Reality and Political Reality

Someone in the G.W. Bush administration once said "We make our own reality". While this revealed the source of many of the problems encountered and created during 2000 - 2008, yet there is a sense in which it is true. As when Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard and said that it was "a problem for the rest of the world", there are times when a situation makes no sense legally or on its merits, but makes total "sense" if you understand political power. Of course with the Nixon and Bush examples and others of this kind, a tension is created that at some point must be resolved, sometimes sooner, sometimes later. I'm saying that you always end up paying for ignoring actual reality.

But political reality is a powerful force, strong enough to affect actual reality. Early computer crackers used to do "social engineering" which was pretending to be a support tech and calling someone on the phone and asking them for their password. Investor and currency speculator George Soros talks about "reflexivity", how expectation can change the market, making it an imperfect measure of value. He also used this to his advantage, most famously in breaking the British pound. President Obama will have a hard time getting anything done the rest of his term because of the angry and popular protests of the "Tea Party".

I mention all this because lately I have been thinking about David Brooks' idea of a different, winning approach President Obama might have taken. Brooks suggests that Obama should have skipped health care, given up on any short-term fix for the economy, and instead taken a long view by starting to make structural changes in the country that would help our economy prosper ten, twenty, and thirty years down the road. He says that Obama should have explained his plan clearly and told the people that it was going to be difficult for a while. Knowing Brooks as a decent and reasonable man, I assume that assurances of help for the unemployed would have also been given.

I immediately like Brooks' focus on long-term structural change; he seems to be the only one talking about this. With an economy based 70 percent on retail do I need to say any more to convince you that we need to rethink and redesign our society?

For the rest of the idea, it would clearly have political appeal since with no 700 billion dollar stimulus and no big health care bill you would have no Tea Party. And it is possible that there would have been some bipartisan support for the structural change. Brooks sees the importance of this political value of good will and much less opposition.

But I remind you that if Obama had done this we would have had at least 15 percent unemployment (in my opinion) and no health care bill (which I see as a long term very good thing). But if he had prepared people for the high unemployment and promised support for the unemployed (and I think you would have to promise a freeze on home foreclosures as well), and if Republicans had given significant support to this and to his structural legislation, and if the climate in Congress was one of problem solving rather than open war, I would take it.

David, if it is true as you say that half the Republicans would have gone along with something like this, you have convinced me.

The Paradox of an Enlightened Society

The United States of America has some very dark times in its past. In the last century we saw Japanese Americans imprisoned in concentration camps, the runaway destructive fear of the McCarthy era, several leaders assassinated in the 1960's, and a costly, seemingly endless and pointless war in Vietnam. Not to mention the frequent murder of our black citizens by lynch mobs.

So we should take heart that today there is an absolute consensus against these evils. Politicians, leaders, and the general populace would condemn such things, regardless of party association or ideology. We have truly come a long way and have the benefit of a much more enlightened society.

So why is it that I feel our country has lost something vital, something that it used to possess, even in its more troubled youth? The root of our problem is that we no longer have a functioning democracy.

It is true that in the past the electorate was greatly manipulated, as it will always be. Real issues were ignored in favor of red-meat red herrings, as we see currently. But I believe there was much more substance there in the past, along with the usual political BS. Whatever your position on President Obama's health care bill, can you honestly say that we had any kind of useful debate over it? How come we have been in two wars since 2002 without any Congressional declaration of war? Why is it that Congress without question continues to approve funding for these (at a cost of something like 300 billion dollars a year if I remember correctly)? This is not democracy.

We face terrible economic peril but no political candidate is held accountable for half-baked plans that clearly would either accomplish nothing or would make the situation worse. Those that say we have to let it get worse and recover by itself are not required to explain how they would take care of the unemployed, nor are those who promise to cut back government expenditures.

There is bi-partisan consensus that we should not be dependent on oil from other countries, yet nothing is done about this, even by our progressive President with majorities in both branches of congress.

There is not a chance in hell that anything will be done about global warming - excuse my language but this is an epochal problem that transcends every other issue. The rest of the world is poised to take action but without U.S. leadership it can't happen. Therefore my children and their children will see this planet with a temperature 3 or 4 degrees warmer than it is now, when it will be a very dangerous place, more like something from a science fiction movie, with a large percentage of the population dying off.

A democracy has the advantage of the pooled knowledge, experience, wisdom, and judgement of all its citizens. Obviously they will disagree, but that is what debate is for. We will still arrive at something better collectively than what any one of us could have come up with individually. We have given that up. Instead we have a system that guarantees that a few large corporations will decide everything for us.

My Green Future: Public Transportation and Petroleum Free Agriculture

President Obama recently proposed a full-scale technological assault on the problem of finding a replacement for petroleum as an energy source. He is criticized on one side for wasting money on blue-sky fantasies by those who believe we have plenty of oil if we had no restrictions on where we could drill. http://article.nationalreview.com/436654/barack-obama-dreamer-in-chief/charles-krauthammer

On the other side he falls in line with people like Bill Gates who have great faith in technology and are calling for greatly increased government funding in this area.

I have less confidence in technology than Bill Gates; I think there is no guarantee that we will find an alternative to oil. Systems theory blogger Jeff Vail has also made the point that transitioning to a new energy source will require additional energy (on top of what we normally use). I.e. making a wind turbine requires a certain amount of energy, making enough of them to supply what we currently get from oil will require a lot of energy. Even if they work as a replacement there will be several years of ramp-up time before they provide much net energy; during this time we will need to use more oil than we normally use at the same time as oil production is declining. This means that we have basically a one-time shot with whatever alternative energy source we focus on. We have to use up the rest of our oil (by using it faster than we normally would) in order to make the transition to the new energy source. If this new source does not work as expected, we have lost our chance to try something else. http://www.jeffvail.net/2009/11/2009-aspo-presentation-renewables-gap.html

Vail is skeptical about the claims for the various alternative energy sources, but points out that even if they are as good as advertised, this is a big risk.

I look at this from a different angle. Even if we could theoretically find a replacement for oil, at some point we need to address the political issue that unlimited expansion is not possible. No matter how good the energy source, there will be some limit to it, at which point we need to accept this and alter our lifestyle accordingly. I think we have hit this limit with petroleum in both its supply and the effect it has on our environment. I don't think we will find a replacement for it. But even if we did, I would like to see us try to be less wasteful in how we live.

My green proposal is this: first put all our efforts into public transportation, using existing technology and restoring existing infrastructure. Get our passenger rail system working again as it worked back in the 1920's. Then convert it to electric rail. Ignore highway maintenance, forget about the car, stop spending money on this very inefficient system of transportation.

Second, provide incentive to thousands of small organic farms. A large use of petroleum is for agricultural fertilizer. Start farming the old fashioned way, put the animals back on the farm and use the manure. Use John Jeavons' techniques of growing the organic matter needed for the soil in the form of high carbon crops like corn and putting it back into the soil. http://www.johnjeavons.info/

Use Masanobu Fukuoka's method of fixing nitrogen in the soil with clover grown along with the crop, and no-plow farming to avoid the loss of the nutrients. http://www.onestrawrevolution.net/

In short, we don't need new technology, we need to change our way of life.

"It's a Team Game" - Clyde Drexler

Last Thursday Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski (a Democrat) received a report from a task force he had created to study the state budget in the coming years. The report said that under current obligations and funding the state should expect to run deficits for the next decade. This casts the governor's race between Chris Dudley (Republican) and John Kitzhaber (Democrat) in a new light; in fact it raises the question of why anyone would want to be Governor right now.

Whoever wins this fall will have to make unpopular budget cuts. Of course this may please some, but the loss of services will ultimately be painful for most citizens, probably even including those who like the idea of cuts in principal.

This leads me to wonder if I, someone who plans to vote for Kitzhaber, would really be better off if Dudley gets elected. Chris Dudley has made statements very supportive of education, and seems to be casting himself as a moderate. During the Republican primary debate Emily Harris of "Think Out Loud" asked if any of the candidates had considered moving out of Oregon, since they thought the tax code was so onerous: no one said yes. This reminds me that sometimes loyalty and ties to a community are worth something too. I also remember that it was Republican Governor Vic Atiyeh who, after making all the cuts he felt he could, actually raised taxes during a recession.
http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2009/02/in_this_recession_exgovernor_a.html

A Republican would have an easier time getting away with this than a Democrat. My bet is that a decent person guided by common sense rather than ideology would do something similar. I don't know much about Dudley as a politician, but I do know that as a Portland Trailblazer he was the ultimate team player.

A Society's Character Matters

Harvard Professor Niall Ferguson does an analysis of societal collapse for "Foreign Affairs".

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/65987/niall-ferguson/complexity-and-collapse

He begins by discussing "The Course of Empire", five paintings by Thomas Cole which depict various stages in the life cycle of a society. The paintings are set in the same location and show in succession a river bank in the wild with aboriginal people, a simple farming community with a large columned temple in the background, the temple turned into a palatial city with ships coming up the river, festive activity, and opulence bordering on decadence, the great city being ransacked by invaders, and finally the overgrown ruins of the city with no humans in sight. This closely parallels the history of Rome over a period of maybe one thousand years.

Ferguson then makes the argument that in spite of the narrative suggested by the pictures, the reasons for a society's collapse are more incidental than structural. Instead of an inexorable calamity years in the making, a civilization's demise can be brought about quickly simply by poor management and decision making.

I disagree with this as a general rule and I think he misses the point as to why the explanation brought to mind by Cole's paintings is so compelling.

First of all, I don't deny that terrible government can quickly destroy a society. However I think this is less likely for society that has the staying power to become an empire; there must be some inherent stability and redundancies present or it never would have gotten this far. But the story of the nation with simple beginnings grown into a behemoth that overreaches is very believable because we have so many examples of this pattern.

Ferguson says that if Rome had been better managed and had the sense to take preemptive military action against the Vandals, or had raised taxes to pay them off again, maybe things would have turned out differently. I think he ignores the fact that the character and characteristics of the Roman empire at that time guaranteed that if they avoided one danger, another would soon come along and eventually they would succumb.

Rome's size alone made it vulnerable. It was slower to adapt, harder to govern, and harder to defend than when it was a small settlement. Its success led to a softness that became a weakening of character, so that it was more difficult for its people to accept hardship.

Does this mean that it is impossible to be successful without being doomed to eventual catastrophic failure? No, but I think you have to consciously avoid the temptation to take the easy way out at the pinnacle of success. Therefore this is not common. Most people will not voluntarily check themselves or undergo some hardship when they don't have to. But this is necessary because growth cannot continue forever.

I think Great Britain is an example of a fairly graceful transition from world power to world nation.

Government or not? A review of Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell

This recently published book (2010) makes a very thorough case against government action of most any kind, with the exception of war. I spent over an hour looking through Sowell's latest book at Borders. The blurb inside the jacket caught my attention because it mentioned how intellectuals influence our democratic process by shaping the thinking of the electorate, rather than directly persuading elected officials. I saw this as a significant insight into how our system works. I extend the theory to any media person with a large audience, the impact of their ideas is greatly amplified. Rush Limbaugh could be an example. A good communicator with a big audience has diproportionately expanded political speech, similar to the expansion of speech rights for corporations under the new Supreme Court ruling. I would argue that the media figure actually has greater power than the corporation. Remember the clashes between GOP chairman Michael Steele and Rush Limbaugh over which of them speaks for the Republican Party?

We have all understood how big business and lobbyists are dominating our political debate and many of us see this as very bad for our nation. But I haven't heard much discussion about the great influence of the very small minority of opinion shapers. So I was disappointed to see that Sowell turned from what could have been a full analysis of this phenomenon and instead chose to pursue a one-sided attack on government. That said, he makes some very good points that should give pause to anyone attempting to govern. There is no question that history is full of examples of unintended consequences, government actions that backfire and make the situation worse, and "public intellectuals" being proven totally wrong by unfolding events. Sowell lists these out with relish. It is a truth that we cannot generally see weaknesses in our own beliefs. People with different convictions are only too happy to point these out, and we can learn from them. Sowell is not immune to this, he sees none of the failings of his own hands-off dogma. I will point these out and show that his overall conclusions are incorrect even though much of what he says is true.

One of the main arguments of "Intellectuals and Society" is that there is far more intelligence distributed among the many actors in the market than can be contained in a small group of experts. This makes sense in a certain way, and is really just a restatement of the Adam Smith's invisible hand. Yet we have an example right before us in recent history where the invisible hand guided market players to make extremely risky loans against no collateral. I have heard Wall Street experts describe how in this climate even prudent managers were basically forced to participate because if they didn't they would be outperformed in the short term by those who did, due to the bubble economics at play. In fact, any bet against the bubble would be impossible to collect, since if you were right then the counterparty to the bet was bankrupt. So experts may frequently be wrong, but the market can also be "wrong", or at least lead us somewhere we don't want to go.

When experts attempt to tinker with complex systems they can easily cause big problems, sometimes bigger than the problem they're trying to solve. Sowell uses this to argue against intervening in the system. Taken to the extreme, this means essentially no government. But what is government other than a very greatly expanded version of a group of people combining forces for greater efficiency? If a neighborhood gets together and decides to take care of their own garbage service to save money, this takes some organization, a group decision, and a willingness to abide by that decision. We accept leadership and top-down decisions in the corporate structure (and all of us who have worked in this environment know how disconnected from day-to-day reality these can sometimes be). Yet corporations can have great success being guided by an elite at the top. Believe me, I'm very much in favor of keeping things simple and keeping an organization lean and small. But does that mean that you should forgo any consolidation of forces to protect individual freedom? This is the trade-off. If you never want someone to tell you what to do, then you are reduced to a lone-wolf status, with no benefit from others resources or know-how. I am arguing that good government may sometimes tell you what to do, but you are getting a great benefit from its efficiencies and combined resources. (I know the idea of efficiencies and government in the same sentence seems ridiculous, but bear in mind that we have a huge country here and so obviously there is a fair degree of waste in this process when you consider the many levels of government involved).

I would grant that our government is too big and too centralized, so we can easily find problems with it. I would be happier with a much more local level of organization. However, this is what we've got, I don't think that means that it is useless. I don't think it means that we would be better off with nothing.

Fanaticism is more destructive than extremism

Normally we seem to apply these terms to religious people in the non-Christian world. I am talking about a particular home-grown example I saw on last night's Charlie Rose show. The guest was former U.S. Representative and House Majority Leader Dick Armey. Armey is currently active as a leader of Freedomworks, a political organization that is a significant backer of the Tea Party movement.

I had never heard Dick Armey speak before, I only knew him by reputation. I must say that he turned out to be more intellectually honest than I expected, and in many ways this makes him scarier. Let me elaborate: I expected him to use any argument that was convenient as long as it supported his anti-Obama attacks. Instead he turned out to be remarkably consistent in his opposition to rules and government of almost any kind. He really believes this.

Armey holds extreme positions on personal liberty and the (lack of) need for government. He objects to almost any rule that would regulate personal behavior, with a few exceptions. He sees government's role as mainly enforcement of property rights and maintaining a stable currency. This puts him way over on the fringe of our political spectrum (maybe not among economists and pundits, but at least speaking of the general populace) but there is a sizable group with him. What I don't like is that he sees anyone who believes otherwise as a danger to the American way of life, and feels they must be stopped. This is fanaticism.

There is something wrong with holding a belief so strongly that you don't consider that you might possibly be mistaken, and that anyone who disagrees is unfit to govern. Charlie Rose called him out with outrageous quotes from speeches he made at CPAC (a recent far-right political convention) and he stood solidly behind those statements. These were things like saying that almost every official in Washington aggressively hates the constitution.

We are a democracy of many different types of people and belief systems. Any kind of government is by definition a compromise. This fanatical allegiance to a single idea leaves no room for any compromise and by nature is anti-democratic.