Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Politics

  • Rachel Maddow Identifies the Religious Right

    I was watching Rachel Maddow last night and she commented on the “rejection of religious right” candidates during the last election and gave examples: Alan Keyes and Mike Huckabee.

    Now there are a couple of problems with this, some of which could be identified by right wing opponents of Mike Huckabee who don’t think he’s far enough right. This ignores great differences in temperament, considering that Alan Keyes has been involved in trying to challenge President Obama’s eligibility for the office, while Huckabee, well, hasn’t. That’s a substantial difference in my book.

    Now I’m sure my right wing friends are right with me thus far, though they may think I should skip watching Rachel Maddow. They’ll generally agree that the left tends to group quite a variety of people under the term “religious right” until the term tends to become meaningless. For example, many people from left of center regard George W. Bush as part of the religious right. Just down the road from me is Crossroads Baptist Church, home of Chuck Baldwin, who thinks Bush is left wing.

    But this is not really a problem of left, right, or any other specific position. It’s a problem of distinction that we all tend to have when someone’s positions are far from our own. It’s easier in this day and age of sound bites and short messages to group people quite broadly.

    But it happens in the other direction as well. I’d particularly like to look at the words “socialist” and “socialism.” As used in the campaign, they got pretty amusing. John McCain and Barack Obama were proposing tax plans that were only marginally different, and that were both redistributive in nature. Our tax system is thoroughly tied up with redistribution and even when we do tax cuts they often end up like spending because of the way we do them. Now “from each according to his ability; to each according to his need” is certainly an element of socialism. But the difference between Obama and McCain on taxation was not between socialism and capitalism; it was between different mixes of the two.

    So why not call all socialists, well, socialists? In my view, because it devalues the term. If “religious right” applies to everyone who is both religious and right of center, then I’m probably a member of the religious right, even if only by a small margin. Yet there’s a large amount of real estate between my position and Huckabee’s, and in turn between Huckabee’s and Keyes’. Similarly, you will note attacks on President Obama’s policies from both left and right. That’s because there’s a substantial difference between his positions and many of those held by various liberal and progressive groups.

    When a politician wants to make a point, he or she will try to generalize a label and place someone in as unfavorable a light as quickly as possible. If I were running in an election against an opponent to my left, I might well be labeled part of the “religious right.” In that way my opponent could reap the votes of those who are frightened by Alan Keyes. It would be politically expedient under current circumstances, but not accurate. (Of course, there are many reasons, much better ones, not to vote me into office, and you won’t see me as a candidate, not even if hell freezes over.)

    The only solution I see is for us to demand better as citizens and take the time, at a minimum, to look at a list of issues and see with some precision where a candidate stands. And while I am reconciled to the fact that politicians will try to oversimplify an opponent’s position in order to gain advantage, I’m less pleased with commentators who do so. I’m not a fan of media neutrality; I am a fan of media depth.

    On those rare occasions when I can find it, that is.

  • Free Speech Means Freedom NOT to Speak

    There’s been a great deal of discussion amongst conservatives about the potential revival of the fairness doctrine, and some action on the left in hope of actually reviving it.

    I regard the fairness doctrine as a thoroughly reprehensible idea. I did not support it while it was still in existence and I hope it doesn’t make a comeback.

    At the same time, and for the same reasons, I think that radio stations should be free not to air this program, which many find offensive. Now the AFA is complaining about how they’re being suppressed. But freedom to speak doesn’t mean that others have to support your particular speech. That was the error of the fairness doctrine–that freedom to speak means somebody else must pay to disseminate your speech.

    In this case, TV stations are rejecting the program because it annoys their customers. Whether you agree with their decision on this particular decision or not, if you believe in freedom of speech, I think you should agree that it is their choice.

    If I write a book and somebody else doesn’t want to publish it, that’s their choice. I don’t have a “right” to a publisher. As a publisher myself, I don’t have a duty to publish things I regard as inappropriate, no matter how wrongheaded my definition of “inappropriate” might be.

    Of course this can go on and on. Indeed the AFA does have the right to complain about those who don’t show their program, as I have the right to complain about their complaint. That’s freedom, folks!

  • Commending Chuck Grassley

    … for his response to Larry Flynt.

  • What I Want in a Stimulus Package

    It is interesting to see what is regarded as spending for stimulus, and how this is debated. I’m afraid I don’t give the Democrats too many points for putting it together, and the Republicans really haven’t done all that much about tearing it apart. Since I’ve complained about it a bit, I thought I’d give some thoughts on what I think would work, so that people could complain about what I propose. And of course, I must provide apologies for writing so far out of my own field of study again.

    While I know that when the word “billion” is involved, it’s a great deal of money, minor increments in the total spending packages, such as were negotiated for the Senate version, are not going to make that large of a difference. On the other hand, tax cuts aren’t all that helpful a suggestion as part of a stimulus package either, though they might well have their place in another policy.

    When you’re working entirely in deficit range, even tax cuts work very much like spending, only somewhat worse. The government decides where to distribute the tax cuts, just as it decides where to spend the money, and it often doesn’t do nearly as good a job with the cuts as it does with the spending.

    OK, am I a raving lunatic? Perhaps, but I don’t think this is evidence of that. The problem is that the tax cuts are not essentially returning money to people who earned it. Because of the shape of the tax code, they are redistributive, and thus they are similar to targeted spending, only spending targeted at people who will not necessarily be all that good at creating new wealth. It’s the folks who created wealth that we took the money from in the first place.

    There will be an improvement in production based on tax reductions, but that isn’t infinite, else a 0% tax would produce the most revenue. In practical terms a 0% tax won’t even produce the greatest economic activity, because we do need infrastructure and regulation. Tax cuts targeted at businesses, at least if those businesses are potentially productive, are an improvement on this, of course.

    The first thing both opponents are proponents of the bill need to decide is whether spending money we don’t have is a good way to stimulate the economy, and whether we can handle the potential inflationary pressure after we do it. If we start a half a trillion dollar deficit, and add another trillion to it (and this is ignoring the financial system bailout), something is going to happen. If we bring the economy out of recession a few months quicker, and add a few years of inflation and assorted associated problems, we may not consider it an overall win.

    There are a number of voices in the media who are claiming that there is no question that we must spend to stop the recession. Rachel Maddow called it Economics 101. But it is not that well established, and bluntly looking at the last few decades I’m not all that inclined to trust the collective wisdom of economists. But there are quite a number of would disagree at this point. The loud claims that stimulus is “obvious” and “Economics 101” ignore a pretty strong body of contrary evidence.

    It’s on this point where I would respect those Republicans who take a straightforward, “this isn’t the right idea at all” approach. Of course, there’s no negotiation there. The gulf between stimulate and don’t stimulate is a bit big to bridge! But at least it’s a position with integrity.

    I’m personally inclined, nonetheless, to support the idea of spending to stimulate the economy. But contrary to what seems to be popular opinion, I think it very much does matter what we spend the money on. In terms of stimulus, the a business does not provide a very good analogy to the national economy. I cannot, after all, borrow large amounts of money, pass it around, and expect it to stimulate my single business. That is a course of action open to government, but not to me.

    But I can borrow money for a business, and as any businessman knows, it’s very important what I do with it. If I’m borrowing to make payroll, I better be very concerned and have good reason to expect the situation to change for the better, and soon! If I’m borrowing to add a new plant and increase productivity, that’s likely a good bet, presuming there’s demand.

    So if I were going through this bill and looking at what I think is a good idea and what is not, I would actually largely ditch those tax cuts. In a considering the entire bill lives inside the deficit, I think they’re going to have less effect than is hoped. On the remaining spending, I’d ask for one of two things: 1) Is this an improvement in our nation’s infrastructure that is going to produce new economic activity, or 2) Is this something that will have such a substantial effect on the nation’s mood that it will tend to stimulate individual activity. Under the first category, one should ask whether government is either the only agency, or the best agency, to carry out that particular activity.

    As it is, much of the spending in the bill looks good to me, though some of the government spending seems to me to fail the test of whether government can do it best. In the second category, I think some support for unemployment insurance is a beneficial psychological stimulus.

    As examples of the first category, I think that both improvements in the energy efficiency of government buildings and investment in basic scientific research are good things.

    In the first case, I think the government obviously must invest in its buildings, and given an economic downturn, investing in them now is a good idea. This is borrowing that will produce savings in the future as well as build future jobs in the technologies and techniques involved. The buildings appear to me to be winners all around. Ironically, or perhaps as one would expect, such spending was cut. It strikes me that some Republicans regard any spending that involves the ecology to be some kind of green pipe dream and knee-jerk oppose it. To be fair, I must admit that for some Democrats, if the word “green” is in there, their support is assured.

    While I believe basic scientific research is a good thing, I am not convinced that government consistently spends such money well. I would prefer that the government take on tasks that it needs to see performed, such as improvements in government buildings, or in transportation, or in information technology, spend money in those areas, and in turn expect that spending to stimulate private investment in developing those technologies.

    If tax cuts were so structured as to stimulate this same type of activity that would improve our productivity in the future, then those might also be valuable. As a general way of getting money back into the economy, I don’t think they will be very productive at this point.

    The problem down the road, of course, is to get government to back off of deficit spending once the corner has been turned, always assuming that we do turn the corner using these methods. In the past, that has always proven a problem.

  • Bipartisan Dialog is Messy

    As readers of this blog already know I have mixed feelings about the current stimulus bill, but I think most of the discussion on the progress of the bill is measured against a wrong standard.

    Despite complaints to the contrary, President Obama has taken a bipartisan approach to formulating this bill. There are Republican ideas in the resulting bill–some of which are things I don’t like. Whether or not he has gotten Republican support does not determine whether he has listened to Republican voices.

    The problem is that people are expecting a smooth path to passage such as might be produced by a well-oiled political machine. But a process of dialog is never that tidy.

    I don’t know how the White House is measuring this. But I don’t think they should be embarrassed by a messy process. If they continue to listen, they may find that eventually there are places where, contrary to the public rhetoric, barriers have been broken. I believe a little annoyance is a small price to pay in the long run.

  • When Strategies Change Hands

    I was just watching Chris Matthews on Hardball who is quite upset about the 60% requirement for a Senate cloture vote because it prevents an up-and-down vote on the stimulus package.

    I seem to recall Democratic outrage at the “nuclear option” which would have removed that requirement for certain types of votes on judicial nominations.

    It seems that when the tool is in the hand of the other party it is no longer an important protection for freedom; now it’s obstructionism. Of course this rhetoric is no surprise from Chris Matthews but he’s not alone.

    And in case we might think this is only done by one party, we have Republicans now who are upset at scare tactics in pushing economic stimulus, yet they have been quite free in using scare tactics in support of unnecessary methods such as indefinite incarceration without any charge and the use of torture. Dick Cheney has just reminded us of this with some irresponsible rhetoric–again, something not unexpected from Dick Cheney.

    Oh well, as Bernard in Yes, Prime Minister would say, it’s an irregular verb: I strategize brilliantly, you sneak a bit, the other guy lies damnably.

  • Setting the Proper Priority for Tolerance as a Value

    Every so often I have a conversation with someone who knows I value tolerance that goes something like this:

    Q: So you believe in tolerance?
    Me: (Heroically resisting the urge to tear apart the phrase “believe in x”) Yes, I value tolerance.
    Q: But then you have to tolerate intolerant people.
    Me: No, actually I don’t.
    Q: But then you’re not really tolerant, because you don’t tolerate intolerant people.
    Me: (Resisting pointing out the difference between not being logically required to do something, and actually not doing it.) ….

    That one is easy to answer, simply because I don’t “believe in” tolerance as a type of absolute, but rather I value tolerance. One must, in addition, define tolerance, because many people seem to define tolerance as “believing everybody is equally correct” rather than something like “favoring freedom for people to hold ideas I regard as incorrect and take actions I think are stupid.” I mean something more like the latter. I value a broad range of tolerance. My value of tolerance, does not trump my value of private property, however, so I don’t favor toleration for stealing. It doesn’t trump my valuing of human life, so I don’t wish to tolerate murder.

    All that is pretty clear, I think. I think it’s good to find limits to tolerance in our values, i.e. to find out where tolerance stands in our scale of values, and to make sure that it is placed in the proper order. Personally, on the question of tolerating intolerance, while I do not feel logically impelled to tolerate intolerance, since I could treat it like murder, I do try to tolerate intolerant expression. I’m thus strongly opposed to government hate speech restrictions (private organizations can do as they wish), and I question a great deal of hate crimes legislation. Thus my tolerance protects certain people who are intolerant, but not others, depending on their actions.

    But there is another set of limits to our tolerance, ones that we may not even be aware of. I’m going to start by looking in church, and then take a look at Washington, D.C. In the United Methodist Church, I have found some very interesting limits on our tolerance. Now don’t get me wrong here. I’m not complaining of how I personally have been treated. I am noting how people have suggested others should be treated.

    We can, for example, tolerate people who are, by their own admission, either not Christian or barely Christian in United Methodist congregations I’ve known, and even let them teach. I hear occasionally about people who are too liberal feeling they are suppressed, but I also hear about many evangelical candidates for ministry who feel that they are being pushed out of that envelope of tolerance. It’s really a hard set of limits to see, but I get the distinct feeling that our candidacy program is not designed for boat rockers.

    I see much more clearly that while various theological views are tolerated, provided they are expressed in proper theological language by people with the proper credentials, certain types of behavior are much less tolerated. For example, you would get less reaction in some congregations if you said Jesus was not divine than if you raised your hands during a song in the worship service.

    As a sideline, I note that in my experience I can get by with saying things that my wife cannot. She is an RN (graduate of a three year program) author of three books, with 12 years experience in hospice care, ending as a director of education for a regional organization. I have an MA degree in religion (concentration–Biblical languages, which earns respect in many quarters!). If I were programming Sunday School classes, I would find more opportunities for her to teach than for me. There are more people who need her expertise. Yet she is heard much less, which is frankly a tragedy.

    But where I have seen a consistent lack of tolerance is for the charismatic movement. I can see this when I teach about different streams of Christian thought. Presbyterians and Baptists are fine. A bit weird, maybe, but they’re respectable neighbors. But mention Charismatics and Pentecostals, and resistance starts in. Aren’t those the crazy people who speak in tongues? I can feel the discomfort.

    The bottom line seems to be that we can tolerate any level of theological disagreement, but we can’t handle odd behavioral differences. We can’t tolerate being embarrassed. I think that is a line that we need to examine. Which is more important? Which is more substantial. The limits of our tolerance need to be chosen wisely, according to our values. If an embarrassing level of enthusiasm is really that important, then we need to be honest about it.

    There is plenty there for people to question, because I’m speaking subjectively. But I see this in Washington, D.C. all the time as well. What kind of behavior should we tolerate in a politician? In a nominee for cabinet or the courts? I think that our politicians are showing their partisan stripes. Remember that partisanship is not just displayed in opposition; it is also displayed in support, based on party, of something that one wouldn’t otherwise support.

    If we had a Republican president, would the Democratic Senate tend to respond in the same way to nominee problems? I’m guessing that we would have a reversal. Some Republicans and some Democrats would be consistent, but the proportions in each party would change. Tolerance, in that case, is based on party loyalty. We allow things in people of our own party that we would reject in the other one.

    We tend to respond most negatively to things that embarrass us. The embarrassment is more important than any moral or legal issue. Our tolerance is determined not by our values, but rather by what is socially acceptable in our own circle.

    While I value tolerance, I think that it can be extremely dangerous. It can, if it is not properly defined and positioned, provide me the excuse to allow things that I should not allow. At the same time since we all know, instinctively if not consciously, that tolerance can’t really be absolute, we have an alternative excuse to allow ourselves to be intolerant–when it suits us.

    Making the choice to be tolerant or not from anything other than a conscious, well-chosen set of values is dangerous to each of us, and to our society.

  • What Stimulus Proponents Could Learn from a Book Title

    Readers of this blog know that I preferred our current president over his opponent in the election. After the bailout fiasco, I would have dearly loved to have had a candidate who actually opposed the whole idea. McCain bleated about socialism, but I honestly don’t believe he could have identified a capitalist or a socialist with a detailed checklist.

    All that has now passed us by. Given the candidates we nominated, it was pretty much a foregone conclusion that we would have some kind of stimulus package and that the ideas behind it would be a bit murky, no matter who was elected. And I’m not 100% opposed to stimulus as a basic concept. I just don’t think the arguments for or against are being done all that well.

    Now I’m not an economist by training or inclination, though I did study just a bit of political science. I’m not likely to be mistaken for one either. At the same time, as I listen to actual economists talk on TV, and sometimes even when I read their longer, and presumably better thought out pieces in print, I begin to wonder why any of them are mistaken for actual economists either.

    Let’s take just one little incident–the $1.2 million renovation of a certain executive’s office. Now there’s reason to be outraged here, but it’s not any of the reasons I’m hearing. Money spent on luxuries may be wasted from the point of view of a company’s or family’s budget, but in terms of the economy it’s not wasted. We really do underestimate the difficulty of keeping a good stack of cash down–when people get to make choices on how to spend it. Even $1400 wastebaskets provide employment and keep the money moving–a much better result than holding that money as a cash reserve. Of course, $1.2 million is a tiny fraction of a percent of the problem here.

    Then there are all those bonuses. People talk as though the bonuses went out with the garbage, never to be seen again. Actually, those bonuses probably did more to stimulate the economy than most of the other money provided as part of the bailout, simply because the money got out of the companies in the first place. I doubt it did very much, however.

    The problem, I think, is that we’re generally forgetting that an economy is more about people than it is about money. Ex-Senator Phil Gramm was pilloried during the campaign for saying that the recession was a psychological recession, but in fact recessions generally have a huge psychological element. In fact, the entire economy has a huge psychological element. If President Obama’s approval ratings remain high, he could have more stimulus effect by giving speeches than the actual spending of money has. I say that not to emphasize the power of speech, but rather the weakness of simple pouring out of money, especially pretend money, i.e. money we pretend we have.

    What we are forgetting all around, and what keeps the economists stirred up and largely wrong, is that we forget that the economy is about people. And herewith the book title: Human Action, by Ludwig von Mises. Now herewith a warning. Human Action is not a short book or an easy book. Ludwig von Mises dislikes most of the terms we commonly use, even labels of fields of study. He defines them and then figures he can use them throughout the book. My edition, the 3rd Revised Edition printed by Henry Regnery Company in 1966, runs to 907 pages including the index.

    I have read all 907 of them. My political science professor at the time advised against it. He said it was hard, and that my time could be better spent. I absolutely and profoundly disagree. It was one of the best decisions of my college life.

    But I believe the most important lesson for economists comes in the title of only two words: Human Action. Von Mises went so far as to name a new science, praxeology, the study of human action. I was asked by another one of my professors why one would name a book about economics “Human Action.” Once I had read the book I was able to answer: Because economics is about human action.

    And that brings me back to my personal outrage over the $1.2 million office renovation, or the billions spent on bonuses by the industry. It’s not that the money was spent. It’s not that the money was spent on luxuries. It is that the money was presented to people as a reward for failure. Companies whose performance was dismal were being paid huge bonuses. A man whose company was about to fail was allowed the choice of renovating his office. That was a choice he should have gotten only as a result of being successful.

    This was the problem with the bailout of the financial institutions and the bailout of the auto industry. The government decided to bailout whole industries as though industries thrive or fail. That’s not the case. People thrive or fail. Gather enough failures into an industry, and sure enough that industry will also fail. But if you push money into the industry it goes to those people, and it rewards them for failure.

    Many people are shocked that we could spend $350 billion on the financial industry and see it still in a tailspin. But if you find someone who is unwise in using money, and he loses $350 billion or so, and then you give him another $350 billion, what do you expect? I still think things would go badly, but at least a sensible lender would require a change in leadership. That’s one of the advantages of bankruptcy. The business gets “bailed out” (sort of), but a judge gets to put limits on the choices of the folks who failed.

    Similarly, we heard in the auto bailout that we couldn’t let the industry fail. But Ford still had cash reserves, even though its president was going to the trough with his fellow executives. Expecting them to reduce their own salaries and bonuses was a minimum sort of precaution, but did anyone ask why we should trust the same people with more money?

    The basic action here is human, and if we forget that, we are unlikely to be able to solve any of the problems. Companies that are rewarded for performing poorly will continue to perform poorly. We’ll get to throw good money after bad.

    The stimulus package that is going through congress right now is also being debated in the wrong terms. “How much of it is in tax cuts, and how much in spending?” we’re asked. But the problem is that we have none of the money, so the point in either case is how much money are we going to pretend to have, and where we’re going to inject our play money into the economy. Now pretending to have money is not necessarily doomed to failure, provided that you have some way of getting the actual money, or more importantly the goods and services that it represents.

    So I’d ask the question of all the stimulus projects: Will this improve the economy, i.e. help improve production enough to pay for itself over the next 10 years? 20 years? 30 years? While psychology has something to do with it, optimism only goes so far before it must be fed by something that actually works. The government could stimulate the economy by building infrastructure, provided it’s good infrastructure, is needed, and is the sort of thing that government has to do.

    I sincerely hope we start examining what we’re doing with a different test, looking at what will actually be accomplished. I’m afraid the Republicans in congress, while right to be skeptical, are not being skeptical of the right things, and are not proposing anything that would be substantially better.

  • So I AM a Secular Humanist

    … at least according to this test. (HT: TheoPoetic Musings, who also turned out to be a secular humanist, though not quite as much of one as I am.) I scored 62 of 166, 37% which makes me a secular humanist!

    The interesting thing about this test was that I had a hard time deciding whether it was written by incompetent test question writers, or skilled marketers. In favor of incompetence I noted: (1) the obvious lead-in, which seems to announce, “We’re trying to suck you in!” (2) Questions with obvious false dichotomies implied, (3) The obviously American character of a worldview test, 4) Questions with multiple elements not necessarily connected logically.

    In favor of skilled marketing is that “sucking you in” feeling which might be much more effective on someone who doesn’t look for it everywhere. In this case it was very blatant, but their market may well be people who can only be drawn in by the obvious. The idea of the test is clearly designed to catch one’s fear of not really being on the in-crowd with God, despite several nods to salvation by faith.

    In the “I don’t know what it means” category is the ridiculous scale they use:

    • Strong Biblical Worldview Thinker
    • Moderate Biblical Worldview Thinker
    • Secular Humanist Worldview Thinker
    • Socialist Worldview Thinker
    • Communist/Marxist/Socialist/Secular Humanist Worldview Thinker

    Everything from support for war to economic policy becomes part of a Bible world view.

    War:

    One of the Ten Commandments is, “thou shalt not kill;”, thus it stands to reason that God is opposed to war and nations going to war.

    My answer of “tend to disagree” was said to be incorrect. The correct answer, if one has a Biblical worldview approved by these folks, is “Strongly disagree.”

    Similarly things like capital punishment and a capitalist economy are said to be a part of the Biblical worldview, and the only acceptable answer is to strongly agree that capital punishment is Biblical, and that the Bible overall teaches an economy built on private property and personal initiative. (I’m not so sure about the former, and the latter leaves substantial wiggle room, in my view.

    In any case, in the final analysis, it appears to that test is designed to produce the result “secular humanist” unless you’re an American right-winger who probably regards the Republican party as socialist, thus making you a good candidate for indoctrination into the so-called “Biblical worldview.”

  • Government Oversight in Action

    The only thing worse than lack of oversight may be oversight. Citigroup is supposed to refuse delivery of a plane they ordered in 2005. I’d love to know the bottom line, but paying a penalty for breaking a contract doesn’t sound like a good use of the money either. Oh, it was a French company. Well, that’s OK then …