between growth of the incomes between very rich and the rest of us. Is it a valid point? It could have been, if instead of focusing on "income inequality", the President talked about "income stagnation" of the middle class. While the latter is a real economic and political problem, the former is a populist slogan smelling of the class warfare, no matter how many times he denies it. Indeed, the focus of Obama and cheering him progressives on the "inequality" betrays their thinking about economy as a zero sum game, which is the essence of Marxist thinking. Within this framework, the labor and capital are enemies in constant struggle for a fixed amount of resources, therefore, when one side wins, the other side looses. Luckily, the economy does not work this way as any serious economist would confirm. Capital and labor are dependent on each other and their rewards are supposed to grow in sync as they create wealth together. A physicist in me cannot resist to pointing out that there is no law of conservation of wealth; it can be created from productive energy and skills of people or destroyed by their incompetence and stupidity, both of which are much worse offenses than greed - the main enemy of populist charlatans and their cheerleaders.
There is a certain consistency in progressive's use of "comparative analysis" when discussing county's problems. They do not talk about poor quality of American education, they prefer to discuss "achievement gaps" between white and black, rich and poor, boys and girls, etc. The notion of the "income inequality" fits right here in this "comparative" narrative. The main problem with this approach is that it does not deal with real problems while wasting time, money, and public energy on unnecessary discussions of phantoms. The problems formulated in terms of "inequalities" or "gaps" have quite simple "solutions". One just needs to make wealthy poorer, strong students weaker, and the problem of inequalities goes away. In the area of education it is already happening, and Obama's latest speech signifies an attempt to apply the same template to economics. It reminds me of an old joke from Soviet times stating that the goal of Russian Revolution was to create a society, in which there are no rich people.
Joke or not, but the second point of Obama's speech, where he proposes a solution to the problem of inequality is quite consistent with the above mentioned goal of Russian Bolsheviks. Indeed, the main point of his proposal is to reform the tax code, such that rich will pay more. While it is not obvious how this proposal will increase income of the middle class, it clearly will make, if successful, rich people poorer. Thus, I think that I am entitled to believe that this is the main goal of the policy.
But let give the man a benefit of a doubt, and let assume that he does want to help the middle class out by increasing their income rather than by making them feel better because their rich neighbors suffer. The speech was, not surprisingly, devoid of any specifics about how taxing the rich will make middle class better off. While it is easy to imagine, how the redistribution of wealth can benefit poor (extension of welfare and medicaid programs), it is much less clear cut with respect to working middle class who live off the wages. To improve their situation these wages must be made to go up. The question how government can achieve this with extra money, collected from the rich. Government does not yet have a direct control of wages for those of 99% who works in private sector, and the idea that taxing the employers more will somehow induce them to pay better wages to their employees seems somewhat counter-intuitive. This leaves the government with only one option - create more and better paid public sector jobs. This proposition, however, raises lots of objections of philosophical ( Do we want to become a nation, where the State is the main employer?), political (Population of a country, in which most lucrative jobs come from the government cannot be free) and economical nature. I will not dwell on the first two objections, they are quite clear, so let me focus on the last one. Economically speaking, this simply would not work for several reasons. First, being deep in debt, government would not have the money even if it raised taxes on the rich by 100%. Second, let's assume for the sake of argument, that the money is not an issue for now. What can be the result of the government creating more and better paying jobs in public sector? If our economy were isolated from the rest of the word, it could, in principle, put pressure on private sector and force them to increase wages of their workers to remain competitive in the labor market. But we do not live in a closed system. The direct result of the employees run from private enterprises to governmental jobs will be shifting even more private jobs outside of the country. This process will be further exacerbated by the fact that increased taxation of investment income (the main portion of Obama's tax plan) will make domestic investment less attractive resulting in the flow of capital to other ,more attractive markets. This will create a vicious circle, with government having to keep stepping in to compensate for job losses in the private sector. It will end, though, pretty soon, with government going completely broke, and the entire system disintegrating. All rich people will flee the country with their money at the first sign of the troubles, and USA will finally become a country of only poor people, the dream of the progressives, I guess. No income inequality anymore, but is this what we all actually want?
One final note. Invoking T. Roosevelt ghost as a champion of progressive agenda is a bold political move, given a number of controversies surrounding his presidency. One that cut my attention in particular, is Roosevelt's fondness of eugenics (source - Wikipedia article on eugenics, where one will find Roosevelt in a fitting company of Keynes). Now we might find this attraction unbecoming, but at that time, where ideas of planned economy were on everybody's mind it was quine a natural sympathy. After all, if one can plan economy, why not to plan humans as well? Another popular idea of that era has also found its way to Obama's speech. It is not good, says he, than everybody plays by its own rules. Everybody will be better off if we all act together. This is, obviously, a poorly disguised attempt at promoting collectivism, from which it is just a small step to any kind of collective type of economy, be it socialism or fascism (not to confuse with Nazism). This part of his speech is wrong on so many levels, that it is even difficult to decide where to start. Interpreting individualistic philosophy as a game where "everyone is playing by its own rule" shows a gross misunderstanding of the nature of American individualism. It does not imply that there are no commonly accepted rules, it means people use their own individual judgements based upon their individual preferences to choose which moves to make in the game. And mantra of "we will be better off if we do it together" has never been anything more as a disguised attempt to force most productive part of society to work for the benefits of the less productive one. I hope that people will see right through this demagoguery.
Sunday, December 4, 2011
Socialism and welfare state
A great deal of confusion going on in current political discussions. Such terms as socialism, welfare state, social safety net, free market, lassies fare capitalism are thrown around as monikers and used to frame users political positions but without actually giving them any real meaning. Most of political conversations these days are conducted not with real words but with their ghosts devoid of any stable meaning, which take any shape dependent on political preferences of their users. This phenomenon is not limited to just one ideological group as everyone, liberal and conservative alike throw around words and ideas in a very incongruent and confused manner.
In this post I want to focus on words socialism, welfare state and social safety net, which are often thought to be almost synonyms. Let me begin by stating that while socialist economics requires establishing the welfare state (population devoid of any rights to private ownership and free economic activity is at complete mercy of the State), the reversal of this statement is not true. Ironically, the first welfare state was conceived and realized by Bismarck in Germany to prevent spread of socialist ideas. The substantial social safety net developed in Nazi Germany played a huge role in ensuring popular support for Hitler. In neither of these cases existence of welfare state implied socialist type of economics. It should be noted, however, that Hitler's economics model was much closer to socialist ideals than current proponents of socialism are ready to admit. Hayek in his "Road to serfdom" gave very convincing arguments to support this point. In contemporary liberal political commentary successful socialism is often mentioned in relation to welfare states of protestant Europe such as Denmark, Netherlands, or Germany. For obvious reasons Greece, Spain or Portugal are talked about by modern proponents of socialism less frequently. At the same time, conservatives do not waste time pointing out to these states as examples of failure of socialism and by extension deny successes of the "Low Countries" and Germany in providing their citizens with free medicine and education.
Any kind of objective analysis must point out, first of all, that neither Denmark, nor Germany have socialist economies. Denmark, for instance, have been rated by Heritage Foundation as a country with most favorable for free markets economic system for several years in a row. Serious economic growth in Germany had began only after Germans significantly liberalized their labor laws. Let me clarify it for particularly stubborn liberals: liberalization of labor laws (making it easier for businesses to fire workers and freeing wages from dictate of the Unions), i.e. freeing labor market from regulations, means more capitalism and less government intervention in economy. Thus, in both examples of Denmark and Germany economic growth is directly caused by more and not less capitalism.
As a side note I would like to point out that discussions about socialism versus capitalism is often framed in terms of Keynesian versus Austrian school economic paradigms, which is undoubtedly wrong. Keynesianism may be an example of economists' equivalent of the delusion of grandeur, when economists believe that they can actually manage economy, but it is not equivalent to socialism.
Returning to the main point of the post, I hope it has become clear by now that presence of well developed social safety net with free medicine and education is not neccessarily imcompatible with free markets economy. This statement, of course, should be qualified because social safety net does create disincentives for productive particpation in the markets, and deflect resources form their most effective use. However, it is wrong to think about people as "pure homo economicus". No society can be built using economic efficiency as an only criterion. Political consideration, which sometimes require redistribution of resources to ensure political stability of the system, also play an important role. Thus, the main question is how much of safety net is too much? The answer to this question cannot be given by economists alone, as it depends on a great deal of local factors such as cultural traditions, the etnic homogeneity of population, the size of economy, economic inspirations of the populace etc. In short, in a democratic society, the extent of the safety net is determined by local social compact, and its success depends on ability of the citizens to resist the calls of the "sirens" of dependent life. It have been working for Dutch and Danes, and I happy for them, but combination of the welfare state with different cultural traditions of Italy and Greece resulted in a complete disaster. The selective use of European experience to promote liberal political agenda is a clear cut example of intellectually dishonest behavior of our progressive "intellectuals". However, when conservatives refuse to address successes of such countries as Denmark talking only about politically more convenient Greece and Portugal, they demonstrate shallowness of their political thinking.
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Conservatives and undoing of America
I started writing this right after the debt ceiling debacle, so the beginning of this post is somewhat outdated. Still I decided to keep everything as it was written. Enjoy (or not).
So, the historic stand-off around the debt ceiling is
over and the sides started tending to the wounded and burying their dead, all while asking a traditional question:"whose fault is that?" Predictably, neither side of the political spectrum is satisfied with the results, while reaction of the liberal wing of the democratic party shows that they have much more corpses to bury than the conservatives. Their attitude toward the deal ranges from complete disgust to attempts to dismiss it as "smoke and mirrors". One ought to enjoy the
irony as one realizes that a big chunk of a recent article in New Yorker
written by a very liberal John Cassidy can be easily attributed to Michele
Bauchman. Anyway, no matter what democrats or more radical elements of the Tea Party say, the conservatives did score a victory if not in terms of actual budget cuts but in terms of redefining the national discourse.
At the same time, this debate has once again highlighted significant weaknesses in conservative movement, which are being happily exploited by liberals all over. In addition to being portrayed as angry, racist, undereducated, if not outright stupid, rednecks, the Tea Party adherents are routinely described as ruthless carrying about nothing terrorists. No matter how baseless all these accusations are, a sober observer must recognize that conservatives did supply enough ammunition to liberals to use against them. I myself, being a student of classical liberalism of Haeyk's
type have a long list of grievances against contemporary conservative political
movement. Apparently, I am not alone in my dissatisfaction as according to a
recent article in Politico, "conservative intelligencia" is not happy with any of potential republican candidates.
So, let me lay down a few issues, which I believe are hurting anti-liberal anti-socialist political movement in this country.
Let me begin with the issue of religion. Americans are religious people, but it does not necessarily mean that the majority of them are ready to embrace the idea that a particular brand of Christianity is essential to American success as a nation. To me the idea of defining USA as a "Christian nation" seems to be not just ounterproductive politically, but more importantly, false intellectually. Religions in general emphasize collectivist approach to life, and are, therefore much closer to
socialist ideas than to individualistic capitalist worldview, which used to be
the cornerstone of American psyche, and which Tea Party conservatives apparently want to restore. Still, there is no doubt that religion played an important role in development of American society, and this creates an impression of a direct link between Christian believes of American settlers and success of American capitalism. This link, however, is illusory. The unique nature of American religious experience stems from its protestant roots. Protestantism with its ideas of personal God and detachment from central papal authority is the least collectivist of all religions, and is, therefore, most conducive to capitalism. Protestantism, therefore, can be considered an important factor in American success only in the sense, that it did not stay in the way of capitalism as, for instance, Catholicism would have. Thus, I see no reasons, ideological or political, why the movement to restore creative force of capitalist enterprise in US should drive away people whose relationship with
God is much more complicated than that prescribed by the standards of
conservative evangelism. Also using adherence for a particular set of religious
views significantly decreases the pool of potential anti-socialist candidates
this country is so much needed.
Another big disappointment is a significant anti-academic and more general anti-intellectual bias of the conservative movement. I understand and share conservative's displeasure with usurpation by liberals of intellectual discourse on nation's campuses and in Academia in general. Way too often what is being passed for intellectualism has very little in common with genuine intellectually honest discussion. It is indeed intolerable that liberal art education has become in many instances an instrument of ideologically driven indoctrination and brain washing. Just a few weeks ago, I listened on NPR an interview with an author of the book on race. The woman was extremely upset with biologists whose work on human genome project indicated that there exist genetically identifiable differences between races. Because this finding contradicted her ideological convictions that the idea of race was invented by whites in order to suppress the rest of the world, she declared genetics to be in service of pharmaceutical corporations. This was really painful to hear since it resembled too much of Soviet's rhetoric of late fortieth of the last century. For those who do not know - at that time Soviet genetics was destroyed for being "a Servant of capitalists" with many geneticists imprisoned or killed. Unfortunately, this is not just a single example of one misguided person. It reflects the trend in social "sciences” to subjugate academic discourse to ideologically predetermined positions.
This, however, does not mean that conservative politicians must reject the very idea of academic discourse and alienate people in Academia who can be their natural allies. Plenty of faculty, especially in natural sciences and economics, support ideas of free market capitalism but are being driven away from conservative politics because of it real or perceived anti-intellectualism mixed with religiosity. This is not to say that conservative politicians and commentators are somehow intellectually inferior to their liberal counterparts. They are definitely not. But after listening to different conservative talks show hosts including celebrated and brilliant Rush
Limbaugh, I got an uneasy impression that they do not trust intellectual abilities of their listeners and dumb down their programs to cater to the level of intellectually lazy.
This lack of intellectual rigor is responsible for conservatives routinely losing the propaganda game to the liberals even on purely economic front, where conservatives are supposed to be at home. For instance, liberals are talking about Keynesian economics as though it is as established as the law of gravity. Anyone rejecting this notion is being branded as a lunatic. They make it look like the entire economics profession agrees about Keynes and his orthodoxy. This is not so, but I am yet to see a serious substantial discussion by conservative politicians and commentators of why Keynesian prescriptions rarely work in real life. I am sure that there are plenty of conservative bloggers and websites doing this, but the main stream conservative media and conservative political events definetely avoid getting involved in serious discussions of this topic. The same is true with regard to discussions of the role of government, social safety net, regulations: virtually
all aspects of public discourse. It seems that conservatives still live in the glory days of the end of the cold war, when socialism as idea seemed to be buried under the remnants of Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. They failed to realize that socialist ideals are very attractive for the public, and that these days socialism is associated not with horrors of Gulag but with free medicine and education of Denmark and Netherlands. Refusal to recognize achievements of European countries in creating social safety net for their public opens conservatives to charges of being deological dogmatists not able to reconcile their views with real world. More importantly, it prevents them from defending conservative economic views by providing detailed analysis of the European situation. It is not sufficient now to just label something as socialist or “big government” to have it dismissed as unacceptable. It is also not sufficient to simply point out to the Europe debt problems and dismiss the entire European experience as failed experiment. They actually have to do the hard work of explaining why they think that Hayek’s approach to economics is better than the one advocated by Keynesians. This is not an easy task as they have to overcome people’s tendency to get addicted to governmental handouts and act against what they may perceive as their self-interest. Liberal in this situation has a much easier task as it is not that difficult to convince people that it is a good thing to take money from those who have them and give it to them. And it is much more difficult to explain why such a policy would be disastrous first of all for those whom it is intended to help. However, if the leaders of conservative movements would not start doing it immediately, they will participate in undoing of this country. It might happen that Ayn Rand was correct once again, when she said that conservatives and not liberals would eventually destroy America.
So, the historic stand-off around the debt ceiling is
over and the sides started tending to the wounded and burying their dead, all while asking a traditional question:"whose fault is that?" Predictably, neither side of the political spectrum is satisfied with the results, while reaction of the liberal wing of the democratic party shows that they have much more corpses to bury than the conservatives. Their attitude toward the deal ranges from complete disgust to attempts to dismiss it as "smoke and mirrors". One ought to enjoy the
irony as one realizes that a big chunk of a recent article in New Yorker
written by a very liberal John Cassidy can be easily attributed to Michele
Bauchman. Anyway, no matter what democrats or more radical elements of the Tea Party say, the conservatives did score a victory if not in terms of actual budget cuts but in terms of redefining the national discourse.
At the same time, this debate has once again highlighted significant weaknesses in conservative movement, which are being happily exploited by liberals all over. In addition to being portrayed as angry, racist, undereducated, if not outright stupid, rednecks, the Tea Party adherents are routinely described as ruthless carrying about nothing terrorists. No matter how baseless all these accusations are, a sober observer must recognize that conservatives did supply enough ammunition to liberals to use against them. I myself, being a student of classical liberalism of Haeyk's
type have a long list of grievances against contemporary conservative political
movement. Apparently, I am not alone in my dissatisfaction as according to a
recent article in Politico, "conservative intelligencia" is not happy with any of potential republican candidates.
So, let me lay down a few issues, which I believe are hurting anti-liberal anti-socialist political movement in this country.
Let me begin with the issue of religion. Americans are religious people, but it does not necessarily mean that the majority of them are ready to embrace the idea that a particular brand of Christianity is essential to American success as a nation. To me the idea of defining USA as a "Christian nation" seems to be not just ounterproductive politically, but more importantly, false intellectually. Religions in general emphasize collectivist approach to life, and are, therefore much closer to
socialist ideas than to individualistic capitalist worldview, which used to be
the cornerstone of American psyche, and which Tea Party conservatives apparently want to restore. Still, there is no doubt that religion played an important role in development of American society, and this creates an impression of a direct link between Christian believes of American settlers and success of American capitalism. This link, however, is illusory. The unique nature of American religious experience stems from its protestant roots. Protestantism with its ideas of personal God and detachment from central papal authority is the least collectivist of all religions, and is, therefore, most conducive to capitalism. Protestantism, therefore, can be considered an important factor in American success only in the sense, that it did not stay in the way of capitalism as, for instance, Catholicism would have. Thus, I see no reasons, ideological or political, why the movement to restore creative force of capitalist enterprise in US should drive away people whose relationship with
God is much more complicated than that prescribed by the standards of
conservative evangelism. Also using adherence for a particular set of religious
views significantly decreases the pool of potential anti-socialist candidates
this country is so much needed.
Another big disappointment is a significant anti-academic and more general anti-intellectual bias of the conservative movement. I understand and share conservative's displeasure with usurpation by liberals of intellectual discourse on nation's campuses and in Academia in general. Way too often what is being passed for intellectualism has very little in common with genuine intellectually honest discussion. It is indeed intolerable that liberal art education has become in many instances an instrument of ideologically driven indoctrination and brain washing. Just a few weeks ago, I listened on NPR an interview with an author of the book on race. The woman was extremely upset with biologists whose work on human genome project indicated that there exist genetically identifiable differences between races. Because this finding contradicted her ideological convictions that the idea of race was invented by whites in order to suppress the rest of the world, she declared genetics to be in service of pharmaceutical corporations. This was really painful to hear since it resembled too much of Soviet's rhetoric of late fortieth of the last century. For those who do not know - at that time Soviet genetics was destroyed for being "a Servant of capitalists" with many geneticists imprisoned or killed. Unfortunately, this is not just a single example of one misguided person. It reflects the trend in social "sciences” to subjugate academic discourse to ideologically predetermined positions.
This, however, does not mean that conservative politicians must reject the very idea of academic discourse and alienate people in Academia who can be their natural allies. Plenty of faculty, especially in natural sciences and economics, support ideas of free market capitalism but are being driven away from conservative politics because of it real or perceived anti-intellectualism mixed with religiosity. This is not to say that conservative politicians and commentators are somehow intellectually inferior to their liberal counterparts. They are definitely not. But after listening to different conservative talks show hosts including celebrated and brilliant Rush
Limbaugh, I got an uneasy impression that they do not trust intellectual abilities of their listeners and dumb down their programs to cater to the level of intellectually lazy.
This lack of intellectual rigor is responsible for conservatives routinely losing the propaganda game to the liberals even on purely economic front, where conservatives are supposed to be at home. For instance, liberals are talking about Keynesian economics as though it is as established as the law of gravity. Anyone rejecting this notion is being branded as a lunatic. They make it look like the entire economics profession agrees about Keynes and his orthodoxy. This is not so, but I am yet to see a serious substantial discussion by conservative politicians and commentators of why Keynesian prescriptions rarely work in real life. I am sure that there are plenty of conservative bloggers and websites doing this, but the main stream conservative media and conservative political events definetely avoid getting involved in serious discussions of this topic. The same is true with regard to discussions of the role of government, social safety net, regulations: virtually
all aspects of public discourse. It seems that conservatives still live in the glory days of the end of the cold war, when socialism as idea seemed to be buried under the remnants of Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. They failed to realize that socialist ideals are very attractive for the public, and that these days socialism is associated not with horrors of Gulag but with free medicine and education of Denmark and Netherlands. Refusal to recognize achievements of European countries in creating social safety net for their public opens conservatives to charges of being deological dogmatists not able to reconcile their views with real world. More importantly, it prevents them from defending conservative economic views by providing detailed analysis of the European situation. It is not sufficient now to just label something as socialist or “big government” to have it dismissed as unacceptable. It is also not sufficient to simply point out to the Europe debt problems and dismiss the entire European experience as failed experiment. They actually have to do the hard work of explaining why they think that Hayek’s approach to economics is better than the one advocated by Keynesians. This is not an easy task as they have to overcome people’s tendency to get addicted to governmental handouts and act against what they may perceive as their self-interest. Liberal in this situation has a much easier task as it is not that difficult to convince people that it is a good thing to take money from those who have them and give it to them. And it is much more difficult to explain why such a policy would be disastrous first of all for those whom it is intended to help. However, if the leaders of conservative movements would not start doing it immediately, they will participate in undoing of this country. It might happen that Ayn Rand was correct once again, when she said that conservatives and not liberals would eventually destroy America.
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Carnival on the Wall Street
I decided to present my response to Nathan's thoughts on the meaning of OWS protests as a separate post. Due to time restrains I would not be able to offer as well written exposition as those of Nathan's and Vladimir Davidenko's, thus I will limit myself to expressing a few poorly connected thoughts.
Let me begin my iterating once again that Vladimir's description of OWP (see link in Nathan's post to his piece written in Russian) as a carnival is amusingly exact. Indeed, masked people with painted faces and bodies demonstrating behavior, which would not normally be considered socially acceptable, ritualization of the process (drums, human "microphone", all have standard characteristics of purely ritualistic actions), and finally the activity, in which process is everything and goal is nothing.
While the view of the OWS protests as a carnival-like action is quite deep and insightful, the protest has also a different side to it. I would describe this other side as a raucous high school party that completely got out of hand in the absence of any meaningful adult supervision. Some adults neglected to pay attention to this party for way too long, while other adults played the role of the cheerleaders and encouraged this raucousness. As a result, the kids imagined that they actually have something smart to say, something that only they can see or have audacity to express. They started "making history". In reality, from what I have seen and heard, none of them have ever done anything productive in their lives, and I doubt that they are capable of it. This carnival will be over once adults wake up from lethargy and tell the kids that sleepover is over and everybody has to go home.
Anyone with unbiased attitude and some brains would see how ridiculous everything that is happening at this party is starting with their incoherent list of complaints and ending with their General Assembly meetings, which are the focal point of the whole action. Presumably, according to the interviews I heard, the process, by which this organ works, is the main goal of everything. They advocate for participatory rather than representative democracy, in which everything is decided by consensus.It invokes direct associations with socialist anarchism, as it was pointed out by one professor of economics at a reasonably respected University who worked for 40 (!) years developing economic model based on this idea. Should I spend more time on this, or it is clear that socialist anarchism can survive only in the make-believe world of stoned high school kids or their older reincarnations?
All this would be amusing if it were not so damaging to the country. The country has got some serious problems which require serious adult discussion. Attention paid to OWS folk actually distracts from this discussion substituting it with some childish games. Those politicians, who give credence to their "grievances" and call them legitimate and deserving serious consideration, are consciously engaged in dangerous populism to frame the discussion of the country's problems in terms most acceptable to them politically. This simply delays finding real solutions making situation much worse. All this agitation against banks, corporations and their CEOs does not offer any constructive solutions unless, of course, you think that destroying corporations as a form of business organization, imposing regulations on compensation structure of private businesses, and massive wealth redistribution via forceful expropriation, is the solution. As far as I know these are the only ideas consistent with the views exposed by majority of protesters.
And on the top of all this, the folk at this protest are simply disgusting, at least the most of them, and I despise them. They descended on my City, which I love, uninvited, as foreign occupiers, and desecrated it with their filth, and litter. They do not understand New York, they do not understand this country, they do not represent anyone whom I know, including you, Nathan. You, unlike them, studied and worked all your life and paid your bills, and did not ask anyone to forgive your debts.
Let me begin my iterating once again that Vladimir's description of OWP (see link in Nathan's post to his piece written in Russian) as a carnival is amusingly exact. Indeed, masked people with painted faces and bodies demonstrating behavior, which would not normally be considered socially acceptable, ritualization of the process (drums, human "microphone", all have standard characteristics of purely ritualistic actions), and finally the activity, in which process is everything and goal is nothing.
While the view of the OWS protests as a carnival-like action is quite deep and insightful, the protest has also a different side to it. I would describe this other side as a raucous high school party that completely got out of hand in the absence of any meaningful adult supervision. Some adults neglected to pay attention to this party for way too long, while other adults played the role of the cheerleaders and encouraged this raucousness. As a result, the kids imagined that they actually have something smart to say, something that only they can see or have audacity to express. They started "making history". In reality, from what I have seen and heard, none of them have ever done anything productive in their lives, and I doubt that they are capable of it. This carnival will be over once adults wake up from lethargy and tell the kids that sleepover is over and everybody has to go home.
Anyone with unbiased attitude and some brains would see how ridiculous everything that is happening at this party is starting with their incoherent list of complaints and ending with their General Assembly meetings, which are the focal point of the whole action. Presumably, according to the interviews I heard, the process, by which this organ works, is the main goal of everything. They advocate for participatory rather than representative democracy, in which everything is decided by consensus.It invokes direct associations with socialist anarchism, as it was pointed out by one professor of economics at a reasonably respected University who worked for 40 (!) years developing economic model based on this idea. Should I spend more time on this, or it is clear that socialist anarchism can survive only in the make-believe world of stoned high school kids or their older reincarnations?
All this would be amusing if it were not so damaging to the country. The country has got some serious problems which require serious adult discussion. Attention paid to OWS folk actually distracts from this discussion substituting it with some childish games. Those politicians, who give credence to their "grievances" and call them legitimate and deserving serious consideration, are consciously engaged in dangerous populism to frame the discussion of the country's problems in terms most acceptable to them politically. This simply delays finding real solutions making situation much worse. All this agitation against banks, corporations and their CEOs does not offer any constructive solutions unless, of course, you think that destroying corporations as a form of business organization, imposing regulations on compensation structure of private businesses, and massive wealth redistribution via forceful expropriation, is the solution. As far as I know these are the only ideas consistent with the views exposed by majority of protesters.
And on the top of all this, the folk at this protest are simply disgusting, at least the most of them, and I despise them. They descended on my City, which I love, uninvited, as foreign occupiers, and desecrated it with their filth, and litter. They do not understand New York, they do not understand this country, they do not represent anyone whom I know, including you, Nathan. You, unlike them, studied and worked all your life and paid your bills, and did not ask anyone to forgive your debts.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
What to make of Occupy Wall Street?
Everyone is talking about the Occupy Wall Street protests and what they mean for American politics and culture, so it seemed to make sense that Lev and I should do the same. Last week, at the invitation of my colleague Maxim Matusevich, I published a short piece on the Russian site "Balt-Info" with my impressions of the protests as of the end of September. Here's the link. And for anyone who doesn't read Russian, my original English text, which, I should note, is rather different from the Russian version, follows below. But Lev suggested that some balance would be appropriate here and offered the following text by the blogger Vladimir Davidenko to provide a conservative counterpoint.
Oct. 3, 2011
Not long ago, I found myself rather unexpectedly amidst the “occupiers” of Wall Street. My reasons for being there had nothing to do with politics, although their protests against the greed and impunity of the titans of American business arouse in me no small degree of sympathy. But no, it was music that drew me to Zuccotti Park on a warm late September afternoon.
That morning rumors starting to crop up on the internet that the group Radiohead, well known for their anti-corporate views as well as their innovative compositions, would be making a surprise appearance at the demonstration. My daughter is a big fan of Radiohead, and I like their music too. Our attempts to procure tickets for a rare concert appearance a few days earlier ended in disappointment. So when we went to the protester’s web site and found a notice confirming that Radiohead would appear we had the same reaction – Let’s go! We rushed down to the train station just in time to catch the commuter train into the city and were on our way.
Less than an hour later, we were wandering around the encampment. The park turned out to be fairly small—about half the size of a football field. A huge orange metal sculpture stood at one end, trees poked out of holes in the brick pavement in the middle and at the other end a set of steps led to the street just around the corner from “ground zero” where the twin towers one stood. One could imagine how in ordinary times employees of Wall Street banks and investment funds might come out here on their lunch breaks or relax in the park at the end of a long day. But now the park was filled with a motley assemblage of young people—probably about a thousand—accompanied by the thunder of drums echoing off the walls of the surrounding skyscrapers. It was clear right away that a concert was out of the question—there was no stage, no sound system, not even electricity—it seems we were victims of a hoax. On the other hand we had the opportunity to observe this rather colorful scene.
For someone of my generation with faded childhood memories of the 1960s and 70s, the appearance of the protestors immediately evoked familiar associations—long haired youths, unwashed, bruised and beaten, shirtless, with beads and tattoos; girls in long skirts with pierced noses and multicolored hair; earnest, sincere faces—the usual style of American nonconformist youth. One second glance, though, other types emerged from the crowd—veterans in camouflage, well dressed men in ties, elderly ladies. Who were these people and what were they doing here?
Judging by the content of their signs, which were displayed in abundance around the perimeter of the park, the protesters themselves didn’t seem to know what exactly they were protesting. The slogans ranged from the strident (Eat the Rich!) to the naïve (I love everyone. Let’s figure this all out together!) to the downright bizarre (I am a goat. Ignore me. Go Shopping). When the first reports of the protests appeared it was easy to dismiss them as a bunch of latter day hippies and muddle headed leftists trying to get attention. But over the past week or so, to the surprise of the participants themselves, the movement has caught fire. Every day more articles and reports appear in the news and more people make their way, as I did, down to Zuccotti Park to see what all the excitement is about.
In part the success of the protesters may be due to pure persistence—if you stay in one place long enough and make enough noise (they make plenty!) someone is sure to notice. On the other hand, the protesters had one of the best publicity agents anyone could possibly ask for—the New York City Police Department. For the most part, the police have exercised restraint in their dealings with the occupiers. In part they have no choice. The Park which the demonstrators have occupied is technically private property. The owner was given permission to build a skyscraper next door on the condition that he create the park and keep it open to the public 24 hour a day. Without permission of the owner, the police do not have the authority to clear the premises. So the police stand around the edge making sure traffic isn’t blocked, but leave the park to the young people.
There have been a few occasions, however, when the protesters have left the refuge of the park and the police have abandoned their restraint, inflicting excessive force, and applying questionable tactics including mass arrests. Invariably videos showing police misconduct surface right away and go viral on the internet arousing a wave of sympathy and support. After two or three such events, the protests had become national news and inspired analogous protests in cities throughout the country.
But all police brutality in the world could not have helped the Wall Street protesters gain support if their message had not resonated with a set of widely held, if not always clearly articulated, beliefs about contemporary American life.
Three points in particular come to mind. The first is that something has gone terribly awry with our financial sector. Instead of providing necessary services and investment opportunities for ordinary Americans, Wall Street has become a crazy game of smoke and mirrors conjuring unimaginable wealth out of thin air through arcane and opaque instruments with names like credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations.
Of course, such games could not continue forever. Eventually the whole thing came tumbling down in the crash of 2008, and giving rise to a second widely held belief--Wall Street walked away from the mess it made leaving ordinary Americans to suffer the consequences. All throughout America people are losing their jobs, losing their homes, struggling to stay afloat under mountains of debt. Meanwhile the great banks and investment firms have received generous government bail-outs and are back to making record profits at the expense of the very people who are suffering the most. Huge banks are deemed “too big to fail” and given help at the tax payer’s expense while ordinary people are abandoned to their fate.
As if this wasn’t enough, Wall Street is clamoring for Congress to remove the few regulations that still remain in place. Hence a third key idea— American political life is controlled by large corporations and ordinary people no longer have a say. Corporations spend millions of dollars on powerful lobbyists and campaign contributions without which no politician can even hope to be elected. Naturally, after the elections, the corporations collect the political returns on their investment and although the politicians come and go, nothing really changes.
In part this perception reflects the disillusionment that many people feel with Barack Obama who came into office promising change only to pack his cabinet with Wall Street insiders and give the banks everything they could ask for and more. The banks, far from being grateful, responded by financing the Tea Party, setting the stage for the decisive victory of the extremist wing of the Republican party in the last congressional elections. As a result, the activists feel that if any change is to occur it must come from outside the framework of the traditional political system. This may be one reason for the lack of specific demands or goals on the part of the protesters. Unlike the Tea Party, to whom they are often compared, the protesters show little interest in supporting political candidates, organizing referendums and otherwise participating in the give and take of American politics. This may come later. But for now they have already made a more profound contribution. By drawing attention to the abuses of Wall Street and its impact on ordinary people, the protesters have given voice to a deep frustration felt throughout the country and opened a new framework for discussion and action. No one knows how long the protesters will remain encamped in Zuccotti Park, but their message has already left its mark.
Oct. 3, 2011
Not long ago, I found myself rather unexpectedly amidst the “occupiers” of Wall Street. My reasons for being there had nothing to do with politics, although their protests against the greed and impunity of the titans of American business arouse in me no small degree of sympathy. But no, it was music that drew me to Zuccotti Park on a warm late September afternoon.
That morning rumors starting to crop up on the internet that the group Radiohead, well known for their anti-corporate views as well as their innovative compositions, would be making a surprise appearance at the demonstration. My daughter is a big fan of Radiohead, and I like their music too. Our attempts to procure tickets for a rare concert appearance a few days earlier ended in disappointment. So when we went to the protester’s web site and found a notice confirming that Radiohead would appear we had the same reaction – Let’s go! We rushed down to the train station just in time to catch the commuter train into the city and were on our way.
Less than an hour later, we were wandering around the encampment. The park turned out to be fairly small—about half the size of a football field. A huge orange metal sculpture stood at one end, trees poked out of holes in the brick pavement in the middle and at the other end a set of steps led to the street just around the corner from “ground zero” where the twin towers one stood. One could imagine how in ordinary times employees of Wall Street banks and investment funds might come out here on their lunch breaks or relax in the park at the end of a long day. But now the park was filled with a motley assemblage of young people—probably about a thousand—accompanied by the thunder of drums echoing off the walls of the surrounding skyscrapers. It was clear right away that a concert was out of the question—there was no stage, no sound system, not even electricity—it seems we were victims of a hoax. On the other hand we had the opportunity to observe this rather colorful scene.
For someone of my generation with faded childhood memories of the 1960s and 70s, the appearance of the protestors immediately evoked familiar associations—long haired youths, unwashed, bruised and beaten, shirtless, with beads and tattoos; girls in long skirts with pierced noses and multicolored hair; earnest, sincere faces—the usual style of American nonconformist youth. One second glance, though, other types emerged from the crowd—veterans in camouflage, well dressed men in ties, elderly ladies. Who were these people and what were they doing here?
Judging by the content of their signs, which were displayed in abundance around the perimeter of the park, the protesters themselves didn’t seem to know what exactly they were protesting. The slogans ranged from the strident (Eat the Rich!) to the naïve (I love everyone. Let’s figure this all out together!) to the downright bizarre (I am a goat. Ignore me. Go Shopping). When the first reports of the protests appeared it was easy to dismiss them as a bunch of latter day hippies and muddle headed leftists trying to get attention. But over the past week or so, to the surprise of the participants themselves, the movement has caught fire. Every day more articles and reports appear in the news and more people make their way, as I did, down to Zuccotti Park to see what all the excitement is about.
In part the success of the protesters may be due to pure persistence—if you stay in one place long enough and make enough noise (they make plenty!) someone is sure to notice. On the other hand, the protesters had one of the best publicity agents anyone could possibly ask for—the New York City Police Department. For the most part, the police have exercised restraint in their dealings with the occupiers. In part they have no choice. The Park which the demonstrators have occupied is technically private property. The owner was given permission to build a skyscraper next door on the condition that he create the park and keep it open to the public 24 hour a day. Without permission of the owner, the police do not have the authority to clear the premises. So the police stand around the edge making sure traffic isn’t blocked, but leave the park to the young people.
There have been a few occasions, however, when the protesters have left the refuge of the park and the police have abandoned their restraint, inflicting excessive force, and applying questionable tactics including mass arrests. Invariably videos showing police misconduct surface right away and go viral on the internet arousing a wave of sympathy and support. After two or three such events, the protests had become national news and inspired analogous protests in cities throughout the country.
But all police brutality in the world could not have helped the Wall Street protesters gain support if their message had not resonated with a set of widely held, if not always clearly articulated, beliefs about contemporary American life.
Three points in particular come to mind. The first is that something has gone terribly awry with our financial sector. Instead of providing necessary services and investment opportunities for ordinary Americans, Wall Street has become a crazy game of smoke and mirrors conjuring unimaginable wealth out of thin air through arcane and opaque instruments with names like credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations.
Of course, such games could not continue forever. Eventually the whole thing came tumbling down in the crash of 2008, and giving rise to a second widely held belief--Wall Street walked away from the mess it made leaving ordinary Americans to suffer the consequences. All throughout America people are losing their jobs, losing their homes, struggling to stay afloat under mountains of debt. Meanwhile the great banks and investment firms have received generous government bail-outs and are back to making record profits at the expense of the very people who are suffering the most. Huge banks are deemed “too big to fail” and given help at the tax payer’s expense while ordinary people are abandoned to their fate.
As if this wasn’t enough, Wall Street is clamoring for Congress to remove the few regulations that still remain in place. Hence a third key idea— American political life is controlled by large corporations and ordinary people no longer have a say. Corporations spend millions of dollars on powerful lobbyists and campaign contributions without which no politician can even hope to be elected. Naturally, after the elections, the corporations collect the political returns on their investment and although the politicians come and go, nothing really changes.
In part this perception reflects the disillusionment that many people feel with Barack Obama who came into office promising change only to pack his cabinet with Wall Street insiders and give the banks everything they could ask for and more. The banks, far from being grateful, responded by financing the Tea Party, setting the stage for the decisive victory of the extremist wing of the Republican party in the last congressional elections. As a result, the activists feel that if any change is to occur it must come from outside the framework of the traditional political system. This may be one reason for the lack of specific demands or goals on the part of the protesters. Unlike the Tea Party, to whom they are often compared, the protesters show little interest in supporting political candidates, organizing referendums and otherwise participating in the give and take of American politics. This may come later. But for now they have already made a more profound contribution. By drawing attention to the abuses of Wall Street and its impact on ordinary people, the protesters have given voice to a deep frustration felt throughout the country and opened a new framework for discussion and action. No one knows how long the protesters will remain encamped in Zuccotti Park, but their message has already left its mark.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Leftists in academia redux
A while back we had an interesting discussion about the apparent preponderance of leftist views within American academia. We suggested a variety of possible explanations but they all seemed to fall short for lack of concrete evidence. I'm not particularly interested in returning to this debate, but when I saw this article in the Times--The Left-Leaning Tower--I thought it might be interesting to post as a sort of follow up.
In the article, the author reviews the work of several scholars who have actually studied this phenomenon in some detail. Unfortunately, the results are still rather inconclusive. One the one hand are the findings of a sociologist who identifies himself as a democrat and claims to have found that discrimination is not a factor in the low number of conservatives in academia. On the other hand are a few conservative/libertarian scholars who argue that discrimination may be taking place in more subtle ways at later stages in academic careers--in short if you're a conservative don't get your hope up for tenure.
So basically this supposedly neutral review of empirical studies boils down to yet another he said/she said media sleight of hand using "balance" as a pretext to shore up an untenable position. It turns out that the "liberal" study is based on an extensive investigation of actual behavior in the real world, whereas the conservative counterpart employs much more flimsy evidence--a much smaller survey of attitudes based on hypothetical scenarios. But in reviewing the conservative critique, the author succeeds in voicing several quite insidious stereotypes that feed right into the anti-intellectualism so prevalent in American culture. Two particularly stood out--first that being a professor is a cushy job with four months of summer vacation, and secondly that there is some kind of multicultural and feminist veto over hiring and tenure decisions. Ultimately what gets lost in all of this is the real reason why people go into academia--love of research, teaching and of the life of the mind. More often then not when it comes down to what academics actually study, the crude distinction between liberals and conservatives that dominates our media landscape becomes almost irrelevant.
In the article, the author reviews the work of several scholars who have actually studied this phenomenon in some detail. Unfortunately, the results are still rather inconclusive. One the one hand are the findings of a sociologist who identifies himself as a democrat and claims to have found that discrimination is not a factor in the low number of conservatives in academia. On the other hand are a few conservative/libertarian scholars who argue that discrimination may be taking place in more subtle ways at later stages in academic careers--in short if you're a conservative don't get your hope up for tenure.
So basically this supposedly neutral review of empirical studies boils down to yet another he said/she said media sleight of hand using "balance" as a pretext to shore up an untenable position. It turns out that the "liberal" study is based on an extensive investigation of actual behavior in the real world, whereas the conservative counterpart employs much more flimsy evidence--a much smaller survey of attitudes based on hypothetical scenarios. But in reviewing the conservative critique, the author succeeds in voicing several quite insidious stereotypes that feed right into the anti-intellectualism so prevalent in American culture. Two particularly stood out--first that being a professor is a cushy job with four months of summer vacation, and secondly that there is some kind of multicultural and feminist veto over hiring and tenure decisions. Ultimately what gets lost in all of this is the real reason why people go into academia--love of research, teaching and of the life of the mind. More often then not when it comes down to what academics actually study, the crude distinction between liberals and conservatives that dominates our media landscape becomes almost irrelevant.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Liberals and Ideology of failure. Take II
Previous thread with the same title got too cluttered, thus we decided to streamline the discussion and move to a new thread. So, here it is. Enjoy.
Recently, I ran across a blog by some fringe uber-liberal blogger mourning the death of Bin-Laden as a misguided hero willing to sacrifice his life for the sake of "oppressed". Her words turned my mind to the question that puzzled me for a long time. Why is contemporary liberalism simultaneously anti-American (more generally anti-Western in the sense of Western cultural values) and anti-Israel in nature? What is that psychological trait which turns people born in USA and Europe to hate values on which their native civilization was founded? What is it that makes liberal Jews, to whom Israel did nothing bad personally, to hate it that much?
Obviously, liberals are against capitalism, and this explains their hatred for such things as individualism, private property, economic freedom, limited government. Capitalism was invented in the West, and US is perceived as the country embodying it the most, thus the anti-West and anti-US sentiments of the liberals are quite natural. What is more puzzling is why they always go hand in hand with loathing for Israel, which is a country with long-lasting socialist traditions.
In an attempt to find the answer to this question, let me begin by noting that liberalism is based on the idea, originating from Marxists class struggle theory, according to which people belong to one of two categories: they are either oppressors or the oppressed. The latter deserve sympathy and should be defended, while the former must be anathematized and, when possible, destroyed. Practical application of this idea depends, of course, on how one determines who the oppressor is, and who is being oppressed. This is where liberals very successfully play their favorite linguistic game redefining words and giving them new meanings. For me oppression is associated with Stalin's GULAG or with Hitler's gas chambers, but this is not what liberals mean by “oppression” these days. Nothing helps to understand the actual meaning of the words than looking at their usage.
The main favorite oppressor these days is, of course, Israel. Never mind that nobody heard about concentration camps build by Israel for Palestinians or about mass extermination of the latter by the former. (And, yes, I do know about certain incidents perpetuated by Jewish groups in 1948, which, while definitely, regrettable, were committed in the midst of the war and never became official policies of the State of Israel). In modern Israel, Arab citizens have the same civil rights as Jews including their own representation in the Knesset. Living conditions of even those Palestinians, who do sit in Israeli prisons for such insignificant things as blowing up Israeli civilians, are often better than that of their “free” compatriots. There has been a press report recently about two Palestinians refusing to leave the prison so that they could complete their education. So much for being oppressed! But it all does not matter because liberals learned very well Lenin’s dictum: “A lie told often enough becomes the truth”. Their demonization of Israel has been so persistent that now everybody is convinced that Jews are the most evil people in the Middle East, and “the pain in the asses” as one famous movie director put it recently.
When liberals do not blast Israelis, they like to talk about global guilt of the West before underdeveloped countries in Africa or Latin America or the same Middle East. Before WW 2, the Western countries "oppressed" the rest of the world directly by colonizing them. What does it matter that those “oppressors” built infrastructure, provided education and medical services to those whom they oppressed? So what that after "liberation" most of this infrastructure, medical and educational institutions fell in disarray, and the newly free nations, especially in Africa succeeded mostly in killing each other? While after the war Europe engaged in restoring their cities and developing their economies, Africa self-destructed. Instead of accepting responsibility for their people, African leaders helped by Western liberals, succeeded mostly in the blame game and stealing whatever resources the West had sent to their countries. The West is being blamed for everything including AIDS epidemics. The idea that one has to use condoms during sex turned out to be much less appealing than suggestions that the Western countries created HIV virus in order to get rid of Africans and to appropriate their resources. And it does not matter how many financial and human resources western countries wasted in Africa, it is never enough. If Africans are miserable, it is because of West's colonial, neocolonial or postcolonial policies.
The faces of oppressors and oppressed back home in the "Land of opportunities" are also well known. The most obvious oppressors are of course the "fat cats” from the Wall street, greedy bankers, and the biggest and the scariest one – the Corporation. Vilification of corporations in liberal media became so beyond any reason that it appears that Corporations are some evil monsters from outer space rather than just one of many ways to organize ownership and governance of a business. Liberals seem to forget that corporations provide hundred thousands of people with jobs and manufacture those things, which liberals do not feel any shame to use in their daily lives.
In addition to large oppressors, there are smaller oppressors, which judging by Obama’s tax proposal, are everyone making more than $250 K per year. They may be not as evil and powerful as Big Oil or Big Farma or Koch brothers are, but they still oppress “less fortunate”, just by the virtue of possessing their “fortune”. One should admire Left’s linguistic abilities in inventing names designed to conceal the actual nature of phenomena they discuss. Term “less fortunate” is supposed to convey the idea that being poor has nothing to do with people making their personal choices, but it just a matter of good or bad fortune. Here are a few examples of those who are encouraged to think about themselves as oppressed. Students at my university feel so oppressed that a week before the finals, instead of studying, went to demonstrate and demand that more money were taken from those who has them and given to them. Another example: welfare mothers, a whole bunch of the “Precious”, who do not have the will and skills or even a desire to hold a job, but dream big about how they magically appear on a brightly lit stage, in a glamorous dress, and are admired by everyone. Also oppressed are the drug dealers and the drug users. The former sell drugs because they are not provided with other economic opportunities and the latter use them for exactly the same reasons. In general, oppressed are those who have “needs” they cannot fulfill and demand that other people were forced to provide for them.
Now, let us see if there is anything in common between these disparate examples of “oppression”. There might be more than one unifying motif here, but the one, which seems almost obvious to me, is that in all these cases oppressors are those cultures, countries, individuals who succeed, and the oppressed are those who fail. Indeed, Israel built a functioning state with a powerful army, modern economics, developed infrastructure, medicine, world-class education, and the level of life unseen in this part of the woods. Palestinians, at the same time, completely failed in developing their territories in spite of streams of money sent their way. This observation also helps me to understand why liberal Jews hate Israel so much that actually covertly want its passing to oblivion. They are psychologically frustrated. They would like to be able to be both good Jews and good liberals, which is not possible while Israel exists as a successful state. If Israel were no more and all the Jews (those who would survive) were scattered again all over the world and persecuted, they could be immediately moved to the category of oppressed. At this point, the liberal American Jews would find themselves in a very comfortable position - once again, they could be good liberals and good Jews saving their fellow compatriots and bringing them back under socialistic banners.
The same idea explains the general animosity of liberals toward principal Western values and their embrace of multiculturalism, which is just a code word for diluting western ideals of individualism, rationality, objectivity with cultural values from other much less successful traditions. The only consequence of this dilution can be diminishing role of those values that brought people from all other the world to the West to enjoy its achievements. The result is not difficult to predict: no more achievements.
One can argue that in the world of limited economic resources, the successful people and countries enjoying the fruits of their success consume too many resources leaving too little for those who are less successful, and therefore they become oppressors immediately once they claim their rights on the fruits of their labor. This argument, however, suffers from two fallacies. First, is the presumption that amount of wealth available for distribution is a conserving quantity so that if one has more than the other necessarily has less. Or if put in terms of the game theory, that economic activity is always a zero sum game. This is, of course, not so. Successful people create something, which would not have existed without them, and this defines their success. In very general terms, they create wealth, and by creating wealth, they increase resources available for everyone, including those who are “less fortunate”. Hayek in his “Road to slavery” gives a perfect example of this phenomenon. The labor of a minimally skilled worker by itself is not worth much. When, however, he becomes a part of a bigger enterprise, a factory, created by a successful individual with vision and talent, the worth of his labor increases by orders of magnitude. The second fallacy consists in the assumption that expropriating wealth created by successful people to achieve its more equitable distribution would have no influence on its overall amount. Ayn Rand showed that this is not so very clearly in her Atlas Shrugged, where she demonstrated with almost mathematical precision what happens to a society, which begins such redistribution.
OK, it is time to wrap it up, as I myself am not able to finish reading this post. To conclude: the liberals hate capitalism because they are ashamed of being successful. They believe that success of some is unfair for the others. It might be so, but to punish people and countries just because they succeeded while others failed is not just more unfair – it makes things worse for everyone, including those whom liberals are purported to defend.
Monday, June 13, 2011
About western values, liberalism and the value of the individual life
In one of his previous posts Nathan suggested that, contrary to what I say, his brand of liberalism has deep roots in the history of Western civilization, and that ideas of modern liberals are representative of the most significant intellectual achievements of the Western thinkers. It is somewhat ironic that to prove his point Nathan resorts to Christianity and the figure of Jesus Christ, even though his ideological comrades routinely disparage Christians for their religiosity. However, I do admit that the term "Western Values" which I used is too broad for discussing this complex conglomerate of often mutually exclusive ideas, so I have to clarify myself.
Among of a great variety of diverse ideas proposed and discussed in the thousand year history of Western civilization, two played a particularly important role. First was the idea that the Universe is the objective reality governed by the universal laws discoverable by a man. The second is understanding that people are self-sufficient individuals possessing rational minds and free will, and that the value of an individual is derived from his individual qualities rather than is handed down to him by his relation to a nations or a state or a king.
The first of these ideas generated unprecedented development of scientific knowledge, while the second one helped people to realize that they have rights to participate in society as independent free agents. This included economic participation and the right to own fruits of their labor and/or ingenuity. The most direct material expression of this realization was the idea of private property as an equivalent of economic freedom. This freedom and scientific progress provided positive feedback to each other resulting in unprecedented development of European nations.
These two ideas, which I consider the foundation of Western civilization, have elevated a human to a position, where instead of being an object of God, or fate, or king, the individual is an actively engaged subject, a creator.
These concepts, of course, were always in a struggle with another set of ideas emphasizing importance of collective in human behavior. According to them a group of people, a society , a nation, a segregation is more important then any individual in the group. Sacrifice for the well-being of the group is encouraged and sometimes even required. Individual rights of the group members are subjugated to the goals of the collective, the common good, which usually are formulated by an authority figure - a king, a messiah, pope, union leaders, etc. Earlier Christians lived in communities, and naturally, Christian morality was formulated in the collectivist terms (strong must take care of the weak, sacrifice for the group is the reason for canonization, etc). They were poor, hence, the negative attitude toward material wealth, property, and concentration on introvertive life of the soul. In addition of promulgating collectivist ideas, Christianity for a long period of time also insisted on the absence of any rational order in Nature, weakness and inadequacy of human mind. This attitude played a particularly negative role for the European civilization seriously hindering its development for 10 centuries. Only Luther's reformation and development of protestantism, which somewhat freed an individual in a person, weakened the brakes of collectivism, leading up to capitalism, industrial revolution and significant improvement in living conditions of a large number of people.
I think, however, that the religious component of protestantism is incidental in this story. It is not the idea of individual G-d, but the allowance for a much larger degree of individualism in general , made this progress possible. A significant role, of course, was played by protestant ethic, with its emphasize on importance of honesty, hard work, sanctity of a contract, etc, but I do not want to get engaged in the discussion if these ethical values are inherent to the religious world view, or they can be formulated from secular positions. What is important for me now is that Luther allowed Christians to recognise the value of their individuality.
It seems to me that out of all major religions, only protestantism is inherently compatible with capitalism. Ideological foundations of other branches of Christianity (Catholicism and Orthodoxy) as well as of Islam are very much at odds with capitalist approach to life. One can easily find conformation of this proposition by looking at the history of colonization of America, or the states of the modern Europe. Territory, known presently as USA, was colonized mostly by Anglicans and protestants while Mexico and all of the Southern America was colonized by catholic Spain and Portugal. The difference in the results does not need any special discussion. Now, look at the list of European countries with biggest economic problems: Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Ireland, all with predominantly Catholic or Orthodox populations.
Among of a great variety of diverse ideas proposed and discussed in the thousand year history of Western civilization, two played a particularly important role. First was the idea that the Universe is the objective reality governed by the universal laws discoverable by a man. The second is understanding that people are self-sufficient individuals possessing rational minds and free will, and that the value of an individual is derived from his individual qualities rather than is handed down to him by his relation to a nations or a state or a king.
The first of these ideas generated unprecedented development of scientific knowledge, while the second one helped people to realize that they have rights to participate in society as independent free agents. This included economic participation and the right to own fruits of their labor and/or ingenuity. The most direct material expression of this realization was the idea of private property as an equivalent of economic freedom. This freedom and scientific progress provided positive feedback to each other resulting in unprecedented development of European nations.
These two ideas, which I consider the foundation of Western civilization, have elevated a human to a position, where instead of being an object of God, or fate, or king, the individual is an actively engaged subject, a creator.
These concepts, of course, were always in a struggle with another set of ideas emphasizing importance of collective in human behavior. According to them a group of people, a society , a nation, a segregation is more important then any individual in the group. Sacrifice for the well-being of the group is encouraged and sometimes even required. Individual rights of the group members are subjugated to the goals of the collective, the common good, which usually are formulated by an authority figure - a king, a messiah, pope, union leaders, etc. Earlier Christians lived in communities, and naturally, Christian morality was formulated in the collectivist terms (strong must take care of the weak, sacrifice for the group is the reason for canonization, etc). They were poor, hence, the negative attitude toward material wealth, property, and concentration on introvertive life of the soul. In addition of promulgating collectivist ideas, Christianity for a long period of time also insisted on the absence of any rational order in Nature, weakness and inadequacy of human mind. This attitude played a particularly negative role for the European civilization seriously hindering its development for 10 centuries. Only Luther's reformation and development of protestantism, which somewhat freed an individual in a person, weakened the brakes of collectivism, leading up to capitalism, industrial revolution and significant improvement in living conditions of a large number of people.
I think, however, that the religious component of protestantism is incidental in this story. It is not the idea of individual G-d, but the allowance for a much larger degree of individualism in general , made this progress possible. A significant role, of course, was played by protestant ethic, with its emphasize on importance of honesty, hard work, sanctity of a contract, etc, but I do not want to get engaged in the discussion if these ethical values are inherent to the religious world view, or they can be formulated from secular positions. What is important for me now is that Luther allowed Christians to recognise the value of their individuality.
It seems to me that out of all major religions, only protestantism is inherently compatible with capitalism. Ideological foundations of other branches of Christianity (Catholicism and Orthodoxy) as well as of Islam are very much at odds with capitalist approach to life. One can easily find conformation of this proposition by looking at the history of colonization of America, or the states of the modern Europe. Territory, known presently as USA, was colonized mostly by Anglicans and protestants while Mexico and all of the Southern America was colonized by catholic Spain and Portugal. The difference in the results does not need any special discussion. Now, look at the list of European countries with biggest economic problems: Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Ireland, all with predominantly Catholic or Orthodox populations.
Thus, of course, modern liberalism does have roots in some of the traditions developed in the West, but my point is that these are not the traditions, which made Western civilization what it is now, at least in terms of its material development.
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Liberals and ideology of failure
Recently, I ran across a blog by some fringe uber-liberal blogger mourning the death of Bin-Laden as a misguided hero willing to sacrifice his life for the sake of "oppressed". Her words turned my mind to the question that puzzled me for a long time. Why is contemporary liberalism simultaneously anti-American (more generally anti-Western in the sense of Western cultural values) and anti-Israel in nature? What is that psychological trait which turns people born in USA and Europe to hate values on which their native civilization was founded? What is it that makes liberal Jews, to whom Israel did nothing bad personally, to hate it that much?
Obviously, liberals are against capitalism, and this explains their hatred for such things as individualism, private property, economic freedom, limited government. Capitalism was invented in the West, and US is perceived as the country embodying it the most, thus the anti-West and anti-US sentiments of the liberals are quite natural. What is more puzzling is why they always go hand in hand with loathing for Israel, which is a country with long-lasting socialist traditions.
In an attempt to find the answer to this question, let me begin by noting that liberalism is based on the idea, originating from Marxists class struggle theory, according to which people belong to one of two categories: they are either oppressors or the oppressed. The latter deserve sympathy and should be defended, while the former must be anathematized and, when possible, destroyed. Practical application of this idea depends, of course, on how one determines who the oppressor is, and who is being oppressed. This is where liberals very successfully play their favorite linguistic game redefining words and giving them new meanings. For me oppression is associated with Stalin's GULAG or with Hitler's gas chambers, but this is not what liberals mean by “oppression” these days. Nothing helps to understand the actual meaning of the words than looking at their usage.
The main favorite oppressor these days is, of course, Israel. Never mind that nobody heard about concentration camps build by Israel for Palestinians or about mass extermination of the latter by the former. (And, yes, I do know about certain incidents perpetuated by Jewish groups in 1948, which, while definitely, regrettable, were committed in the midst of the war and never became official policies of the State of Israel). In modern Israel, Arab citizens have the same civil rights as Jews including their own representation in the Knesset. Living conditions of even those Palestinians, who do sit in Israeli prisons for such insignificant things as blowing up Israeli civilians, are often better than that of their “free” compatriots. There has been a press report recently about two Palestinians refusing to leave the prison so that they could complete their education. So much for being oppressed! But it all does not matter because liberals learned very well Lenin’s dictum: “A lie told often enough becomes the truth”. Their demonization of Israel has been so persistent that now everybody is convinced that Jews are the most evil people in the Middle East, and “the pain in the asses” as one famous movie director put it recently.
When liberals do not blast Israelis, they like to talk about global guilt of the West before underdeveloped countries in Africa or Latin America or the same Middle East. Before WW 2, the Western countries "oppressed" the rest of the world directly by colonizing them. What does it matter that those “oppressors” built infrastructure, provided education and medical services to those whom they oppressed? So what that after "liberation" most of this infrastructure, medical and educational institutions fell in disarray, and the newly free nations, especially in Africa succeeded mostly in killing each other? While after the war Europe engaged in restoring their cities and developing their economics, Africa self-destructed. Instead of accepting responsibility for their people, African leaders helped by Western liberals, succeeded mostly in the blame game and stealing whatever resources the West had sent to their countries. The West is being blamed for everything including AID epidemics. The idea that one has to use condoms during sex turned out to be much less appealing than suggestions that the Western countries created HIV virus in order to get rid of Africans and to appropriate their resources. And it does not matter how many financial and human resources western countries wasted in Africa, it is never enough. If Africans are miserable, it is because of West's colonial, neocolonial or postcolonial policies.
The faces of oppressors and oppressed back home in the "Land of opportunities" are also well known. The most obvious oppressors are of course the "fat cats” from the Wall street, greedy bankers, and the biggest and the scariest one – the Corporation. Vilification of corporations in liberal media became so beyond any reason that it appears that Corporations are some evil monsters from outer space rather than just one of many ways to organize ownership and governance of a business. Liberals seem to forget that corporations provide hundred thousands of people with jobs and manufacture those things, which liberals do not feel any shame to use in their daily lives.
In addition to large oppressors, there are smaller oppressors, which judging by Obama’s tax proposal, are everyone making more than $250 K per year. They may be not as evil and powerful as Big Oil or Big Farma or Koch brothers are, but they still oppress “less fortunate”, just by the virtue of possessing their “fortune”. One should admire Left’s linguistic abilities in inventing names designed to conceal the actual nature of phenomena they discuss. Term “less fortunate” is supposed to convey the idea that being poor has nothing to do with people making their personal choices, but it just a matter of good or bad fortune. Here are a few examples of those who are encouraged to think about themselves as oppressed. Students at my university feel so oppressed that a week before the finals, instead of studying, went to demonstrate and demand that more money were taken from those who has them and given to them. Another example: welfare mothers, a whole bunch of the “Precious”, who do not have the will and skills or even a desire to hold a job, but dream big about how they magically appear on a brightly lit stage, in a glamorous dress, and are admired by everyone. Also oppressed are the drug dealers and the drug users. The former sell drugs because they are not provided with other economic opportunities and the latter use them for exactly the same reasons. In general, oppressed are those who have “needs” they cannot fulfill and demand that other people were forced to provide for them.
Now, let us see if there is anything in common between these disparate examples of “oppression”. There might be more than one unifying motif here, but the one, which seems almost obvious to me, is that in all these cases oppressors are those cultures, countries, individuals who succeed, and the oppressed are those who fail. Indeed, Israel built a functioning state with a powerful army, modern economics, developed infrastructure, medicine, world-class education, and the level of life unseen in this part of the woods. Palestinians, at the same time, completely failed in developing their territories in spite of streams of money sent their way. This observation also helps me to understand why liberal Jews hate Israel so much that actually covertly want its passing to oblivion. They are psychologically frustrated. They would like to be able to be both good Jews and good liberals, which is not possible while Israel exists as a successful state. If Israel were no more and all the Jews (those who would survive) were scattered again all over the world and persecuted, they could be immediately moved to the category of oppressed. At this point, the liberal American Jews would find themselves in a very comfortable position - once again, they could be good liberals and good Jews saving their fellow compatriots and bringing them back under socialistic banners.
The same idea explains the general animosity of liberals toward principal Western values and their embrace of multiculturalism, which is just a code word for diluting western ideals of individualism, rationality, objectivity with cultural values from other much less successful traditions. The only consequence of this dilution can be diminishing role of those values that brought people from all other the world to the West to enjoy its achievements. The result is not difficult to predict: no more achievements.
One can argue that in the world of limited economic resources, the successful people and countries enjoying the fruits of their success consume too many resources leaving too little for those who are less successful, and therefore they become oppressors immediately once they claim their rights on the fruits of their labor. This argument, however, suffers from two fallacies. First, is the presumption that amount of wealth available for distribution is a conserving quantity so that if one has more than the other necessarily has less. Or if put in terms of the game theory, that economic activity is always a zero sum game. This is, of course, not so. Successful people create something, which would not have existed without them, and this defines their success. In very general terms, they create wealth, and by creating wealth, they increase resources available for everyone, including those who are “less fortunate”. Hayek in his “Road to slavery” gives a perfect example of this phenomenon. The labor of a minimally skilled worker by itself is not worth much. When, however, he becomes a part of a bigger enterprise, a factory, created by a successful individual with vision and talent, the worth of his labor increases by orders of magnitude. The second fallacy consists in the assumption that expropriating wealth created by successful people to achieve its more equitable distribution would have no influence on its overall amount. Ayn Rand showed that this is not so very clearly in her Atlas Shrugged, where she demonstrated with almost mathematical precision what happens to a society, which begins such redistribution.
OK, it is time to wrap it up, as I myself am not able to finish reading this post. To conclude: the liberals hate capitalism because they are ashamed of being successful. They believe that success of some is unfair for the others. It might be so, but to punish people and countries just because they succeeded while others failed is not just more unfair – it makes things worse for everyone, including those whom liberals are purported to defend.
Obviously, liberals are against capitalism, and this explains their hatred for such things as individualism, private property, economic freedom, limited government. Capitalism was invented in the West, and US is perceived as the country embodying it the most, thus the anti-West and anti-US sentiments of the liberals are quite natural. What is more puzzling is why they always go hand in hand with loathing for Israel, which is a country with long-lasting socialist traditions.
In an attempt to find the answer to this question, let me begin by noting that liberalism is based on the idea, originating from Marxists class struggle theory, according to which people belong to one of two categories: they are either oppressors or the oppressed. The latter deserve sympathy and should be defended, while the former must be anathematized and, when possible, destroyed. Practical application of this idea depends, of course, on how one determines who the oppressor is, and who is being oppressed. This is where liberals very successfully play their favorite linguistic game redefining words and giving them new meanings. For me oppression is associated with Stalin's GULAG or with Hitler's gas chambers, but this is not what liberals mean by “oppression” these days. Nothing helps to understand the actual meaning of the words than looking at their usage.
The main favorite oppressor these days is, of course, Israel. Never mind that nobody heard about concentration camps build by Israel for Palestinians or about mass extermination of the latter by the former. (And, yes, I do know about certain incidents perpetuated by Jewish groups in 1948, which, while definitely, regrettable, were committed in the midst of the war and never became official policies of the State of Israel). In modern Israel, Arab citizens have the same civil rights as Jews including their own representation in the Knesset. Living conditions of even those Palestinians, who do sit in Israeli prisons for such insignificant things as blowing up Israeli civilians, are often better than that of their “free” compatriots. There has been a press report recently about two Palestinians refusing to leave the prison so that they could complete their education. So much for being oppressed! But it all does not matter because liberals learned very well Lenin’s dictum: “A lie told often enough becomes the truth”. Their demonization of Israel has been so persistent that now everybody is convinced that Jews are the most evil people in the Middle East, and “the pain in the asses” as one famous movie director put it recently.
When liberals do not blast Israelis, they like to talk about global guilt of the West before underdeveloped countries in Africa or Latin America or the same Middle East. Before WW 2, the Western countries "oppressed" the rest of the world directly by colonizing them. What does it matter that those “oppressors” built infrastructure, provided education and medical services to those whom they oppressed? So what that after "liberation" most of this infrastructure, medical and educational institutions fell in disarray, and the newly free nations, especially in Africa succeeded mostly in killing each other? While after the war Europe engaged in restoring their cities and developing their economics, Africa self-destructed. Instead of accepting responsibility for their people, African leaders helped by Western liberals, succeeded mostly in the blame game and stealing whatever resources the West had sent to their countries. The West is being blamed for everything including AID epidemics. The idea that one has to use condoms during sex turned out to be much less appealing than suggestions that the Western countries created HIV virus in order to get rid of Africans and to appropriate their resources. And it does not matter how many financial and human resources western countries wasted in Africa, it is never enough. If Africans are miserable, it is because of West's colonial, neocolonial or postcolonial policies.
The faces of oppressors and oppressed back home in the "Land of opportunities" are also well known. The most obvious oppressors are of course the "fat cats” from the Wall street, greedy bankers, and the biggest and the scariest one – the Corporation. Vilification of corporations in liberal media became so beyond any reason that it appears that Corporations are some evil monsters from outer space rather than just one of many ways to organize ownership and governance of a business. Liberals seem to forget that corporations provide hundred thousands of people with jobs and manufacture those things, which liberals do not feel any shame to use in their daily lives.
In addition to large oppressors, there are smaller oppressors, which judging by Obama’s tax proposal, are everyone making more than $250 K per year. They may be not as evil and powerful as Big Oil or Big Farma or Koch brothers are, but they still oppress “less fortunate”, just by the virtue of possessing their “fortune”. One should admire Left’s linguistic abilities in inventing names designed to conceal the actual nature of phenomena they discuss. Term “less fortunate” is supposed to convey the idea that being poor has nothing to do with people making their personal choices, but it just a matter of good or bad fortune. Here are a few examples of those who are encouraged to think about themselves as oppressed. Students at my university feel so oppressed that a week before the finals, instead of studying, went to demonstrate and demand that more money were taken from those who has them and given to them. Another example: welfare mothers, a whole bunch of the “Precious”, who do not have the will and skills or even a desire to hold a job, but dream big about how they magically appear on a brightly lit stage, in a glamorous dress, and are admired by everyone. Also oppressed are the drug dealers and the drug users. The former sell drugs because they are not provided with other economic opportunities and the latter use them for exactly the same reasons. In general, oppressed are those who have “needs” they cannot fulfill and demand that other people were forced to provide for them.
Now, let us see if there is anything in common between these disparate examples of “oppression”. There might be more than one unifying motif here, but the one, which seems almost obvious to me, is that in all these cases oppressors are those cultures, countries, individuals who succeed, and the oppressed are those who fail. Indeed, Israel built a functioning state with a powerful army, modern economics, developed infrastructure, medicine, world-class education, and the level of life unseen in this part of the woods. Palestinians, at the same time, completely failed in developing their territories in spite of streams of money sent their way. This observation also helps me to understand why liberal Jews hate Israel so much that actually covertly want its passing to oblivion. They are psychologically frustrated. They would like to be able to be both good Jews and good liberals, which is not possible while Israel exists as a successful state. If Israel were no more and all the Jews (those who would survive) were scattered again all over the world and persecuted, they could be immediately moved to the category of oppressed. At this point, the liberal American Jews would find themselves in a very comfortable position - once again, they could be good liberals and good Jews saving their fellow compatriots and bringing them back under socialistic banners.
The same idea explains the general animosity of liberals toward principal Western values and their embrace of multiculturalism, which is just a code word for diluting western ideals of individualism, rationality, objectivity with cultural values from other much less successful traditions. The only consequence of this dilution can be diminishing role of those values that brought people from all other the world to the West to enjoy its achievements. The result is not difficult to predict: no more achievements.
One can argue that in the world of limited economic resources, the successful people and countries enjoying the fruits of their success consume too many resources leaving too little for those who are less successful, and therefore they become oppressors immediately once they claim their rights on the fruits of their labor. This argument, however, suffers from two fallacies. First, is the presumption that amount of wealth available for distribution is a conserving quantity so that if one has more than the other necessarily has less. Or if put in terms of the game theory, that economic activity is always a zero sum game. This is, of course, not so. Successful people create something, which would not have existed without them, and this defines their success. In very general terms, they create wealth, and by creating wealth, they increase resources available for everyone, including those who are “less fortunate”. Hayek in his “Road to slavery” gives a perfect example of this phenomenon. The labor of a minimally skilled worker by itself is not worth much. When, however, he becomes a part of a bigger enterprise, a factory, created by a successful individual with vision and talent, the worth of his labor increases by orders of magnitude. The second fallacy consists in the assumption that expropriating wealth created by successful people to achieve its more equitable distribution would have no influence on its overall amount. Ayn Rand showed that this is not so very clearly in her Atlas Shrugged, where she demonstrated with almost mathematical precision what happens to a society, which begins such redistribution.
OK, it is time to wrap it up, as I myself am not able to finish reading this post. To conclude: the liberals hate capitalism because they are ashamed of being successful. They believe that success of some is unfair for the others. It might be so, but to punish people and countries just because they succeeded while others failed is not just more unfair – it makes things worse for everyone, including those whom liberals are purported to defend.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Why the situation in Libya scares the hell out of me?
Before I begin I have to make a disclaimer: this is a pure opinion piece not pretending at any degree of analysis. I just wanted to express the feelings I have been having since the beginning of the latest adventure of western powers in Africa.
Airways are full of news from Libya: brave pilots of coalition forces bombed this and that and completed establishing a no-fly zone all over the Libya, hurray –hurray! What a great victory over an air force with two and a half planes from the prehistoric era and the pilots who think that an airplane is just like a camel only with wings! Apparently, we are supposed to fall into an ecstasy about our Western might. Do not get me wrong, I am not mocking here the coalition pilots, who are doing their jobs at highest professional level, risking their lives as routinely as we are going out for the cup of coffee at Starbucks. My beef is with those morons who actually made the decision to begin this whole operation. Or may be it is better to say, half-made, half-decision?
My problem is with so called leaders of the free world, Mr. Sarkozy and Mr. Cameron. No, I have not forgotten about Mr. Obama, I did not include him in the above list intentionally. I just recognize the simple truth that Mr. Obama’s behavior in this situation is anything but leadership. He looks more like a child forced by his parents to do his chores. He does not want to, but is too afraid to refuse. So, let’s talk about our brave Frenchman, and his supporting star, Mr. Cameron. They scare me because I do not understand what they are doing in Libya, and whenever I do not understand something, I get scared. Now, may be this is it: I just do not understand. May be Mr. Sarkozy and Co. have a great design imperceptible by regular folks, like me, and I have really nothing to worry about. Daddy knows better, and children must just relax and trust daddy. This is probably what they told to Mr. Obama.
Even though I admit remote possibility of this scenario, it does not seem too likely. No one can keep secrets nowadays for too long, and if there were a hidden design, someone, somehow would have leaked at least a glimpse of it. However, all what we hear and read is about the great mission of protecting Libyan revolutionaries from evil Qaddafi. O, he is evil indeed, there is no doubt about that, but do we really go to war these days to protect one side in the civil war against the other? The idea itself seems quite absurd to me, and I know from my pre-American experience that civil wars are never about good versus evil, it is usually, evil of one kind versus evil of another kind.
Interestingly, there is very little information available about those rebels. I have not heard the media discussing their ideology, political goals, and such, except of that part, where they want to get rid of Qaddafi. Well, Osama bin Laden would love to get rid of Qaddafi, too, but I presume it does not mean that we have to help them, does it? Or we do? A few days ago, a guy from Bush’s counterterrorism team stated on NPR that at least some of these rebels are indeed connected with militant Islam, and we do provide them with air cover. What an insane world are we living in?
Still, let give our coalition a benefit of a doubt. Let assume that these rebels are indeed freedom-loving people ready to give their lives to establish a western style democratic government in Libya. Is it still a sufficient reason to go to war? I would understand it if Sarkozy and Cameron would have told Qaddafi: “Dear Colonel, we have invested billions into your country, and we need your oil. So, if you are going to f-ck with us, we will come and get you.” I, personally, do not see anything wrong with going to war to defend one’s vital economic interests and investments. Of course, any war is bad, and should be avoided, but when nothing else works, responsible governments must do whatever it takes to defend interests of their citizens. And, of course, it is reasonable to suspect that French and British doing in Libya exactly that, but why all this pretense? Since when did it become so shameful to defend one’s economic interest that some bogus “humanitarian” reasons must be invented to justify such actions? It probably happened at the same time when “profit” became a dirty word, and self-interest became something like masturbation – everybody does it, everybody knows that everybody does it, but it is improper to mention it in public.
So, while I can see legitimate reasons for the Brits and French to be angry with Qaddafi and wanting to get rid of him, I do not understand how their current actions will achieve this. Instead of a quick and decisive Falkland Islands or Grenada style operation, they conduct a bombing campaign and establish a no-fly zone. Where in the annals of the history of military art have they read that bombing can win a war? Haven’t they learned the lessons of Iraq and Kosovo? I am completely flabbergasted by their shameful bickering about the chain-of-command, by their unwillingness to accept painful reality that there can be no victory without causalities. I am stupefied that they care more about nonsensical things such as reaction of the Arab world to their action, instead of thinking how to achieve their objectives in the quickest and most efficient way. And this scares the hell out of me. If this is how our “leaders” are going to defend our way of life, we are doomed. I still hope though, that I am wrong, that there is something out there, which I am not aware of. May be some special op forces inserted on the ground in such a clandestine manner that even the journalists did not get the wind of it. Well, hope dies last, but as of now, it is hardly breathing.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Again about unions
I decided to continue our discussion of unions on a new thread since the previous one became too clattered with particulars. Do not get me wrong, though. I would be happy tot talk about Keynesian versus Friedman economics, or about education any time, but I believe that these topics are too important to be buried somewhere in the middle of the discussion about unions.
Nathan, in one of his last comments, very passionately defended union’s role during Gilded Age and the first Progressive era of American history. I am afraid, however that he has wasted all this passion busting a door, which was already open. Presently, hardly anyone (with a possible exception of extremely hardcore libertarians) doubts that at that time unions played an important role in funneling angst of the workers into a socially more or less acceptable form. Even though Adam Smith considered collective bargaining analogous to price fixing by manufacturers, and, therefore going against the free market principles, one can still accept this practice as a way to compensate extensive power of the Capital against a much weaker position of an individual easily replaceable worker.
One, however, must clearly separate private sector unions and organizations of state employees. In the early days of the labor movement, the idea of unionizing workers on government’s payroll was perceived as a perversion even by labor leaders, and for very good reasons. First, the politicians and appointed by them bureaucrats, who negotiate salaries and benefits of people working for government, divide money, which is not theirs. All these salaries and benefits come from the taxes, but the taxpayers have no say in the negotiation process. Therefore, out of share sense of fairness, the suggestion by Wisconsin governor that all pay raises for governmental workers going beyond the corrections for inflation must be approved by the taxpayers makes to me a lot of sense. If this idea seems too extreme, one could delegate this decision to the local legislatures, which are elected, and are, therefore, responsible before the taxpayers. Unions, in this case would have to “negotiate” with the public convincing them that their members do such a good job that they deserve a pay raise.
Second argument against collective bargaining by government workers has been restated many times, but is still misunderstood, thus I will repeat it here. If a politician is elected with a primary support (financial and organizational) of people whose salary he/she is supposed to negotiate, this process becomes inherently and irrevocably corrupt. In this case, they are not negotiating, they are fulfilling their campaign promises, and since the money does not come from their personal pockets, they do not care much if they are spent efficiently or not. They main area of concern for the politicians is to deliver on the promises in order to get support for the next election.
The rule is, of course, not absolute, as nothing in politics is absolute. An interesting situation is developing in Connecticut, where the new governor, a democrat, who was elected with a heavy union support, suddenly demanded huge concessions from the unions. The union’s reaction was sheer disbelief in what is happening: their man turned against them, a scandal! The problem for the unions in this particular case came from changing political situation due to events in Wisconsin and elsewhere. Besides, the governor Malloy was elected with a very narrow margin, and perceived that union’s support actually coasted him votes. Thus, there is nothing surprising in Connecticut’s events, just a politician being a politician, and nothing is really new or unusual: investment in politicians always carries a risk. This is true for unions or for any other donor giving monies to politicians.
This brings me to Nathan’s assertion that union’s support of politicians is no different from the similar support of, for instance, defense contractors, contributing financially to politicians making decisions about defense spending and writing military appropriation bills. I agree that these relationships can and often do result in corruption, which is an unavoidable evil of government interaction with private companies. Still, since we cannot privatize defense, in this area government and private sector are necessarily intersect and corruption becomes an issue. However, I do not think it is correct to compare the political support provided to politicians by private firms, even if they receive governmental contracts, with support provided by unions. Private companies, unlike unions, receive taxpayers’ money as a payment for goods, which government needs (tanks, airplanes, etc.). Obviously, these companies sell these things to the government at a profit, and it is this profit, which they use to secure a continuous flow of governmental orders by supporting “friendly” politicians. Besides most government contracts are awarded on a very competitive basis (with few exceptions, when there exist only few companies able to produce required goods, like Boeing), so that even if you pay off a politician or two you still must be able to deliver the tangible goods to win the contract. At the same time, there cannot be any competitors for unionized government workers, and their financial support of elected officials is pure ugly bribery. It is even uglier than usual corruption involving private companies and municipal bureaucrats, because in the case of unions, the bureaucrats virtually paying bribes to themselves using unions simply as a conduit for the money.
The last arguments explaining why unions of government workers should not have rights for collective bargaining was presented recently in a very clear form by Thomas Sowell in National Review On Line. Basically he makes a point that competition makes unions in the private sector responsible for their action, while lack of thereof in governmental sector enables unions of state employees make exuberant demands without any real consequences for union bosses and their membership. For instance, unions virtually destroyed the coal industry in this country, but paid for it with its own extinction. Unions of public employees, however, do not have to face reality of the market, and, therefore, their power can only be limited by limiting their right to bargain.
Nathan, in one of his last comments, very passionately defended union’s role during Gilded Age and the first Progressive era of American history. I am afraid, however that he has wasted all this passion busting a door, which was already open. Presently, hardly anyone (with a possible exception of extremely hardcore libertarians) doubts that at that time unions played an important role in funneling angst of the workers into a socially more or less acceptable form. Even though Adam Smith considered collective bargaining analogous to price fixing by manufacturers, and, therefore going against the free market principles, one can still accept this practice as a way to compensate extensive power of the Capital against a much weaker position of an individual easily replaceable worker.
One, however, must clearly separate private sector unions and organizations of state employees. In the early days of the labor movement, the idea of unionizing workers on government’s payroll was perceived as a perversion even by labor leaders, and for very good reasons. First, the politicians and appointed by them bureaucrats, who negotiate salaries and benefits of people working for government, divide money, which is not theirs. All these salaries and benefits come from the taxes, but the taxpayers have no say in the negotiation process. Therefore, out of share sense of fairness, the suggestion by Wisconsin governor that all pay raises for governmental workers going beyond the corrections for inflation must be approved by the taxpayers makes to me a lot of sense. If this idea seems too extreme, one could delegate this decision to the local legislatures, which are elected, and are, therefore, responsible before the taxpayers. Unions, in this case would have to “negotiate” with the public convincing them that their members do such a good job that they deserve a pay raise.
Second argument against collective bargaining by government workers has been restated many times, but is still misunderstood, thus I will repeat it here. If a politician is elected with a primary support (financial and organizational) of people whose salary he/she is supposed to negotiate, this process becomes inherently and irrevocably corrupt. In this case, they are not negotiating, they are fulfilling their campaign promises, and since the money does not come from their personal pockets, they do not care much if they are spent efficiently or not. They main area of concern for the politicians is to deliver on the promises in order to get support for the next election.
The rule is, of course, not absolute, as nothing in politics is absolute. An interesting situation is developing in Connecticut, where the new governor, a democrat, who was elected with a heavy union support, suddenly demanded huge concessions from the unions. The union’s reaction was sheer disbelief in what is happening: their man turned against them, a scandal! The problem for the unions in this particular case came from changing political situation due to events in Wisconsin and elsewhere. Besides, the governor Malloy was elected with a very narrow margin, and perceived that union’s support actually coasted him votes. Thus, there is nothing surprising in Connecticut’s events, just a politician being a politician, and nothing is really new or unusual: investment in politicians always carries a risk. This is true for unions or for any other donor giving monies to politicians.
This brings me to Nathan’s assertion that union’s support of politicians is no different from the similar support of, for instance, defense contractors, contributing financially to politicians making decisions about defense spending and writing military appropriation bills. I agree that these relationships can and often do result in corruption, which is an unavoidable evil of government interaction with private companies. Still, since we cannot privatize defense, in this area government and private sector are necessarily intersect and corruption becomes an issue. However, I do not think it is correct to compare the political support provided to politicians by private firms, even if they receive governmental contracts, with support provided by unions. Private companies, unlike unions, receive taxpayers’ money as a payment for goods, which government needs (tanks, airplanes, etc.). Obviously, these companies sell these things to the government at a profit, and it is this profit, which they use to secure a continuous flow of governmental orders by supporting “friendly” politicians. Besides most government contracts are awarded on a very competitive basis (with few exceptions, when there exist only few companies able to produce required goods, like Boeing), so that even if you pay off a politician or two you still must be able to deliver the tangible goods to win the contract. At the same time, there cannot be any competitors for unionized government workers, and their financial support of elected officials is pure ugly bribery. It is even uglier than usual corruption involving private companies and municipal bureaucrats, because in the case of unions, the bureaucrats virtually paying bribes to themselves using unions simply as a conduit for the money.
The last arguments explaining why unions of government workers should not have rights for collective bargaining was presented recently in a very clear form by Thomas Sowell in National Review On Line. Basically he makes a point that competition makes unions in the private sector responsible for their action, while lack of thereof in governmental sector enables unions of state employees make exuberant demands without any real consequences for union bosses and their membership. For instance, unions virtually destroyed the coal industry in this country, but paid for it with its own extinction. Unions of public employees, however, do not have to face reality of the market, and, therefore, their power can only be limited by limiting their right to bargain.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Should teachers be paid more?
There was a column in the Times today that touched on the topic of our previous discussion of unions and budget cutting. As you'll see, Nicholas Kristof is no fan of teachers unions, in fact he echoes a few of Lev's points, but his argument that we do a disservice to ourselves by treating teachers poorly is very well taken.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/opinion/13kristof.html?hp
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/opinion/13kristof.html?hp
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Unions and the Politics of Budget Cutting
So, I guess my post on Ronald Reagan didn't exactly whip the conservative masses into a polemical frenzy. Here an issue that's a little more timely.
I've been following with interest the goings on in Wisconsin and other states as well as the political posturing over the federal budget. I have to admit that public service employee unions were never particularly near and dear to my heart. The one time I attended a local school committee meeting the teacher's union, trying to move along difficult contract negotiations, was out in force. I felt very sorry for the school committee members as they had to listen to endless harangues and put up with what struck me as an appalling lack of basic civility. I could also never understand the concept of teacher tenure. I always assumed that tenure existed to protect scholars from political interference in their academic research, not to guarantee school teachers lifetime employment. And I've been dismayed at times by the behavior of police and fireman's unions whose concept of solidarity seems to mean defending their members who abuse their power regardless of the circumstances.
So I certainly can see how public service unions could be improved, and I don't dispute that the budget crises facing states are very real. But looking at what the Republicans have undertaken, I can help but conclude that reforming the public service sector and balancing the budget are secondary concerns at best, and that the real motive is to enact a political agenda. It's hard to take Republican new found religion on budget deficits seriously, first of all, when they have done so much to create the deficits with their mania for tax cuts and military spending. Rather, they are using the pretext of budget cutting to launch an all-out assault on the state run social safety net in general and on unions in particular. It is very revealing that that the governor of Wisconsin has refused to conduct any negotiations at all with the public employee unions despite their willing to agree to all the financial concessions he has proposed. If his primary goal was balancing the budget, this should have been enough, but it's clear that he has other goals in mind, goals shared by his right wing sponsors who funded his electoral campaign and helped put him in power.
I know my friend Lev has very different views on these matters, and I'm interested to hear his response.
I've been following with interest the goings on in Wisconsin and other states as well as the political posturing over the federal budget. I have to admit that public service employee unions were never particularly near and dear to my heart. The one time I attended a local school committee meeting the teacher's union, trying to move along difficult contract negotiations, was out in force. I felt very sorry for the school committee members as they had to listen to endless harangues and put up with what struck me as an appalling lack of basic civility. I could also never understand the concept of teacher tenure. I always assumed that tenure existed to protect scholars from political interference in their academic research, not to guarantee school teachers lifetime employment. And I've been dismayed at times by the behavior of police and fireman's unions whose concept of solidarity seems to mean defending their members who abuse their power regardless of the circumstances.
So I certainly can see how public service unions could be improved, and I don't dispute that the budget crises facing states are very real. But looking at what the Republicans have undertaken, I can help but conclude that reforming the public service sector and balancing the budget are secondary concerns at best, and that the real motive is to enact a political agenda. It's hard to take Republican new found religion on budget deficits seriously, first of all, when they have done so much to create the deficits with their mania for tax cuts and military spending. Rather, they are using the pretext of budget cutting to launch an all-out assault on the state run social safety net in general and on unions in particular. It is very revealing that that the governor of Wisconsin has refused to conduct any negotiations at all with the public employee unions despite their willing to agree to all the financial concessions he has proposed. If his primary goal was balancing the budget, this should have been enough, but it's clear that he has other goals in mind, goals shared by his right wing sponsors who funded his electoral campaign and helped put him in power.
I know my friend Lev has very different views on these matters, and I'm interested to hear his response.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
On the Mythologization of Ronald Reagan
We're back after a hiatus of sorts, but here's a topic that liable to get the polemical juices flowing--the legacy of Ronald Reagan.
So given what Reagan’s presidency actually represented, why has this cult of Reagan emerged. The easy answer is that it is useful. Larger than life heroes are the lifeblood of ideological movements, and when you’re building a cult of personality, the last thing you want to do is sully it with the messy details of real life. Of course it takes time (at least in an open society) to pull this off. As late as 1992, more Americans had an unfavorable than a favorable view of Reagan and a substantial plurality felt that they were worse off as a result of his presidency. But by the end of the 1990s memories had begun to fade, a process eased along by the general prosperity of the Clinton years and the three ring circus put on by Ken Starr and co. My first recollection of a changing image came around the 2000 election when Bush Jr. was deliberately marketed as a kind of latter-day Reagan—a warm-hearted no nonsense kind of guy who shot from the hip, thought from the gut and would bring back those happy days. Reagan’s death in 2004 brought a new wave of fond remembrances, soon to be encapsulated in pithy YouTube clips replaying the best of Reagan’s made for TV moments—“Mr Gorbachev—tear down this wall!” And once the ideological right rediscovered its mojo after Obama’s election, the image of Reagan was there waiting for them, indelibly etched, clear and bright and safely removed from the messy reality of his presidency.
It’s Reagan’s 100th birthday and all his admirers are out in force. I don’t recall exactly how or when it happened, but over the last decade or so Reagan has become something like a latter day founding father—a wise, skillful politician whose judgments were invariably spot-on. It’s as if he set the gold standard, and Republicans ever since have been trying to find someone who could measure up I wouldn't be surprised if they're clearing away space for him on Mt. Rushmore at this very moment.
Funny thing is, this is not at all how I remember Reagan. Of course, I can’t speak to his image in what we now know of as the Red States (imagine how that would have sounded when Reagan came into office!), although I do recall that there were times, particularly in his first term when his popularity dropped quite low—well below anything Obama has encountered. But his image in circles that I frequented was overwhelmingly negative. If you had asked my take on him back then, probably the best I could had said was that he was well trained actor. He put on a good show, but nothing was as it seemed. He preached family values, but he divorced his first wife and was estranged from his children. He courted the Christian right, but was indifferent to religion in his own life. He was touted as the “Great Communicator,” but only when he was reading Peggy Noonan’s speeches off a teleprompter. Off the cuff, he could barely string together a complete sentence. He claimed to be standing up for the common man, but no one was a better friend of the corporate world. In short, whatever it was about him that was charming the American public, I didn’t get it.
The other thing I would have said about Reagan, particularly during his first term, was that he was dangerous. He was a fanatic anti-communist dead set on bringing the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation. All of the progress that had been made in moderating Cold War confrontation was lost under Reagan. Of course no one could possible have imagined what would happen to the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, and so Reagan’s path of confrontation seemed to border on insanity.
Well, that was then. Now with 30 years of hindsight, and a whole different worldview, how does Reagan measure up? Does he deserve all the brouhaha?
I would have to admit that in retrospective, I do have more positive feelings toward Reagan, as least on a personal level. If you asked me now, I would say that not only was Reagan a good actor, he was also a good politician. Two things in particular come to mind. First, is his human touch, his ability to connect with people, even his ideological opponents, on a personal level. As a result, he was never afraid to engage in give and take and work toward practical solutions. This leads to my second positive characteristic- his flexibility. Of course no one could argue that Reagan was not a person of strong beliefs. But he could also be pragmatic—whether it was in negotiations with the Democratic Congress or in arms control talks with Gorbachev. And it was precisely this ability to allow his positions to evolve as circumstances changed that led to his greatest achievement—helping to create the conditions under which the Cold War could come to an end.
When Reagan came into office, he was as rabid a cold warrior as they came. His key advisers on Soviet affairs were Richard Pipes and Richard Perle whose take on the communist world was basically—nuke ‘em! Rollback replaced containment and detente as the governing doctrine. But around the middle of his presidency Reagan’s views began to shift. The story I’ve heard is that Nancy Reagan prevailed upon him to start meeting with a writer on Russian culture, Susan Massie, who in the course of a series of meetings, helped bring him toward a more nuanced view. This shift in his viewpoint helped to make him more receptive toward Gorbachev and allowed him to give Gorbachev the reassurances he needed to launch his attempts at reform. I certainly don’t buy the triumphalist myth that Reagan ‘won’ the Cold War, through his arms build-up. But I do think that by signaling his willingness to enter into serious dialogue on arms control, he helped to create the atmosphere that made Gorbachev’s perestroika possible.
So I do give Reagan some credit for positive achievements. But what gets lost in the rush to canonize him are the deep and lasting costs of his many misguided ventures. We can see this both domestically and internationally. In foreign policy, Reagan subordinated every possible consideration of human rights, social justice and democracy to his fanatical anti-communism. Sure, he talked a good talk about liberal values when it was a matter of condemning communist abuses, but he was perfectly happy to funnel massive amounts to aid to the military in El Salvador to support the likes of Roberto D’Aubuisson (AKA Blowtorch Bob), described by a former ambassador as a “pathological killer,” who organized horrific death squads and ordered the murder of untold thousands including Archbishop Oscar Romero and four American nuns. And I won’t even go into the story of the Nicaraguan contras, whose violence and brutality were legendary.
One could argue that Reagan’s Latin American misadventures were essentially episodic. They were regrettable, of course, but once Reagan left office and the Cold War ended the countries involved could resolve their inner conflicts and more or less go back to normal life. Personally, I simply don’t know enough about the recent history of these countries to make a judgment either way. But this could certainly not be said about Afghanistan, where the legacy of the policies of the 1980s still haunts us to this day. There’s even a word for it—blowback. We built up a force to further our Cold War interests and now it has turned against us. Who would have thought that these valiant Muslim “freedom fighters,” to whom we were funneling billions of dollars, would form the nucleus of Al Queda and the Taliban? With all that Cold War noise buzzing in Reagan’s ears, who could have expected him to actually listen his beloved mujahedeen long enough to understand just how antithetical their ideas and aspirations were to the values of the Western democracy? It didn’t matter. Our enemy’s enemy is our friend. But as they say, with friends like that who needs enemies.
But perhaps the most profound negative aspect of Reagan’s legacy is precisely what he is most lauded for by his conservative admirers. It was Reagan, I believe, who did more than anyone else to infect mainstream conservative discourse with the anti-government virus that it suffers from to this day. Reagan got a lot of mileage, particularly while on the campaign trail, assailing the power of the state – “government is the problem not the solution,” “most frightening phrase in the English language: I’m from the government and I’m here to help,” etc. etc. Once he was President, of course, Reagan’s anti-government bluster quickly dissipated. He raised taxes on numerous occasions, did little or nothing to cut back on the size of government and if fact actually added new government agencies while in power. I always found it appropriate that the Ronald Reagan building on Pennsylvania Ave that opened in the mid 1990s was the most expensive Federal office building every constructed.
But if Reagan’s anti-government rhetoric turned out to be largely smoke and mirrors, the same cannot be said of his latter-day admirers, who are threatening to inflict immense damage to the American way of life in their zeal to “starve the beast.” We got a hint of this during the Bush II administration when the ineffectiveness of government agencies became a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: cut back funding, fire the best people, replace them with incompetent cronies, remove any kind of meaningful oversight, and then when the agencies mess up proclaim—“see we told you government couldn’t do anything right.” Now, thank goodness, the grownups are back in control of the agencies, but the Tea Party wingnuts have their hands on the fiscal spigot and are threatening to cut off funding willy-nilly. The recent budget proposals in the House are a monument to shortsightedness and irresponsibility. Of course they will never pass, but even a “compromise” could do enormous damage. And it’s all in Reagan’s name.
Monday, January 10, 2011
A few technical arguments to clear the fog surrounding the science of global warming
I did not want to write a technical post on global warming. There is plenty of information on this issue available on the Internet, and I thought that everyone with an interest in the subject would just go ahead and read. Still, after it had become clear that my discussion of this issue with Nathan in non-technical terms hit the wall, and I was accused in dismissing offhandedly the entire “scientific field of climatology”, I gave up and started researching this post. I did not intend to become an expert climatologist, but I did go as far as to read a few original research papers in peer-reviewed climatology journals such as Journal of Climate, Journal of Geophysical Research and such. I am obviously still not qualified to judge who is right in the climate change debate, the majority of the alarmist, or the minority of the skeptics, but this much I feel qualified to say: despite the vocal claims to the opposite, the science of the climate change is very far away from being fully understood and settled. Frankly speaking, I was appalled by an extremely low, by standards of my own area of science, level of argumentation and analysis of the data presented in the papers I have read. But I am running a little bit ahead of myself here, so let’s go back to basic.
The physical foundation of the global warming theory is so called “greenhouse effect”. To understand this effect one needs to realize that the solar radiation falling on the Earth comes in many different varieties: radio waves, infrared radiation, visible and ultraviolet light. All of this is essentially just electromagnetic waves, which differ from each other by their wavelengths: longest for radio waves and shortest for ultraviolet light. Waves with different wavelengths interact differently with atmosphere, oceans, ground, living organisms, etc. It is crucially important that the atmosphere is transparent to the visible light (this is why we can see it), but is not transparent to the infrared radiation. The reason for the latter is the presence in the atmosphere molecules, mainly water vapor, and to a lesser extent carbon dioxide and others, which are oblivious to other forms of electromagnetic radiation, but strongly absorb infrared waves. Therefore, the visible light travels almost unobstructed through the atmosphere, where it is either reflected back or absorbed. When electromagnetic radiation is absorbed, it is necessarily re-emitted, but in the form of infrared light, which cannot get through the atmosphere. Thus, a significant portion of the energy of light radiation remains trapped in the Earth-atmosphere system. The atmosphere still emits certain amount of infrared radiation as determined by its temperature to the outer space. This temperature is defined by the equilibrium between amount of absorbed sunlight and the emitted radiation (the Earth warms up or cools down until it emits as much energy as absorbs).
The greenhouse effect is a well-understood physical phenomenon, which plays positive and essential role for life on this planet. Without it, the temperature here would have been too low for any life to be possible. However, while being the physical foundation of the global warming theory (GWT), the greenhouse effect by itself is not part of it.
GWT can be presented in the form of three postulates
- The average temperature on the Earth increases
- This increase is due to extra amount of carbon dioxide released to the atmosphere because of human industrial activity. This extra CO2 results in more solar radiation being absorbed, and, therefore, warms up the Earth to balance out this increased absorption with more emission.
- Increase in temperature will result in drastic climate changes with catastrophic consequences for Earth’s ecosystem, including human population.
Let me begin with the first of these statements, which is the least controversial, and this is what most people have in mind when they talk about the overwhelming empirical evidences of global warming. I will not discuss in too many details the actual observational base of this statement, even though there is still some controversy between temperature measured by the land-based stations, and data obtained from satellites (the latter show much smaller warming). Instead, I want to focus on meaning of the concept of average temperature.
The concept of “averages” is one of the most widely used and most misunderstood ideas in natural and social sciences. One uses this concept to replace a complex set of apparently random data with a single number, which can be done with a clearly defined mathematical procedure (just add all your data together and divide by the number of entries in your data-set). What is not that obvious is the actual meaning and usability of the derived number. An example of a meaningless average is “the average temperature of patients in a hospital”. On the other hand, the average number of votes projected for a candidate for political office is an example of meaningful average. What is the difference between these examples? In the later example, winning or losing an election is determined by the cumulative effect of many voters making their choices, while in the former case there is no quantity whose value would depend on the cumulative effect of individual patient’s temperatures. I suspect that the average temperature in the context of global warming is akin to the average temperature in the hospital because none of the essential climate related quantities is determined by cumulative effects of daily, monthly or annually changing temperatures.
The climate scientists do understand this, and it seems to me that average temperature data are constructed mostly for external consumption: politicians, journalists, and political activists of all persuasions. For internal discussions, other measures of global warming are used. One of the most meaningful metrics is global heat content of the oceans. I was surprised, however, to discover that this indicator shows a lot of volatility even though one would expect the changes of the total thermal energy of the oceans to be very slow reacting only to cumulative effects. Still, these numbers are much more indicative then average temperatures, and they show that starting from about 2000 the heat content of the ocean is flat or even decreases indicating absence of warming. This point is of course being debated on both sides up to now, but the very existence of this debate shows that even with the first postulate of GWT, the situation is not as settled, as its proponents would like us to believe.
Another popular indicator used as a proof of the first postulate of GWT employs the mass of ice in Antarctic. This indicator, however, is not as clear-cut as the ocean heat content because there exist too many different phenomena that could influence melting of ice in Antarctic, such as direct sun light, ozone layer, cosmic rays and others. But even the melting phenomenon itself is not that straightforward: while the land ice in Antarctic does melt, the amount of sea ice shows unprecedented growth. It is interesting to note that the melting of Antarctic ice occurs faster than predicted by the climate models. While this fact is taken by the advocates of global warming as its even “stronger than expected” confirmation, it is really not. This fact simply shows that climate models are not reliable, their predictions are not trustworthy, and that no one really understand why the Antarctic melts.
The situation with the second postulate of the global warming theory is even worse. No one argues that industrial activity increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. At the same time no one also disputes the fact that the direct contribution of CO2 into greenhouse effect is very small - about one degree of centigrade for doubling of the amount of CO2, and we are still far away from this threshold. However, this small effect can be amplified through so-called feedback mechanisms. This means that rise in temperature due to small increase of CO2, which would have been otherwise negligible, stimulate additional processes, which affect the climate in a much stronger way by either enhancing the warming effect (positive feedback) or reducing it (negative feedback). The cornerstone of the global warming science is the assumption that main feedback mechanism is water vapor feedback, which is strongly positive, and, therefore, even small changes in CO2 concentration results in exponentially increasing temperature. The physical origin of this feedback lies in a simple fact that warmer air can contain more water vapor, which in its turn, absorbs more sunlight producing more warming. The problem with this picture is that this is not the only possible feedback mechanism.
Everybody agrees that clouds whose formation is affected by increased water vapor content of the atmosphere, also provide an important feedback mechanism. What scientists cannot agree upon is the type of this feedback: on one hand, clouds reflect more radiation back to space (negative feedback), but on the other hand, they trap more radiation emitted by Earth (positive feedback). Richard Lindzen of MIT argues that the cloud feedback is strongly negative so that it cancels the positive water feedback. Dessler of A&M University and others find the cloud feedback to be either positive or small negative. The uncertainty in the cloud feedback has not yet been resolved as admitted in 2010 Science article by Dessler, which makes it very difficult to know the overall feedback with any certainty.
This overall feedback determines so-called climate sensitivity, which is the crucial parameter for the GWT. If this parameter is large and positive, then the climate is indeed very sensitive to even small changes of CO2 and the humanity is in danger, but if this parameter is small or negative, we still have some hope to survive without wrecking our economy.
Another approach to determining the total feedback is based on statistical analysis of empirical data such as surface temperature and radiation imbalance (difference between incoming and outgoing radiations) in the upper atmosphere. I already mentioned that average temperature does not really measure much, and even if it does, whatever it measures depends on a number of quite arbitrary decisions, and is, therefore, highly uncertain. Given these uncertainties of the input data and a number of arbitrary assumptions unavoidable in this type of analysis, it is not surprising that different researchers come up with opposite conclusions. Therefore, I personally think than none of the results obtained with this approach can be taken seriously and that level of certainty of our knowledge of climate sensitivity implied by the Intergovernmental Panel and the media is strongly overblown.
To conclude the discussion of the 2nd postulate of GWT I want to make another point. Even if the value for the climate sensitivity provided by the Intergovernmental Panel is close to reality, the estimates of the future based on this number are seriously flawed for another reason. The whole concept of feedbacks and climate sensitivity assumes that these parameters themselves remain constant over time. This type of assumption is called linear approximation. This approximation is only valid in the close vicinity of equilibrium. When a system moves farther away from equilibrium, and this is exactly what is being implied by GWT, the linear approximation unavoidably breaks down. In order to know how far from equilibrium a system can go before this happens, we must have models going beyond the linear approximation. I am yet to find papers seriously discussing this issue, and without such a discussion, conclusions based on linear models do not worth much.
Finally, I will say just a few words about the third postulate of the GWT. It is not necessary, though, because analysis of the second postulate already has shown that Freeman Dyson was completely correct saying that the climate science is in a crappy shape. Still, I want to add a few words about long-term predictions of the climate models. Climate is a complicated nonlinear system, and if we know anything about generic nonlinear systems, it is that their dynamics is extremely sensitive to initial conditions and values of the parameters. This means that even a smallest change of one of the parameter can result in completely different predictions, and I do not mean different numbers, I mean different equilibrium states. This conclusion is a rigorous mathematical result in the theory of nonlinear dynamic systems, of which climate is one of the examples. (For those familiar with nonlinear dynamics: I do realize that situation is more complex: there are regions of parameters and initial conditions with stable behavior, as well as those with unstable; there are different types of equilibrium,or better steady states, which can be reached from different initial conditions, but these too much technicalities for this post intended for general public. I am afraid I have already bored everyone to death.) For instance, modern computer climate models include only interaction between atmosphere and oceans, but do not include effects of biosphere (trees, plants, CO2 eating plankton in the oceans, etc.). Even though, these effects appear small, over a long time interval due to the instability of the nonlinear dynamics, they can completely change the fate of the climate. How long is this long time interval? May be some climate scientists know, but they do not share this knowledge with broader public. These arguments do not mean to say that no catastrophic events can ever happen; they mean that these events are not predictable and not controllable.
To conclude, I believe I made a good point showing that the climate science does not yet have a well-established paradigm, and that its unresolved difficulties are of fundamental nature, which has to be resolved before any real paradigm can be formulated. Accordingly, I believe that it is quite irresponsible to force any political and economical actions with global consequences based on this kind of theory.
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