I finally clicked on and opened this little treasure trove of wonders on The Economist website (http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/), and discovered (at the top of a string of interesting posts) a post which suggested, tongue-in-cheek, that foreign participation in American democracy (ala foreign money financing political speech) is only just and right, since American hegemony means that American decisions increasingly directly and indirectly affect the lives of foreign nationals.
As I’ve argued before (http://coloradoconfluence.com/?p=243&cpage=1#comment-12), there isn’t really such a vast difference between “empire” and “federalism” as we sometimes pretend. The Tea Partiers, as sometimes happens, are actually right to conflate the two, though wrong in the oversimplistic moral-political judgment they impose on that similarity: Such political consolidation generally yields both aggregate and broadly (if not equitably) distributed benefits that shouldn’t be disregarded. It also involves the institutionalization of uneven distributions of power and influence.
As many people around the world viscerally realize, American hegemony is not really that far removed from American empire, just as Roman hegemony during the late Republic was not all that different from the Roman Empire that followed. And the Southern states that rebelled in defense of slavery were far more accurate than the Northern zeitgeist acknowledges when they (the Confederates) claimed to be heirs to the revolutionaries, fighting against a centralized federal/imperial government telling them what to do.
Of course, the American Revolutionaries themselves weren’t all that anti-imperialistic a mere 13 years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, when they were still proud and loyal British citizens. It was their disappointment in the wake of the French and Indian War over a set of British policies that was less favorable to them than they would have liked that quickly eroded their love of empire (the policies in question included the abandonment of the long-standing British policy of “salutary neglect,” sparing the colonies the taxes levied on everyone else in order to give them an opportunity to grow prosperous, which they did; the protection of the Indian tribes in the newly acquired Ohio Valley from colonial expansion; and tolerance of the French language and Catholic religion in the newly acquired Canadian territory).
Our attitudes (like those of our founding fathers) toward political consolidation and centralization are generally situational, less indignant when it is serving our interests, and more indignant when it isn’t. Two ideological cross-currents have entered that stream, one which views any exercise of power over those who are not constituents of that power (i.e., members of the electorate of those who exercise it) as unjust and unacceptable; and one which, bizarrely, sees any consolidation of democratic agency within the nation (over those who elect their representatives) as an affront to liberty, but at least a significant faction of which is not particularly concerned about exercises of power abroad (over those who have no democratic say in the matter), except to the extent that it inconveniences them. (To their credit, another faction of this latter group are true isolationists, but, as I hope I make clear below, though that may be more consistent, it isn’t at all functional).
Both of these ideological cross-currents to some extent confuse the issue, the first by positing that humanity is best served by the eradication of all injustice (something that, if successfully prosecuted, leads to universal destitution), and the second by thinking that humanity is best served by the eradication of all power (other than, for some, that which the nation projects abroad), something that, if successfully prosecuted, leads to social disintegration and a very dramatic contraction of wealth and well-being (whether at the national or global level).
While I am not unaware of the beneficial, if not necessary, role of hegemony in the world, simply because the preferable path of global confederation is too obstructed by a tangled and brutal mess of vested interests to keep pace with the overwhelming need for some degree of global governance, I certainly recognize the injustice of it, and even more so when hegemony is exercised particularly irresponsibly (as it was throughout the first eight years of the new millennium). I’ve written about that demand for global governance (Problems Without Borders ), and about the aristocratic arrogance with which that demand has been met, when it’s been met at all (Lords and Serfs on the Global Manor: Foreign Aid as Noblesse Oblige ). But social organization, perhaps in all forms, involves some distribution and exercise of power (even decentralized normative control does). That’s just a reality we have to deal with, and far preferable to the alternative (a Hobbesian “war of all against all”).
The issue isn’t that the power exists, but rather how it is distributed, how it’s checked and balanced, how it’s contextualized to best serve the interests of those under its umbrella and to protect the vulnerable from abuses. We should want to live in a world capable of organizing across national boundaries to face international challenges and take advantage of international opportunities. But we should also want it to be done, to whatever extent possible, in a way which does not, systemically and consistently, serve the interests of some at the expense of the interests of others. We should want it to be done democratically.
America no longer trusts the world enough to be in the vanguard of its democratization as a world. We have, for some time, exercised our hegemony with disdain for the voice and will of those over whom we are exercising it. This is neither just, nor, in the long run, functional. Maybe it’s time we returned to the dream of Wilson and FDR that we usher in a new age of international organization, and sought ways to give those over whom we reign some small voice in how they are ruled.
I am not, of course, suggesting that we extend rights of direct or equitable participation in American democracy to the world’s population, but rather that we continue what had been evolving for two centuries or more; the gradual forging of a weak but functioning overlay of global governance. From the Concert of Europe in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, through the League of Nations, to the United Nations, the modern developed world (repeatedly abandoned by the United States in the effort) has haltingly and imperfectly tried to forge workable institutions comprising a weak overlay of participatory global governance, each incarnation a little stronger and more functional than the last.
The United Nations is hopelessly flawed, it is true, but so was The United States under the Articles of Confederation. Hopeless flaws invite hopeful reforms, not an abandonment of the challenge the flawed institutions arose to meet. We probably need a new incarnation of this necessary part of the global institutional landscape, one which has more direct subnational representation and less deference to often parasitic national governments that don’t necessarily represent their people’s interests, and more participation of transnational, extranational, and supranational organizations that are key players on the world stage. But America has to continue to aspire to be more than a mere hegemon pursuing its own interests in the global arena; we must aspire to be the “leaders of the free world” we have so long claimed to be, and, as leaders committed to democratic ideals, continue to seek and find ways to include those who are led in the decision-making processes which affect them.
Everyone who advocates any political or social position, and who claims to do so because it serves interests other than merely their own, acknowledges, either implicitly or explicitly, that we are in a shared enterprise. Some think the public interest is best served by an absolutist commitment to “less government,” and some by doing the analysis and making the determination, in each instance, in the light of the specific relevant facts. But regardless of what we value, what we believe, what we insist upon, if we are valuing it, believing it, and insisting upon it in a public forum in an attempt to persuade others that it is the right thing to value, believe, or insist upon, then we believe that we have some shared fate, and some common interest in governing and organizing ourselves wisely. That is the human enterprise.
First, let’s dispense with the artificial distinction above between “governing” and “organizing” ourselves. Those who believe that churches and community organizations and voluntary associations of various kinds are useful, but that government is an impediment to our individual and/or collective welfare (the latter simply being an aggregation of our individual welfare, according to some set of values held by the individual advocating a particular position), are in effect saying that they favor one form of government over another. If government were eliminated or reduced, but voluntary organizations were left to fill the void, then the latter would become governments, and would be subject to many of the same issues, debates, and concerns that current governments are subject to. So, the debate is always over what form and function of government we advocate.
I assume that we can all agree, that in any conflict of ideologies, generally speaking, we are acting on the assumption that some are more useful than others. The logically possible alternatives are that conflicting ideologies are not actually incompatible, or, if they are incompatible, that the public interest is unaffected by the choice between them, in both of which cases there should be no conflict. The existence of conflict demonstrates the belief that some ideologies, some positions, better serve the public interest than others.
I further assume that we can all agree that the purpose of our political process, of our public debate over which ideas to implement, is based on conflicting beliefs over which ideas best serve the public interest. We should all acknowledge that we are engaged in a process the purpose of which is to select those ideas which best serve the public interest, however it is defined.
There are really, implicitly, two interrelated debates taking place under that one rubric: What is “the public interest,” and how is it best served? In other words, there is a debate over how to define the goal, and over the means for achieving it. We routinely conflate these two debates, arguing over means to differently conceived goals without debating the relative merits of the goals themselves, because we are in conflict over policies which, by their nature, are based on particular resolutions of both aspects of this contested terrain.
The first thing we need to do, in service to the human enterprise that we all implicitly acknowledge we are in, is to engage explicitly in the debate over what defines “the public interest,” without leaping to the debate about how it’s best served. This pre-empts the error of various idolatries, including “Constitutional Idolatry” (the treatment of adherence to a particular reductionist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution as the necessary and sufficient justification for all policy positions), by requiring attention to the end that is being served, rather than merely advocacy of a particular means for serving it. It requires, in other words, that the argument be made, rather than merely the dogma invoked.
Having to “make the case” is an essential procedural cornerstone of engaging in the human enterprise most effectively. We resolve legal disputes by “making the case” in court, which looks for adherence to a particular set of procedures and rules to best ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information presented. We resolve scientific and academic disputes by “making the case” in peer-reviewed journals, which look for adherence to a particular methodology which maximizes the reliability of data and of the analysis applied to it. We need to learn how to submit political disputes to the same discipline, to a methodology which maximizes reliability of information and of the analysis applied. The starting point for developing such a discipline is the requirement that political positions prevail to the extent that the case for them prevails in a court-like or academy-like procedural crucible, rather than to the extent that they manage to exploit unexamined emotional responses and predispositions (the same predecessor to modern legal and scientific procedures which gave us throwing witches into lakes to determine guilt or innocence, and basing knowledge of nature’s subtleties almost exclusively on popular superstitions).
When we subject the fundamental political conflict over how to define “the public interest” to this constraint, we discover that one set of positions is based on a refusal to make the case, rather than on how well the case was made. The Tea Party and its fellow travelers, invoking the “Constitutional Idolatry” mentioned above, claim that we have an authoritative document that tells us exactly how to pursue the public interest, without requiring any consideration of what the public interest being pursued is. It jumps to advocacy of a methodology for pursuing the public interest (i.e., adherence to a particular interpretation of the Constitution), assuming that the public interest is thus served. It may be, but the case needs to be made, explicitly, to determine if the argument should prevail under a sound methodology applied to political disputes.
Currently, there isn’t really any debate over what the public interest is. There is, rather, a conflict between those who think we should pursue it, and those who think we shouldn’t, the latter, essentially, arguing that the public interest is best served by being disregarded. This latter group is rooted, for instance, in a belief in the justice of inequity, that what each has is what each deserves, and that any attempt to “redistribute” wealth, or to refine property rights in ways which result in the redistribution of wealth, is an injustice against those from whom it is redistributed.
But this position is detached from reality. It doesn’t recognize that current property rights are a legal and political artifact, no more inherent to nature than alternative sets of property rights, and are a particular kind of distribution, not the absence of one. Modifications in these laws are less “redistributions” than “alternative distributions.” All that distinguishes them from the current system of distribution of wealth is that they are more or less efficient (contributing more or less robustly to the production of wealth), more or less fair (distributing wealth and opportunity with less regard for the chances of birth), and more or less sustainable (establishing a stable pattern of rights and responsibilities).
This position that defends strictly defined and inviolate private property rights is detached from history, in which the distribution of wealth extant today is rooted in violence and exploitation, and that the distribution of opportunity today is affected by that historical legacy. It is detached from empathy, in which the injustice of being born into poverty and suffering its effects is a social problem to be addressed rather than someone else’s problem to be disregarded. It us detached from pragmatism and economics, in which our current extreme economic inequality diminishes economic robustness and social mobility, decreasing both aggregate wealth and increasing persistent, long-term social costs imposed on all of us. But most of all, it is detached from consideration of what “the public interest” means, because the economically, socially, and morally dysfunctional commitment to current inequities can only be defended in blindness, for only as long one refuses to face the question of what “the public interest” means. It crumbles under scrutiny as soon as that question is addressed.
The Human Enterprise requires that we address both the question of what defines “the public interest,” and what means (i.e., public policies) best serve it. And it requires that we do so according to a methodology that maximizes the reliabilitiy of information and analyses employed, and minimizes the role of prejudice (i.e., emotional predispositions). It’s time for all of us to engage in that enterprise together.
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David Harsanyi wrote in the Denver Post that the Obama Administration is running out of people to demonize(http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_16321444). This right-wing columnist insists that Democratic “demonization” of the Chamber of Commerce is reinforcing moderate perceptions that the Democratic Party has gone bonkers. Ironically (too painfully so), it is what has become the Republican mainstream that literally (rather than figuratively) demonizes Obama himself, accusing him of being foreign born, Muslim, and, yes, the the anti-Christ. As a mouthpiece for right-wing extremism, Harsanyi has turned reality completely on its head, accusing the opposition of the defects that so dramatically characterize his own ideological camp.
The Denver Post criticizes Rep. Ed Perlmutter (CO CD 7) for, among other things, supporting cap-and-trade (http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_16281757). I think that Ed is doing a great job in general, is supporting what reason and goodwill dictate that a responsible elected representative support, and has revolutionized constituent services and outreach (his “government at the grocery store” town halls have become famous). But what strikes me as incredible is the Post’s irresponsible position on cap-and-trade on the basis that it raises energy costs.
The rest of the developed world, responding to abundant and compelling evidence, recognizes the need for an affirmative global warming abatement policy (the prime contenders being cap-and-trade or a carbon tax), but has been stymied in its attempt to create a globally concerted policy to address the problem by the short-sightedness of a country that would rather keep energy prices low today than start to reduce the infinitely higher future costs that we can no longer completely avoid. We scuttled the Kyoto Protocol, and now the Denver Post wants to make sure that we make continue to stick our heads in the sand rather than even begin to address this most consequential of challenges. It’s one thing to have to fight popular misconceptions, it’s another to have them amplified by Denver’s last remaining major metropolitan newspaper. I’ve never in my life felt less respect for any newspaper anywhere in America than I feel for this one now.
Susan Greene reports on the strong-arm tactics of the Denver Archdiocese of the Catholic Church, suing a lesbian Sunday School teacher the Archdiocese had fired for brining her case to the Colorado Civil Rights Division (http://www.denverpost.com/greene/ci_16314690). Such strong-arm tactics by institutions that should be in the vanguard of nobler attitudes are all too common. I’ve experienced them at the hands of the current Jefferson County Schools administration, first for trying to bring to the district’s attention the serious problems with a principle who was the superintendent’s “dear old friend,” and more recently for trying to establish a robust school-community partnership in Jefferson County. In all such cases, it is the community’s responsibility to stand up and reject this privileging of power over purpose. I strongly encourage people to be more aware, and get more involved.
The Economist reports on the use of steganography, and a program called “Collage,” which distributes and hides messages among files posted to public websites, and allows intended recipients to reassemble them (http://www.economist.com/node/17243251). It is another example of the decentralized, and unstoppable, flow of information in the modern world, with all of the vast implications that that has. Totalitarian governments will find it increasingly difficult to control what information people have access to, and their ability to organize in opposition to the government. And more responsible governments will find it increasingly difficult to control the organization and implementation of violent extremism.
The blogosphere is a cacophony of arbitrary assertions, unreliable information, angry retorts, and assumption-laden quick commentaries. Long, thoughtful explorations of issues and aspects of our lives are resented on many sites, high volume being instantly equated with low density, and in-depth analysis conflated with unnecessary verbosity. There are reasons for this: The lack of quality control and editorial assistance involved in instantly self-published compositions leadto a lack of confidence on the part of others that investing a large amount of time is worth the effort. And the world has become a more sound-bite driven place, relying more on quick hits of factoids and headlines than insightful discussion of underlying dynamics and implications. The rapid, massive flow of information is a deluge in which no one can swim, and those who try are left grabbing fractured pieces rather than comprehensive narratives.
But lengthy composition does not imply poor quality. Those of us who still read books, read books that are hundreds of pages long, without generally complaining that the author failed to make his or her point in less than 200 words. Even the magazine articles we read are generally of a length that would be greeted with derision in the blogosphere. But those who self-publish are not necessarily writing works of inferior quality, and thoughtful essays cannot be reduced to soundbites without destroying their value entirely.
I started this blog (just over seven weeks ago, as I write) in order to create a more thoughtful haven on the internet, a place where we do something more useful than post links and quick retorts and escalating flame wars. I wanted to create a confluence of thoughts and ideas, a place where people can teach and learn from one another, where we can all lift one another up by using this technology of collective consciousness in a more deeply nourishing way.
But though a fair number of people have been stopping by on a daily basis to read my posts, very few have posted anything of their own. I can’t make this clearing house of ideas and insights and ponderings and contemplations work all on my own; I need the help of others who are also thinking about the world in which we live. Please, post your essays here, on any topic of interest to you, and send the link to this page to everyone you know who might wish to do the same. Let’s create a real confluence of thought, and imagination, and aspiration, right here, and, hopefully, gradually, flowing together with all other such efforts wherever they may be, everywhere.
I look forward to reading your thoughts about the world in which we live, and what we can do to improve the quality of our lives.
As we continue the great national debate over whether we are the kind of people who believe that worshipping mindlessly at the alter of the “small government” idol is more important than using government as intelligently as we can as one tool with which to confront the challenges and opportunities of a complex and subtle world, let’s put some meat on the bones of what, and who, we are forsaking when we fight to shrink our government. (What follows is just one, most poignant, example of the myriad ways in which our anti-government hysteria in this country is really an act of collective cruelty and callousness, and an economically irrational one at that.)
We are foresaking, among others, the millions, perhaps tens of millions, of American children who endure horrendous abuse and neglect every day. We are forsaking the little girl in North Carolina who not only suffered from bone cancer and lost a limb to it, but also was relegated to a living hell by a callous and cruel parent, and has quite probably since been murdered and disposed of by her (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101012/ap_on_re_us/us_missing_girl_north_carolina). We are forsaking “The Lost Children of Wilder,” the children depicted in the book by Nina Bernstein by that name which traced the history of one little girl and the court case in her name, illustrating how the need to buy child services on the cheap, through religious organizations, led to horrendous abuses and systemic deficiences (http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/03/25/reviews/010325.25luhrmat.html). We are forsaking the four-month old baby girl whose parents broke as many as 40 bones in her body (http://www.wral.com/news/local/story/2764548/), the eight year old boy tortured day and night for months by his parents (http://newstalkradiowhio.com/localnews/2010/08/horrendous-child-abuse-case-in.html), the teen starved for years by her parents until she looked like a concentration camp survivor (http://www.komonews.com/news/30891284.html), and millions of other children suffering like them. (In 2007, 5.8 million children were involved 3.2 million reported cases of child abuse: http://www.childhelp.org/pages/statistics. The number of reported cases vastly underrepresents the number of actual cases, since what happens behind the closed doors of the family home is rarely reported).
There are those who argue that declining to empower and fund our government to address these problems more assertively and proactively is not the same as “forsaking” these children, because there are laws against child abuse, and we prosecute those who violate them. But that is not preventative medicine, and does not make the suffering of these millions of children any more palatable, any less tragic, and, most importantly, any less preventable.
There are those who argue that it is indeed our social responsibility to try to address this problem, but that government is not the right vehicle for doing so. They refer to private charities as being the preferable system, conveniently ignoring the historical deficiency of relying on private charities to address social problems, and the role that those charities have played in implementing public policies and programs that mobilized resources the charities themselves recognized they would never be able to.
There are those who argue that addressing these issues should be left to state and local governments rather than the federal government, to which I say, fine, as long as we fund state and local governments sufficiently to address them, and empower state and local governments to do so. Unfortunately, those who make this argument tend to be the same people who passed TABOR in Colorado (and are currently floating far more extreme revenue-depriving ballot measures). The “small government” crowd may refer most often to the federal government, but, when push comes to shove, it’s all government that they oppose.
The tragic irony is that they are not only crippling our ability to assist these children so desperately in need of our assistance and intervention, but that they are imposing far more devastating fiscal and economic costs on us by doing so. Our public failure to provide effective social services to those who need them creates long-term problems whose reactive costs are far, far greater than the costs of providing effective proactive services would have been. A quote from the above-linked New York Times article about The Lost Children of Wilder reveals the consequences of failing to deal with poverty proactively:
This book makes two things clear. First, it is foolish to separate parents from children with the ease that our current system encourages. Our policies assert that it should be less comfortable to be on welfare than to work, which is sensible. They also assert that a mother who cannot feed and house her child should not raise him, which also is sensible. The consequences are not. [One particular child’s] care cost the city half a million dollars, far more than it would have cost to support his mother, and it repeatedly and traumatically severed him from an enduring human relationship, as crucial to a child’s development as food and heat.
Second, the problem is poverty. This is perhaps not a novel insight, but this history makes it sickeningly clear that the state cannot solve the problem of needy children without doing something about the conditions that produce them. There are so many children, so few resources — in this stunningly prosperous age — and, repeatedly, solutions born of crisis and good intention create disasters of their own. Children who enter the system tend to exit it as poor and unskilled as the parents who bore them, and the cycle grinds painfully on.
It’s time to stop justifying our cruel condemnation of millions of American children to the most nightmarish of existences by recourse to an ideology which, when you strip away the layers of hollow rationalization, really amount to the institutionalization of mutual indifference, and inexcusable indifference to children in need.
The concept of “liberty”, far subtler and richer than its current idolaters realize, can’t be explored in isolation from its partner, “society.” The idolatry with which the concept of liberty is now insulted, ironically, does far more to undermine it than defend or perpetuate it, because it divorces liberty from its partner, without which it cannot exist. For we have no freedom without life, without health, without opportunity, and it is only through a robust and well-functioning society that our lives and health are protected from mutual predation, and opportunity maximized through the creation of a context in which liberty is more than just “freedom from,” but is also “freedom to.”
Our Declaration of Independence refers to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (slightly modifying, in an act of historically acceptable plagiarism, John Locke’s earlier “life, liberty, and property”). There is no pursuit of happiness without health and opportunity; life is threatened and shortened by disease and destitution. There are thosewho insist that only negative, not positive, rights are guaranteed by our Constitution, “freedoms from” rather than “freedoms to.” Be that as it may, wisdom and compassion dictate something more, as does logic, for “freedom from” is intended as a means to “freedom to.” We guarantee freedoms from oppression in order to be free to pursue the goals that are available to its in its absence. “Freedom to” is always the ultimate purpose. When we have created the capacity to extend and augment it, then it is incumbent upon us to do so.
And what is it that we are free to do? To speak a language which is a product of collective genius, inherited from the many over the ages. To worship as we choose, either in discrete religions that are similarly products of our collective genius, created by the many over the ages, or in synthesis and distillations of existing religions and philosophies, which are, as well, products of our collective genius…. To think, express, believe, wonder, and act using the motifs and instruments that we have collectively produced, through media we have collectively invented and made available, to and with others, usually to some social end. Liberty is all about society.
Indeed, those liberties which don’t explicitly involve society (though they always implicitly do, in the forms of thought we utilize) require no protections, because they are invisible to others. One has always and everywhere been free to think what they please, as long as they keep it secret. It is only when it enters the public sphere, our shared universe, does liberty require protection. It is only when it involves a social act that liberty is a concept with any meaning.
Those who are advocates of social disintegration can argue, of course, that they’re not, that they only argue against “government,” which is not synonymous with “society.” They can argue that they understand that we belong to a society, and that our liberty is an expression of that fact, but that when we express the fact that we are a society with any focused intentionality, when we seek to actually act with a will as a society, when we try to empower our primary vehicle of collective decision-making, it is then that we have violated the sanctity of liberty, by infringing on it in precisely the way that our venerable forefathers so nobly opposed.
But our venerable forefathers never opposed government, per se. They opposed government that represented some and not others, that infringed upon liberties in order to extract wealth for the few at the expense of the many. Our government, whether state or federal, suffers no such defect. The franchise has never been broader, and is considerably broader than it was at the time of The American Revolution. We are more, rather than less, like the ideal our forefathers envisioned. And, while both our founding fathers and our current “patriots” share a bias in favor of the wealthy, the impulses on which our revolution was based were far more about the more equitable distribution of wealth and opportunity than about the protection of privilege, an ideal which today is expressed in efforts that our pseudo-patriots most vehemently oppose.
With that endless irony that characterizes their movement, it is often those who have the most to gain from an improved distribution of opportunity that are opposing it most angrily, in a variation of Marx’s realization that the masses are opiatedby the religion of the powerful, and seduced into a false consciousness that serves the interests of the wealthy rather than of themselves or the public as a whole. (Disclaimer: I am not a Marxist, a theory which fails both politically and analytically by failing to understand the salience of individual over group or class interests. But Marx did get some things descriptively, if not analytically or prescriptively, right, to an extent that retains at least some value).
If we admit that society is an equal partner of liberty, and that even such events as our own Revolution and the drafting of the U.S. Constitution are collective acts of a society designed to express its collective will, than we admit that there is some role to having a vehicle for such collective action as a society, one through which we can express our collective will in defense of, and perhaps even to augment, our personal liberties. We are not always fighting the King of England, nor is our own democratically elected president, signing into law legislation passed by our own democratically elected Congress, a “tyrant.” He is an expression of the will of a majority of the people, and if, after the election, a majority does not support some of the choices he and our legislators make, then that is also in accord with our blueprint for representative democracy, which was never designed to be run by incessant plebiscite, to our great good fortune.
As many have noted, our founding fathers were extremely bright individuals, certainly far brighter than those who insultingly claim their mantle today. They understood the importance of establishing a strong central government (which was the purposeof the U.S. Constitution), and the importance of creating some separation of that government from the popular whims that would dominate it if it could. Liberty is not just an expression of society in the abstract; it is dependent on government in the daily reality of life. And how vibrant, robust, extensive, and egalitarian that liberty turns out to be, depends on how noble the will we chooseto exercise via that government. Alas, those who wear the tricorn hats today are mere tasseled jesters mocking those who wore them when they were first in vogue.
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Colorado has several comparative advantages that position us to combine a commitment to the preservation of our natural endowment; a commitment to the preservation, refinement, and expansion of the pleasant lifestyle that many enjoy in our beautiful state; a commitment to contributing to the development of the New Energy Economy (an inevitable component of future global economic development); and a commitment to fostering the most robust, sustainable, and equitable state economy, and most proactive, efficient, and effective state government possible.
Our natural endowment, particularly our spectacular mountains, are an economic asset both directly, in the tourism industry, and indirectly, as an attractor for investment capital by those who want to locate small start-ups, particularly in high-value-added information-intensive economic sectors, in the most attractive locations possible (since such sectors have no geographic constraints). And, of course, many Coloradans treasure our natural beauty for its inherent, aesthetic and recreational value, considering it to be one of our greatest assets, even independently of economic considerations.
For these reasons, we need to place a very high emphasis on the preservation of this endowment, carefully regulating other industries and practices (such as mineral extraction) that pose a threat both to the environment, and to public health and safety. Fortunately, despite erroneous ideological assertions to the contrary, mineral extraction, as an economic enterprise, is not highly sensitive to regulations or severance taxes, since there is very little flexibility in where minerals can be extracted (they must be extracted where they are found). Furthermore, since extracted minerals are sold in national and international markets, the increased costs of state regulations and taxes have only a marginal effect on market prices. In other words, the benefits occur within the state while the costs are distributed all over the world. For these reasons, sound policy requires that mineral extraction be a well-regulated and taxed enterprise.
Not only is Colorado rich in minerals, but it is also rich in sun and wind and the researchers and institutions doing the most to tap the energy contained in them. The future can rarely be predicted with confidense, but one thing that is virtually certain is that clean, renewable energy technologies are a growth industry, and will be enormous economic engines in the not too distant future. Foresight pays off in the long run. Investing in the New Energy Economy today, despite the modest size of that economc sector at present, and regardless of short term ups and downs in the market for “green energy”, is sound economic policy, and a smart move for the state of Colorado.
Our natural endowment is part of our pleasant lifestyle, with hiking trails, ski runs, rocks to climb and mountain rivers to float down, and spectacular vistas to appeal to all who enjoy nature’s wonders. But the Colorado lifestyle extends into our cities and suburbs as well, with excellent cycling opportunities, beautiful pedestrian malls, open spaces, and an increasing investment in the combination of excellent public transportation and sustainable, localized, aesthetically pleasing urban development. Continuing in this direction not only provides Coloradans with the benefits of all of these public goods, but also attracts the entrepreneurial capital of precisely those kinds of small start-ups that can create the most robust state economy possible. We live in a world in which the most information-intensive industries (e.g., computer software, and cutting edge technologies) create the greatest number of high-paying jobs, and contribute the most to the local and global economy. And such start-ups in such industries locate in places that provide the combination of natural beauty, pleasant life-style, and infrastructural investment that Colorado can provide, if we pursue wise policies.
But to attract such investment capital, and the young professionals and their families that bring it, we need to provide, competitively, what they are looking for: A well-developed human and material infrastructure on which they can depend, and the assurance of the availability of excellent and affordable public and higher education institutions for their children. We are currently, disgracefully, near the bottom of the country in investment in both public and higher education, and that is a very powerful disincentive to small information-intensive start-ups to locate here. More importantly, it is a moral failure on the part of the people of Colorado. As much of a cliche as it may be, our children are indeed our future, and failing to invest in them, to provide them with the best education possible, simply because an alliance of popular economic platitudes and well-funded corporate interests have displaced economic analyses, is a choice that can end up crippling and impoverishing this state, when nature has endowed us with such soaring opportunity.
There is a clear path forward for Colorado, a coherent strategy that preserves our natural endowment, fuels our economy, and secures a high quality of life for our residents. We need now to make sure that we elect the people, and cultivate the public commitment, to realize this vision, and create a more prosperous, sustainable, and opportunity-rich future for all Coloradans.
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The three 2010 Nobel Prize Winners in Economics won on the basis of work that shows friction in labor markets which leads to increased job vacancies do not necessarily lead to decreased unemployment (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101011/ap_on_bi_ge/nobel_economics). Two things to note: 1) Their work was directly applied to a British program called “A New Deal for Young People”, getting people between 18 and 24 employed after long periods of unemployment, and 2) Obama had appointed one (Peter Diamond, a former professor of Ben Bernacke) to the Federal Reserve board, but republicans have dragged their feet on confirmation, arguing that Diamond doesn’t have enough experience for them. These two observations illustrate that: 1) the government has a vital role to play in greasing the gears of the economic engine (mostly by reducing transaction costs), and 2) the Republicans are increasingly obstinately wedded to ignorance, eschewing the implementation of good ideas and the utilization of those who have them in favor of the rabid promotion of their own blind ideological false certainties. The Republican rejection of one of the creators of the current model of how markets work is an eloquent testimony to the nature of the ideological contest we are in: Those who want to apply the best analyses to address the challenges we face, against those who want to cling to shallow platitudes that serve their own interests and the interests of those they identify with.
Nelson Mandela had given a team of archivists with the job of distilling from the plethora of notes, letters, and recorded conversations he had produced over the course of his lifetime, charging them not to consult him or protect his reputation in doing so (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101011/ap_on_en_ot/af_south_africa_mandela_book; http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/10/07/60minutes/main6936384.shtml?tag=contentMain;cbsCarousel). An amazing man thus leaves two amazing legacies, a political one, and a biographical one.
Computer algorithm driven “High Frequency Trading” now may account for as much as 70% of current trading on the New York Stock Exchange (most of which no longer occurs atthe New York Stock Exchange). These high-speed computers deploy programs that are designed to sort through and analyze virtually all quantifiable data regarding virtually all corporations trading on the NYSE, making split-second decisions to buy and sell in order to make fraction-of-a-penny gains millions of times a day. This creates a combination of benefits, problems, and dangers for the market. The primary benefit is increased liquidity: Their massive, rapid buying-and-selling function means that other traders always have a seller to buy from and a buyer to sell to.
The primary problem is market-distortion: These massive, high velocity trades, dominating the market, have nothing to do with the long-term value of the stocks, or the long-term prospects of the enterprises. Thus, they confuse the market signals being sent by flooding them with information that is only of split-second relevance. A secondary problem is the loss of transparency: No one knows, and few understand, the algorithms being utilized, and what impact they have on the fairness and functionality of trading. And yet another problem is a sort of de facto inside trading, obtaining, processing, and utilizing information before all others not engaged in high frequency trading, an advantage so sensitive to even split second differences that proximity to the server from which such information is obtained creates an advantage.
And the primary danger is that the algorithms they implement can sometimes go awry, which was exactly what happened in the case of the sudden 600 point market freefall several months ago, that shook market confidence and cost traders billions of dollars. The lesson of High Frequency Trading is that in a complex, high tech modern economy, we need to have a government regulatory structure that can keep up with it. I’ve often referred to “information asymmetries” as one of the primary reasons why the elaborate and expensive federal regulatory regime we’ve created is an absolute necessity, and, in fact, probably still too small for the task it must meet. High Frequency Trading is a perfect, almost archetypical, example of what is meant by “information asymmetries”: Those who are more centrally located to the flow and processing of relevant information have the opportunity to manipulate markets to their advantage, and to the public detriment.
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Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards
Everybody knows that we are in the midst of a slow recovery from a major economic crisis. Everyone knows that growth (or lack thereof) in employment is a source of major political and economic concern. And, believe it or not, the politicians are listening, and worrying. But that may well end up being a part of the problem.
Economic and associated political desperation lead to a contracting global economy by leading to increasing protectionism, a race to the bottom in currency devaluation (competing to make one’s own products cheaper abroad than those of other nations), and an increasing need to come up with short-term fixes at the expense of long-and-medium-term economic growth. Some would argue that ARRA was a prime example of this error; I don’t agree (in fact, one of ARRA’s greatest defects as a recovery mechanism was its degree of investment in human infrastructure, which only really pays off in the long-run). But the delusion that we live in a national rather than global economy, which persists on both the right and the left of the political spectrum, is a dangerous fantasy, and one we need to strive to avoid indulging in.
Concerns about the devaluation war are starting to rumble through that sphere of the collective consciousness which pays attention to such things (http://www.economist.com/node/17202341?story_id=17202341; http://www.economist.com/economist-asks/should_america_place_punitive_tariffs_china_if_it_continues_maintain_artificially_wea; )http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_16299595). As the first Economist article explains, it’s a strategy that has, paradoxically, boosted stock, bond, and gold markets simultaneously, but not because of the strength it imparts on our long-term economic prospects. As The Denver Post article points out, “the concern is that such efforts could trigger the trade wars that contributed to The Great Depression of the 1930s as country after country raises protectionist barriers to imported goods.”
There is perhaps no economically more volatile and dangerous combination than a suffering population demanding immediate results, and a set of policies which provide immediate results at long-term peril. This is a time when a higher degree of self-restraint and long-term responsibility is required than populist-driven democracies are wont to provide. It’s a time when both elected officials and those who elected them have to recover a stronger sense of how important leadership is in a crisis. We need elected officials who are courageous enough to piss us off in order to do the right thing, rather than give us what we want at our own long-term expense.
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Glenn Beck, still twirling his baton in the vanguard of the wing-nut parade, while busily calling all people who disagree with his, ah, “imaginative” interpretations of U.S. History and the U.S. Constitution (which includes, I would wager, somewhere north of 99.99% of all American Historians and Constitutional Law scholars) “idiots,” demonstrated for us what a non-idiot such as himself understands: That slavery was fine until the federal government stepped in to regulate it (http://www.examiner.com/political-buzz-in-national/glenn-beck-claims-slavery-was-not-really-bad-until-government-got-involved). It’s difficult to select which aspects of this absurdity to comment on, but I’ll choose one that is not completely obvious, but is most relevant to the ideology that Beck represents: Defense of the institution of slavery (and, after abolition, of systematic institutionalized discrimination) was tightly intertwined with states rights advocacy throughout the history of this nation until at least the 1960s, when the federal government, in the culmination of a national-history-spanning evolution prioritizing the protection of individual civil liberties over states’ and private rights to violate them, passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Beck got it exactly backwards: It was federal government intervention that had always both threatened to end, and eventually, against the most violent opposition yet against it, actually succeeded in ending, slavery, and ending government sponsored discrimination against African Americans. And it was this precise role of the federal government, regarding this precise topic, that always was at the heart of states’ rights advocacy, and anti-federal government fervor. Whether the Tea Party is a predominantly or implicitly racist movement today (a hotly debated topic), it is certainly heir to the anti-federal government ideology that racists depended on throughout our history to protect and perpetuate their right to institute and enforce their racism in law. Defining themselves by reference to slavery (which their ideological forebears defended and perpetuated) is just not a smart move.
Susan Greene of the Denver Post, with whom I generally agree, was, I think, slightly off mark today in her overzealous definition of how broad a range of speech is, or should be, protected by the First Amendment (http://www.denverpost.com/greene). The Supreme Court has yet to decide whether Kansas pastor Fred Phelps has the right to mar the funerals of fallen soldiers by holding demonstrations within sight of them holding placards with such endearing phrases as “Thank God for Dead Soldiers.” Without trying to decide the case on the legal merits, I will definitively state that I think it would be good public policy to outlaw such speech in such a context, nor would doing so be a clear violation of the First Amendment (the Supreme Court will decide whether it is a violation at all, by exploring the nuances of the issue).
Free Speech protections have always been limited in certain ways to protect other rights or public interests that might be violated by speech (e.g., laws against libel and inciting violence, and diminished protection of student speech in public schools). Time, place, and manner restrictions have always applied (you can’t disrupt any event or meeting in any way you please); the kind of “forum” involved, even when a government forum, affects how much freedom of speech others have. Private forums are that much more protected. Obviously, if the funeral were in an enclosed private space, Phelps would have no right whatsoever to violate that space. The lack of walls blocking the view from a cemetery is hardly a major legal distinction. Given the ways in which we have delimited freedom of speech in the past, I think that protecting mourners from the harassment of such speech at the time and place of mourning is well within the range of a reasonable exception to free speech protections.
Research suggests that people who believe in God tend to conceptualize God in one of four ways: Authoritative, Benevolent, Critical, or Distant (http://abcnews.go.com/WN/book-religion-examines-ways-americans-perceive-god/story?id=11825319). Unsurprisingly, which view of God we adhere to correlates to gender, race, socio-economic status, and educational-level, and to particular social and political orientations. The irony, of course, is that right-wingers, who claim to be the defenders of liberty, tend to believe in an authoritative God who, by divine right, sharply circumscribes what liberty we should allow ourselves and others to enjoy, whereas progressives tend to believe in a more remote God, who leaves us with the responsibility of creating our own destiny.
Freedom, once again, has less to do with how free we are from our own democratically elected government than with how free we are from our own lack of imagination (or surplus of self-shackling imagination). Freedom is not a function of crippling the primary vehicle we have developed for exercising our wills in cooperative and coordinated ways (i.e., government, at all levels, including federal), but rather a function of how able we are to imagine that we are indeed free, charged with the responsibility of wisely and compassionately confronting the challenges and opportunities that we face here on Earth.
