Max Borders

Tea Party: Starfish or Spider?

I offer my answer in this piece. Here's a sliver:

The functional reasons are compelling: You don’t want your organization to dissolve because your leadership gets sandbagged, or because your information system is way too top down. But function and form is just one reason the Tea Party should never formalize... 

A formal (hierarchical) organization - like a political party - is not only too centralized, but it becomes less effective as a check on government power. Currently, the Tea Party is coalescing around anti-incumbent, anti-elite and anti-state-power themes. It moves from without and, due to it’s form, is not as corruptible. Don’t believe me?  Try lobbying the Tea Party. 

There are trade offs, of course. What you lose when you’re decentralized is decision-making power, carried out at some instance, based on some plan. You can’t just turn, go straight, or back up on a dime. Tim Kaine or Michael Steele can’t either, but they can turn the ship with commands and controls to a far greater degree. Their organizations are more like spiders.

But the pluralism and broad theme-orientation of the Tea Party makes it effective in ways that really count: like keeping politicians accountable, raising a stink, and getting people to the polls--which is currently the only game in town when it comes to checking Leviathan.

Read the whole thing if you like.

Examiner Trifecta: Tax-hike Groupthink, Vote w/a Boat, Legal Booch?

If somebody paid me to write here more, I would. I swear. Alas, this blog has become something of a link repository for other stuff. My Summer's resolution is to devote more time to writing about what people don't want to pay me for (yet anyway). I will try to find the time.

Without further ado:

• Fighting tax-hike groupthink
  
• Voting with your boat, and
  
• Will the Dems legalize marijuana?
  

Have a great weekend.

George Shultz: Turmoil and Triumph - Documentary, Website

Okay, so for my day job, I spent a good three months putting together this website on George Shultz - a companion to the documentary film, which airs on PBS Monday night. So naturally I want people to visit and explore. 

George Shultz is a very interesting man. Is he more interesting than the Dos Equis man? You be the judge.

(See also today's WSJ review of the film by Dorothy Rabinowitz.)

My Commentary on the "Cry Wolf" Strategy - Progressives' Academia-gate

Some activist academics have been busted trying to engage in researchprop. I have two commentaries in the Examiner on this: here and here.

The story was originally broken by Team Breitbart. 

A Toe-Dip into Populism

In this post, I wax a tad populist defending the tea party movement:

Okay. Keep your traditional views and values close to your bosom as a soldier would a photo of his kids. But get out there and fight like hell--without the kid gloves, if necessary. To "true" conservatives everywhere, I say: Throw your powdered wig on the flame of liberty. Lay your teabag across the lofty bridge of the stodge's nose. Throw up your coattails and expose your rosy bumcheeks to the elites who toss our tax-dollars carelessly into the gullet of Leviathan. And for goodness sake 'rouse the rabble. We've got a lot more to lose right now than our sense of decorum.

I don't know how well I do populism, but I don't like seeing (mostly) normal people with legitimate concerns get pissed on from both the left and right. 

Olson, Organizations and the Red Queen Effect

I have another guest post over at A Thousand Nations. Here's a sliver:

If people like Shirky are right, it’s getting cheaper both to monitor and to organize against special interest groups—at least select ones. I’m not saying we’re anywhere near being able to fight them at parity. Perhaps we’ll never be. Nor are we likely to see the immediate effects of our new distributed, organization tools. But we may soon be equipped at least to slow the process of “demosclerosis.” We may already be. And as long as our collective productivity gains outpace the growth of the deadweight state, we’ll be okay—at least in some less-than-savory utilitarian sense. We’re also going to be better equipped to drive creative destruction and out-compete the government in some of its historic monopoly areas, such as education. (We might even unleash the forces of social entrepreneurship if you believe folks like Michael Strong.)

My optimism ends there, however. Read the whole post.

Limiting Government Through Incentives

Okay. I’m no economist. Nor am I an accountant. But the economist or accountant who comes up with the way to integrate the following concept might do wonders for reining in an ever-expanding Leviathan in Washington (and 50 little Leviathans, nation wide).

Here’s the basic idea: give government employees incentives at every level and in every department to reduce the amount of money they spend by giving them a percentage of the money they save in their paychecks. This, theoretically, would shrink government and allow government employees to get bonuses for being better stewards of our tax dollars—rather than simply looking for ways to keep growing. Sounds simple, right? 

Of course, real life is always more complicated. One problem with this idea is that you can always get your masters to raise the baseline. For example: if you told bureaucrats in The Department of Deadweight Loss that they would get 1 percent of the savings in the annual budget – distributed quarterly – then these folks would have an incentive to lobby the appropriate budget writers and legislators to raise the baseline for the following fiscal year. This would allow everyone to grow government while supposedly “saving money” from year to year – i.e. missing the point (and gaming the system). Therefore, you’d have to peg the baseline to something besides percentage savings in the annual budget. 

But to what? There may be an obvious answer. And this is where a bean counter or economist might be able to help. In any case, the basic idea is to incentivize those internal beneficiaries of government largesse to consume fewer resources. Hopefully, this post will spark something that smarter people can run with. 

(Note: Another problem is that budgets are determined by legislators. Might they also get an incentive to save/shrink?)

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.

Let Them Mock Us

Advocates of socialized medicine don't understand how a majority of Americans are becoming less verzaubert by the vaguaries of hope and change and are coming out against Obamacare. Whatever our reasons, the left (and media lapdogs) is running the risk of overplaying its hand in three ways:

1. Questioning the intelligence and/or motives of voters, as Paul Krugman does here.

2. Doubting the commitment and organization of the rightroots, libertarians and ordinary Americans who are opposed to a healthcare takeover--by claiming this is just an astroturfing phenomenon.

3. Or mockery as comedy in the spirit of both 1 and 2.

This is not a good strategy, which is why we should let them proceed unabated. (As I point out here, mocking people's core values is a losing proposition.)

Countering Obamacare Talking Points

The following talking points are being circulated by Congressional staffers on the left. Here they are and how to counter them pithily:

• "Hold the insurance companies accountable." To whom and for what? They're already overregulated and overmandated - by you - to the point that insurance is now unaffordable for millions.

• "Remove them from between you and your doctor." ...And insert a government bureaucrat instead!
  
  
• "No discrimination for pre-existing conditions. No dropping your coverage because you get sick." This will ensure that irresponsible people get rewarded with healthcare after the fact, and responsible get punished with more expensive insurance! (More young people will risk going uninsured because it will be so unaffordable thanks to you.)
  
  
• "No more job or life decisions made based on loss of coverage." If this is the goal, why not stop subsidizing people to get healthcare through their jobs? Change the tax code, not the delivery system. (This is proof they want to kill the insurance industry, not build the individual market.)
• "No need to change doctors or plans." You'll be trapped in a single, monolithic government plan. Your doctors and care will be selected for you by bureaucrats.
  
  
• "No co-pays for preventive care. No excessive out-of-pocket expenses, deductibles, or co-pays. No yearly or lifetime cost caps on what insurance companies cover." Overconsume! Overconsume! Make sure it's expensive for everyone! Especially taxpayers!  

Then, if you get some absurd claim about why the other side has no ideas for improving healthcare, send them here.

PS: Please send this, right or wrong, (i.e. rat on me) to a White House staffer. Tell them I said fuck off while you're at it.