BrinkLindsey.com – The Age of Abundance

I wasn’t a fan of Ron Paul to begin with. And Ron Paul’s crowd didn’t think much of me, either.

I hadn’t known about his old newsletters and their cesspool of racism and homophobia.  But I didn’t need to know about them to know that I wanted nothing to do with Ron Paul’s brand of libertarianism.

Here’s why. I’m a libertarian because I’m a liberal.  In other words, I support small-government, free-market policies because I believe they provide the institutional framework best suited to advancing the liberal values of individual autonomy, tolerance, and open-mindedness. Liberalism is my bottom line; libertarianism is a means to promoting that end.

Ron Paul, by contrast, is no liberal. Just look at his xenophobia, his sovereignty-obsessed nationalism, his fondness for conspiracy theories, his religious fundamentalism — here is someone with a crudely authoritarian worldview. The snarling bigotry of his newsletters is just the underside of this rotten log. 

In the twentieth century, alas, American liberalism was heavily influenced by the socialist dream of supplanting markets with central planning and top-down control. That confusion begat confusion in response — namely, an antistatist movement heavily influenced by authoritarian resentment of liberal cultural values. Paul’s illiberal libertarianism is a particularly unattractive variant of this kind of “fusionism.”

With the collapse of socialism, however, American liberals have begun rediscovering the value of market competition. By my lights, many of them still have a long, long way to go. But encouraging that process – making the case that economic liberalization is of a piece with overall social liberalization — is the only way forward for those of us concerned about overweening state power. In this project, people whose values and habits of mind are deeply hostile to liberal modernity are not our allies.

I read in Robert Novak’s column this morning that Mike Huckabee held a fundraiser earlier this week at the Houston home of Dr. Steven Hotze. As Novak notes, Hotze is “a leader in the highly conservative Christian Reconstruction movement.”

Christian Reconstructionists, for those unfamiliar with the term, are Religious Right radicals who believe that America, and the rest of the world besides, should be governed in accordance with strict Biblical law. And yes, that includes stoning adulterers. Here’s a snippet from “A Manifesto for the Christian Church,” a 1986 document from an outfit called the Coalition on Revival that was signed by, among others, Steven Hotze:

We affirm that the Bible is not only God’s statements to us regarding religion, salvation, eternity, and righteousness, but also the final measurement and depository of certain fundamental facts of reality and basic principles that God wants all mankind to know in the sphere of law, government, economics, business, education, arts and communication, medicine, psychology, and science. All theories and practices of these spheres of life are only true, right, and realistic to the degree that they agree with the Bible.

For more, check out this audio clip of Hotze from back in 1990. Over the years, Hotze has achieved some prominence for his anti-abortion and anti-gay activism. Also, the good doctor appears to be a total quack.

Meanwhile, Novak reports that among the members of the fundraiser’s host committee was Baptist minister Rick Scarborough. The founder of Vision America and a self-described “Christocrat,” Scarborough made news earlier this year when he argued that the HPV vaccine improperly interferes with God’s punishment of sexual license.

Just when you thought the Huckabee campaign couldn’t get any creepier….

UPDATE: Commenters wonder if I’m just kidding about Reconstructionists’ support for stoning adulterers. I’m not.

In a recent appearance on bloggingheads.tv with Mark Schmitt, I expressed disdain for the current spate of conservative-bashing books by Jonathan Chait, Greg Anrig, and Paul Krugman. Now don’t get me wrong: conservativism deserves some fairly spirited bashing these days. But what I objected to about these books was their crude partisanship — specifically, their grossly distorted, black-hats-versus-white-hats version of recent American political history.

I didn’t get a chance there to flesh out my criticisms in any detail, so I’d like to do a little bit of that here. And thanks again to bloggingheads.tv (if you’re not familiar with it, it’s really a terrific site), I’ve got an excellent jumping-off point: an interview of Paul Krugman by none other than Mario Cuomo. Cuomo, it turns out, is an excellent interviewer, carefully drawing out Krugman’s views and gently challenging him at a number of points. And the picture of Krugman that emerges is one of a man completely besotted with ideological enthusiasm.

You have to remember who Paul Krugman is, or at least who he was: an immensely talented economist, winner of the John Bates Clark medal, capable of analytical ingenuity at the most rarefied level and simultaneously a gifted popularizer of complex economic ideas. So how can someone with so much brainpower, with such talent for subtlety and insight, say something like this? Or this?

Let’s focus on these two snippets. In the first, Krugman says that the middle-class society he grew up in (i.e., the American political economy of the quarter-century after World War II) did not evolve by the invisible hand of the market; it was created by FDR and the New Deal. Meanwhile, the “second Gilded Age” we now live in (i.e., the American political economy of the past quarter-century) was created by Reagan and other right-wing politicians.

And in the second clip, Krugman defines liberalism as the idea that we are our brothers’ keepers, and that government needs to ensure a basic minimum for all citizens. Conservatives, on the other hand, believe “you’re on your own.”

In these clips we see, not subtlety or insight or analytical ingenuity, but the Manichean worldview of the true believer: one mass political movement, defined by its noble intentions, accomplishes unalloyed good, while a rival mass political movement, motivated by base and selfish values, works to undo that good.

For an alternative to Krugman’s stick-figure morality play, you can read my book on the coming of mass prosperity and its cultural and political consequences. For present purposes, though, note just a few things that Krugman’s FDR worship/Reagan demonization skips over:

• the extent to which widespread prosperity was the result of impersonal market competition rather than benevolent politicians
• the extent to which the “great compression” of the early postwar decades was created by the cataclysms of depression and total war
• the extent to which the New Deal included policies that most economists today of whatever ideological persuasion would regard as utterly wrongheaded (e.g., the farm subsidies regime of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, and the industrial cartelization attempted by the National Industrial Recovery Act)
• the heavy reliance of the New Deal political coalition on support from southern segregationists, and the consequences of that reliance for the shape of many New Deal policies
• the fact that the postwar system of political economy led after a couple of decades to stagflation and a breakdown in productivity growth
• the fact that one after another unionized American industry proved incapable of keeping pace with foreign competition during the ’70s and ’80s, and thus that business as usual was unsustainable
• the fact that Great Society social programs were followed, not entirely coincidentally, by an explosion of crime, urban riots, family breakdown, and welfare dependency
• the fact that Cold War liberal internationalism produced the Vietnam debacle
• the fact that the New Left and the ’60s counterculture exerted powerful influences on reshaping the character of American liberalism, with important consequences for the appeal of that liberalism to traditionally Democratic working-class constituencies
• the fact that the sweeping economic deregulation of the ’70s and ’80s enjoyed bipartisan support (much of it occurred during the Carter administration)
• the extent to which the increase in measured income inequality reflects demographic rather than economic or public policy changes (e.g., more single-parent households, more dual-earner households, more immigration, older population, better-educated population)
• the fact that, according to virtually every conceivable physical indicator, material living standards for Americans across the board have risen dramatically over the past quarter-century (i.e., the so-called “second Gilded Age”)

How can someone as intelligent and informed as Krugman concoct an interpretation of the post-World War II era that does such violence to the facts? How can someone so familiar with the intricate complexities of social processes convince himself that history is a simple matter of good guys versus bad guys? Because, for whatever reason, he has swapped disinterested analysis and scholarship for ideological partisanship. Here, in a revealing choice of phrase, he paraphrases Barry Goldwater’s notorious line: “Partisanship in the defense of liberty is no vice.”

To be a partisan is, by definition, to see the world partially rather than objectively: to identify wholeheartedly with the perspectives of one particular group and, at the extreme, to discount all rival perspectives as symptoms of intellectual or moral corruption. And the perspective Krugman has chosen to identify with is the philosophically incoherent, historically contingent grab bag of intellectual, interest group, and regional perspectives known as postwar American liberalism.

Of course, over the period that Krugman is addressing, the contents of that grab bag have changed fairly dramatically: from internationalist hawkishness in World War II and the early Cold War to a profound discomfort with American power in the ’70s and ’80s to a jumble of rival views today; from cynical acquiescence in Jim Crow to heroic embrace of the civil rights movement to the excesses of identity group politics to a more centrist line today; from sympathy for working-class economic hardship to hostility to working-class culture and back again. Yet with a naive zeal that leaves even Cuomo visibly nonplussed at several points in the interview, Krugman embraces the shifting contents of this grab bag as the one true path of virtue.

I understand the us-versus-them pleasures of ideological partisanship. In my younger days, I indulged in them with gusto. But at some point, ideology joined Santa Claus and the tooth fairy in my attic of discarded beliefs. Firm values, yes; definite points of view on contested empirical questions, to be sure — but to see a country as diverse, yet blessedly prosperous and stable, as this one as an ongoing war between angels and devils is to live in a fantasy world.

… and Harold Meyerson is not pleased! 

In his Washington Post column today, Meyerson bemoans the sinister influence of “Wall Street Democrats”:

The younger masters of the universe who work on Wall Street like as not are liberal on cultural issues and appalled at Republican foreign policy, though they’re no fans of regulating capitalism. They give big-time to such Democrats as Barack Obama (who supported legislation moving class-action lawsuits from state to federal courts, a bill intended to reduce the size of jury awards in such lawsuits) and Chuck Schumer (who has opposed a fairer tax rate for hedge fund operators)….

The problem is that the drift of much of Wall Street toward the Democrats on noneconomic issues coincides with Wall Street’s creation of inscrutable and unregulated investment devices that imperil the entire economy, as the current mortgage crisis makes painfully clear. On gay rights, say, the nouveau financiers are 21st-century progressives; on economic oversight, they are 1920s speculators, determined to keep their machinations free from public oversight.

Last year, in a piece called “Liberaltarians,” I wrote that conservatism’s crackup had created the possibility that libertarian-leaning “economically conservative, socially liberal” types might shift their loyalties to the Democratic Party. I was urging liberals to meet them halfway, and that certainly hasn’t happened yet. But maybe it doesn’t matter.

After all, if small-government voters come to think of themselves as Democrats because of social and foreign policy issues, sooner or later they’ll try to make their influence felt on economic matters as well. Will they be able to make a discernible impact on the Democratic Party’s longstanding love affair with Big Government?  Who knows, but the very idea is giving Harold Meyerson heartburn — and, surely, that’s an encouraging sign.

Naomi Klein, darling of the loonie left, has a new book out called The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. The basic idea is that the insidious forces of neoliberalism take advantage of wars, economic crises, and natural disasters to impose their evil schemes on disoriented and distracted publics. The career of Milton Friedman, the occupation of Iraq, and the bungled response to Katrina are all supposedly cases in point.

Klein is not a serious person, and in this book she does not mount a serious argument. But she does raise an interesting issue: the political implications of crises. It is certainly true that the waves of liberal reform (political as well as economic) that swept the world in the ’80s and ’90s were often triggered by economic crises. Indeed, I wrote a book on the subject in which I interpreted the current episode of globalization as a response to the often cataclysmic breakdown of various state-dominated models of economic development.

There’s nothing terribly surprising about this. Inertia is a powerful force in politics: every status quo has vested interests that benefit from it, while advocates of change push in all different directions and frequently cancel each other out. A crisis, though, can discredit the status quo and demoralize its supporters, while galvanizing particular pro-reform camps and boosting their credibility. Politics suddenly becomes more fluid; rapid and sweeping changes that had no chance of being enacted beforehand now occur in rapid succession.

But it’s ridiculous to portray this dynamic as somehow uniquely favoring one side of the political spectrum. Recall the great triumphs historically associated with the left: the French Revolution was made possible by the financial distress of the ancien regime; the Paris Commune was founded after defeat at the hands of the Prussians; the Russian Revolution was catalyzed by military failures in World War I.

In our own country, it was a one-two punch of cataclysms – the Great Depression, followed by World War II — that brought Big Government to the United States and then consolidated its hold. The unprecedented economic collapse made traditional American attitudes of laissez faire and individual responsibility seem hopelessly outdated; by contrast, the frenetic activity of the New Deal, regardless of the decidedly mixed results, projected boldness and vigor and hope. The subsequent mass mobilization for total war reinforced the shift in political culture. If you watched any of the wonderful new Ken Burns documentary on “The War,” you saw that the “home front” wasn’t just an expression: the diversion of the country’s industrial might to war production, price controls and rationing, extremely high tax rates, war bond drives, and incessant propaganda combined to thoroughly collectivize American society. And it worked: the economy boomed, people reaped the psychological satisfactions of banding together against a common and abominably evil enemy, and in the end America triumphed.

Today people on the left are filled with nostalgia for the political economy of the early postwar decades. I don’t think many of them recognize, though, how heavily their Golden Age depended on the lingering economic and cultural effects of destruction on a mind-boggling scale. They call themselves progressives, yet they pine for the good old days of disaster collectivism.

This eerie video clip of a 1994 interview with Dick Cheney has been making the rounds in recent days:

In it, Cheney defends the Bush 41 administration’s decision not to proceed to Baghdad after expelling the Iraqi army from Kuwait. His description of the downsides of occupation now sounds downright prophetic.

Seeing this clip reminded me of a personal experience along similar lines. Back in 1998, when I was running Cato’s then-new Center for Trade Policy Studies, we held a conference on unilateral economic sanctions called “Collateral Damage: The Economic Cost of U.S. Foreign Policy.” And our luncheon speaker at that event was none other than Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney.

Looking back at the transcript of his talk, you can see that it’s not just Cheney’s views of the wisdom of occupying Iraq that have undergone an amazing transformation. So has his attitude about engaging versus confronting Iran:

[O]ur sanctions policy oftentimes generates unanticipated consequences. It puts us in a position where a part of our government is pursuing objectives that are at odds with other objectives that the United States has with respect to a particular region.

An example that comes immediately to mind has to do with efforts to develop the resources of the former Soviet Union in the Caspian Sea area. It is a region rich in oil and gas. Unfortunately, Iran is sitting right in the middle of the area and the United States has declared unilateral economic sanctions against that country. As a result, American firms are prohibited from dealing with Iran and find themselves cut out of the action, both in terms of opportunities that develop with respect to Iran itself, and also with respect to our ability to gain access to Caspian resources. Iran is not punished by this decision. There are numerous oil and gas development companies from other countries that are now aggressively pursuing opportunities to develop those resources. That development will proceed, but it will happen without American participation. The most striking result of the government’s use of unilateral sanctions in the region is that only American companies are prohibited from operating there.

Another good example of how our sanctions policy oftentimes gets in the way of our other interests occurred in the fall of 1997 when Saddam Hussein was resisting U.N. weapons inspections. I happened to be in the Gulf region during that period of time. Administration officials in the area were trying to get Arab members of the coalition that executed operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm in 1991 to allow U.S. military forces to be based on their territory. They wanted that capability in the event it was necessary to take military action against Iraq in order to get them to honor the UN resolutions. Our friends in the region cited a number of reasons for not complying with our request. They were concerned with the fragile nature of the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, which was stalled. But they also had fundamental concerns about our policy toward Iran. We had been trying to force the governments in the region to adhere to an anti-Iranian policy, and our views raised questions in their mind about the wisdom of U.S. leadership. They cited it as an example of something they thought was unwise, and that they should not do.

So, what effect does this have on our standing in the region? I take note of the fact that all of the Arab countries we approached, with the single exception of Kuwait, rejected our request to base forces on their soil in the event military action was required against Iraq. As if that weren’t enough, most of them boycotted the economic conference that the United States supported in connection with the peace process that was hosted in Qatar during that period of time. Then, having rejected participation in that conference, they all went to Tehran and attended the Islamic summit hosted by the Iranians. The nation that’s isolated in terms of our sanctions policy in that part of the globe is not Iran. It is the United States. And the fact that we have tried to pressure governments in the region to adopt a sanctions policy that they clearly are not interested in pursuing has raised doubts in the minds of many of our friends about the overall wisdom and judgment of U.S. policy in the area.

Note again that Cheney gave these remarks in 1998 – when Iran’s nuclear ambitions were already well known, and two years after the Khobar Towers bombing in which Iran was believed to be complicit.

9/11 may not have changed everything, but it sure changed Dick Cheney.

In my book and elsewhere (see, for example, here and here), I’ve argued that American society has shifted in a decidedly libertarian direction — i.e., left on culture and right on economics — over the past generation, and that American political culture reflects this shift. Regarding economics at least, Ezra seems to agree:

America’s political consensus is almost absurdly to the right. But because people still need to run to the left of each other, the rhetoric on offer frequently sounds like the rhetoric of the left, even as its actual prescriptions are decidedly within the mainstream of our fairly conservative consensus on economics. And vice versa in other countries, where rhetoric of the right can refer to almost comically leftist policies. where the center is much further left — and in other countries, the precise opposite happens.

Ezra makes this point in an effort to counter charges that John Edwards is a dangerous left-wing populist. Fair enough — I agree that Edwards’ policy views would fall on the right side of the center line in many European countries. But since he’s running for office in the United States, I don’t see how that matters much.

Rather, I think Ezra’s point means we shouldn’t make too much of the current popularity of left-wing populist rhetoric. After all the globalization and “new economy” hype of the ’90s, we were bound to experience a swing in the political and rhetorical pendulum; meanwhile, the Bush administration and its failures have given the leftward swing additional momentum.

But when we get past rhetoric and electioneering and move to actual policymaking, we’re still in a very libertarian political culture by world standards. So progressives who imagine we’re on the verge of a big lurch toward social democracy are setting themselves up for a major disappointment.

In her Wall Street Journal column today, Kimberly Strassel reports on opposition within the congressional Democratic ranks to various “soak the rich” tax hikes. Here’s an excerpt:

Class warrior Sander Levin from Michigan introduced House legislation levying higher taxes on hedge fund and private equity managers’ earnings back in June. It took until the end of July for Senate Democrats to start publicly trouncing the idea. Washington’s Maria Cantwell worried the tax would hurt returns for her state’s public pension fund, which makes a pretty penny off the back of private equity funds. Others fretted it would drive their private equity companies offshore. As for the almighty Chuck Schumer, patron senator of Wall Street, he declared his opposition to any tax that wasn’t also levied on non-finance industries. And since Mr. Schumer is the one doling out money for next year’s Senate re-election races, that may well be the end of that tax idea….

Madame Speaker, meanwhile, spent what was by all accounts an unfriendly hour last week trying to coax Democrats from oil-patch states to sign on to her oil-company tax hike. As of yesterday, she hadn’t had much luck; Texas’s Gene Green and about two dozen other oil-state dissidents were holding firm against the $16 billion tax package leveled directly at their home-state economies. It was unclear whether Ms. Pelosi could even risk bringing her vaunted energy legislation for a vote before August recess. Chief tax writer Charlie Rangel has faced so much in-party blowback to his idea of heavily taxing “the rich” in order to finance an alternative minimum tax fix, he has yet to introduce legislation.

It’s too early to know how any of this will turn out, but these little flareups of tax resistance illustrate the political constraints that serve so often to keep economic populism in check.

Economic populism — bash the rich, bash corporations, and bash foreigners — cashes in on economic anxiety, and consequently it usually resonates with a goodly chunk of the electorate. For a variety of reasons, it’s resonating especially well these days.

But here’s the catch: populism works much better as diagnosis than prescription. Rail against obscenely paid CEOs and hedge fund managers, greedy oil and pharmaceutical companies, and dastardly job-stealing Chinese imports, and you’re sure to convince certain constituencies that you’ve correctly identified the problem. No suprise there — people are feeling pain or feeling worried, and you’re offering up a primal scream on their behalf.

But now comes the hard part. Now that you’ve tapped into economic anxiety for political gain, what are you going to do to alleviate it?  If your answer is tax increases or protectionist policies or other measures that throw sand in the economic gears, good luck — because those proposals, if enacted, will end up increasing the number of people suffering from economic anxiety.

Because of this dynamic, the politically optimal solution is often some version of bait and switch: stir up political support with market-bashing demagoguery, then avoid a huge backlash by sticking to small-bore or symbolic policy changes. Consequently, populism’s bark usually ends up being much worse than its bite.

The great outsourcing scare of 2004 was a case in point. It was a political season, and the “jobless recovery” made playing to employment anxieties a political winner. John Kerry dutifully cashed in with a populist diagnosis of “Benedict Arnold CEOs”; his prescription, though, was penny-ante tinkering with the tax code. Yawn…. Before too long, job creation recovered, the election season ended, and concern over outsourcing was relegated to the back burner.

I’m not saying we should be complacent in the face of market-hostile political sentiment. Rather, I’m saying that supporters of pro-growth policies shouldn’t get demoralized by the current wave of economic populism. Yes, we’re forced to play defense for the time being, but being temporarily on the defensive and actually losing are two different things.

Ezra Klein, commenting on my recent WSJ piece about the cultural roots of economic inequality, criticizes my call for increased competition in schooling as “an astonishingly narrow and inadequate solution.” I agree!

The point of my op-ed was to identify a problem: the culture of economic underperformance. I did feel obliged to say something about what ought to be done, but I didn’t offer much. First, I said upfront that there’s no silver bullet. Then I said:

But the public institutions most directly responsible for human capital formation are the nation’s schools, and it seems beyond serious dispute that in many cases they are failing to discharge their responsibilities adequately. Those interested in reducing meaningful economic inequality would thus be well advised to focus on education reform. And forget about adding new layers of bureaucracy and top-down controls. Real improvements will come from challenging the moribund state-school monopoly with greater competition.

I stand by all that, unsurprisingly, but I’ll readily concede that even the best possible (by my lights) educational reform would have only a modest impact.

Ezra writes that “all evidence suggests [school reform] will be far less effective than more serious interventions like universal preschool.” And I think that, in theory at least, Ezra has a valid point: if you’re trying to counteract the effects of a dysfunctional or at least maladapted culture in the home, you’ll have much more leverage if you reach kids in the first years of life.

It’s the dicey little trip from theory to practice that I have problems with. To put the matter plainly: how can anyone seriously believe that the people who brought us the D.C. public schools are going to do better if we give them preschools as well?

Meanwhile, Ezra is too quick to write off K-12 as irrelevant. After all, the public schools have long been touted as the centerpiece of government efforts to provide something like equality of opportunity — i.e., to offer some compensation for the kids who didn’t win the parent lottery. If, in fact, schools don’t matter, why do we spend so much tax money paying for them? If, on the other hand, government support for K-12 does do something to mitigate the inequality in investment in childrens’ human capital, shouldn’t we ensure that the public investment being made is as effective as possible?

Today is the 38th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The space program was the great enthusiasm of my boyhood, and it was watching the events of July 20, 1969 that awakened that enthusiasm. Back then the meaning of the first moon landing seemed obvious: it was an early victory in humanity’s conquest of space. Perhaps that conquest will eventually resume, and Apollo’s promise will be redeemed.

Now, however, the meaning of Apollo looks different: from our current vantage point, it looks like the high water mark of technocracy. Over the course of the twentieth century, the dream of space travel waxed together with the dream of central planning and social engineering. An early visionary of the final frontier was the Fabian socialist H. G. Wells; another was the Russian rocket pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who ended his life as a committed communist. Rocketry advanced first under the Nazis, then under the Soviets. Krushchev pushed forward after Sputnik with an ambitious space program in the belief that the Space Age would herald the transition to true communism. Which, in turn, provoked a response from the New Frontier/Great Society technocracy of the “best and brightest,” culminating in the landing at Tranquility Base.

By the time of Apollo’s triumph, however, the tide had already turned. Krushchev had been ousted five years earlier, his fantasies of the communist millennium replaced by Brezhnev’s disillusioned corruption. The New Frontier had ended in horror; the Great Society, in tragic failure. A few weeks after Apollo 11, the counterculture’s rebellion against technocracy peaked at Woodstock.

As Cold War rivalry cooled and the technocratic vision lost its hold on the imagination, the Space Age fizzled. The gleaming future gave way to rust and ruin, as evidenced in the photo at the top of this post. The picture is of Launch Pad 34 at the Kennedy Space Center, site of the Apollo 1 fire and the launch of the first successful Apollo mission, Apollo 7. The picture was taken 10 years ago, on the 30th anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire.

But the dream of space has survived the demise of its technocratic host. A new era of private spaceflight may now be starting, funded primarily by fortunes created by the Internet revolution. And what a wonderful twist that is. Spaceflight’s founding era rose and fell with the vision of technology as an instrument of top-down control. How wonderful if its rebirth can be midwifed by the vision of technology as an instrument of personal liberation.

Here is a video clip of the moon landing: