Archive for the ‘Political Philosophy’ Category
Problems with Nationalism?
I try to avoid Sunday morning talk shows like the plague, but somehow I happened to catch five minutes of Fareed Zakaria’s “GPS” show on CNN International. Elliott Abrams and Peter Beinart were arguing about the Gaza flotilla and Beinart’s New York Review of Books article about liberal Zionism.
What I found interesting about the segment was the exchange between the two men about the argument Beinart made in the article: that many young Jews saw the choice before them not as being between liberal Zionism and conservative Zionism, but rather between conservative Zionism and no Zionism. Beinart spelled out the argument, and this is what followed:
ZAKARIA: Elliott, you can briefly respond to this, and then we’ve got to go.
ABRAMS: OK. I think it’s quite historical.
What Peter is forgetting, that Jewish liberals have never supported Israel. They didn’t support the founding of the state of Israel. The reform movement was anti-Zionist for decades and decades.
Jewish liberals have a problem with particularism, nationalism, Zionism, and they always have. And it isn’t due to anything that is going on in Israel, it’s due to things that are going on inside their heads. They need to grow up and realize that Israel has a right to defend itself. (emphasis mine)
I’ve included his whole response for context, but I’m only really interested in the italicized part of the argument. Aren’t all Americans supposed to have problems with nationalism? Not our own nationalism, of course, which we have re-labeled “exceptionalism.” But foreign nationalism? Isn’t that supposed to be pernicious?
The way in which Abrams presented the argument struck me as being a normative claim, not positive. That is, “particularism, nationalism, and Zionism” were not just things that Jewish liberals have problems with, but rather they were things that Jewish liberals have problems with but should not.
Abrams’ inclusion of Zionism alongside nationalism ought perhaps to caution him about Zionism’s susceptibility to the perils that have plagued other nationalisms through history.
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With presidential “daddyism” rampant, and our National Father-Protector’s manifest failure to protect us from oil spills and tornadoes, there couldn’t be a better time to check out the comprehensive libertarian indictment (if I do say so myself) of the presidency, the very model of a modern constitutional monstrosity.
Download it here.
Will Higher Tax Rates in 2011 Cause an Economic Collapse?
Art Laffer has a compelling column in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, where he makes the case that future tax rate increases will cause considerable economic damage because people have an incentive to maximize income this year to take advantage of current tax rates — resulting in an artificial drop in economic activity next year. In effect, this will be a reverse version of the experiment in the early 1980s, when entrepreneurs and investors had an incentive to postpone economic activity since Reagan’s tax rate reductions were phased in over several years. I am reluctant to endorse Art’s prediction that the “economy will collapse,” since even good economists are lousy forecasters. But we certainly will see a large degree of tax planning, which will lead to less revenue than expected next year. And the higher tax rates will inhibit growth, though it is impossible to predict whether this means 2.1 percent growth instead of 2.3 percent growth, for instance, or 0.5 percent growth instead of 0.6 percent growth.
On or about Jan. 1, 2011, federal, state and local tax rates are scheduled to rise quite sharply. …the highest federal personal income tax rate will go 39.6% from 35%, the highest federal dividend tax rate pops up to 39.6% from 15%, the capital gains tax rate to 20% from 15%, and the estate tax rate to 55% from zero. …Tax rates have been and will be raised on income earned from off-shore investments. Payroll taxes are already scheduled to rise in 2013 and the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) will be digging deeper and deeper into middle-income taxpayers. And there’s always the celebrated tax increase on Cadillac health care plans. State and local tax rates are also going up in 2011 as they did in 2010. Tax rate increases next year are everywhere. …if people know tax rates will be higher next year than they are this year, what will those people do this year? They will shift production and income out of next year into this year to the extent possible. As a result, income this year has already been inflated above where it otherwise should be and next year, 2011, income will be lower than it otherwise should be. …In 1981, Ronald Reagan—with bipartisan support—began the first phase in a series of tax cuts passed under the Economic Recovery Tax Act (ERTA), whereby the bulk of the tax cuts didn’t take effect until Jan. 1, 1983. Reagan’s delayed tax cuts were the mirror image of President Barack Obama’s delayed tax rate increases. For 1981 and 1982 people deferred so much economic activity that real GDP was basically flat (i.e., no growth), and the unemployment rate rose to well over 10%. But at the tax boundary of Jan. 1, 1983 the economy took off like a rocket, with average real growth reaching 7.5% in 1983 and 5.5% in 1984. It has always amazed me how tax cuts don’t work until they take effect. Mr. Obama’s experience with deferred tax rate increases will be the reverse. The economy will collapse in 2011. …The result will be a crash in tax receipts once the surge is past. If you thought deficits and unemployment have been bad lately, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Adam Smith Quote of the Day
“In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory, from a longer continuance of the war.”
- Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book 5, Chapter 3
Cult Watch
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Driving home the other night, I caught the end of the NPR program “On Point.” This edition, running the ideological gamut all the way from left to center-left, featured Bob Kuttner and Jonathan Alter, “on the Obama presidency and the oil spill challenge.” At about 45:20 in, Alter took the week’s prize for utterly creepy views of the presidency (no small feat):
One thing I want to make clear where Bob and I strongly really agree is that — when FDR died the funeral procession moved up Pennsylvania avenue and a man, a grieving man, fell to his knees, and another man helped him to his feet and said, “Did you know the President?”
And the grieving man said, “No, but he knew me.”
And Barack Obama is not yet at a point where the American people really feel like he knows them and their problems and that’s where he needs to get to.
Yes, if only our president could emit from his concern-furrowed brow rays of inspiration so powerful, they’d make Americans swoon in the street like holy rollers at an Appalachian snake-handling session — then and only then will we know our democracy is truly healthy.
“Man is a toad-eating animal,” the early 19th-century English essayist and political radical William Hazlitt wrote in 1819: “naturally a worshiper of idols and a lover of kings.” That’s a pretty pessimistic take on humanity as a whole, but it certainly holds true for a good many public intellectuals.
Charles Murray on Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand’s books have been selling strongly for more than 50 years, a constant irritant to the literary and academic establishments. And since the acceleration in government growth about 18 months, they’ve been selling better than ever. In the middle of that surge of interest, two new biographies of Rand were published, whose authors were featured at a Cato Institute Book Forum last fall. Now Charles Murray, the author of such books as Human Accomplishment and What It Means to Be a Libertarian, reflects on Ayn Rand in a review of those books.
Murray does a great job of showing what was wrong — and what was very right — with Ayn Rand. To the certain annoyance of her fans, Murray insists that “there is a dismaying discrepancy between the Ayn Rand of real life and Ayn Rand as she presented herself to the world. The discrepancy is important because Rand herself made such a big deal about living a life that was the embodiment of her philosophy.” Nevertheless, he muses, “Why then has reading these biographies of a deeply flawed woman—putting it gently—made me want to go back and reread her novels yet again? The answer is that Rand was a hedgehog who got a few huge truths right, and expressed those truths in her fiction so powerfully that they continue to inspire each new generation.” He concludes:
Ayn Rand never dwelt on her Russian childhood, preferring to think of herself as wholly American. Rightly so. The huge truths she apprehended and expressed were as American as apple pie. I suppose hardcore Objectivists will consider what I’m about to say heresy, but hardcore Objectivists are not competent to judge. The novels are what make Ayn Rand important. Better than any other American novelist, she captured the magic of what life in America is supposed to be. The utopia of her novels is not a utopia of greed. It is not a utopia of Nietzschean supermen. It is a utopia of human beings living together in Jeffersonian freedom.
I note that the excellent new group blog Pileus got to this review before I did. Plenty of other good thoughts there, too, on topics ranging from Adam Smith to David Souter to a comparison between Rand and Marx.
Daddy Issues
My Washington Examiner column this week looks at the bipartisan conniption over President Obama’s “responsibility” for the Gulf oil spill:
It’s “taking so doggone long,” Sarah Palin wailed, for Obama “to dive in there” (literally?). “Man, you got to get down here and take control!” James Carville screeched. “Tell BP, ‘I’m your daddy!’ ”
When Hurricane Katrina hit, liberals who had spent years calling President Bush a tyrant suddenly decided he wasn’t authoritarian enough when he hesitated to declare himself generalissimo of New Orleans and muster the troops for a federal War on Hurricanes.
Now the party of “drill, baby, drill” — the folks who warn that Obama’s a socialist — is screaming bloody murder because he’s letting the private sector take the lead in the well-capping operation. It’s almost enough to make a guy cynical about politics.
“Did you plug the hole yet, daddy?” is an understandable reaction from an 11-year-old like Malia Obama. Grown-up pols and pundits have no such excuse, however, and when they confuse the chief executive with an all-powerful father-protector, the results are likely to be bad policy and an increasingly imperial presidency.
Right on cue, as I was finishing the column, came Sunday’s New York Times with a pair of cringe-inducing opeds illustrating the perils of presidential “daddyism.” According to their bios, Thomas Friedman and Maureen Dowd are 57 and 58 years old, respectively. You’d never guess it from their columns.
Friedman urges Obama to “react to this spill as a child would.” (Aren’t plenty of people doing that already?)
Like a chirpy, earnest kindergarten teacher, Friedman insists us that
Kids get it. They ask: ….Why aren’t we doing more to create clean power and energy efficiency when so many others, even China, are doing so? And, Daddy, why can’t you even mention the words “carbon tax,” when the carbon we spill into the atmosphere every day is just as dangerous to our future as the crude oil that has been spilling into the gulf?
That is what a child would want to know if he or she could vote.
And if you think a surfeit of political maturity is our major problem these days, maybe we should expand the suffrage to grade-schoolers.
On the opposite page, Maureen Dowd echoes a theme she struck back in January, when she complained that with his calm, sober reaction to the failed Christmas bombing, Obama missed his “moment to be president…. to be the strong father who protects the home from invaders.” As I wrote at the time, “Could there be a more infantile conception of the chief executive’s role?”
In Sunday’s column, MoDo whines that Obama’s acting like “President Spock,” instead of our “Feeler in Chief.” How, she asks, can we possibly survive with a chief executive who ”scorns the paternal aspect of the presidency”?
I don’t know, maybe we could… grow up?
Is Hillary Clinton Ignorant about Geography, Fiscal Policy, or Both?
Hillary Clinton recently opined that Brazil was a great role model for the idea of soaking the rich with higher tax rates. She didn’t really offer evidence for that specific assertion, but Politico reports that she did say that “Brazil has the highest tax-to-GDP rate in the Western Hemisphere and guess what — they’re growing like crazy.”
I’m not sure if “growing like crazy” is an accurate description, particularly since poor nations normally have decent growth rates because they start from such a low baseline.
But let’s excuse that bit of rhetorical excess and focus on the really flawed portion of her remarks.
Contrary to her direct quote, Brazil does not have the “highest tax-to-GDP rate in the Western Hemisphere.” It may have the highest tax burden in South America. And it may even have the highest tax burden in all of Latin America, but its overall tax burden of about 24 percent of GDP is slightly below the aggregate tax burden in the United States.
I suppose I should issue a caveat and say there’s a very slight chance that the recession has temporarily pushed U.S. tax receipts as a share of GDP below the Brazilian level, but that isn’t apparent from the IMF data. Moreover, there’s no doubt that the tax burden in Canada is significantly higher than the Brazilian burden.
So Secretary Clinton either was unaware that the United States and Canada are in the Western Hemisphere, or has no clue how to read fiscal statistics.
‘Do Something, Superpresident!’
Amid the din of James Carville’s screeching, you may have missed a couple of reasonable voices taking issue with the “do something, Superpresident!” approach that’s dominating the discussion of the Gulf Spill. (They both mention Cato work, which is a bonus).
In the Daily Beast, Tunku Varadarajan writes that this isn’t
“Obama’s oil spill,” if by saying so we mean to ascribe culpability to the president. He didn’t run the rigs, or oversee the plans, or grant the licenses to drill, or write the rules that govern the granting of those licenses. He was just president when the bloody thing happened.
(Varadarajan links to this piece by Peter Van Doren and Jerry Taylor on what the spill says about “the profound intellectual poverty animating our public conversation about energy policy.”)
Over on the New York Times‘ website, Glenn Greenwald cites my book, The Cult of the Presidency, to worry about a political culture dominated by
the mythology that presidents are paternal, virtually omnipotent figures who will protect us from harm and, in the broadest sense, ensure that justice is done. Americans, in turn, crave protection from a messianic commander-in-chief, and are willing to vest him with great latitude and power in exchange for that protection.
This mystical conception of the presidency–and the power-concentrating dynamic it leads to–is the major theme of my book, especially Chapter 7, “Omnipotence and Impotence”:
In the BBC production of Robert Graves’ “I Claudius,” Emperor Augustus tells his wife Livia that the Senate had voted to make him a god in the Syrian city of Palmyra, and the people there had put a statue of him in the temple, to which they’d bring offerings in the hopes that the emperor would grant rain or cure their ailments. “Tell me Livia,” Augustus says, “If I’m a god, even in Palmyra, how do I cure gout?”
Augustus’s frustration is all-too-familiar to the modern president. He can no more “manage” the economy or provide seamless protection from all manner of hazards than Augustus could bring rain or cure gout.
Libertarianism Hits the Big Time
Michael Crowley, late of the New Republic and now with Time magazine, writes thoughtfully about Ron Paul, Rand Paul, and libertarianism. Crowley notes that Rand Paul, “more politically flexible than his father,” has plenty of unlibertarian positions. But both of them are tapping into a real strain in contemporary politics:
But he, like his father, also knows well that a genuine libertarian impulse is astir in America…. polls show an uptick in both social permissiveness and skepticism of government intervention….[Ron Paul] has already waited a long time — and it appears the country is moving his way.
This is a current trend, but it’s also deeply rooted in the American political culture. As David Kirby and I wrote in “The Libertarian Vote“:
It’s no surprise that many Americans hold libertarian attitudes since America is, after all, a country fundamentally shaped by libertarian values and attitudes. In their book It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States, Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marx write, “The American ideology, stemming from the [American] Revolution, can be subsumed in five words: antistatism, laissez-faire, individualism, populism, and egalitarianism.”… Richard Hofstadter wrote: “The fierceness of the political struggles in American history has often been misleading; for the range of vision embraced by the primary contestants in the major parties has always been bounded by the horizons of property and enterprise. However much at odds on specific issues, the major political traditions have shared a belief in the rights of property, the philosophy of economic individualism, the values of competition; they have accepted the economic virtues of capitalist culture.”… McClosky and Zaller sum up a key theme of the American ethos in classic libertarian language: “The principle here is that every person is free to act as he pleases, so long as his exercise of freedom does not violate the equal rights of others.”…
The Insane Drug War
“Thousands of police and soldiers swarmed into slums in Jamaica’s capital Tuesday in search of an alleged drug kingpin wanted by the United States, trading gunfire with masked supporters of the fugitive,” the Washington Post reports. “At least 30 people, mostly civilians, have been reported killed since the battle erupted Sunday.” Later reports put the number of deaths at 44. And for what?
[Christopher] Coke, who allegedly assumed leadership of the “Shadow Posse” from his father, was accused in a U.S. indictment in August of heading an international trafficking ring that sells marijuana and crack cocaine in the New York area and elsewhere.
So he’s accused of selling pot and coke to willing buyers. I’m sure he and his colleagues have engaged in violence along the way, but that’s an inevitable part of illegal businesses. And to capture a drug dealer, we’ve spent nine months pressuring a friendly government, and “thousands of police and soldiers” have been dispatched, with 44 deaths and counting. This policy is insane.
And it seems to confirm the point of this Newsweek column by Conor Friedersdorf, which I read a few hours earlier:
Forced to name the “craziest” policy favored by American politicians, I’d say the multibillion-dollar war on drugs, which no one thinks is winnable. Asked about the most “extreme,” I’d cite the invasion of Iraq, a war of choice that has cost many billions of dollars and countless innocent lives. The “kookiest” policy is arguably farm subsidies for corn, sugar, and tobacco—products that people ought to consume less, not more.
These are contentious judgments. I hardly expect the news media to denigrate the policies I’ve named, nor do I expect their Republican and Democratic supporters to be labeled crazy, kooky, or extreme. These disparaging descriptors are never applied to America’s policy establishment, even when it is proved ruinously wrong, whereas politicians who don’t fit the mainstream Democratic or Republican mode, such as libertarians, are mocked almost reflexively in these terms, if they are covered at all.
Friedersdorf goes on to declare that Rand Paul’s views on the gold standard and his doubts about the Civil Rights Act are “wacky.” (Without refighting the civil rights argument, I’ll note that some economists would disagree with Friedersdorf about the gold standard.) But, he concludes, “crazy, kooky, extreme actions are perpetrated by establishment centrists far more often than by marginalized libertarians.” Look no further than Jamaica.
Libertarianism: A Primer Goes Global
I’m delighted to report that just this week I have received copies of Libertarianism: A Primer published in Italian and Korean, the latter delivered to me personally by the president of the Korea Economic Research Institute. I now count the following translations:
- Japanese
- Russian
- Czech
- Polish
- Serbian
- Bulgarian
- Cambodian
- Mongolian
- Kurdish
- Persian
- Spanish
- Korean
- Italian
- Chinese
and of course
You might notice a couple of things about that list. First, it includes a lot of communist or ex-communist countries, where perhaps they are especially attuned to the conflict between freedom and statism. And second, it has not yet been translated into of the languages of Northwest Europe — German, French, Dutch, Scandinavian languages. Perhaps those countries have achieved the end of history and have no need of further ideological debates. Perhaps. I wrote the following in the preface to the Italian edition:
The publication of a primer on libertarianism in Italy is another sign of two heartening developments: the continuing process of the world’s people being drawn closer together, and the worldwide spread of the ideas of peace and freedom after a century of war and statism.
This book may seem to be reaching Italy at an inopportune moment, a time when people from the president of France to Nobel Prize-winning economists are proclaiming that “laissez-faire is finished.” One American pundit of the center-left even exulted in “the end of libertarianism.” These critics are short-sighted. The idea of libertarianism, of liberty under law, is needed now more than ever….
Libertarianism is sometimes perceived as a radical philosophy. And in some ways it is: It rejects and has fought in turn absolutism, communism, fascism, national socialism, corporate statism, theocracy, and every form of tyranny over the mind of man. Libertarians advance a radical and consistent vision of individual rights and strictly limited government that would eliminate the great bulk of the modern state, even in mixed-economy democracies. But in a broader sense libertarianism is the fundamental philosophy of the modern world: liberty, equality, enterprise, the rule of law, constitutional government. These ideas have become so commonplace that we forget how radical they were at one time. Libertarians want to apply those principles more consistently than do the adherents of other ideologies. But few people in the modern world would want to reject libertarian ideas wholesale.
The largest trends in the world reflect libertarian values. Communism is virtually gone, and few people still defend state socialism. Eastern Europe is struggling to achieve societies based on property rights, markets, and the rule of law. Honest observers throughout the developed world understand that the middle-class welfare states are unsustainable and will have to be radically reformed. The information revolution is empowering individuals and small groups and undermining the authority of centralized power.
Perhaps most importantly, the increasing globalization of the world economy means that countries that want to prosper will have to adopt a decentralized, deregulated, market-oriented economic model. You can’t avoid world markets in the 21st century; or if you do, you will be left out of the phenomenal economic growth that global markets and technological development will deliver.
So one reason that Italian readers should be interested in libertarianism is very simple and practical: these are the ideas that drive the modern world, and you need to know about them. The other reason is that libertarianism offers to every country the promise of peace, economic growth, and social harmony. I hope Italian readers will join libertarians around the world in working to restrain state power and liberate individuals, families, associations, and enterprises.
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