Category Archive

This WSJ poll is about six weeks out of date, so it is pretty useless for tracking the presidential race.  There are some other results that have more lasting relevance.  58% say that the globalisation of the American economy has been on the whole “bad,” with just 28% saying the opposite and 11% declaring it a wash.  That is pretty clearly bad news for the party most closely identified with globalisation at present.  The number for those saying globalisation has generally benefited “the American economy” has dropped 14 points from a poll 10 years ago.  There are as many dissatisfied with their financial circumstances (33%) as there have been since the wake of the ‘01-’02 recession.  52% said that immigration “hurts more than it helps” the United States, up eight points from last summer and back at the same levels two years earlier.  As of mid-December when the poll was taken, 56% said that victory in Iraq was not still possible.  All of the pro-”surge” talk affected the respondents over the course of 2007, but as of last December 44% said it had made no difference and 14% said that it had made things worse.  57% agreed with the statement that most American soldiers should be withdrawn from Iraq by the start of 2009.  Except for immigration, obviously, the Republicans are on the unpopular side of every one of these questions.    

The poll also has two interesting figures on anti-Mormonism.  59% could correctly identify that Romney was a Mormon, and 26% “felt uncomfortable” about Romney’s  Mormonism and its possible effect on his presidential decisions (this was how the question was phrased), which was slightly higher than the percentage “uncomfortable” about his religion in the abstract. 

It’s like this, James: if you push for more neoliberal policies in Latin America, that will magically reduce the popularity of the “false populism” that has flourished on account of the backlash against the last round of neoliberal policies pushed by Washington, whereas if you don’t support those policies “false populism” will run wild.  That’s clear, isn’t it?

When the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis went crashing into the Mississippi River, everyone was suddenly paying a great deal of attention to our old, overburdened infrastructure, which is still, as it was last summer when this happened, old and overburdened.  Now, as it turned out, that particular collapse did not result from a lack of maintenance but from a structural flaw, but this hardly makes the overburdening of the rest of our highways and bridges any less real.  When Huckabee talked about doubling I-95 along its entire length, a frequent reaction on debate night was to laugh or make cracks about Huckabee’s Keynesian economics, but there were some who saw something of value there.  One of the common themes that can be found among a number of different advocates for a genuinely middle-class-oriented conservatism is a recognition of the incredible amount of time and energy put into commuting, as well as the huge opportunity cost of this commuting. 

Though all of the advocates in question might not agree with this entirely, mass commuting over long distances is a function of the unsettled and highly dependent nature of American life that creates the vast spaces between home and work and obliges people to rely increasingly on automobiles to go anywhere or do anything.  While the “whirlwind of creative destruction” makes mobility from city to city commonplace, sprawl daily compels frequent long-distance mobility.  In such an arrangement, people are settled neither in place nor really even in state of mind.    

The trouble with Huckabee’s proposal is that it seems to be a kind of ad hoc alternative to even more dubious “stimulus” packages on offer and does seem to reflect the logic of government work programs, but it also shows him as someone who appears to understand the strains commuting–and the traffic jams those commutes create–puts on families, on energy resources and on the environment, to say nothing of the additional transportation costs that are passed on to consumers.  Ross spoke about addressing the length of commutes in his bloggingheads appearance with Ruy Texeira here.  The larger problem with Huckabee’s proposal is that it is really almost nothing more than a Band-Aid, the sort of temporary fix to structural problems of our (sub)urban life and zoning regulations, and it is ultimately no different from paving over more rural and suburban landscape to provide larger roads for ever-growing settlements, except that this proposes to do the same on a semi-national scale.  As people live farther and farther away from their places of work, highway expansions are either going to become increasingly necessary to accommodate the increasing numbers of cars driving ever-longer routes or the divisions among residential, commercial and industrial zones will have to be reduced or eliminated.  Ideally, the less dependent on the highway system communities could become the better, and the less need for mass commuting the better.  Until then, highway expansions are probably the best make-shift solution. 

The objection to Huckabee’s I-95 proposal reminds me a lot of the complaints against Huckabee’s fiscal record in Arkansas.  Some significant part of the tax hikes for which he is now being demonised went to rebuilding Arkansas’ main highways.  This is what the Huckabee campaign says, but it also happens to be true.  Anyone who drove through Arkansas on I-40 during the very beginning of his tenure and then drove on it a few years later (as I did for four years going to and from college four times a year) knows how much Arkansas’ main highways improved in just a few years.  While I can think of some traditional arguments against internal improvements that would make highway spending undesirable, I don’t believe for a second that most of Huckabee’s critics think that highway maintenance is not an acceptable function of government.  Infrastructure is costly to build and maintain, and it is reasonable that it is a public expenditure that pays for it, since these roads serve a public purpose and, at least in theory, benefit the entire commonwealth. 

James asks in response to this Romney post:

But what if Mr. Global Capital is also Mr. Nationalist Bailout?

As the man has already told us, he doesn’t believe in bailouts–he believes in “workouts”!  And here you were thinking that Huckabee was the only fitness nut in this race.

By the way, whatever you think of Paul’s monetary views, his statement that wars produce inflation is absolutely right and pretty much irrefutable.  At some point, you have to be either pro-dollar or you can be pro-war.

Does Huckabee enjoy people ridiculing him?

Duncan Hunter, who actually opposes free trade and illegal immigration, has endorsed Mike Huckabee, who wants you to think that he does.  My one-time, quite ludicrous prediction that Duncan Hunter would be the Republican nominee (based once again on the implausibility of all of the alternatives) was informed partly by the idea that Hunter’s protectionist and border security credentials would help the GOP this cycle with those states that they must win.  One of the crucial flaws with this is that I assumed voters would want the experienced legislator who knew what he was talking about, rather than the artful showman who does not.  Nonetheless, the Huckabee phenomenon shows that there is some response among Republicans to the themes Hunter has articulated–they just needed someone a bit smoother and more glib to gesture towards them very generally before they would get excited. 

P.S. Hunter’s endorsement statement is here.  It clearly helps Huckabee’s reputation on border security and national security that one of the leading restrictionists and former Chairman of the Armed Forces Committee has endorsed him.  It’s an interesting split of the two also-rans: Tancredo went for Romney, which was frankly more bizarre than this, and Hunter has backed Huckabee.  As recent and cynical as Huckabee’s shift on immigration has been, the Hunter endorsement doesn’t strike me as being nearly as odd as Tancredo’s support for Romney.  The latter is just wrong on so many levels.   

Rod and I were exchanging messages with a colleague earlier today with the recent remarks by Limbaugh over self-reliance as the starting point.  At the conclusion of my message, I wrote:

Self-reliance is an excellent thing to instill and to follow, and that is and should be the ultimate answer, but almost everything about the current regime works against self-reliance and creates disincentives for practicing self-reliance.

By that I mean that we have a dependency problem that has been fostered to a significant degree by what some people like to call “economic dynamism” or “creative destruction.”  Knocking out the old mechanisms of social support, scattering communities with the draw of “better opportunities” elsewhere (and thereby helping to kill whichever small towns weren’t already ravaged by the highway system) and encouraging consumption and the mandate of “growht” with cheap credit all work to make Americans less economically independent and make sure that they have few, if any, private institutions they can fall back on that are capable of bearing the load.  Having creatively destroyed support networks that were fulfilling the functions that must be assumed more and more by the state, the “greatest force for change” is the greatest force for facilitating the growth of intrusive government to clean up the wreckage of all that destructive creativity.  Further, having become so dependent on either government or employer (or both), Americans are at the mercy of policy decisions over which they routinely have little influence, except at election time when the people who have fashioned the system that puts them in the present predicament of dependency promise them…more government assistance!  This reminds me of Caleb Stegall’s op-ed from 2006:

One of the primary conditions of freedom is a widespread distribution of capital, both economic and cultural. This accounts for conservatives’ long-standing skepticism and mistrust of centralized and concentrated enclaves of money and power with their tendencies toward societal management at every level. The oppressive effect of the management elites is essentially the same whether those elites sit in the board room, the judicial chamber, the legislative halls or the Oval Office.   

Or as I said during the debates over Wal-Mart and similar corporations back in 2006:

I don’t know if it is “counterfeit Americanism” to find troubling or objectionable the considerable dependence of the well-being of a town on the unaccountable decisions of one corporation that has no stake and no real attachment to the place, but I would suggest that there is nothing terribly consistent with the listed American “core values” in this development.  We do well to be wary of the road to state serfdom and advocate going in the other direction, but we make a great error if we think that road to corporate serfdom does not lead in the same direction and does not eventually meet up with the other road.  The masters of both use fear of the other to aggrandise their power.  The state tells you, “I will protect you from exploitation, give me power (and money)!”  And so you do.  Then the corporation says, “I provide you services and represent your freedom from government interference, so give me money (and power)!”  And so you do.  At no point are you concerned that the corporation generally supports what the state is doing and vice versa, or that some of the money you give to each one goes towards empowering and influencing the other.  

Fundamentally, all of this comes back to the question of whether dependent people can be the governors of those upon whom they depend, and the answer is no.  Without that, there can be no real self-government, and as Caleb said no real freedom.  To the extent that he has no intent on breaking this chain of dependency, Huckabee is not any kind of populist that Caleb or I would recognise.  He uses the opposition between “Main Street” and “Wall Street” rhetorically, but one has to wonder if he thinks that their interests are really all that divergent, or if he thinks that there has just been some misunderstanding in allocating the benefits.  He acknowledges that something is awry, but he apparently thinks the answer is to elect him so that working Americans will feel better about their President (he will remind them of their co-workers!), as if that will alleviate their real ills.   

This ties into the debate that has been going on over Romney’s “I’ll fight for every job” routine that he is now reprising in South Carolina.  I sympathise with calls to self-reliance generally, but these are being made as much in a vacuum as Romney’s false promises.  How do I know Romney’s promises are false?  It isn’t just that I think he’s untrustworthy (though if his recent display in Michigan hasn’t persuaded you of that, nothing I say here will), but that he is not going to make the auto industry in Michigan competitive with production facilities in other countries simply through deregulation and research subsidies.  For one thing, Washington only has so much control over the cost of doing business in Michigan, and the one area where Washington does have control over relevant policy (i.e., trade) is the area where Romney isn’t going to do anything to shore up domestic manufacturing.  Not only is he not going to do anything, but he has all but vowed to make sure thhat the same process that has been hollowing out Michigan factory towns will keep happening elsewhere–that is what his “Reagan Zone” offers American manufacturing. 

To stave off recession, the Fed appears anxious to slash interest rates another half-point, if not more. That will further weaken the dollar and raise the costs of the imports to which we have become addicted. While all this is bad news for the Republicans, it is worse news for the republic. As we save nothing, we must borrow both to pay for the imported oil and foreign manufactures upon which we have become dependent.

We are thus in the position of having to borrow from Europe to defend Europe, of having to borrow from China and Japan to defend Chinese and Japanese access to Gulf oil, and of having to borrow from Arab emirs, sultans and monarchs to make Iraq safe for democracy.

We borrow from the nations we defend so that we may continue to defend them. To question this is an unpardonable heresy called “isolationism.” ~Pat Buchanan

Ponnuru chastises Ross and says:

Many of Romney’s policy specifics involved removing Washington-imposed burdens on the industry, such as the prospect of new regulations. You can think he exaggerated their impact—I do—but that’s not left-wing. Convening industry reps and government officials to gab about the industry’s problems doesn’t strike me as all that alarming, either: It’s what comes out of the meeting that matters, and Romney didn’t commit to anything statist. Romney’s plan to quintuple research spending was pretty bad, in my view—but plenty of free-market folks are okay with such subsidies. The reason Romney got a “slap on the wrist” is that it’s all he deserved.

Plenty of free-market folks may be okay with such subsidies, but then that makes the definition of “free-market folks” rather flexible.  If you look at what Romney said, he made the subsidies an essential part of his proposal:

But taking off all these burdens is only half the solution [bold mine-DL].  If we are going to be the world’s greatest economic power, we must invest in our future. It’s time to be bold.  First, I will make a five-fold increase – from $4 billion dollars to $20 billion dollars – in our national investment in energy research, fuel technology, materials science, and automotive technology. Research spins out new ideas for new products for both small and large businesses.  That is exactly what has happened in health care, in defense, and in space.  Look how industries in other states have thrived from the spin out of technologies from our investment in these areas.  So if we can invest in health care, in defense, and in space, why not also invest in energy and fuel technology here in Michigan?

In other words, state capitalism is already the way we do things in other sectors, so why not link yet another industry to massive government spending in unhealthy and distorting ways?  

Noting a double standard in the treatment of Romney on the one hand and Huckabee and McCain on the other on fiscal and economic policy, Ross says:

It’s “sustained and detailed,” all right, just as Frum says - a sustained and detailed infringement on free-market principle, and one that appeals to voters in places like Michigan precisely because it goes much further to the left than Mike Huckabee’s substance-free talk about how the current period of economic growth isn’t doing all that well by the working class, or John McCain’s straight talk about how Michiganders can’t expect the federal government to bring back the glory days of Chrysler and GM. But because conservatives spend way, way more time worrying about the spectre of “class warfare” than they do about than the nexus between big business and the Republican Party, Romney gets off with a mild slap on the wrist, while McCain and Huckabee get tarred as liberals.

This is what I was talking about when I said:

My larger point was that Huckabee actually presents much less of a threat to economic conservatives than they suppose.  It seems to me that, in their indignation that one of the non-anointed candidates has started succeeding where the chosen ones have failed, establishment Republicans have started applying a kind of rigour to litmus tests on fiscal records that they would not apply in other cases.  If Huckabee’s Cato grade was a D, Romney’s was a C, yet we are gamely told by those who endorse Romney that he is much better as an economic conservative than Huckabee, when the truth is that, by the high standards of Cato and CfG, both are woefully lacking.  The difference is that Romney is a corporate Republican and will be quite glad to work in the interests of corporations, while Huckabee manifestly is not.  That makes Romney more reliable [bold mine-DL], even if it does not make him any more conservative on economics and fiscal policy…

This point would also apply to McCain.  Beyond the substantive differences (i.e., Romney seems to be calling for massive state intervention to revive the auto industry and gets little criticism, while the same magazine that endorsed Romney would shriek about creeping socialism if Huckabee mocks candidates who went to boarding school), there is also a difference in the style of how Romney delivers his pandering nonsense: he is “optimistic” while the others are “pessimistic.”  If you dress up even worse policies in optimistic language, optimists will view whatever you say more favourably than if you cast it in “pessimistic” (i.e., realistic) terms. 

Those who don’t support Romney have certainly noticed the glaring problems with what Romney said.  Doesn’t it seem odd that the “full-spectrum conservative” is the first candidate to elicit multiple comparisons between his plans and Soviet economic policy?  Of course, you can’t believe a word he says, so there’s probably no danger that his actual policies would be quite so interventionist, and he is a team player, while McCain and Huckabee are idiosyncratic, temperamental politicians who enjoy bucking the establishment, if only a little.  In an odd way, Romney’s complete lack of credibility means that any promises he has made to Michigan are almost certainly empty and therefore non-threatening, while Huckabee’s mildest gestures in the direction of the middle class are proof of his unacceptable “populism.”  What also seems to worry people about McCain and Huckabee is that they have convictions and might act on them in a consistent manner.  Romney gives them nothing to fear on that count.

Update: Or, as David Brooks says:

His campaign was a reminder of how far corporate Republicans are from free market Republicans.

Of course, it helps to be reminded of this, since many free market conservatives often take criticisms of corporations as criticisms of the free market and some of them seem to conflate the two.

Not to beat the point to death, but I did a little digging and found this news item from last year:

During a speech delivered in the heart of the financial district, where compensation packages routinely reach into the tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars, Mr. Bush announced that he would ask corporations to curb excessive executive pay.

When it comes from Bush, Republicans may not be happy with it, but they aren’t exactly declaring him the second coming of Huey Long.  What shocking socialist rhetoric has been pouring forth from Huckabee’s mouth?  One news story reported late last year:

He calls himself the candidate who isn’t a “wholly owned subsidiary” of investment banks, decries large executive-pay packages and says the party needs to shift its focus from Wall Street to Main Street.

The logic of the backlash against Huckabee seems to be this: if you have a net worth of $20 million-plus, you can call for curbing executive pay packages, and if you don’t have that much your similar calls to do this are proof that you are a wild-eyed left-winger.  Or something like that.  It does make sense that an establishment embarrrassed by or tired of Bush would be unwilling to rally around Huckabee, but that would confirm the point that they see the two men as being markedly similar and it would likely mean that they are quite similar.

Let us all cast our minds back to those early days of the 2000 campaign when Bush unveiled the “compassion” agenda (in 1999) and see what he said:

The purpose of prosperity is to make sure the American dream touches every willing heart. The purpose of prosperity is to leave no one out–to leave no one behind.

In Michigan the other day, Huckabee said:

My goal is not to make rich people poor, it’s to give poor people a shot at the American dream.

Now I don’t like Huckabee or Bush, but can someone explain to me what the substantive differences are between the two of them?

And yet, Romney, the candidate with the most executive experience, is fated to wake up one morning and realize that he just ran the worst campaign since Phil Gramm’s.  Romney will have spent $100 million or more wrecking his reputation! That takes work. It is all worthy of a Harvard Business Review analysis someday. ~Rich Karlgaard

Karlgaard also makes the right point about Huckabee and the Fair Tax, and the same one I was making earlier:

His Fair Tax would devastate lots of small businesses, such as retail stores, restaurants and realties.

This is frankly why I don’t understand how Karlgaard can also say that Huckabee has “boxed himself in with his populism.”  If anything, he has boxed himself in with his advocacy for a crazy tax plan that hurts small business and middle-class households, but he seems to be persuading middle and lower-middle class voters that he is “one of them,” even when his policies do not benefit them.  It is Thompsonesque phony populism at its best, and it seems to be working.  Granted, he makes a lot of noise about being against Wall Street, but where is the evidence is that he is?  It seems to me that if corporate Republicans could get someone who promised to get rid of corporate and capital gains taxes in exchange for calling them names once in a while, they would take him.  The crucial flaw in Karlgaard’s analysis is the assumption that most voters will understand that his tax plan harms small businesses.   

Huckabee has every incentive to distance himself from the GOP coalition; his nomination rests on its demise. ~Dick Armey

If that doesn’t seem to make any sense, that’s because it doesn’t.  Arguably, Huckabee’s election as President would lead to the splintering and demise of “the GOP coalition,” but for Huckabee to win the nomination he does have to alleviate the doubts of other members of the coalition who are not yet convinced that he is tolerable.  Now Armey is a primarily economic conservative with some libertarian inclinations, and he has long been engaged in a running battle with prominent religious conservatives over domestic policy priorities, so we understand why Armey is hardly thrilled to see Huckabee succeeding.  Even so, what Rollins said about the disappearing Reagan coalition is not all that remarkable.  It is a statement of recognition that the current GOP coalition is not what it was fifteen years ago, much less almost thirty years ago.  The makeup of the GOP has changed over just the past ten years, as many noted last year with the release of the latest Fabrizio polling.  Trying to organise an electoral strategy that rallies a coalition that no longer exists would seem misguided and a classic example of fighting the political equivalent of the last war.  Listening to Romney rail against the welfare state, as if it were 1980 all over again, you get the impression that he is trying to run for Reagan’s fourth term.  There are significant elements of the GOP opposed to Huckabee, even though they may be relatively few in numbers, but the same might fairly be said of every major contender.  When it comes to talking about all of the others, even Giuliani, most establishment Republicans do not make overblown claims that this or that nomination would entail the “demise” of the GOP coalition. 

With respect to Huckabee, this accusation has become a bit of conventional wisdom so commonplace that people assert it without even going through the motions of demonstrating whether it is true or not.  Whatever else you can say about Huckabee’s fiscal record, it is extremely odd for economic conservatives to attack him when he proposes to do more tax-cutting than every other Republican candidate save Ron Paul.  Never mind for a moment that his plan is poorly conceived, would probably be impossible to pass and induces laughter in most conservative economists–he claims that he wants to wipe out corporate, capital gains, income and payroll taxes and yet the corporate wing of the party is actually angry at him?  What more does the man have to promise these people?  A consumption tax would actually function as a burden on small businesses, making every small firm and store around the nation into the middlemen for revenue collection–a task that would still be handled by some part of the federal bureaucracy.  Forget for the moment that it would hit middle and lower-middle households more directly, since they spend a larger percentage of their income on consumption, and consider how unfriendly the program is to small business and how actually very pro-corporate it is.  While a consumption tax would have a certain kind of benefit, in that it would, like all taxes, discourage the activity being taxed, the impact this would have on consumer spending would be fairly severe.  Americans might become less consumerist, at least temporarily, and might be less inclined to go into ever-greater debt to buy trifles that will have become simply too expensive, but that probably means the service economy would suffer.  Once again, this would hit small firms hardest and would have deleterious effects on the general economy.  The biggest joke of the Huckabacklash is that he claims to represent Main Street Republican interests and somehow corporate Republicans believe it, even though his main domestic proposal is far more to their advantage than it is to Main Street.  There is nothing especially desirable about reorganising how Leviathan is fed if we continue to insist on feeding it ever-increasing amounts. 

On countless levels, however, 2008 is aeons away from 1996, let alone 1992. In each of his races, Buchanan was trying to topple a genuine, formidable front-runner: a sitting president, a Senate majority leader. But today it’s evident that, after a year of frantic campaigning, no such creature exists; indeed, Huckabee’s leap into the top tier is itself vivid proof of the point. The GOP too is a very different beast from what it was in the nineties: no longer the majority party in Congress, its foundations crumbling, its leadership dazed, confused, and helpless. When I recently asked a senior party operative if the Republican Establishment could block Huckabee from the nomination, he replied, with a tiny chuckle, “What Republican Establishment?”

More to the point, the conditions on the ground are arguably more conducive to populism now than in Pitchfork Pat’s heyday. In 1996, after all, the economy was in the midst of a historic boom, one that was on the verge of kicking into overdrive. Today, the situation is the reverse: Recession looms, the Dow sags, the housing and credit markets buckle. The economy has elbowed aside Iraq as the central locus of voter anxiety. ~John Heilemann

Ron Paul appeared on Jim Kramer’s CNBC show Mad Money.  They make for a very unusual pair, but just watch them as they bash the Fed!

To hear the pronouncements about Ukraine that issue from that establishment’s nodes every time the country makes it through another election without mass violence, you’d think this was Switzerland. Brussels and Washington pat Ukraine on the head for its ‘maturity’ and its ‘evolving democracy’. The smart locals know they live in a klepto-oligarchy, and that the West will trumpet Ukraine’s ‘robust democratic culture’ as long as capital keeps flowing in and out of the country. It’s meaningful that every time populist Ukrainian politicians have made noises about renationalising industrial properties stolen by oligarchs, the screaming from the West has been such to make you think a return to Stalinist terror had been proposed.

And it’s telling to watch Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, the Orange revolution’s villain restored now to power, smiling a thousand-watt smile as he consorts with sheepish Western leaders. He knows where his bread gets buttered. Ukraine has achieved that sine qua non of the second-tier country whose elite wants to prosper in the global order — it’s managed to unlink politics from the economy. ~Andrey Slivka

What can be said about Mr. Paul is that he’s not only ahead of Mr. Bernanke but also of his fellow Republicans, and he will eat into their standing until they address the question of the soundness of our currency. ~The New York Sun

That’s pretty high praise for someone who has such allegedly “kooky” ideas on economic policy.  It’s good to see Ron Paul finally getting a little more respect.

Sullivan responds to this Brad DeLong post by claiming that “only a left-liberal” could ask how the NYT could choose Bob Herbert “out of the 75 million liberal adults in America.”  But DeLong’s point in objecting to Herbert was not ideological.  He was focused on the errors in one of Herbert’s columns.  He wasn’t complaining that Herbert was somehow insufficiently liberal, as his concluding question taken out of context might have suggested, but that Herbert was embarrassingly wrong on basic matters of fact.  Everything DeLong said about recession and the CPI, so far as I can see, was correct, and Herbert’s statements (and uncritical repetition of others’ statements) were not.  What Herbert describes as the “flimflammery of official statistics” is actually the evidence that we were not in a recession last quarter, which makes his moaning about Bernanke’s refusal to say that we have been in a recession in the last quarter even more ridiculous.  Certainly, there are some weaknesses in the economy, and there is a great deal of economic anxiety, but those things do not make it a recession. 

Apparently, Daniel thinks I spend a good deal of time saying nothing more substantive than that I do not agree with things I disagree with. ~Will Wilkinson

In the two particular cases in question, I think that a skeptical reader might not find that much more to the arguments Mr. Wilkinson advances beyond his assertion of moral abhorrence for policies and norms that he does not support, plus the occasional dismissive reference to nationalism or a “national coalition” thrown in here and there.  How substantive that is, I will leave to others.  My concluding remarks for both responses sought to draw out what seemed to me to be the root of the disagreement, which was a disagreement over basic assumptions.  In the remainder of both posts, I did attempt to address at least some of the rest of what Mr. Wilkinson had to say.  Perhaps these attempts were lacking. 

In any case, the two posts in question are expositions of the observation that conservatives do not hold his kind of libertarian assumptions about national identity and borders, because, among other things, they do not and cannot take liberty to be the moral baseline.  They make distinctions between citizens and non-citizens, nationals and non-nationals, which they consider to be not simply prudent but actually obligatory and right.  Neither do conservatives, or most people for that matter, judge the efficiacy and worthiness of U.S. immigration policy on the basis of whether it aids the populations of ”developing” nations, because we do not think that it is the role of the U.S. government to set its policies to maximise the prosperity of the populatiions of “developing” nations.  Having put up a rather eccentric set of standards, Mr. Wilkinson finds that conservatives are not measuring up.  That’s all very well, but I don’t know that it tells us very much.  That is why I wrote the concluding remarks that I did.   

My concluding points in these two cases were to draw attention to the fact that the points of contention between Mr. Wilkinson and his interlocutors are not disagreements over anything like measurable practical benefits for the world’s poorest or anyone else.  They are disagreements between libertarians such as Mr. Wilkinson and conservatives, because the two are sharply, seemingly irreconcilably at odds about basic values.  He berates conservatives for privileging the interests of fellow citizens and countrymen (which he finds “morally abhorrent”), but beyond asserting that this act of privileging is wrong he does not give any persuasive reason why this should be so, except to fall back on his assumption that distinguishing between citizen and non-citizen is arbitrary and wrong. 

He wrote:

For example, this liberal finds the claim, implicit in much of the immigration debate, that I ought to heavily discount the welfare gains to non-citizens simply because they belong to a different national coalition morally abhorrent. I don’t doubt that many people take themselves to have an “inescapable” moral obligation to treat outsiders unfairly, or to even positively harm them (even kill them!), if it redounds to the benefits [sic] insiders. But I deny that there is any such obligation to escape in the first place. 

There’s no question of an obligation to treat outsiders “unfairly”–the so-called “unfairness” comes in distinguishing between insider and outsider–since it only seems like unfair treatment to someone who thinks there should be no distinction.  Yet there is no good rationale for abolishing the distinction, or at least none that has been presented in these posts.  The point is that there is not an argument I can see for why there is no obligation.  It is simply a restatement of Mr. Wilkinson’s assumption that none exists.  Hence my original conclusion. 

He then made the point that the (to use Levin’s phrases) “contractual way” and moralising according to “continuity and generation” are both equally artificial, which prompted me to respond that, if this is true, their equally artificial nature simply underscores  that people opt for one “way” or another depending on what functions they valued most.  This drives home the point, implicit in the entire discussion about moral sentiments, that the adherents of the two ”ways” judge morality by significantly different standards.  If it is true that “the liberal dimensions of the moral sense are uniquely amenable to defense by rational argument,” it would be interesting to see some of that kind of argument in these cases.        

In the latest post, Mr. Wilkinson tells us that “the global system of exclusion through citizenships, visas, and borders has manifestly failed to make the world’s least well-off better off,” though the system was never designed specifically to make the “least well-off” better off.  The basic question remains: why should that system be upended or radically changed, when the system of exclusion has actually worked to promote competition and innovation that have benefited most nations enormously?  Furthermore, is it even certain that such a proposed massive influx of poor labourers into developed economies would have the beneficial effects attributed to the proposal?  The idea might be as humanitarian and high-minded as you please, yet the costs of absorbing all these people (and the more, the better, because we wouldn’t want to be heartless and cruel, would we?) could weaken or stall those developed economies to the detriment of all.  

Conservatives argue that there is a hierarchy of loyalties based on natural affinities and social relationships, and that it is, in fact, a disordering of moral priorities to pretend that our obligations to our next-door neighbour and to a man on the other side of the world are effectively the same or even close to being comparable.  Proximity, kinship and shared citizenship create bonds between people that do not exist with others.  Conservatives here are no more personally ”indifferent” to the suffering of the world’s poorest nations than are the people of any “developed” country.  What Wilkinson calls “indifference” to foreigners’ suffering, conservatives call loyalty to compatriots (and a rejection of the sentimentality that allows us to see nothing around us closer than Africa).  The false choice that Mr. Wilkinson would have us make is to believe that there is something particularly pernicious and vicious about valuing such loyalty, and that the only way to show concern for the suffering of the world’s poor is to open the gates and create a huge, exploited underclass in our own country.  

I assume that Mr. Wilkinson’s concern for the world’s poorest is not a kind of rhetorical moral blackmail, though he still deploys it rather heavy-handedly.  Naturally, he does not extend the same assumption of good faith to his interlocutors, but imputes to them “morally abhorrent” views, he hints of bad faith and disregard for other people’s human rights, and describes the ideas to which he objects as “repugnant, and dangerous” and “poisonous.”  He says things like: “Levin wants to defend the shudder when it comes to, say, cloning, but (I trust) not when it comes to the subhuman treatment of the Dalits.”  Levin argues that there are some obligations that we owe family and neighbours that we do not choose, which means in Mr. Wilkinson’s view that he would not really think twice about tacitly endorsing the worst aspects of a dehumanising caste system. 

Don’t you see?  Any reasonably strong concern for purity and hierarchy must lead to tolerating the treatment meted out to untouchables.  That sounds like a very fair conclusion based on what the man said.  This is the sort of tendentious stuff that religious conservatives in particular have had to put up with for years: if you strongly espouse a moral precept, you must obviously endorse the worst fanaticism imaginable and you cannot possibly object to it.   Oh, yes, and then there is the charge of indifference to the suffering and injustice suffered by billions.  But, no, really, there is an argument in there somewhere.   

Telling us that that our immigration policy should be geared towards reducing global poverty is revealing in its own way, but takes no account of the ever-greater immiseration of the population left behind by the mass emigration advocated here as a solution.   Is Mr. Wilkinson “indifferent” to the suffering and injustice that those people who remain  behind (and inevitably many people will remain behind) will experience?  I wouldn’t assume that he is.  Yet that seems to be a likely outcome of the proposal he has endorsed.  Rather than stripping the most destitute of nations of their human resources, it would be best for all involved in the long term if they remained in their own countries.  This would in all likelihood hasten the pace of domestic reforms that would gradually make these places increasingly liveable and prosperous.  For each horror story from the “developing” world, there are success stories in the same parts of the world that suggest that mass abandonment of the poorest countries is not the only alternative to dead-end developmentalism.  As Easterly says:

But this doesn’t quite square with the sub-Saharan Africa that in 2006 registered its third straight year of good GDP growth — about 6%, well above historic averages for either today’s rich countries or all developing countries. Growth of living standards in the last five years is the highest in Africa’s history. 
  

At the moment when things may be looking up, with the obvious notable exceptions, we should call on people to flee their countries just as they beginning to enjoy some limited prosperity?  The failures of international development efforts in many parts of the world are well known, and Mr. Wilkinson and I are in agreement about that much.  However, some “developing” nations have actually managed to improve social and material conditions quite considerably (those Dalits that concern Mr. Wilkinson so much are politically mobilised now and have elected officials drawn from their ranks–unthinkable only a couple decades ago).  It seems to me that the benefits for future generations in these countries would be greater still, if more of their most capable and industrious people did not resettle elsewhere but instead remained to build up those countries rather than essentially abandon them.       

So if it’s wrong to consign someone to second-class citizenship based on skin color, why should we feel any more comfortable about forcing someone to live someplace horrible like Zimbabwe simply because that’s where he happens to have been born? ~Tim Lee

Because we’re not “forcing” someone to live in Zimbabwe (or wherever), but rather preventing him from living here.  Second, Zimbabwe was not always so horrible, and is not doomed to be so.  It is horrible for very explicable reasons of bad “policy,” if you can call systematic plunder and looting a policy, that are a matter of record, and which could be corrected if the Mugabe kleptocracy were no longer there.  I feel “comfortable” about stopping Zimbabweans (or anyone else) from coming to this country en masse, if they could actually manage it, because I see what this massive influx of refugees is doing to Zimbabwe’s neighbours and I do not want that for my country.  I would prefer that it not be happening to Zimbabwe’s neighbours, either.  The refugee crisis is a product of corruption and misrule on an epic scale.  The solution is not found in constantly offering maniacal despots a safety valve to release the buildup of social discontent, but in keeping the pressure on until the tyrannical goose is well and truly cooked by domestic rebellion.  Mass emigration not only drains other countries of some of their most industrious members, but it also serves as a much-needed relief for people in control of the sclerotic and bankrupt political institutions of many “developing” nation-states.  Western guilty consciences and the policies based thereon are their insurance policy and one of the means for their continued domination and exploitation of their subjects.  I have a hard time coming up with a moral theory that justifies that.

Update: On the subject of Zimbabwe, would you believe it if I told you that Zimbabwe was still 31st in a ranking of states for good governance in sub-Saharan Africa?  That means that there are 17 countries that are considered to be governed even more atrociously.  That seems worth nothing.

Today we regard a Northerner circa 1855 who transported, housed, and concealed from authority a fugitive slave as a moral visionary, despite the fact that he was flouting the laws of his time. Is there any morally relevant distinction between that individual and someone today who smuggles a refugee from Zimbabwe into the United States, shelters him in his home, and helps him evade the immigration authorities? ~Tim Lee

My Scene colleague Tim does his best to weight things in favour of his argument with the most extreme example of a misruled country and a comparison with slavery and a title that evokes memories of apartheid.  Since everyone will agree that Zimbabwe is today a waking nightmare, and we will also agree that slavery and apartheid are bad, there must be nothing left for it but to relocate the entire population of Zimbabwe to our shores.  The Zambians will be relieved.  Or maybe there is another answer.

First, it is doubtful that life in a country that is suffering net population loss by the millions because of fears of famine and violence from ZANU-PF-supporting ”veterans” is less brutal than was the antebellum South.  With respect to food production in particular, modern Zimbabweans would be fortunate to live in agriculturally rich and fertile lands that were being used so productively as they were in the Old South.  Slaves in the antebellum era certainly had a much better chance of staying alive and prospering after a fashion than do “free” people in Zimbabwe today.  Give Mugabe his due: his tyranny is just about as brutal as it gets short of mass killing.  

Second, since it apparently needs to be said, people who are actually engaged in human trafficking today and the Harriet Tubmans of the past are very different sorts of people.  First, the former are driven primarily by economic interests, while the latter were a sort of politico-religious agitator.  The moral differences between them are vast.  The former are criminals, not simply by some technicality of federal immigration law, but by trade.  They are smugglers and crooks who exploit and abuse their charges.  Since the people they bring here are on the fast track to being cheap exploited labour, and if we wanted to keep using slavery analogies, they are about as morally pure and high-minded as slave traders.    

Bringing slavery into the debate might introduce other difficulties for the proponent of large-scale immigration, since extreme economic dependency is the state into which these people are entering (or, rather, it is the state in which they will remain).  The argument a pro-immigration person might want to make is that this system of illegal exploitation and human trafficking is one of the reasons why immigrants should not be criminalised for trying to come here, since that would theoretically prevent at least some of them from putting themselves at the mercy of criminal operations.  Of course, even in an era of open borders with all the other problems that would create, such exploitation would continue, especially for those coming by boat, as migrants will still be herded into shipping containers just as they are today if there is an economic incentive for the smugglers to do it and little or no law enforcement to deter them.  Decriminalising immigration, which I take to be the main point Tim wants to make, would not mean that the human traffickers will be any better regulated; decriminalising immigration is a concession to the supposed “reality” that it is already impossible to regulate the “movement of labour.”  If I were wont to get on a humanitarian soapbox and decry the evils of such human trafficking, I could point to this as a massive moral blind spot of the pro-immigration side, but I don’t like humanitarian soapboxes and see this as mostly a distraction from the larger question. 

The larger question is this: how does mass emigration actually help other parts of the world?  Letting in those who can escape the nightmare is all very well and good, but it is almost certain that the most motivated and most capable will be among the first to abandon their “prisons,” as the Free Exchange blogger calls them, leaving their neighbours to endure even greater hardships as conditions continue to deteriorate.  Applied domestically, this would be rather like writing off inner cities as hopeless and encouraging those who could ”get out” to move to the suburbs, leaving the city centers to deteriorate and collapse even more quickly.  In effect, what these humanitarian arguments for ending “international apartheid“ will lead to is resource-stripping of human capital by the developed world, maintaining the “developing” world’s status as a source for raw materials and a world with the export profile of a colonial dependency.  Rather than arguing, as some anti-developmentalists do, that trade and investment will build up the economies of these countries, the “humanitarian” argument for encouraging mass emigration calls for massive divestment from the failed “enterprises” of post-colonial Africa and elsewhere by the very inhabitants of those countries.

As I have argued before against a certain Free Exchange blogger :

Some might think that people who live in these “prison” countries regard the place where they live as their home and might even say that they are not simply labour units to be reassigned to allow for greater efficiencies.  Mass uprooting and relocation of poor populations with migrants moving from the countryside to the city and from the home country to communities abroad, which has happened in virtually every impoverished, modernising nation-state from the independence of Greece on, is all very good for those who can get out, but dooms those who remain (and many will remain) to an even more miserable existence.  Dr. Wilson once remarked on this, asking a rhetorical question that went something like this: “What sort of country robs poor countries of their best and brightest people?”  This blogger’s kind of country, it would seem. 

Via this Economist Free Exchange blogger (via McArdle), whose arguments seem strangely familiar, comes a review of The Bottom Billion.  My guess is that Paul Collier, the author, and I would agree on many of the evils of ”developmentalism” and would find some of the same problems with the organisations and institutions that allegedly promote development in poor countries.  The Free Exchange blogger refers to ”Easterly’s jaded pessimism,” which is fair if he means Easterly’s attitude towards the institutions and ideology of development.  It might be misleading to those who are not aware that Easterly is, in fact, a tremendously optimistic booster of free trade (one might almost call his views on trade naive, but I do not) who believes that the surest way for “the developing world” to enjoy economic growth is for development agencies and foreign governments to stop engaging in their absurd obsession with “helping” them.  Much more help of that kind, and these countries are done for.  

At one point, the reviewer writes:

The Nobel laureate Robert Solow once wrote that economists are intellectual sanitation workers: their key contribution is to consign bad ideas to the trash.

So that’s what economists are good for!  I had been wondering.  The Free Exchange blogger goes on to promote mass immigration (or rather mass emigration from the poor nation-states) to free people from their “national prisons.”  Iraqi refugees have been thus “liberated,” and I assume that they would have preferred to stay in the “prison,” which makes this talk of prisons seem rather odd.  Some might think that people who live in these “prison” countries regard the place where they live as their home and might even say that they are not simply labour units to be reassigned to allow for greater efficiencies.  Mass uprooting and relocation of poor populations with migrants moving from the countryside to the city and from the home country to communities abroad, which has happened in virtually every impoverished, modernising nation-state from the independence of Greece on, is all very good for those who can get out, but dooms those who remain (and many will remain) to an even more miserable existence.  Dr. Wilson once remarked on this, asking a rhetorical question that went something like this: “What sort of country robs poor countries of their best and brightest people?”  This blogger’s kind of country, it would seem. 

This talk of “national prisons” is the sort of language applied to states that one wishes did not exist and would like to see dismantled.  Again, the example of Iraq (or that of the recent Ivorian civil war) stands out to show us what will follow the breakdown of the “national prisons” in Africa and elsewhere.  However, like the bold Wilsonians dispensing self-determination to the “imprisoned” nations of the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires, those who would destroy the prisonhouses may be quite unhappy with what results.   

Since he has never imputed bad faith or shabby motives to his opponents, I guess this Will Wilkinson post really puts Ezra Klein in his place.  Oh, wait…never mind.

Concerning the specific dispute over why respectable economists routinely put their arguments on The Wall Street Journal op-ed page, I don’t think that either Klein’s incredulity or Wilkinson’s mockery gets anywhere near the real answer.  It isn’t a question of credible people lending support to a “laughable ideology” or credible people who are ideologically inclined towards the paper’s editorial views publishing in a comfortable venue.  Prominent, respectable economists submit articles to the WSJ op-ed page because the paper is one of the most widely-circulated national newspapers whose main focus is reporting on business and finance.  A huge percentage of WSJ readers, whose politics are happily not always that of the immigration-cum-imperialism crowd who write the paper’s editorials, is made up of people who make their living working for corporations or investing in the market (or both) and who want to have informed commentary about developments in the economy.  Economists publish their op-eds in the WSJ to reach an audience that is going to be interested in what they have to say.  And supposedly clever schemes of building up the empire of the supply-siders really has nothing to do with it. 

Ross follows up on the debate over his latest Atlantic piece on future Democratic electoral prospects, and he explains quite clearly what he means by populism and how his reform ideas relate to it.  I think Ross’ analysis of electoral trends makes sense, which is why I wrote in defense of it.  However, I am actually sympathetic to those, such as Will Wilkinson, who do not like the substance of the policy proposals endorsed by economic populists, as I do not care for many of them myself.  I disagree with some libertarian critics of this populism, to the extent that they even allow that it actually exists, concerning some specific areas of policy and more general assumptions about the legitimacy of the claims of national sovereignty and national interest.  While I have some right-populist inclinations in matters of trade and immigration and I have a very old-fashioned Bolingbrokean-Jeffersonian hostility to concetrated wealth and power, which makes for some common anti-corporate ground with more conventional left-populists, in practice I am not that much of a populist.  You will not see me voting for Edwards-style populism or “compassionate” conservatism or “Sam’s Club Republicanism” now or ever.  For that matter, I neither shop at Sam’s Club, nor am I a Republican, so that makes me a pretty unlikely supporter of this sort of politics, since I rather rather regard the former as a symptom of moral and economic disorder and regard the latter as, well, not my favourite organisation.  Yet I still do recognise that there are people who might just go for such reformism, and these really are the sorts of people the GOP needs to win over and keep if it wants to remain competitive going forward.   

As I have made abundantly clear over the years, I am a small-government constitutionalist and a Ron Paul man, which puts me in a fairly small group.  (I am also very sympathetic to corporatist ideas of solidarity and a conservationist ethic, which may put me in an even smaller subset of this group.)  Despite an appreciation for some of the aspects of corporatism, the kind of economic intervention by the state on offer these days leaves me completely cold.  (Non-intervention is very often the wise course, in foreign policy as in domestic affairs.)  However, my preferences do not really give me the luxury to pretend that people in this country are not looking for some sort of intervention by the state in the field of health care, because they plainly are.  You hear this anecdotally from friends and colleagues, and you see it backed up in polling.  The desire is there, and the main dispute seems to be over whether you have a mostly state-run or a more state capitalist-run program.  Mike Huckabee talks vaguely about having a solution that involves none of the above, but he is typically blissfully free of specifics when he says this.  (Based on anecdotal impressions, I would say that young, educated professionals might be even more worried about health care than many other groups, but I wouldn’t press that too far.)  These people are acting on the assumption that the U.S. government is “their” government (if only!) and that it exists to provide them with certain things they need, or at the very least to provide them with the “opportunity” to acquire what they need. 

At this point, someone usually says something saccharine about empowerment, which is usually where they finally lose me, since it is never the government’s role to empower its citizens.  This idea of government empowering people is the root of all swindles.  Indeed, citizens’ power stands in an inverse relationship with that of the government,and the government never “gives back” the power it has taken.  The more “empowerment” we have, the more servility we have.  This is naturally not a popular view (for confirmation, see the political history of the 20th century or just the 1964 presidential election), and it is not one that is normally associated with populism, though I think a case could be made that it is the ultimate populist view, insofar as it is one that places the best interests of the people ahead of popular enthusiasms.  It is the view most consonant with a decentralist understanding of political liberty, and such an arrangement would ultimately be far better for the common good, a humane, sane way of life and the flourishing of more self-supporting communities. 

As George Grant observed forty years ago, though, political decentralisation without economic decentralisation is simply submission to corporate oligarchy, which I think he regarded as worse than a living Hell (in which case, he would have been too generous).  Consequently, he was known as the “Red Tory” for his harsh criticism of the dissolving acid that capitalism and technology poured on social bonds.  Also, the Loyalist and Anglo-Canadian Conservative tradition never knew the reflexive hostility to state action that our political tradition initially did, and strangely enough Canada now enjoys more effective decentralisation in certain respects than we do (even though it also has more in the way of government services).

All of this got me to thinking about how strange it is that the Democrats have become the party of the economic populists, since they have historically been the less nationalist of the two parties and appear to be in no danger of changing, yet this kind of populism almost always goes with a strong dose of nationalism.  Most economic populist complaints today focus on a few general areas: free trade, the effects of globalisation (e.g., outsourcing, etc.), related government favouritism for corporate interests and immigration.  The Washington-New York political elite is largely in agreement that free trade, globalisation, state capitalism and mass immigration are fundamentally desirable.  There may be disagreements about how to manage them, but there is only minority support for rejecting or opposing any of them on a large scale.  (This is still true in the current presidential fields.)  You would expect the historic party of labour to be more concerned about immigration, but as chance would have it, they are also the historic party of immigrants.  You would expect the more nationalist party to be more skeptical of free trade and globalisation, but they are also the party of corporations.  On each issue where populists might gain traction, the party leadership has tended to reject the populist position and endorse the globalist one, because their true corporate masters desire it.  This remains true.  What is striking today is the extent to which Democratic candidates are willing to buck corporate America at least a little when it comes to free trade, which suggests that the populist critique of free trade and globalisation, which was smothered during the incredibly boring, issue-free 2000 election, might break through this time and cause a change in the political landscape.       

Caplan divides them into three categories: antimarket bias, antiforeign bias, make-work bias and pessimistic bias. Antimarket bias describes people feeling that trade and profit are zero-sum games, that one person’s gain is another person’s loss. They haven’t learned that free exchange is win-win and that in a free market, profit comes from cost-cutting innovation. Antiforeign bias, perhaps a vestige of primitive man, consists of distrusting “them” even though our prosperity increases according to how global the division of labor is. Foreigners don’t want to invade us; they want to sell us useful things [bold mine-DL]. Make-work bias is the belief that what makes us rich is jobs, rather than goods, and so anything that eliminates jobs is bad. If that were really true, we could prosper by outlawing all inventions created after 1920. Think of all the jobs that would create! Finally, pessimistic bias is the view that any economic problem is proof of general decline. Lots of people actually think we’re poorer than our grandparents were! ~John Stossel

It’s no secret that I don’t like Caplan’s arguments.  I also find them wanting.  Do “lots of people” actually believe that we are poorer than our grandparents, the folks who lived through the Depression?  I would really need to see some evidence for that.  Not that the self-serving claims of libertarians aren’t enough for me, mind you. 

Profit can come from innovation, or it can come from other ways of cutting costs, such as reducing the price of labour by moving operations to places where labour is exceedingly cheap and of fairly comparable quality (or by importing cheap black market labour that does the same job for half the price or less).  If you could cut costs through innovation and cheaper labour, profits would be even greater–that sounds like a win-win…except for the people who don’t reap any of the profits.  The generalisation about foreigners is true, except in all those cases when it isn’t.  Some foreigners may want to invade; some may want to infiltrate and attack.  If you want to say that most do not want to do this, you might have a point, but the default assumption in favour of importing foreign labour and foreign products is no more rational when it is pursued relentlessly.  What Caplan has categorised as irrational biases are simply different political leanings from his own; he knows that he is rational, so it must be that all these others are irrational.  People do not assume that anything that eliminates jobs is undesirable.  They assume that something that eliminates, for example, the manufacturing sector from their town is undesirable, particularly when that manufacturing provides most of the employment in the town.  The libertarian answer: things change, people should move to another location.  When people respond to this upheaval in a hostile way, it is declared irrationality and bias and the libertarian believes he has answered his critics.  The optimistic bias of every free trader and market enthusiast is that every disruption, upheaval and economic transformation brings net benefits to all at ultimately minimal cost.  That might even be true, but it won’t change the response of the voters harmed by the upheaval.  The people who bear the brunt of those costs don’t care whether the costs are “minimal” in the grand scheme of things–they respond rationally to what is happening around them and are not inclined to measure their present misery against an uptick in national productivity. 

I can see why Caplan’s agenda is attractive.  It would be tempting for me to argue that no one who disagrees with me about policy questions should be allowed to vote.  That would simplify matters considerably, and naturally I think that the resulting policies would be better, but somehow I think someone might suspect that this was a not-so-subtle power grab.  If we were going to start setting up standards for voting, I would want to insist on voters who could also demonstrate foreign affairs and historical literacy, which would disqualify so many people that we would not need ballots, but could settle all important matters by a show of hands.

But in fact, the real Africa is quite a bit different. And the problem with all this Western stereotyping is that it manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of some current victories, fueling support for patronizing Western policies designed to rescue the allegedly helpless African people while often discouraging those policies that might actually help. ~William Easterly

Prof. Easterly is on a roll this month.  His Foreign Policy article on development ideology was excellent (my comments are here), and he offers a much-needed corrective to the common media portrait of Africa (starring mainly Somalia, Sudan and Zimbabwe).  As Prof. Easterly supposes in his latest, the developmentalists have an institutional interest in exaggerating the nature and scope of the problem (much as governments have an interest in exaggerating security threats, etc.).  The larger the problem is, the more important, necessary and powerful they will become (or at least this is the hope), so they have a real incentive to continue to deem all of Africa to be a failure by their standards.  That in turn makes the developmentalists that much more relevant to “fixing” a problem that is already being addressed, albeit at less-than-miraculous speed.  Then comes the revelation that the developmentalists really don’t want you to hear:

In truth, Africans are and will be escaping poverty the same way everybody else did: through the efforts of resourceful entrepreneurs, democratic reformers and ordinary citizens at home, not through PR extravaganzas of ill-informed outsiders.

Just imagine–a world with no NGO junkets, no meddlesome international bankers and bureaucrats, no self-important actors who are out to save mankind!  Okay, let’s not get carried away.  Those things will all continue, but if African nations are fortunate they will not have these things inflicted on them.  These nations have been poorly served by the way in which development lending has been done and the way in which foreign aid has been distributed.  These nations will be the ones that achieve increased prosperity, provided that the developmentalists do not sabotage it, retard it or discourage it through their historically unsuccessful policies. 

People do not grasp the “invisible hand” of the market, with its ability to harmonize private greed and the public interest. ~Bryan Caplan

Some unfortunate phrasing, perhaps, but even so it is an interesting claim that, because most people do not see the imaginary, metaphorical force that surrounds and binds together economic activity, they thereby must have an “anti-market bias.”  More likely, these people lack the invisible hand-detectors that libertarians receive upon obtaining their libertarian membership.  Caplan continues:

They underestimate the benefits of interaction with foreigners.

Perhaps some people underestimate them, but if anyone overestimates the benefits it is surely a free-trading libertarian, who seems to see no real downside to such interaction.

Caplan again:

They equate prosperity not with production, but with employment.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but if someone lacks employment it doesn’t matter to him how outstanding the GDP has been.  If we’re talking about politics, and not what constitutes good policy, the lack of employment today is more pressing and will move more votes.  19th century liberals at least understood this and restricted the franchise accordingly to keep the electorate from expanding much beyond their base of support.  Once the electorate grew in size beyond the buergerlich urban voters that supported liberal economic policies, these new voters quite rationally embraced policies that would work to secure their interests–whether of agricultural land or labour or small artisanal workshops–rather than endorse those that tended to benefit middle-class businessmen and industrialists.  As 19th liberals were bewildered then by the choices of the mob, so, too, are libertarians today, yet like the 19th century liberal the libertarian is an interesting, eccentric and fun figure who can command no great political following.  Liberalism flourished in the early phase of industrialisation, and the effects of that same industrialisation worked to overthrow and destroy classical liberalism.  Likewise, it is not “baffling” that American labourers sought and supported the politicians that at least promised to secure them certain basic protections with respect to the length of the workday, safety and health regulations and the like.  (It is a separate question where the federal government gets any authority to do these things.)  These choices may not be optimal for maximising productivity, but that doesn’t necessarily matter to the labourer.  The interests of labour actually involve more than the compensation for work that has been done.  Voters act irrationally just as Caplan claims if you have already determined that labourers’ voting for policies that govern workplace conditions, for example, is a form of irrationality.   

If someone’s job has been outsourced to another country (there’s my anti-foreign bias!) or eliminated for the sake of efficiency (my anti-market bias is taking over), it is unreasonable to expect him to say, “That’s all right.  The economy grew by 4%!”  Voters are often irrational when it comes time to select candidates (because candidate preferences are driven by all sorts of intangibles and identity politics quite distinct from policy questions), but they are not so blindly, willfully hostile to their own self-interest that they misunderstand their own immediate economic interests.  They may very well not see “the big picture” and they may support policies that seem immediately beneficial to them (for instance, nationalisation of an industry or massive redistributionist taxation), but which have overall negative consequences for the entire economy. 

This complaint has ever been the lament of the classical liberal when confronted with a mass electorate: “Why don’t you people realise that the policies that will make me wealthier are the right ones?”   

Of course, voters are short-sighted, prone to misguided enthusiasms and vulnerable to the predations of demagogues.  I don’t like democracy.  Generally speaking, I’m against it.  It is injurious to liberty, because no mass electorate presented with the ability to control, however minimally, a huge coercive apparatus is going to endorse a platform of austerity, limited government and decentralised power.  It will abuse to some extent this power, and demagogues will encourage this abuse for the sake of concentrating more and more power in their own hands. 

No one will confuse me for a defender of the rationality and sanity of democratic politics.  However, policies aimed at shoring up or protecting domestic industry do not strike me necessarily as being at all obviously “socially harmful.”  They contribute to increased prices on imports, and often provoke retalitatory tariffs on exported goods, but is such protectionism actually “socially harmful”?  Beyond the diminished consumption of commodities that such a tariff war might cause, what exactly is the harm?

Whatever else this study reveals, it definitely explains why no one will be bending over backwards to run on a libertarian economic platform anytime soon. 

Conservatives and liberals will fight unto eternity over whose notions of the law, society and justice are right. But the one idea owned by conservatives is the market.

For many Democrats in politics, the market–the daily machinery of the private economy–is a semi-abstraction. ~Daniel Henninger

To normal people, “the market” is a full-blown abstraction.  No semi-abstractions here.  Conservatives are supposed to be allergic and opposed to abstractions.  Therefore, it seems implausible that conservatives “own” one of these abstractions and still remain conservatives.  How does one own an abstraction anyway?  Wait, I know–the market will provide the deed! 

If Mr. Henninger means to say that many modern conservatives have traditionally tried, at least to some degree, to guard property rights, defend the claims of private enterprise against regulation and argue for the more effective distribution of goods and services via a relatively less regulated process of providing such goods and services, then he might say something more like that.  To speak about “the market” as if it were a concrete entity in opposition to an abstraction is to take a term that is specifically designed to abstractly describe a vast, complex system of exchange and make utter nonsense of it.  But then if I were trying to pretend that providing cheap labour for business interests (a.k.a., exploitation) was a “core” American value, I would probably wind up talking a lot of nonsense in the process as well.

If the Church were to start transforming herself into a directly political subject, she would do less, not more, for the poor and for justice, because she would lose her independence and her moral authority, identifying herself with a single political path and with debatable partisan positions. The Church is the advocate of justice and of the poor, precisely because she does not identify with politicians nor with partisan interests. Only by remaining independent can she teach the great criteria and inalienable values, guide consciences and offer a life choice that goes beyond the political sphere. To form consciences, to be the advocate of justice and truth, to educate in individual and political virtues: that is the fundamental vocation of the Church in this area. And lay Catholics must be aware of their responsibilities in public life; they must be present in the formation of the necessary consensus and in opposition to injustice. ~Pope Benedict XVI

In 1988, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger published a collection of essays under the title of Church, Ecumenism and Politics. In it, he argued that capitalism is little better than national socialism or communism, in that all three propose false idols (prosperity, the Volk, and the state, respectively). Ratzinger said that to build a humane civilization, the West must rediscover two elements of its past: its classical Greek heritage and its common Christian identity.

From the classical era, Ratzinger wrote, Europe should rediscover objective and eternal values that stand above politics, putting limits to power. Ratzinger used the Greek term eunomia to describe this concept of the good. In that sense, one could say that Ratzinger proposed a eunomic, rather than capitalist, model of Western culture.

Over the years, Ratzinger has been close to the Communio school within Catholic theology, which stresses the need for cultures to take their point of departure from the Christian gospel rather than secular ideologies. Its primary exponents have repeatedly criticized capitalism for promoting an ethos of individualism and “survival of the fittest” that is at odds with the communitarian thrust of Catholic social teaching. ~John Allen

Via Bettnet.com

The “Idiot” species, we suggested, bore responsibility for Latin America’s underdevelopment. Its beliefs—revolution, economic nationalism, hatred of the United States, faith in the government as an agent of social justice, a passion for strongman rule over the rule of law—derived, in our opinion, from an inferiority complex. In the late 1990s, it seemed as if the Idiot were finally retreating. But the retreat was short lived. Today, the species is back in force in the form of populist heads of state who are reenacting the failed policies of the past, opinion leaders from around the world who are lending new credence to them, and supporters who are giving new life to ideas that seemed extinct. ~Alvaro Vargas Llosa

Far be it from me to defend the wisdom of crowds and the virtues of democracy.  If Mr. Vargas Llosa wants to say that the policy preferences of mass democratic electorates are often foolish and unsound, I will not contradict him.  However, I tend to find the anti-populism of the liberal democrat a little hard to take, since it is so transparently inconsistent with his own confidence in democratic government.  There is often nothing obviously more purely rational and less self-interested about the preferences of the liberal democrat that puts him in the position to laugh at the populist and socialist as an “idiot.”  Carl Schorske’s cultural history of fin-de-siecle Vienna was one work that revealed to me this contempt of the 19th century liberal and his sympathisers for the conservative Catholic, the nationalist and the socialist: in this telling, liberals conceived of themselves as embattled heroes of rationality, and their foes were foolish crowds stupidly pursuing “magical” answers that could not be explained by anything other than irrationality.  In fact, the backlash against classical liberalism across all of Europe and, to some extent, also here in America was the result of the failure of liberal policies to address the interests and needs of huge numbers of people.  There is good reason why Christian democracy and social democracy became the dominant forces in European politics in virtually every country: most constituencies did not benefit from and did not want the liberal order.  The story of modern Europe is the story of how liberty and democracy are frequently mutually exclusive, but it also offers an important reminder that there are social and political goods that most people will privilege ahead of fairly abstract notions of liberty. 

Liberal economic policies were geared for the benefit of liberal middle-class voters and promised, eventually, benefits for others as well, but in the short term the rural and labour interests were quite rationally and sensibly opposed to policies that privileged the interests of buergerlich city-dwellers and the interests of capital and finance.  Liberals are always caught in the paradox that they endorse all of the contractual and egalitarian theories that must lead inexorably to universal suffrage and mass democracy, knowing at the same time that their definition of good government and freedom is not shared by the overwhelming majority of people in the world and will likely be repudiated once everyone has a vote.  Nowadays they possess a charmingly naive faith in the virtues of democracy, but reserve the right to declare the exercise of the franchise in ways they dislike to be the workings of idiocy.  This role today is taken up by the inheritors of the American Freisinnigen, the Republicans, who are quite happy to extol the glories of democracy and “people power” at every turn when it seems to vindicate their policy preferences until the demos turns against them, whereupon they rediscover that America is supposed to be a republic and the madness of crowds is a dangerous and worrisome phenomenon.  It is as some of them are Jacobins who are willing to pose as Federalists when the occasion requires; the centralising tendencies of both Jacobin and Federalist make this contradictory stance less absurd than it might otherwise be.  But that is another story.         

Back to Latin American idiocy.  What is striking about this analysis is not its rude dismissal of the recurring preferences of large numbers of Latin Americans, but the treatment of the resurgence of “the Idiot” as if no