Max Borders

Apply the "Shock Doctrine" in Haiti

Probably won't win any humanitarian awards with this post for the Washington Examiner. A sliver:

I've never understood how allowing people to be freer to do anything is an imposition - unless you think of human beings as children or lab rats. Despite whatever warmed-over Marxist meta-narratives Klein and Winterbottom would have us swallow, Haiti could use a lot more Milton Friedman right now.Why? Because Haitians are a people who have nowhere to go but up.

Read the whole thing. 

Promiscuous Blogging

Been writing on other sites, so allow me to share:

• A couple of Examiner Posts here (Obamacare Epicycles) and here (Google and China).
• An oped in the Raleigh News and Observer that's not making me any friends in Winston Salem.

Plus, a very good thinker out West has decided to re-publish my piece on Panarchy himself in pamphlet form. Pretty cool. $5.00 ain't bad to spread peace and prosperity around the world while getting rid of tug-o-war politics.

University of North Carolina School of the Arts - Full Paper

UNCSA: Should it be self-sustaining? Full paper here. (I even quote Bastiat.) Thanks to Jane Shaw and the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy for giving me the opportunity to write this report.

North Carolina School of the Arts

This Thursday, I'll be on a panel with John Hood and J. Peder Zane discussing my Pope Center paper on the University of North Carolina School of the Arts (the paper is not yet available). The lunchtime event will be held at the Renaissance Hotel, Six Forks. If you're in the Triangle, please come out. We'll be talking about the cost and justification for subsidy of UNCSA. I'm sure the conversation will degenerate into a discussion of arts subsidy, in general. Should be fun.

Panarchy

The original essay on Panarchy:

My panacea, if you will allow this term, is simply free competition in the business of government. Everyone has the right to look after his own welfare as he sees it and to obtain security under his own conditions. On the other hand, this means progress through contest between governments forced to compete for followers. True worldwide liberty is that which is not forced upon anyone, being to each just what he wants of it; it neither suppresses nor deceives, and is always subject to a right of appeal. To bring about such a liberty, there would be no need to give up either national traditions or family ties, no need to learn to think in a new language, no need at all to cross rivers or seas, carrying the bones of one's ancestors.It is simply a matter of declaration before one's local political commission, for one to move from republic to monarchy, from representative government to autocracy, from oligarchy to democracy, or even to Mr. Proudhon's anarchy - without even the necessity of removing one's dressing gown or slippers. 

So simple and so brilliant. Where has this been all of our lives? (Thanks to Gian Piero de Bellis and Adam Knott.)

Youtopia Part II

Part II is up at Let a Thousand Nations Bloom. Thanks for reading.

Guest Blogging at "Let a Thousand Nations Bloom"

I love this site, which makes it an honor to guest blog over there. Part II is coming soon...

Politics and the "Transmutation of Means to Ends"

Here's an interesting post by Arnold Kling, who's commenting on a paper by Dan Klein. Basically these guys are thinking about why Progressives, Libertarians and Conservatives are disposed the way they are. Both make some really interesting points. First, because human beings are meaning-seeking creatures, progressives find meaning in the state, which symbolizes their aspirations for a kind of collective good. This is no less a cognitive shortcut than the conservatives' inclination to contract with a "spirit-lord," a term that made me chuckle. A quick, dirty and probably unfair characterization might be: leftists worship Government and conservatives worship God. 

When it comes to progressives, I'd want to include some discussion about an excessively pronounced inborn guilt/envy/indignation disposition, which I call the Stone Age Trinity and that I elaborate on here. (I'll return to this in a moment...)

But Kling's post (as well as this NY Times Magazine piece by Steven Pinker) reminds me of that little bit of meta-ethics philosopher W.V.O. Quine did when he was alive. Quine said that ethics was basically a "transmutation of means to ends" and had little else to say on matters of right and wrong. He was a philosophical naturalist to be sure. And Quine thought ethical dispositions usually amounted to cultural mores that had been transmitted, via nature or nurture, from a time when the means were critical to a people's survival or flourishing. For example, the natural consequences of sex with a sibling was increased likelihood of birth defects and harm to the clan. While that taboo exists today, we can imagine scenarios in which that risk would be close to zero (birth control, prophylactics, etc.) The basic idea is that the moral value, the taboo, (or whatever) is what gets turned into the object of moral reverence or of tabooization after running the gauntlet of life and the world--often in very different contexts. They are epiphenomena of learning how to survive in the real world. But the world changes and sometimes the moralisms hang around anyway.

Back to my point about the Stone Age Trinity: On the paleolithic steppe, it made much more economic sense - i.e. was "rational" - for members of a clan to engage in reciprocal altruism, which is a fancy way of saying to share and share alike. But this only works as a rule when a group is pretty small (less than about 150) and food stuffs rot in a couple of days. As populations grew, our market economies evolved and gains from trade could be realized across greater distances, share and share alike became a rule that worked less and less well. Trade generated more prosperity. But both the evolved instinct and the cultural moralisms of sharing have hung around. None of this is to say that sharing is BAD. But government bureaucracies engaged in forced "sharing" over a population of millions just doesn't work very well for a whole host of reasons--from the government failure a la public choice theory to concerns about competing values like individual liberty. While the instinct of sharing may be satisfied by sanctimony in the opinion pages or voting booth, it works better closer to home and community. Knowledge is local. And so, frankly, are the folks tethered to one's heart. But the means of surviving on the paleolithic steppe have been "transmuted" into a political end. That's why politics will not be without struggle for a very long time. And that's why I find it interesting that "social justice" is little more than cave man instincts with fancy verbiage woven around it.

In any case, these are just a couple points of confusion I'd toss into the mix as we try to unpack why people think the way they do politically.

(Addendum: Not to be too harsh, but one of the less interesting (but popular) theories about political disposition - from a couple of leftists - is summed up here. Weiler and Hetherington purport to measure and aggregate the degree to which people are "authoritarian"--which is an unfortunate and inapt term for one's propensity to be stark, simple-minded and Manichean (i.e. seeing the world in black and white or good and evil). They then compare the authoritarian scores to party affiliations and conclude that a) the country is more stratified today than it was a couple of decades ago and b) Republicans are way more "authoritarian". I'll leave this mostly for the reader to consider. But I'd say there are much richer theories out there about political dispositions than one that views the political landscape through such a monochrome filter as relative "authoritarian-ness". For two guys who claim to be on the Blue Team of Nuance, they seem pretty darned reductionist to me. (Social science as scientism rears its head again.))

The Pragmatism of Principle

It’s clumsy. Perhaps it’s a little rough around the edges. But it’s happening. People are coming back to principles. 

By contrast, when I hear the President’s rhetoric, I’m reminded of the Chicago school of pragmatism. Obama sprang from this tradition whether he knows it or not. You can see pragmatist strains at work in Obama’s decision-making, in his careful vacillations and, increasingly, hear it in his overplayed oratory. Except for Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul, most politicians are whisked along by calculations of political expediency. Living by such calculations means that bumper-sticker image of progressivism from the campaign is fading fast. A pragmatist acts, looking for what will work. The people grow disillusioned. Any wooly-headed ideas Obama came in with are now but echoes of ‘08. 

Whatever you think about Progressivism intellectually, it has the ability to nourish a certain kind of spirit (i.e. for those who value social equality and paternalism). But there has never been anything in pragmatism to nourish the spirit. Leadership is mostly tone-setting. And that’s what makes pragmatism, well, impractical for a leader. Turns out that to unite people and to keep them united, you have to offer them an organizing framework—one grounded in people’s emotions, or better, cornerstones cut from their sense of right and wrong. What “works” for this policy or that isn’t enough. That’s why the Center-Right has some reasons to be optimistic—despite a decade of unprincipled Republican power and a poorly-spoken executive who managed to coast on fumes of fear.

People are turning back to our Founding Principles not just because said principles are carved from core American instincts like suspicion of authority and a do-it-yourself outlook. People are also turning to principles again because they work. Our founding institutions work. Markets work. Giving freely works. As it happens, real American pragmatism isn’t technocratic, which makes Tocqueville more American than Dewey. 

Most people don’t have time to get into policy minutiae. They can, however, see what tracks with their principles. Ten come to mind for me:

1. The Rule of Law means that laws should not privilege certain persons or groups. 

2. Legislation should rarely, if ever, make us less free. 

3. The Government shouldn’t use my family’s resources to fix problems it helped create.

4. The Government shouldn’t use our grandchildren’s resources for short term political gain or band-aid policies.

5. The Government should not subsidize personal irresponsibility, profligacy or dependence.

6. The power of Government should be checked. 

7. Markets – exchange between consenting adults – should be free.

8. We Americans can get on with it. We don’t need nannying or nudging.

9. Problems are better dealt through local community than central authority.

10. Big government solutions cause terrible unintended consequences.

Intellectually, principles give people a kind of ready measuring stick for policy. Spiritually, they offer a seat for the political soul. It also happens that, since liberty works better than big government, pragmatism gets to be a welcome side-effect of people pursuing their happiness—whether through entrepreneurship, charity or living their lives without interference from political elites. These principles and these dispositions define America--or at least they ought to.

Cold Civil War - The Spirit of Free Speech is Dying

John Stuart Mill is known for his broader idea of free speech as radical toleration. He believed that an enlightened person should be willing to hear out views with which he doesn't agree -- both in order to test his own understanding and to strengthen it. This spirit of free speech is the essence of pluralism. But we are starting to see this spirit lost in America.

• Ordinary people go to town hall meetings to express concerns and displeasure with policy proposals and are called "mobs" and worse. 
• Nativist Tom Tancredo goes to UNC-Chapel Hill to express his views only to have bricks thrown at him and be shouted down. I think he's wrong. But I didn't get a chance to hear him, as he was silenced.
• John Mackey is boycotted because he dared challenge leftwing orthodoxy on heath care reform.

We have clearly gotten to the point where free speech has devolved. Toleration and open discourse is, well, no longer tolerated. We are slowly becoming a place of mere de jure free speech. And even that is being eroded by the day. I have to blame so-called "progressives" the most for this. They are people for whom the end justifies the means. So any lip-service they occasionally pay to civil liberties is but a tool of convenience to be employed on the way to getting things their way. A new cold civil war is emerging.