Thursday, February 26, 2009

A chronicle of the Obama Administration, and related matters.

As of today I have changed the name of the blog to The Newest Dealer because, apparently, some people thought Obamanation was a wordplay on abomination, which never crossed my mind. For, as I have said, I want this Administration to succeed, and this blog is analytical, not lowbrow gossip. Anyway, it's changed and now no one can misunderstand me.

To keep the blog complete, I have imported below all previous posts, starting from the start on January 22, 2009. Of course, they are in reverse order, the earlier at the very bottom, yesterday's just below this note. Almost no one has read or commented on any of this, for reasons explained in the January 22 post.  That's fine.


Wednesday, February 25, 2009

OK, let's look at President Obama's first State of the Union speech as compared to my Presidential platform. Let's see how well he did. (I'm not going to comment on the art of the speech itself, except to say it was ordinary. It had some pretty good lines--I counted about four or five--but a lot of avoidable awkward expression and transitions. Am I really saying that I could have done a better job writing that speech? Damn right, I am.)

Let's just go down the list.

No 1: Baby Bond-National Service Concept. Well, there was a tantalizing passage about a future Hatch-Kennedy bill on volunteer and service that helps pay for college. The President gave no details, and I don't know anything more about this. If it comes even close to being as bold as my idea, I'll be shocked, however. I'd be happy, though, if it does.

No. 2: Banning the financing of public education via property taxes: Not a word, no suggestion the problem is even on his radar screen.

No. 3: Repealing the 17th Amendment: Not a word, and not a word suggesting that our federal system is out of balance. Not a word about the uses of state governments for policy innovation to be scaled up to the national level.

No. 4: Getting out from under the divisive impact of the culture war issues: Well, he mentioned none of this last night, but he has spoken of it elsewhere, and I think he gets it. But has he done anything more about it? No sign yet.

No. 5: Health care: This is one of the three highest priorities, along with energy and education, but it is disappointing in the extreme to hear so few real ideas and so little serious analysis, and to hear about a review conference of shareholders. One would have thought that a top priority would have already been the subject of serious thinking and sharing and planning. What the hell were these people doing during the transition, anyway? When you get into office and call for a policy review, you totally blow your chance to strike while the iron is hot. Very disappointing, and no hint, yet, of any understanding of what the real sources of the problem are.

No. 6: Control biotechnology: Not a single word.

No. 7: Getting a grip on TV and electoral reform: Not a word, but it'd be too early to say that our loud in the present context, even if the man had a clue about what to do here.

No. 8: Reform DHS: Not one word.

No. 9: Reform the USPS: not one word, but, of course, so what?....

No. 10: Reform the IRS: just a reference to eliminating tax breaks for companies that export American jobs. That's nice, depending on whether that masks protectionist inclinations or not. But it's hardly adequate as a statement about what's wrong with the tax code.

On the other hand, the President did mention getting ride of direct payments to agribusiness (let's see him even try to get away with that), did mention the importance of preventive care in medicine, did mention that education begins at home with parents taking responsibility, and did mention the idea of creating tax-free universal savings accounts for all Americans (which harmonizes, at least, with the Baby Bond-National Service idea). Great stuff, and it was a joy to hear it. So the speech wasn't a complete wash, although most of the good stuff was very vague in the way it was expressed. And a lot of opportunities, as I have suggested, were missed.

As to the overall tone--striking the right balance between expressing concern and being optimistic--I think he did very well. He used the bully pulpit well. It could have been a lot worse. But I could have written such a better speech for him. Oh, well. .....




Posted at 9:17 AM 0 comments
Tuesday, February 24, 2009

We are about to have a health care summit, says the President. And the director of OMB, Peter Orszag, says that fiscal responsibility and reform run right through health care. He's right.

Now, folks, if you will refer back to an earlier post, part of my presidential platform (the post for February 15, to be specific), you will see what I think this effort has to achieve to be worthwhile.

As I noted, and as I will repeat now in brief, there are many reasons for the sharp rise in health care costs. Some are structural, having to do with technology and the vast new range of diagnostics and treatment we did not before have, and with an aging population. But some are contingent, having to do with dysfunctional governance structures of several types. These dysfunctions are nearly all caused by a series of perverse incentives, and most of these exist because a genuinely free market in health care does not exist. That said, we don't want a fully free market in health care, because that would mean that many people would not be able to get minimally acceptable health services from some combination of fee-for-service and insurance. Not everything in society is or should be exposed to the forces of the market. (This is obvious when one thinks about it, but people rarely think about it. We don't allow child labor and mugging people to steal their organs, do we? We don't sell justice to the highest bidder either, and so on and so forth -- like duh.)

So the problem is how to streamline and free the market to create efficiencies in the areas in which we do want it to work, because it is impossible and very expensive to "command" all dimensions of a healthcare system, and decide those areas in which we don't want the market to dominate decisions and outcomes. Very hard problem.

We also need to remember, as I said in my February 15 post, that there is no simple technical fix for the problem, because it is at base about moral choices. We cannot afford, and actually need not afford, to make all medical services available to all people. By definition we need some kind of general triage. And it is the toughest issue of all in any society to determine who gets to make those decisions.

As for me, I will consider a health care reform successful if it does three things, and unsuccessful if it doesn't.

First, we have to rationalize the distribution of technology and services and eliminate the expensive duplication of effort we see now. To do this we have to identify those regional systems that outperform the average, model them and scale them up to apply to the rest of the country.

Second, we have to refocus efforts on prevention, and on the most basic aspects of human health: diet, exercise, sleep and mental well-being. This is partly an educational issue, but also partly a function of medical practice and training. We waste an enormous among of resources fixing illnesses that never should have happened in the first place and, of course, we over- and mis-medicate ourselves as a result.

Third, we have got to separate the insurance pools so that the extraordinary expenditures that go into care for those in the last 12-18 months of their lives (as much as 40% of all costs)--people who we know will never get better and have productive or happy lives anymore--do not make insurance prohibitively expensive for so many others. We can't easily stop people these days from making foolish decisions about such care, what with our secular focus and all these damned lawyers everywhere. But we have to segregate its effects on the rest of the system.

Of course, we also have to reform the insane HIPPA legislation and do a thousand other things. But these three are the keys. If we are more rationale on a national level about how we use expensive resources, if we get back to basics, and if we control for extreme pressures on the insurance market, we will at least have a chance to get our arms around the problem. If we don't, we won't. Mark my words.

Posted at 7:05 AM 0 comments
Monday, February 23, 2009

Well now that my presidential platform is revealed for all to see, I need to think of other things to discuss. What has happened in the world and in the administration during the time I was waxing presidential? That ought to provide the grist I need. Answer: A lot, and nothing.

By a lot I mean that, for example, our Secretary of State made her first trip, to Asia. It was a bust. And her tenure is so far not impressive.

What Ms. Clinton seems not to fully appreciate, yet, is that you don't really need to say publicly everything you think. If no one asks you a specific question, it's fine to ask them one, or to just shut up until you've thought things through. (Mr. Holden and his "national of cowards" could probably benefit from the same advice.) Diplomacy is the orchestration of words and deeds. The State Department is not capable of all that many deeds, so it tends to get imbalanced in favor of words--all the more reason to be very careful about the use of them. Two examples.

You don't call the prospect of a North Korean long-range missile test "unhelpful." That's like calling a small pox outbreak a kind of a nuisance. You call it what it really is: a very threatening development that requires close consultation between the United States, South Korea, Japan, China and Russia. If talk you must, you say it's the test case for the Six-Power Talks: They either prove useful at this critical time, or we need to seek another way of addressing the problem. Even Democrats (Ash Carter and Bill Perry) during the Bush Administration saw this kind of missile test as the crossing of a very dangerous red line, and counseled the use of force. Bush thought that was a little premature. It's no longer premature. Alas, what the SectState said was "unhelpful."

You also don't drop the fourth D. You don't say that "smart power" (I cringe whenever I have to type it) is defense, diplomacy, and development. You say it's defense, diplomacy, development and democracy promotion, because if you don't--and if you say that human rights abuses in China must not get in the way of practical cooperation--you are giving the Chinese government a free pass to do whatever they want with impunity.

Everyone already knows that human rights are not always trump in Sino-American relations, and they shouldn't be. I also stand second to none in opposing the Bush Administration's so-called freedom agenda. I am lavishly in print with criticism, and I did what little I could while in government to limit the damage this completely reality-free, faith-based idea could cause. But there are smart, patient and constructive ways to promote liberal institutions, and there are careless, hasty and counterproductive ways. Accidentally getting a mouthful of sour milk doesn't or shouldn't make a person swear off milk for all time, right? Same here: Just because the Bushies did it wrong doesn't mean you banish the goal from your vocabulary. That's just giving the other side an undeserved gift. If she expects one back from Beijing, she is going tobe sorely disappointed.

There are other examples, too. Where was the boss when Richard Holbrooke and Richard Boucher engaged in a shouting match in front of their staffs as to whom officials should report to? Reported in the Nelson Report and elsewhere, this argument was typical in a set-up, as we have described here before, where it's not clear who is in charge. Tony Zinni understands the problem...... The Bush Administration was notoriously inept at establishing unity of command in complex political warfare. It was one of its major failings, and cost lots of lives, not to be able to integrate what government types call the kinetic and non-kinetic aspects of a policy. Looks like the Obama Administration, so far anyway, is even worse. But let's wait until the President notices the problem and tries to fix it. Maybe he will. George Bush never really did.

(By the way, I asked Richard Boucher, whom I know reasonably well, in an email to his private email address (no, you can't have it so don't ask) what really happened. He has not answered, diplomat that he is..... But he will, face-to-face with no paper or electron trail. Later.)

It has also been entertaining watching the afterspin from the stimulus bill. There are actually four possibilities ahead of us, not just two.

First is that, as the administration hopes, the economy will rebound and the stimulus bill will be shown to have helped a lot, or spun to make a lot of people believe that. A lot rides on it politically looking to the 2010 mid-term elections.

Second, the economy may rebound naturally, and the stimulus program will have had nothing to do with it. In this regard, today's Washington Post lead really arrested my attention: "Government Gets Chance to Prove It Can Work." That's a capital I on It.

Well, that's right. And here's a prediction based on both theory and experience. Government will work if by "work" you mean spending money on things government organizations already know how to do. There are sharp limits to how much new money government can spent efficiently, however, and diminishing returns on investment will set in soon. But if the Administration is asking government to "work" by doing things it has not done before, government will not work--not soon, not cost-effectively and probably not at all.

Here's why: Our government is a beautiful late-19th-century-style hierarchy; we've perfected it, finally. Alas, the world has pulled the reality-rug out from under its feet. The world is a networked, distributed system that operates much faster that the U.S. government can cope with. We have, in short, a design problem. So if government is expected to work like a vending machine--put in money, pull handle, out comes service--it will work wherever government standard operating procedures are aligned with reality. Where it is not aligned, it won't work absent a new redesign effort. Those parts of the stimulus meant to be transformational (few though they are, regrettably) will therefore probably not work.

And one final comment here on possibility number 2: The closer the money is spent to the problems it is trying to solve--namely, on the state and local levels--the more likely it won't be wasted, all else equal. State and local government is outrageously inefficient in many cases, true; but it is still more likely to align with reality, according to the unbreakable, unshakable rules of metis and subsidiarity (see earlier blogs, or a dictionary), than spending from Washington that would presume to reach long-distances into local communities. "I'm from Washington and I'm here to help you" really is one of the funniest lines in American politics.

Third, perhaps the economy won't rebound quickly or much at all, and may continue to sink into 2010 and beyond, and the stimulus will be irrelevant to this because the mass psychology abroad in the land will have trumped the psychological power of the stimulus. This will be true if my hunch that this is not a ordinary business cycle is correct (see Feb. 10 post). It will be even truer if Tim Geithner looks to be the empty suit he appears to be. Bank on it.

And fourth, maybe the economy won't rebound quickly or at all and the stimulus package, because of the new debt it piles on top of the old debt, will make everything worse by stimulating massive inflation and an even worse credit crunch.

Mindful of this possibility, the President has promised to cut the deficit by scrutinizing the Federal Budget he will soon present to Congress. Obama is a budget hawk, and good for him--at least that is his instinct, and it is sound. But Ronald Reagan was too, and the best he could do was slow the growth of government, a fact obscured by the other fact that as the economy grew (in all the wrong ways) after 1982 government share of GDP dropped. But the point is that government still got larger, Reagan notwithstanding, and Reagan had a bunch of small government Republicans in Washington to help him. Wait until Obama gets a load of how Congressional Democrats will oppose most of the budget excisions he will want to make. Until he really attacks the K Street mafia and the transactional culture, he will not be able to really shrink the pork and the others kinds of fat out of the budget. Until he attacks the middle class entitlements, which does not fall under discretionary spending and which he cannot touch, he will not get at the guts of the problem.

Moreover, this budget, though the Obama Administration will present it, is not really its budget. The budget process for any fiscal year is three years long, at the least. It is a bear, a huge effort. The budget the President introduces a year from now will be the first that will even possibly really bear his stamp. He has got to know this, right? He has got to know that he cannot go line by line through the Federal Budget and make much of a dent after only a few weeks in office. Right? Well, you at least should know it, so don't expect too much when the budget proposal is introduced.

Which of these four possibilities is most likely? I'm guessing possibility 4, sad to say.

As for what hasn't happened, well, a lot of nominations. But that's enough for now.


Posted at 6:33 AM 0 comments
Friday, February 20, 2009

Now for the tenth and final plank of my presidential platform (after which a few more semi-random comments, as often, if not always):

No 10. The IRS has to go.

I am not qualified to judge whether a flat tax is wise or practical, or a consumption or VAT tax. I’ve never studied the matter in earnest. But I do know that, even well short of any revolutionary change to the way the Federal government funds itself, I have roughly the same problem with the IRS code that I have with the USPS manual: It is excessively, bizarrely and unnecessarily complicated.

As with the USPS, Medicare and so on, these complications add vast transactional costs to the system, slow everything down (which imposes other very real costs), and increase the rate of error.

If there were a compelling reason—concerning fairness, say, as in education issues—for such complexity that would be one thing. But there isn’t; again, quite the reverse. The complexity of the system advantages those who can afford to hire expensive lawyers, lobbyists and accountants to navigate and exploit it, and that, invariably, is corporate in nature either directly or indirectly: It’s either the company or the high-placed corporate employee who can afford it. This is not fair.

So flat tax or no flat tax, Congress needs to cut the present IRS code by at least 90 percent in length. I am not entirely content to leave exactly how to do this to experts, but I can't do it myself. If it cannot be done, then we need to abolish the IRS as it now exists, and as Sen. Richard Lugar once proposed, and just start over.

If a normal, typical American citizen cannot do his or her taxes in a few hours without the aid of a lawyer or an accountant, something is seriously wrong. A recent poll revealed that most Americans would rather go to the dentist than do their taxes. O holy cow (as Phil Rizzuto used to say)!

Worse, the $200-$300 that even average-income families have to pay to get their taxes done amounts to another kind of tax, a tax collected not by government but by businesses that have manipulated the government for their own private benefit. This is an outrage, and if I could swing it I’d start a national tax revolt—basically an ultimatum to Congress: Fix this mess within one year or something like fifty million Americans will refuse to file their taxes next April 15. Think you can arrest fifty million Americans? We dare you to try.

Some of my ten ideas are compatible with a “small is beautiful”, “government is the problem” ideological perspective. But others demand that government, including the Federal government, do more, not less. This may seem contradictory to small or rigid minds, but it isn't contradictory at all. I am a liberal of a certain kind, but one with a conservative temperament.

I am a lot like, I think, William Allen White who, I suppose, might have influenced me many years back. (Don't know who he was? Pity....) I am the sort of liberal, now evidently obsolete, who thinks that government's role is to insure a level playing field and maximum feasible democratic participation at the governmental level and about the issues where it matters most. I am not for government "getting out of the way" but I am also not for government "getting in the way", as when government doesn't level the playing field but occupies, dominates and smothers it with social engineering schemes that can never work as intended. As explained several posts ago, the original 19th century liberalism tilted to the former impulse, postwar American liberalism toward the latter. I like the more balanced kind in between the extremes championed by the first Roosevelt more than the second, the balanced liberalism whose goals need to be approached carefully, i.e., with a conservative temperament.

William Allen White was a Republican (after all, he was from Kansas) and a liberal, as I have just defined it. He admired small town America and small town values and virtues. He feared gigantism, but had nothing against the efficient mass production of basic goods. It raised living standards and put a dent in real poverty. What he would have thought of putting the country's finances in hock in order to buy tons of crap from China I think I can guess.

Alas, our troubles are too many and too complex to be approached with a simpleminded ideological fixation. We need to really think about our circumstances, not substitute labels for thought instead. I don’t worry about others not being about to understand that my ideas are in fact ideologically consistent. Besides, I myself worry about them being effective in solving real problems more than I worry about consistency. That's too much a luxury when there's work to be done.

So, dear non-existent reader, if we institute a Baby Bond program of national service, ban property tax-based public education, repeal the 17th amendment, devolve controversial moral questions and health care issues to the state level, get a better grip on biotechnology and the distorting effects of television on our political process, redesign DHS, and put both the USPS and IRS out their Kafkaesque miseries, we will have really accomplished something in my first presidential term. (And I have lots more good ideas for my second term.) Think that's impossible to do in one term? Maybe, but go back and look at what TR accomplished between re-election in 1904 and the end of 1908. You'll be startled if the past quarter century is all you have to go on as precedent.

“Is that all?”, you ask? No, of course not. We have to rationalize immigration policy, as President Bush tried but failed to do. Our drug laws are stupid and counterproductive. The way we deal with student loans is somewhere between shady and imbecilic. Obviously, our financial system has evolved in ways that have outrun minimal regulatory frameworks, and we need to fix that. As suggested already, our agricultural subsidies are a deeply destructive rip-off that, among other things, contributes to an increasingly dangerous food safety problem. But most intelligent people know all this already.

We could, by the way, stimulate a productivity explosion and reduce workplace accidents if we’d institute a national afternoon naptime, like other civilized societies have done in history (I’m serious). We could get an even larger productivity boost if we could ban per-hour pay for services (from your plumber, your electrician, your carpenter, your gardener, your ratty lawyer, too) and pay for everything on a by-the-job basis. (Think about that one for a moment in terms of incentive structures, and you’ll see what I mean.)

But I’m realistic. Instituting a Baby Bond-National Service Program would be simple compared to tearing agribusiness parasites away from the public teat. Elect me President, and I’ll do it. I promise. Hey, I didn't do so well in the 2008 election, but there's 2012 just ahead. Harold Stassen's got nothing on me. (Never head of him either?!)

Posted at 5:55 AM 0 comments
Thursday, February 19, 2009

The ninth plank of my presidential platform is about the USPS, which I already wrote about at some length back on February 9. But I'll repeat the plank here just to keep things in order. If you think you already understand my view, you can skip to the bottom for other diffuse remarks--except for one comment that needs to come now.

Since I wrote what is posted below, and after I wrote my February 9 comment here, the USPS announced that first class rates would rise to 44 cents in May. The reason given: increased costs of operation. No one, as far as I have heard, raised a word in question.

But folks, this is bizarre. Increased costs? How? What? Everyone with a brain is worried about deflation, the signs of which are everywhere. Even the USPS' fuel costs, despite the spike in prices last summer, look to be lower than usual for the year past and for the year ahead. What increased costs? If the USPS is suffering increased costs, despite the oversight of the Postal Regulatory Commission established in 1996, then it's because they have to be the worst managers in the country.

No. 9: Repair the USPS.

The USPS, our postal service, is a disaster. For many years now, the cost of service for ordinary citizens like me has been rising way faster than inflation while the quality of service has diminished. Somehow, the more labor-saving technology the USPS introduces, the more expensive its service becomes. There is no other sector of the American economy where this is true, so why should it be true in the post office?

One reason is that efficient service for the public isn’t anymore the system’s main purpose. Rather, the USPS has become a vehicle for a corporate subsidy. Businesses get highly preferential rates for advertising through the postal system. We are told that the revenue from advertisers makes a profit for the post office, but this is true only in a surrealistically narrow sense. If you add in the transactional costs made necessary by an almost unbelievably complex rate system, and add the fact that most of the advertising is also tax-deductible for corporations, the numbers start to look very different. On the USPS’ two-column accounting system the advertising ink may be black, but the rest of us are knee deep in red fleece.

Our postal regulations are so complex that they make the Social Security and Medicare systems look simple, and that isn’t easy to do. The people who make up the rules, too, seem to be …how to say this nicely?…..complete idiots. It now costs 42 cents to mail a 1st-class envelope, as long as it weighs one ounce or less. For an additional ounce, you need another 17 cents—that being a reduction from before, when each additional ounce cost 24 cents. (Don’t ask why; no one knows.) But when you get to 3.5 ounces—not 3 and not 4, but for some woolly reason 3.5 ounces—the whole rate system changes and now you must refer to the “large envelope table.”

Ah, but this is where the problem begins. There is one rate table for packages heavier than 3.5 ounces that are bendable, or have no "stiffening matter", and a different, higher rate table for those that do have stiffening. Since what is and is not a “stiff” package is not entirely obvious, you can take the same package to two different postal clerks and get two different answers as to what it costs to mail it. The bozos who thought this up, and the lesser clowns who allowed this to go forward, should be taken out and shot—at least with pellet guns. Since Ben Franklin founded the U.S. Postal Service, and since his face appeared on the first U.S. stamp in 1847, no one has ever done anything quite as moronic as this.

Not that the imbecility of the USPS is really as pressing a national problem as the others I have discussed, but sometimes a thing is just so ugly you can’t stand it. And the USPS mess is symptomatic of system wide problems, namely the lack of attention to organizational design as a part of management and the ubiquitous role of Congress (with its unlimited appetite for feeding special interests who in turn feed their campaign coffers) in screwing things up.

In any event, here is what needs to be done.

First, the President should direct that Congress hire a competent and above all independent auditor to analyze the USPS and recommend management changes. The Postal Workers Union should not be allowed to prevent this overhaul; it is one of the main reasons for the wild inefficiency of the USPS, because it has become almost impossible to fire a derelict employee, no matter what the reason. (I have nothing against trade unions, quite the contrary. But I do have something against public sector featherbedding at citizens’ expense.)

Second, the rate structure needs to be radically simplified. There should be just one rate scale for 1st-class mail, one for advertising, and one for parcel post. That’s it, with equally simply structures for international mail. No zip+4, no bulk rates, no machinable discounts—forget it. We just have to average income and costs over a range of functions as we always used to do, enabling a much simpler, cheaper and faster system with the same overall revenue balance. That would get rid of the thousands upon thousands of USPS middle managers taking up acres and acres of expensive office space whose completely pointless jobs are devoted to servicing the ornate corporate rip-off the USPS has become.

Obviously, this will make advertising by mail more expensive for businesses than it is now, so there will predictably be less of it. Good: Who needs all that crap anyway? Everyone knows that if you tax something you get less of it, and if you subsidize something you get more of it. We should not be subsidizing a function as non-productive as advertising; if anything, we should be subsidizing the exchange of goods via the mail among individuals and businesses, and between individuals and businesses. We can make individual/individual, business/business and individual/business exchanges cheaper, which plainly helps the economy. I can't think of a responsible business that wouldn't trade a significant reduction in its shipping costs for a hike in its advertising budget. In short: Advertising revenue should support basic services; basic services revenue should not support advertising, as it does today.

The postal manual for domestic and international mail, now hundreds of pages long and heavy enough to induce a hernia, must be made to fit into no more than 18 pages. It used to, so there is no good reason why it cannot do so again. This simplification of the rate structure will save huge amounts of money: after all, gratuitous complexity is very expensive.

Third, at the same time, the rate structures need to be modernized. It’s dumb to divide the postal rate structure into discrete ounces below a pound. It used to be that the cost of delivering a package was a function mainly of its weight, but that hasn’t been true for years: The variable that matters most now isn’t weight but how many hands or pieces of machinery have to handle a package from starting point to end point. It does not cost significantly more, or less, to deliver a 4-ounce envelope than it does to deliver a 7-ounce envelope, so there is no justification for charging different rates for them. A dramatically simplified and modernized rate structure will speed up service and further reduce costs. We are fools to have tolerated the bizarre complexification of what is, in essence, a simple and straightforward government function.

Fourth, just for fun, the USPS should introduce a special 2-cent red, white and blue stamp called a “My Two Cents” stamp. This stamp would be used exclusively for citizens to write to their elected federal, state and local officials, at the specially discounted rate of 2 cents per ounce. There’s a subsidy we can really use.


Posted by at 6:05 AM 0 comments
Wednesday, February 18, 2009

And now for number 8:

No. 8: Redesign the Department of Homeland Security

The creation of DHS was not a mistake by way of concept, but it has been a huge mistake by way of design. As it now exists, DHS cannot make America safer; it can only make us more vulnerable. It is a clear and present danger to us all.

The original proposal for a Department of Homeland Security—developed before 9/11, by the way, by the Hart-Rudman Commission on whose staff I served for more than two years—recognized the need for some coordinating mechanism for domestic security comparable to the National Security Council for American national security policy in the wider world. We had our three main border security agencies—the Border Patrol, the Customs Service and the Coast Guard—in three different Executive departments (Justice, Treasury and Transportation). This made absolutely no sense. Also, the INS was an internal contradiction: half of its job was keeping certain people out of the country, and the other half of its job was letting certain people in. You don’t have to be a management professional to see how stupid this was.

The original DHS proposal was to amalgamate these three relatively small agencies into one new Executive Department, and bring FEMA in, as well, to serve as its organizational framework. FEMA always had a small Washington footprint, with most of its assets pushed out in its ten regional centers, close to where problems and their first-responders were. The idea was to create a DHS that, like FEMA, had a small Washington presence and that pushed resources and responsibilities out to the regions. This was subsidiarity and common sense at work.

There was no good reason to make DHS more centralized than that, anymore than, on the foreign policy side, the NSC needs to swallow the Defense and State Departments and the intelligence community. There would be an EOP (Executive Office of the President) office for domestic security comparable to the NSC, and the new Executive department, DHS, could be comparable in size to, say, the Department of Education, or maybe even smaller.

That’s not what happened. There is an EOP office for homeland security, but DHS as it exists today is a bureaucratic monstrosity, a slow and ponderous behemoth that has not one hope in a million of operating within the decision cycle of terrorist adversaries who want to strike us in our homeland. It has swallowed other agencies whole, and buried them beneath multiple layers of bureaucracy.

Even so, DHS does not control more than 25 percent of what the government spends on homeland security. It is a textbook case of how not to align strategy, resources and operational capacity. DHS is also understaffed for its size, which shows you what happens when people who don't really believe in government design a new department or agency. This has led it to depend overwhelmingly on contractors, but its staff is even too small to manage that right. What a mess.

DHS today is not reformable anymore than it is manageable. It needs to be ripped apart, and reconfigured according to the original design. As it stands, DHS is more a liability to our security than it is an asset.

Posted by at 8:35 AM 0 comments
Tuesday, February 17, 2009

OK here's number seven, followed by an afterword -- after it, of course, or else it would be a foreword....

No. 7: Control the destructive effects of television advertising on national politics.

All professional politicians in the United States know about the invisible 800-pound gorilla over in the corner: It’s called television. The way to win statewide and national office these days is to buy more and better TV advertising than your opponents. To do that, you have to raise really huge amounts of money to buy air time and hire the professionals who make the ads. To do that, you’ve got to devote an inordinate amount of time and staff to fund-raising that would be better spent talking and listening to voters, and to thinking about and planning how to actually govern if elected.

Worse, having to raise all that money raises troubling questions about corruption. There are only so many places a candidate can get huge sums of money, and all those places have vested interests in the outcomes of important policy debates. Money usually buys access to politicians, not actual decisions; those who hold otherwise are more cynical than realistic. Still, the system isn’t healthy, and it’s getting worse. It’s not a good thing when industries that contribute to political campaigns get to have their staff people essentially draft legislation pertaining to their own industry. And the campaign finance reform we’ve had in recent years, almost everyone agrees, has made things worse, not better.

There is actually an easy way to alleviate, if not solve, this problem—though it is, admittedly, politically difficult to achieve. It has two interconnected parts.

The first part is to have the Federal Communications Commission auction off rather than give away all broadcasting and bandwidth resources, not just some of them as is now the case. The companies that acquire broadcasting licenses are not exactly pauperized; they can well afford to pay for this relatively scarce resource—and that’s exactly what broadcasting bandwidth is. The money earned from these auctions and license renewals could then be used to subsidize political campaigns and help educate voters, just as happens in lots of other democratic countries.

The only way this works out fairly is if the time for active campaigning is constrained—this is the second part. Almost every other Western electoral democracy does this. There is nothing anti-democratic about it. It does limit free speech in some theoretical way, but the way things work now, with money dominating the process so completely, limits free speech for lots of candidates in a very real, not just theoretical, way. So the FCC should require all of its clients to allow a certain minimum of air-time during constrained official campaign seasons for all candidates who qualify to get on the ballot.

This is not a panacea. Candidates with lots of money could still buy more advertising during the campaign period, but those without a lot of money would be guaranteed a minimum of exposure to explain their proposals and views. We shouldn’t try to sterilize the advantages of money in politics, which is impossible anyway; but we shouldn’t want money to trump absolutely everything all the time, either.

So, sell the licenses to subvent free and fair political debate, and limit campaign seasons to curtail costs. This is a much simpler solution than those trying to limit and measure political contributions, whether of “soft money” or “hard money” and so on and so forth. Most such proposals, as with McCain-Feingold, are inherently too complex to be workable, because there are a zillion lawyers eager to make billions of dollars finding millions of ways around them. Proposals for a voluntary public funding system make a certain amount of sense, but the fact that they have to be voluntary to be constitutional limits their utility.

Besides, if the core problem is television—and it is—then the best solution is a direct one aimed at putting some boundaries around television’s functions in political campaigning. You can’t affect the position of a shadow by doing things to the shadow; likewise, we can’t do much about the shadow cast by television’s power. We have to get at the source.


And now the afterword, which connects my mention of David Korten the other day with David Brooks' column today with the fact the someone in Oregon just bought my old copy of Kirkpatrick Sales' book Human Scale, published back in 1980. And connected, too, to what I wrote on February 10 about cycles and bicycles. If I look just behind me I see a row of about 20 books I bought and read in the 1970s and early 1980s about ecology as a public policy paradigm. A lot of these books, including Human Scale, were a little flaky and impractical. Most of them, actually. But, you know, looking back, they had the big idea right. It's taken more than 30 years for the reality of it to finally ooze through the the more mainstream among us. But I think it's actually happening. Maybe. And what is so sweet about it is that the recognition of what's gone wrong does not look any more conventionally liberal than it looks conventionally conservative. That old language, as I have said, is virtually obsolete. Maybe I'll re-read some of that old 1970s stuff--before it's all been sold away on Amazon!

Posted by at 8:56 AM 0 comments


Monday, February 16, 2009

OK, here is number 6 from my presidential platform, in a moment. First just another newspaper note or two, which I will do from time to time when something that happens in the Administration and/or the world echoes with something recently explained in this blog.

Today's New York Times says on the front page above the fold that as part of the "stimulus" there will be a $1.1 billion program to investigate which medical procedures actually work and which don't, or don't work so well. This echoes directly with yesterday's post about the many reasons for escalating health care costs, and also with the idea of a Federal Health Board proposed by Sen. Daschle and others. This is exactly the sort of thing an FHB would do. The question is, can such a study actually be pulled off, get useful and unarguable results? It's not easy to see how one does this without touching off all sorts of arguments and uncertainties, but I suppose we'll find out. I suppose we'll also find out if this study is a wedge meant to open a crack to create a much larger FHB, one without wise principles of exclusion. Maybe, with all the looming issues in our future concerning biotechnology and the need for triage decisions, we'll have to have a larger government role in health care. Maybe, but the tradeoffs will be ferocious.

Also in today's paper, the Washington Post in this case, Bob Samuelson writes about the similarities between Japan's 1990s' economic doldrums and our own now. He vanquishes conventional wisdom about what happened in Japan. And he agrees with my hunch, back on February 10, above, that what we're seeing is not just the downslope of a typical business cycle but something deeper in the culture. Here's what he wrote toward the end of the column: "Since the early 1980s, American economic growth has depended on a steady rise in consumer spending supported by more debt and increasingly asset prices. . . . The present U.S. slump signals the end of upbeat, consumption-led growth. But its legacy is an overbuilt and overemployed consumption sector, from car dealers to malls. The question is whether our system is adaptive enough to create new sources of growth to fill the void left by retreating shoppers." That's pretty much what I said, in my own words with more an emphasis on the hopeful end of the throwaway, consumerist, anti-thrift economy we've had since way before the early 1980s, going back at least a quarter century before that. It's nice when you find someone smart who agrees with you.

And now, on to #6, about bioscience and its dangers (as well as promise).

No. 6: Create a new national institution to control biotechnology.

American society is the most history-oblivious, optimistic and market-oriented ever to exist on this planet. For the past century and more, we have been conducting a totally unregulated experiment in the sociology of science on ourselves. Build railroads all over the place if we can? Sure, and who cares what the social, economic and legal implications might be. The internal combustion engine and the interstate highway system? You bet: Pollution, congestion…what’s that? Allow the scale of corporate growth to far outpace any regulatory framework? Why not? Trickle, trickle, trickle down. Television? Right: What harm could that possibly do? Birth control? Yes, indeed, and don’t look back. The Internet, BlackBerries, a cell phone that can double as a toothbrush in a pinch? Um….

Americans commercialize everything our best minds (and our other minds) can invent, let the market take its natural course, and ride each great successive wave of stability-destroying innovation all the way in to the beach. Then we shake our hair dry, take a deep breath, and run back out to catch the next wave. It’s only as an afterthought that most of us ever think to ask if these changes have been worth the costs. Maybe they have been; but not to even wonder about the question as a society has always stuck me as strange. It’s like habitually jumping off the high dive without looking to see if there’s water in the pool just because you like the sensation of hurtling through the air.

Only once in American history did it occur to us to ask whether the government might not have some obligation to think through the consequences of a new technology before letting the market run wild with it. That was with nuclear energy, right after World War II. We created the Atomic Energy Commission to deal with it. Well, contemporary biotechnology is even more fraught with potential for monstrous abuse today even than nuclear energy was in 1945.

And what have we as a nation done about it? Basically, nothing--even as other countries, and the EU as well, have recognized the danger and have begin to act. All we've done is assemble groups of bioethicists to ruminate over the matter, while dangerous problems and horrific precedents have already been set. Leaving this technology to the market has resulted, among other things, in untutored judges ruling that human genes can be patented and owed by corporations. This is outrageous, an abomination to the very spirit of our humanity. We have got to overcome our so-far cavalier approach to arguably the most momentous danger of our century. We need the equivalent of the AEC for biotech, and we need it now.


Posted 7:46 AM 0 comments
Sunday, February 15, 2009

Now for number 5, but first a modest musing or three about today's newspaper.

It's amazing how sometimes you can find something interesting to ponder in the most unlikely places. Take the New York Times Magazine, for example, an often infuriating waste of ink, paper and time. The NYTMag has become the national homosexual highbrow magazine over the past dozen or so years. I am not against homosexuals, but sometimes I do get a little sick of hearing about how wonderful, and how oppressed, they are--and how so altogether wonderful single-female or in any event male-less parenting can be (when all the actual social science data we have says otherwise). I don't care what people do in private with their genitalia as long as they don't insist on telling me about it, and that goes for heterosexuals as well as homosexuals and transsexuals and metrosexuals and any other kind of -sexuals you can think of but I can't.

I also get a little sick of the term homophobic, as if not assenting to and cherishing the "gay" lifestyle means you're somehow afraid of it. I'm not afraid of vomit, but that doesn't mean I'm particularly interested in someone else's manifestation of it. Well, I suppose that if this sort of thing is what the Magazine's readers really want, then the editors are right to give it to them. And how should I know? I haven't done a survey.

I like the Magazine for the puzzles, especially the acrostic, which they run every other week. They amount to brain exercise, which I need. I don't like the crosswords as much because to do them efficiently requires a lot of pop culture knowledge, to include television and Hollywood movie watching, two activities I do not do a whole lot of--which is not a boast, just a fact.

Anyway, every once in a while the Magazine will have a great piece--I can think of four or five over the past year--not a high average, perhaps, but not entirely useless. Yet today what struck me were three items on the Letters page....of all places. One was a letter by an economics professor from NYU, someone named Edward Wolff. He was commenting on last week's cover piece by David Leonhardt about education. He main point was that, pace Leonhardt, there is no statistical evidence that mean improvements in education pay any economic dividend.

My reaction to this is that Wolff simply must somehow be wrong--either the statistics are misaligned with what they are supposed to measure, he is not standing far enough back to see the causal chain, or something. This just seems too counterintuitive at first blush to possibly be true. And yet, he may well be entirely right. It may be that human capital as applied to economic growth is highly skewed, that a few thousand scientific geniuses, enlightened tinkerers and entrepreneurs account for nearly all the productivity growth at base in out society, and that what 99% of everyone else knows doesn't count for a whole helluva lot. That's not something you want to say too loud in an egalitarian-minded culture (never mind the reality of things). But it might actually be true. It would be nice to know; damned if I'm prepared to trust one economist's opinion.

Even more interesting was a little note from a medical doctor in Vermont, Rebecca Jones. She points out that for all the medical technology we have, it can't and doesn't trump such basics as diet, exercise, sleep and emotional well-being in our overall health. She's so obviously right that I see no need to defend her further--and I will only return to this point briefly below, since #5 on my presidential platform is about health care. Amazing how three sentences from someone with experience and common sense can make hundreds of thousands of pages of technical writing about the health care crisis seem so pointless.

Best of all, however, was mention, by someone named Rosaleen Mazur from Rhode Island, of a book called Agenda for a New Economy by someone named David Korten, who I admit I never heard of until this morning. Maybe it's a bad book--who knows? But it sounds like it bears a thesis I have carried in my head and heart for 40 years--that we ought to be developing an economy based around local communities, even as an international economy goes ahead based around Wall Street and international trade. That means supporting one-of-a-kind local businesses, locally owned, that use local labor and care about the local environment.

This approach reminds me of the Prosperity Index that the Legatum Institute has devised, which insists that quality of life issues need to be counted is as much as stuff than can be measured with numbers. To have ever not realized that is the price we pay for our public schools having ignored philosophy and ridiculed religion all these past forty or so years, of course, but that's another story. I have to find Mr. Korten's book, and then, perhaps, Mr. Korten, and invite him into The American Interest.

We'll see--he sounds like the subsidiary-loving type, the crunchy con-type perhaps (though he may not realize it), the anarchist-as-opposed-to-statist kind of person I have always been myself. I distrust all concentrations of power, whether private or public. I insist on metis and subsidiarity as the most effective and morally sound way to solve problems, whenever possible. I insist that there is an ecology of liberty--that people who do not develop in their everyday lives the habits of self-sufficiency cannot make up the ingredients of a genuinely free society. Ah, but more of this later. Now to health care.

No. 5: Don’t even try to create a national health care system.

I know that this is a very complex problem, one with many, many, many moving parts. I do not expect, and no one else should expect, that a short blog post can encompass it all. But I will try.

The main reason health care costs are skyrocketing is fairly easy to understand, but almost no one who has not thought systematically about this seems actually to understand it. Here it is in a nutshell: Science and technology are rapidly expanding the range of diagnostic and treatment options, but without—as in other areas of our economy—also enabling us to substitute capital for labor to make medical functions more cost-efficient. In medicine, no matter what sorts of diagnostic and care options there are, we still need highly skilled doctors and nurses and lab techs. Machines or robots can’t substitute for people in medicine like they do in building cars or making steel or growing food. Trained human capital is very expensive, and this double-whammy—new options opened by bioscience and the need for skilled people—is what makes health care costs keep rising.

Of course, that’s not the only reason. There are at least seven others I can count; let's just list them.

One is demography. We are an aging population (not as much so as some others, like Japan, China and the EU, but aging all the same), and older people suck up more medical care dollars than younger people. This is structural; there's nothing we can do about it, but it is only temporary, because eventually the population pyramid will change its shape.

Two is that about half of all medical spending in the United States is spent by the Federal government, and the Federal government spends inefficiently because it is too large. Its transactional costs are huge, and it has a knack for making them even hugher—the insane HIPPA “privacy” legislation being a key case in point.

Three is that private insurance companies also have huge inefficiencies and transactional costs. And they are not entirely honest about how they go about their business. They cherry-pick and they exclude.

Four is the near total disorganization of the capital-technical stock in medicine. Some regions have too many machines and labs and some too few. Some regions, like Rochester, New York where the Mayo clinic is, are something like 17 percent more efficient than the norm. We don't need a national health insurance infrastructure to model and scale up health care systems within the United States that have proven efficient. If we do that--learn from our successes--we can mitigate the effects of our supply-push system, defined, simply, as "we have a machine, we use it whether it makes sense or not." We have an obsession with the technology, and we ignore common sense, as Dr. Jones says: diet, exercise, sleep, emotional well-being (eg., stress). We are terrible at preventative care in this country. There are all sorts of cultural reasons why this is, including how doctors get trained these days, but we do not have time to linger on this.

Also, note that doctors use the machines in part to protect themselves from malpractice suits--lawyers and their damned overlawyering--that's the fifth factor. But the cost of malpractice, while significant, lamentable and avoidable with good policy, is actually not as huge as is often assumed. Probably more expensive over all are, six, the lobbies for the pharmaceutical industry, a very powerful special interest that gets Congress to vote it all sorts of expensive favors. Not only are we overlawyered and over-machined, we are also outrageously over-medicated.

And seven, one other major reason for the problem is something no one wants to talk about: religion. Yes, you heard me right.

In an age of older, more innocent religious belief, mortality was accepted as a natural facet of living. Aging was seen as not only inevitable but noble; we respected our elders, and venerated them. Now most Americans run from aging and mortality like scared children. No wonder, then, that people today seize upon the possibilities of rejuvinative medicine in a way most of our forbears never would have. Upwards of 40 percent of all medical expenses in the United States is reportedly spent on very elderly, ill people in the last eighteen months of their lives! And a lot of that spending is on operations and treatments of dubious real value to anyone, except those who sell painkillers and medical machines. (Increasingly, too, disproportionate amounts of money are spend on those at the very beginning of their lives, including many damaged infants who will never be able to lead normal, productive or independent lives, but that's another matter.)

This spending we do on the aged and permanently infirm is absolutely crazy. I am not advocating euthanasia, so don't get prematurely excited. Of course I respect the non-instrumental, intrinsic sanctity of all human life; I am a religious Jew, after all--I have no choice. But that does not mean we should use machines and scarce medical resources to keep such people alive at the expense of others, which is, in effect, what we are actually doing. Unless people write binding living wills, children and other relatives are extremely loath to “pull the plug”, and medical professionals are afraid of being sued if they do. But how dumb do we have to be not to realize that if insurance pools have to take into account that 40 percent of all costs that are spent on people who we know will never get well, and whose lives have generally lost purpose or any sense of enjoyment, premiums are going to be very expensive?

Now, policy can be important. If there is way to use policy to encourage people to eat right, get exercise, get good sleep and enjoy emotional well being, that would solve most of our health care crisis overnight. You bring core costs down, and suddenly insurance premiums become far more affordable--like duh, right? And this really is is the beginning of wisdom here: It is plain stupid to worry about insurance coverage without thinking of ways to reduce the overall cost structure of health care, but to do that you have to understand where the escalatory pressures actually come from. They come from the culture--the political culture and the culture more generally.

It follows that, by definition, there is no single technical or bureaucratic fix for our circumstances. Can you think of policies possible in our Congress that would make people eat right, exercise, sleep well, and--the most wildly improbable of all--see to their emotional well-being?! I can think of one: Stop letting fast-food crap "restaurants" advertise their destructive so-called "food" on television, and here we come back, yet again, to one of the the roots of evil on our country, television and TV advertising, with its mean-world syndrome that increases our national stress quotient and its relentless pollution of our national capacity to distinguish "need" from "want", thus infantalizing our entire culture--because, yes, knowing "need" from "want" is what has traditionally distinguished an adult from a child.

As I say, better governance would help, certainly, if it were practically available (which it isn't)—but no, it won’t really fix the problem anyway. As with problems of equal access to decent education, health care issues amount to a series of what are essentially moral issues. Who deserves what care, or enhancement? What should a minimum level of care be, regardless of a person’s ability to pay, and who gets to determine that minimum? If the patient can’t pay, who should—and who gets to determine that? When does, or should, the concept of triage kick in for the care of the elderly and terminally ill?

Obviously, these are controversial and fraught questions. We will probably never likely agree on them at a national level, anymore than we’ll agree on abortion and gay marriage. If we try to create a national health care system, we will be forced to answer such questions for all of America’s religious and regional communities at the same time. That is just asking for trouble.

Of course, if we do this we will also inevitably saddle ourselves with a highly bureaucratized, inflexible and expensive management apparatus, as well (again, not that the market-driven model we have now is a paragon of efficiency!). That's why ideas of creating a Federal Health Board will probably end up doing, unless they are very carefully designed with strict principles of exclusion in mind. Everyone who is honest about the problem knows that. Such an apparatus will help drive talented young people away from careers in medicine—already a worrisome trend. Thus, in order to deal with what some construe as a problem of fairness, we will make the problem of costs much worse, and the vast majority of Americans will be worse off for it. With dollars for health care relatively scarce, the last thing we should want to do is add gratuitous transactional costs to our medical system.

Given the nature of the problem—which, again, is as much moral and cultural as technical or administrative—it is also one best handled at the state level. The State of Massachusetts under Governor Mitt Romney managed to hammer out a way to do universal health care. Other states have taken note, and if it works in Massachusetts variations can work elsewhere. But circumstances differ from state to state, and sustainable solutions have to fit local conditions. To think there is a one-size-fits-all solution on a national level is delusional. It represents the “will to a system” of social engineering that every sensible philosopher and observer has warned against. The solution to intrinsically difficult problems like health care costs is not made easier when its scope is made larger. This is so obvious that, under ordinary circumstances, it should not need to be explicitly pointed out. But evidently we are not living in ordinary circumstances.

There is another reason we need now to recognize and deal with the moral and political aspects of our health care problem: It’s going to get worse. There is already a troubling blurring trend between what is medically necessary and what is merely desirable. For example, drugs originally developed for legitimate therapeutic reasons, like Viagra, are now used for essentially recreational and enhancement purposes. It is also becoming harder to distinguish some minor surgeries and physical therapies justified for physiological reasons from cosmetic surgeries. But the real looming problem before us concerns the impact of genetic engineering: hence my next idea.


Posted at 8:18 AM 0 comments
Saturday, February 14, 2009

And now number 4; but first, you just have to look at the photo on the front page of the Thursday Wall Street Journal. There are Sen. Reid, Sen. Spector and someone else, not sure I can remember who, and above them, flattened by the magic of photography, is a ceiling decoration in the Senate caucus room that looks exactly like a roulette wheel. Talk about perfect inadvertency.....

No. 4: Remove “red button” culture war moral issues from national politics.

The abortion issue and issues concerning marriage for homosexuals can never be settled in American national politics. These are issues that raise absolutist claims that, by their very natures, are resistant to compromise. The result is a source of permanent divisiveness that has driven our political parties into the hands of extremists on both sides. This is bad for everyone, and it is arguably getting worse.

Happily, there are such things in the United States as regional and local sensibilities and differences. That’s natural in a country as large and with social origins as diverse as ours. Following from the principle of subsidiarity, judgments about abortion and homosexual rights should be rendered at the state level, and perhaps, in some cases, at the municipal or local level.

My own view is that decisions on abortion and homosexual marriage are inherently religious decisions, and that these decisions should be made among interested family members and their respective clergy. Where decisions are matters of consent and no living person can be construed as a victim of any judgment, government should have as little a role as possible in them. That is what liberty is all about, after all.

But of course, not everyone has a religious tradition or community to turn to, and some communal standards are certainly necessary at the outer limits of potential human behavior. If, say, a group of cultists whose members stood for the public execution of adulterers moved into your town, the larger community would have a natural right to prevent that if, as one would hope, it so desired. But it is clear that local communities, at a maximum individual states, have a much better chance of reaching working compromises on sensitive moral issues than the country as a whole. And if minorities within a community or state disagree with the local consensus reached on issues like abortion and homosexual marriage, they can always go someplace where the consensus is more to their liking. It’s a free, and thankfully a diverse, country.

Therefore, the two main parties should agree not to use the Congress as a platform from which to wage culture war against each other. We need to stop beating ourselves up in a battle no one can ever win at the national level. The party leaderships should also agree that, at the level of the states, every effort should be made to cooperate to define standards acceptable to the majority. That’s the best we can do, and it’s the least we should do.


Posted at 7:28 PM 0 comments
Friday, February 13, 2009


OK, here's number 3.

No. 3: Repeal the 17th amendment
In 1913, the very structure of the checks and balances the Founders created for our Federal system was altered, and the result has been a disaster for true democracy. The Founders created a system with both “vertical” and “horizontal” balances. The horizontal ones we all know well: between the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches. The vertical ones inhered in our system of Federalism, especially in the balance between the interests of the states as states and the Federal government. The way that balance was insured is that the Founders directed that U.S. Senators be elected by State Houses. And they were—until 1913.

After the Civil War, Congress passed some really bad laws that compromised the workings of the original system, with the result that many people came to believe that the indirect election of the Senate was undemocratic and prone to corruption. But the result of changing the original system is that it has fallen to the Federal courts to preserve the interests of the states, something the Founders clearly never intended.

Worse, severing the sinews of accountability between local and Federal jurisdictions has enabled the vast growth of the Federal government and its bureaucracy at the expense of state policy responsibility. The result has been, in part, the substitution of administrative regulations for actual lawmaking, to the point that those who actually most influence our lives—the “reg” writers in the Federal bureaucracy—are not elected at all.

Ah, once again good intentions paved the road, if not to hell, then to a less democratic result. The direct election of the Senate was supposed to save democracy from the corruption of “smoke-filled rooms”, but the result has been to make the corruption of the Senate easier and more economical at the hands of today’s large corporate lobbies. And is the distance between an average citizen and his or her U.S. senators greater then, or now? Then, a citizen could “get to” a Senator though his or her local state government representative, someone a citizen was and is still far more likely to know and see face-to-face. Now that is essentially impossible for all but a tiny fraction of Americans.

The direct election of the Senate violates the sacred Jeffersonian principle now called subsidiarity—a high-falootin’ word that simply restates the common sense idea that the most efficient and effective solution for any social problem is the one as close to the problem as possible. What neighbors can settle, they should settle. What those in the same congressional district can settle, they should settle, for who knows their interests better than they do? Tip O’Neill was right to say that all politics is local—or should be, to the extent possible. What we’ve done since 1913 is make government more distant from the average person. We’ve made it harder to solve problems where there are most easily, most sensibly and most cost-effectively settled: locally.

This in turn is one of the deepest root causes of our civic participation crisis. Average people feel they have no voice, except to vote once every four years. They don’t see how they can participate in politics in a way that has a bearing on their own daily lives. It’s no wonder most people take no interest in local and state government: It doesn’t do much of anything that really affects them, except provide designer license plates for those who care about such things.

The result is that what the late Mancur Olson called “the logic of collective action” takes over: Special interests, like developers, who are few in number but who have big and well-focused stakes, win out over the vast majority who have smaller and more diffuse stakes.
Repeal the 17th amendment and all that will start to change. If your State House elected your two U.S. Senators, as James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin and their colleague intended, you would damn sure take more of an interest in them. So would your neighbors, and then local special interests would not be able to get away with the semi-legal larceny they now practice on a massive scale.

We need to reinvigorate political life in America on the level that makes it real for ordinary citizens. We need to make it possible for people to participate meaningfully in public life. PTAs are great, and so are voluntary neighborhood civic associations. But they’re not enough; that’s not what the Founders had in mind. We need to return the original balance back to our Federal system. We must repeal the 17th amendment. It won’t be as easy as repealing Prohibition, but it’s even more important—and that’s really saying a lot if you happen to like a nice single malt once in a while.

Posted at 8:57 AM 0 comments
Thursday, February 12, 2009

OK, national service is number 1. Here goes number 2.

No. 2: Ban the funding of public education from property taxes.

Most Americans do not realize it, but our country has gone backwards over the past twenty years in terms of residential segregation, and our public schools still do not provide a level playing field for our children largely because of it.

Let me mince no words here: Black incomes on average are lower than white and “other” incomes, and most black neighborhoods are poorer than most white neighborhoods. Since most public education is funded mainly from property taxes, that explains why schools in predominantly black districts have a smaller resource base with which to fund education. That contributes at least some to inferior education, which in turn reinforces the pattern of relatively lower black incomes, which leads back around the circle of causality to their living in poorer neighborhoods with poorer schools. This causal cycle is inherently unfair and should be unacceptable to any nation “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

That said, per capita spending on students explains a lot less about educational outcomes than many observers claim. Nor can a truly level playing field be guaranteed for all students even at the young age of six years, because by that time many forms of inequality, cultural and social, are already in play. We can spend a veritable fortune per student, but if children return to homes where adults do not engage them in articulate conversation from a young age, where learning is not valued for its own sake, and where adults are not typically seen reading, it won’t matter most of the time. Educational aptitude is a matter of culture more than it is of either nature or nurture, narrowly defined, and there is a limit to what any liberal democratic government can do about it.

Still, public policy in a liberal democracy must concern itself with all issues of basic fairness, and it is very unfair that schools for some of our citizens are structurally under-funded compared to schools for others. That this unfairness breaks down largely along racial lines is a national scandal of which we should all be ashamed.

Of course, as everyone knows, the Federal government tries to smooth out inequities caused by funding education through property taxes with offset payments. Some city school districts, Philadelphia, for example, have more complicated funding mechanisms not based exclusively on property taxes. This smoothing process does not work that well, however, and even if it did, it is still wrong in principle to fund public education, an equal opportunity right for everyone, with a vehicle than cannot by its very nature ever be equal—property taxes.

Besides, there is no logical reason why funding for education should not come out of the same general pool of tax money that pays for other public services. Congress should therefore ban the financing of public education from property taxes, period.

That ban would have several benign effects. First, it would almost certainly reduce property taxes in most places, which would aid home-ownership levels even if other sorts of fees and taxes might rise to offset the revenue loss. Second, if all services are funded out the same general revenue pool, it would force communities and their political leaders to make more explicit choices about how important education is to them relative to other services. Then people could choose neighborhoods and school districts based on quality, not on de facto racial criteria and the machinations of real estate fascists. This would, over time, probably reduce residential segregation and increase spending on education, although, to be honest, lots of other factors play into this equation. Fairness would win, and American society would win.

If there is a sound and unselfish argument against my proposal, I have yet to hear it. Anyone want to try?

Posted by Obamanation at 7:01 AM 0 comments
Wednesday, February 11, 2009

I apologize for that long post yesterday. I just had to get that stuff out of my system so I could get some work done.

I promised to tell something about my ill-fated and never-ending presidential campaign, so I will. I created a platform consisting of ten parts, and my plan is to roll these parts out one by one over the next week or so. But first, a little about the campaign itself. Oddly enough (or maybe not so oddly), its rationale rather mirrors that of this blog. Here goes:

Every four years, usually in the early spring before an election, I decide to run for President. Here is how it always seems to happen: I survey all those threatening to occupy the White House, looking for anyone with actual good ideas about how to make our great nation even greater. If I find someone, I support that candidate—but he or she rarely lasts long in the race. The reason, I have come to understand, is that the combined influence of television and professional consultants makes it almost impossible for candidates for national office to articulate anything beyond the first paragraph of any idea, if they happen to have one. They’re too busy raising huge sums of money for TV advertising to think about public policy, and the last thing they want to do is alienate well-heeled donors with prospects of significant change that might affect their fortunes. That’s how a man like Barack Obama, campaigning on a platform of “Change”, can vote for the 2008 Farm Bill, the mother of all corporate welfare abominations in U.S. politics.

When this scene replays itself every four years, I remember a slightly screwy but charming and mostly harmless character named U. Utah Phillips. A songwriter and folk club entertainer of a Wobblies persuasion, Phillips used tell audiences he was running for president on the Sloth and Indolence ticket. As an anarchist, he'd say that if elected he promised to hang around the White House and shoot pool because, if you wanted to change something, you needed to go out and do it yourself. He also used to tell audiences that if elections could really change anything they’d be illegal, and so not to vote—“It only encourages them”, he’d say.

It has never been quite fair for me to appropriate Phillips’ Sloth and Indolence label, even though it has well described the tempo of my campaign if not its content, because for all I knew Phillips himself was running again on that ticket. That may change next time I run, since Phillips passed away back in May, I think it was. But unlike Phillips, I would never tell people not to vote. I only tell them not to vote for people who have no good ideas. But I have good ideas, so I ask people to vote for me, heading up what I called last time the Common Sense ticket. I have ten such ideas for starters to make America a better place, ideas far-reaching enough to make a meaningful difference were they to be implemented, but not so far-fetched as to be beyond discussion. These ten ideas are thus “torque points” in American politics, places where positive change would resonate throughout our political culture. Here is a summary of the first one.

No. 1: Re-Create a Culture of National Service
There is a crisis of civic participation in America; we’ve become increasingly a nation of cynical spectators, not participants, in our own governance. No democracy can be healthy with the levels of apathy and alienation that exist today in America. We need to recreate a culture of national service that will have long-lasting benefits for civic participation. Here’s how to do it (and note that this not just my idea).

When an American citizen is born, the U.S. government should create, along with a social security number, a savings account for that child into which somewhere around $5,000 and $7,500 is placed—called a Baby Bond (or, as some prefer to call it, a “Service Bond”). That child’s parents, family and friends may contribute to that fund until the child becomes 18 years of age, and those contributions are treated for tax purposes like charitable deductions: money put aside that can be subtracted from taxable income. Through the miracle of compound interest, every child will have a considerable nest egg upon reaching the age of consent—upwards of $18-30,000.

Even if the Baby Bond idea, which has been operating in Great Britain on a modest scale since 2003, stopped there, it would be useful as a way to get equity spread around to more young people who can put it to productive use. In my plan, it mustn’t stop there: To get that money, every citizen would have to sign up for and do national service in one of eight categories: military; Peace Corps; Educore (like Teach for America); forestry and environmental remediation; urban “broken windows” brigades; hospice and elderly care; hospital ship duty ; and a “habitat for humanity” program. (Military service, by the way, should be made to attract only a small percentage of Baby Bonders, because the last thing our generals want or need is a huge number of untrained short-timers to put up with.This idea, therefore, is definitely not a smokescreen for a new military draft.)

One 12- or 18-month stint of service, complete with training, would have to be done between ages 18 and 25, and that first stint would entitle a person to three-fourths of his or her Bond. Another 9-12 month stint at any time, even after age 65, entitles the person to the rest (it stays in the same account earning interest until its owner chooses to collect it). Our 18-25 year olds can use that money to pay for college or vocational training, to buy a home or to start a business. And we’d be crazy (we are crazy) not to encourage our older citizens to share their experience with others. This is the way to create a real shareholder mass democracy.

Everyone seems to understand the rationale for Social Security: We hold ourselves as a society morally responsible for providing a basic minimum for our elderly out of respect for their humanity and an abiding sense of basic fairness toward them. If we care about our elderly enough to pool social resources on their behalf, why don’t we take a similar attitude toward our young people—young people who not only deserve a fair start, but whose accomplishments in the constructive lives ahead of them will benefit us all? The Baby Bond idea is not charity or welfare; it is socially selfish, for it benefits everyone.

Because it will benefit everyone, businesses and state and local government will have good reason to offer partial or full matching funds to encourage Baby Bonders to spend their money at colleges or in areas they wish to encourage. So, for example, if the City of Pittsburgh, say, wanted in-state Pennsylvania Baby Bonders to invest in real estate or businesses in certain parts of the city, the municipal government could offer special incentives to attract Baby Bond resources. If General Electric wanted to encourage more students to go into electrical engineering, it could offer to match any Baby Bonder funds used to pay toward an academic major in that field. The possibilities, if not literally endless, are extensive.

In my version of the Baby Bond-National Service concept, the first 12-18 month stint of service, in whichever of the eight categories is chosen, must be done away from a person’s home area. The government will provide enough of a stipend for basic subsistence housing and board (financed in part out of the interest-earning money it is holding in maturing Baby Bond accounts), just as “City Year” and AmeriCorps programs do now.

A key reason for “circulating” our 18-25-year olds is to break the downward spiral of poverty, drug addiction and hopelessness that afflicts a still far too large percentage of inner-city residents, and a significant number of rural “white” poor, as well. The only way to really solve this problem is to literally remove young people away from harmful environments and have them come face to face with people of their own age from different places. Moreover, the only way to generate real understanding for people in such straits from the rest of our population is to have them actually meet and get to know one another in a neutral environment. The military draft used to help fulfill this function in the past; we need that function again, now by dint of another method.

This proposal amounts to integrating the many private volunteer and public service programs already in existence, and perhaps adding a few more. It amounts really to scaling up dramatically and incentivizing in a new way what we already do in a fragmented and inadequate way. Even so, a national service program of this magnitude would not be cheap. Even if we use existing non-profit infrastructures to their maximum, the government would have to put aside (but not initially spend) money for Baby Bonds, pay out money when service is rendered, and pay for the operational costs of the program, as well.

But, then, the GI Bill—which serves as the basic model for this idea—wasn’t cheap either. Neither was the Civilian Conservation Corps, but that worked, too. Just like the GI Bill and the CCC, the benefits of a Baby Bond National Service Program would more than offset its costs over time. Just think of the costs we as a society already pay for prison and drug-related debilities on account of how poisonous environments trample the hopes of so many young people. We do not have to tolerate those costs, which go way beyond the merely monetary. If we look at all the cost factors involved over the long term, a national service Baby Bond program would beyond doubt be an overall economic winner for the nation. As it is, every dollar spent on AmeriCorps volunteers pays back roughly $2 in services rendered.

Besides, costs are relative. We know how many Americans will turn 18 in any given year—a little under four million—and we can estimate program costs within reason. If we do that math, two things become clear: first, that the United States of America, the wealthiest mass society in history, can afford the Baby Bond-National Service Program; and second, that the costs are almost trivial compared, say, to wars like the one in Iraq or the financial bailout of recent months.

Note, too, that service is not compulsory, and there is no penalty for demurral. There would be no costs for the government having to track down truants and dodgers, for by definition there cannot be truants or dodgers. If a person does not wish to do service, his or her bond is merely forfeit and the money goes back into the general pool to earn interest, pay for program operations and help others. But once a culture of service is created, I believe that the opt-out rate would be small.

Obviously, a great deal more can be said about how this program would work and what its main challenges and many benefits would be. Clearly, intervening into the negative social patterns in our inner cities can’t wait until people are 18 years old, so supplementary programs would have to be devised (I have ideas here, too). But note that sending Baby Bonders in to help rescue the just 15% of our high schools nationwide (about 2,000 schools) that produce the majority of high school drop-outs can make a tremendous difference.

And we can’t wait 18 years from the passage of a bill to graduate our first Baby Bond class; we’ll have to devise ways to accelerate the program between now and 2027. But based on the already existing incubus of AmeriCorps, we can find ways to scale up over time to do that.

The patterns of undergraduate university life, too, would be temporarily thrown off pattern, as significant numbers of high school graduates do service instead of becoming college freshmen at age 18 or 19. But does anyone think it would be a tragedy for our young people to go to college a year or two more mature than most do now? Who is anyone kidding? It would be a huge improvement for our kids and our colleges alike.

Of my ten ideas, this one has the greatest potential to change American society for the better. You think it’s too hard? Then your own thinking is part of the problem, so please think again.

Posted at 6:57 AM 0 comments
Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Cycles, Bicycles, Tricycles

President Obama held his first news conference yesterday. He did reasonably well. He was serious, on point and well balanced in the optics he projected. He also managed to duck some questions designed to get him into trouble. Whether he seemed properly presidential is another matter; it's still early. He said one thing in particular, however, that caught my attention, and provides a perfect hook for my chosen subject today: "This is not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill recession."

Well yes, that's right. But one wonders exactly what he means by that, for he did not elaborate. Unfortunately, none of the press present had the brains to probe further on how the President understands and interprets the problem. They did what they usually do: Focus on personalities and superficial politics, the "who's up/who's down" method of creating what people think of as news, but which is really a form of ever so slightly highbrow gossip that works commercially, like nearly everything else in these "bread and circus" times, as entertainment. (Some of my best friends are journalists--I have to say that, of course. But you will find as this blog progresses that I am not particularly impressed--at least not positively--by what most mainstream journalists do most of the time.)

This is of a piece with what has seemed to me to be an astonishingly superficial discussion we have been having in public about the economic mess we're in. I am about to deepen it for you, you lucky dog. But be warned: This will not be a short blog.

Now, first, a full disclosure: I am not an economist--neither a classical macroeconomist of the postwar ilk nor what is now often a behavioral economist, which, it seems to me, is just a new term for what used to be called a microeconomist. A macroeconomist, in case you missed this day in school, is someone who looks at large trends and the data that describes them. A microeconomist, or a behavioral economist, is more interested in individual and small group behavior, making him a trafficker in what other social sciences have to say about human behavior, notably psychology, anthropology and sociology.

While I have never wanted to be a macroeconomist, or to know a whole lot about macroeconomics anymore than I ever wanted to be a lawyer, I have always wanted to know more about microeconomics as an aid to my main interests as a social scientist, which is best defined as political sociology, or political anthropology, perhaps. I pay attention to new books about "animal spirits"--a term once used by John Maynard Keynes himself--as a key to understanding why markets do what they do, and I am interested in what behavioral economists like Robert H. Frank, Tyler Cowen and others have to say. (These two gentlemen, I am happy to note, are recent additions to The American Interests' editorial board.) I am not interested very much in what the rational-thought model of social science has to say, because it all strikes me as so retro-positivist--Skinnerian even--and wrong, and far too abstract to be taken seriously as actual social science. But never mind methodological and epistmological foreplay: What the hell is going on out there, anyway?

Let's start with the most obvious elements of the problem and move along to the less obvious ones. We have not one but three problems, as Bob Samuelson pointed out some days ago. We have a financial meltdown and consequent credit crunch as the result some very stupid behavior on Wall Street. We also have a collapse in consumer spending, which is related to but still independent of the first problem. And we have an international economic problem thanks to the integration of the world's financial and trade markets, which is making itself felt in rising protectionism and the virtual disappearance of capital and credit from the poorer countries. These three problems have related but not identical causal patterns. So there is no one solution for the problem, because it isn't one problem.

Timothy Geithner's approach to the second iteration of the bank bailout is designed to address the first problem. The stimulus package is designed to address the second problem. As far as I can make out, nothing much is being done by governments to address the third problem, although it is true that the President did see the wisdom of resisting the "buy America" element in the stimulus package. As understandable as the idea is, for a reason explained below, it would only contribute to beggar-thy-neighbor protectionism that would make pretty much everyone worse off by dampening demand worldwide.

All of this, so far, is pretty obvious, I think. Less obvious is what caused it all. For a good while most people thought that the subprime mortgage debacle was the root cause of the problem. And this view, naturally enough, led observers to focus in on the Wall Street subculture, and the regulatory environment for it shaped in Washington. This is part of the problem, to be sure, but it is not necessarily well understood.

It is true that technology is to blame for part of what has befallen us. The speed with which transactions can be completed has enabled new products like bundled investments and derivatives to dash around madly below the radar of more sagacious observers. The top people in may investment firms really had no idea what the kids they hired were doing at their computers. So the sheer volume of bad investment decisions rose much faster than the regulatory system could detect and correct for them. It is true, too, that the incentive structures for both the bond-rating agencies and the SEC itself have been either perverse or way too lax. And it is true, further, that a market-fundamentalist ideology--that markets could be counted upon to regulate themselves--is partly to blame for that. It demobilized our sense of the possibility of error and tragedy. It made the crooked timber of humanity, to remember Kant's famous phrase, seem suddenly straight.

But that is not the whole story even at the level of the subprime crisis, and it turns out that the subprime crisis is not at all the source of the overall problem.

The beginning of wisdom here is that a regulatory system is effective in relation to the people it is supposed to regulate. If you have a flawed and loose regulatory system, it will still work reasonably well if the people being regulated are basically provident, patient, honest, abstemious and mindful of intergenerational responsibility as inculcated in the traditions of society's core institutions. But if you have people who are greedy, impetuous, dishonest, debauched and selfish, even a much more rigorous regulatory system will not work well. In the end the problem at this level is not about values but virtues. One would do well to recall something Edmund Burke once wrote: "Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. . . . Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon the will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."

This is why, when this mess began to take the shape it did, The American Interest searched at this level not for the symptoms of the problem but it's true source: virtue, not value. So I thought immediately of Gertrude Himmelfarb and her work on the Victorians, but she never replied to my invitation to write. Neither did Thomas Sowell. Nate Glazer replied, but declined to commit to write. I had to content myself with a marvelous essay on "The End of Thrift" by Barbara Defoe Whitehead, the end of thrift being a part of the problem but not the whole of it.

I still insist that, as far as Wall Street is concerned, the real issue isn't technical or technological; it is moral in the broadest sense of the word. And that is why, too, I have commissioned Ramesh Khurana of the Harvard Business School to write on the monumental but virtually unmentioned shift in business school culture over the past thirty years. We have gone from a time when business understood its social responsibility as that of creating wealth to one that rewards and cares about only making money. These are not at all the same things, of course, but that I need even to point that out is a measure of what has happened to us as a culture.

Yes, we have to change the way the bond-raters get paid. Yes, they have to get serious over there at the SEC, start guarding the chickens rather than feeding the foxes, and Ms. Shapiro seems to understand that very well. Yes, along with Senator Levin, we have to do something drastic about offshore secrecy jurisdictions, which aid and abet the cavalier deals and selfish behaviors Wall Street has specialized in lately. But even all that will not make bankers and hedge fund operators any more intrinsically trustworthy. It will only constrain their ability to act badly within the law. Rather, the business culture itself has to change, and we have to hope that it doesn't take thirty years. We need more George Baileys and fewer Mr. Potters, if the metaphor from "It's a Wonderful Life" works for you. How do we do that? I wish I knew. I do know, however, that changing a few regs will not do the trick.

As I say, however, the subprime problem is not really the source of the mess. As most people know, the subprime bubble arose in part because an earlier bubble, the tech bubble of the previous decade, was never really popped and deflated. Thanks to Mr. Greenspan's political instincts, about which we could speak for hours, the Fed let interest rates dwell at rates that instead caused the bubble to migrate into the housing market. But even this is not the source of the problem, but only a prior second-order manifestation of it. The source of the problem, as Martin Wolf of the Financial Times has been at pains to point out now for some years, is that there was just way too much money in American banks and financial institutions, far more than could be lent out wisely.

There was way too much money to lend to the U.S. government, whose deficits were nowhere near that level. American businesses did not need to borrow so much, for the their profits were adequate for their own investment in capital. So where did it go? The banks essentially tried to bribe the money into loans to consumers using very low real interest rates. Want to buy a house you can't afford? We can make that happen. Want to extend your debt on your credit cards? Let us accommodate you. Want to borrow huge sums to send your kids to expensive private colleges and universities, so that you can keep up in the status race for the future? Here not only did banks oblige, but the Federal structures for student lending became bizarrely corrupt, and university administrations, for reasons of their own, hiked tuitions and fees way up trying to take best advantage of loan environment. Yes, you heard me right: The breathtaking rise in tuition in recent years, vastly above the rate of inflation, is partly because of all the money available to be borrowed by status-sensitive parents.

Where did this money come from? Well, China, and Japan and the Arabs mainly. The Chinese in particular, trying to propel export-led growth like the Japanese and Germans did three, four and five decades ago, have kept their currency artificially undervalued. They have done this, and prevented inflation, by soaking up export earnings in dollars and reinvesting them back into what was and, amazingly, still is, taken to be the safest place: the United States. Think of it this way: Joe the plumber goes to Wal-mart and buys some cheap piece of Chinese junk he doesn't really need but wants anyway because he saw it advertised on TV, and pays for it with a credit card; the Chinese manufacturer makes $2 from the purchase, and the Chinese government buys those dollars with cheap yuan (which the manufacturer saves or reinvests) and uses them to buy T-Bills. So the $2 ends up back where it came from, except now it is the property of the Chinese government in some sovereign wealth fund. The Fed keeps interest rates low, because it would attract even more foreign capital if it promised higher yields. And that encourages consumers to borrow more and go deeper into personal debt, and the whole stupid cycle starts all over again.

I've left out a lot, like the inflation-dampening effects of cheap goods from abroad, and I intend to keep it left out, but you get the basic idea. The basic idea is what Niall Ferguson has called Chimerica--the idea being that China and the United States formed a single economic system in which China saved and manufactured and America spent and consumed. They basically acted as our savings bank, and we provided them a market sized commensurately to their expanding manufacturing base. This led to a huge trade deficit, of course, which had to be financed, but the Chinese and others were happy to help finance it, even at low yields on their investment, to sustain American demand. And around and around and around we went until the whole arrangement simply went off the tracks, and Wolf and few others warned it had to eventually.

It is human nature that too much money chasing too few really valuable goods and services is going to eventually lead to people taking risks they should not take. Money should not sit idle; it should earn more money. And of course it's a kind of game, too, in which emotions about status and success play a role. The bubbles we've seen were the result of risky behavior at a near mass level. Ordinarily, you learn in economics class that too much money chasing too few goods and services leads to inflation, as the price of what there is to buy is bid up by raging demand. But an asset bubble is a kind of inflation, after all. As long as the money supply is responsibly shepherded, the currency will not degrade. But that only stokes asset inflation--the money has to go somewhere. But just like a currency inflated beyond the value it can actually procure is worth less, so overvalued assets end up creating what amounts to virtual, ghost or fantasy money. I am sorry that so many people my age have lost so much of their retirement savings, but they have to know that a lot of that money wasn't ever real in the first place; it did not represent real value extent in the real economy.

Of course, if in the past 16 years we had had a government that understood all this, the government might have borrowed massive funds at low rates on behalf of long-term investments in infrastructure, education, energy research and technology and a few others areas. That money borrowed would have paid off in spades had it been invested wisely--like the GI Bill did, only several hundred times scaled up. But this didn't happen. The Clinton Administration was happy that it left us with a balanced budget and even a surplus there for a while. Democrats took pride in that. They shouldn't have. As for the Bush Administration, as far as I can see it had no economic investment strategy for the long haul at all. It took a market fundamentalist view of things, an ideologically driven policy in that domain no less than its foreign policy after 9/11 was faith- instead of reality-based.

So far, I have been talking about the recession/depression (we'll find out which it is in due course) as though it were just a bigger, badder business cycle. That was the premise of an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal last week by two economists, Reinhart and Rogoff. These two scholars did us a service of sorts by comparing past recessions both here and abroad. By looking at the historical data and plugging in what we know about our own situation near the front end of the current recession, they predicted how deep and how long this one was liable to be. Very interesting.

Toward the end of the piece they admitted that this recession displays some differences with past ones, including the 1981-82 U.S. recession, the last really deep one we experienced. But, as if the editor was holding a sword and a limited word count over their heads, they only managed to mention one: global scale. This recession is global in a way the 1981-82 recession was not, so that American investors lost money not just here but pretty much everywhere. Spatial diversification no longer buys much insurance against tough times. Fine, but that is hardly the only difference.

One other difference is that in 1981-82 Paul Volcker was deliberately trying to create a recession in order to wring a devastating inflation out of the economy. It was painful, but it was the right thing to do and it worked. Now, we're trying to do the reverse: We're not fighting inflation but deflation. We're trying to create not a recession but some inflationary sparks to offset the deflationary trends. One would think, would one not, that the policy measures one would take would hardly look like those of 1981-82?

Another difference is that in 1981-82 the United States retained a much larger manufacturing sector than it has today. I don't know the numbers, but I would not be surprised if our manufacturing sector today involved no more than 15% of the labor force, and it may well have been double that 25 years ago. If you go to the American Midwest and talk to people, you quickly hear tales of large manufacturing concerns having simply disappeared. Now, to stimulate an economy like the one we have today do you use the same models as those that were used 25 years ago? I've asked some economists this question. Some say it doesn't matter what the ratio of manufacturing to services is, you do the same things with interest rates, taxes, money supply and so on. I've asked others who answer that with so much of what Americans buy being imported today compared to 1982, you do need a different model. If the stimulus puts money into the hands of Americans through tax cuts, but the money gets spent mostly on stuff from China and Korea and Indonesia and oil from the Arabs, well, it seems highly unlikely that this is going to create or sustain the same number of American jobs as would be the case if all or most of that stuff were made here. Hence the reference above to the logic of the "buy America" impulse. So those economists who say the manufacturing/services ratio makes no difference do not persuade me.

And then I have actually met a few economists who I sense are telling the truth. The truth sounds something like this: "We have no idea. We do not yet have the methodological tools to generate any empirical basis upon which to give an answer. Yes we need a new model, but no, we don't have one."

If this is what the President meant by the phrase not your run-of-the-mill recession, well, that's both good and bad: Good that he realizes that we're off the charts, bad that our economic experts have no real idea what to do.

So far, we have raised the possibility that this dive in the business cycle may be sui generis and hence not subject to prediction or policy treatment based on past experience. But now it's time to go to a more speculative level. What if what we're witnessing is not just about a business cycle, the sort of cycle typically measured in 12, 18 or 20-some-year intervals? What if what we are seeing has to do with a cultural cycle whose causal power exceeds that of a business cycle, and is shaping this particular business cycle in ways we are not accustomed to perceive?

What on earth am I talking about? I will try to explain, but bear with me, please, for we need to take a few steps sideways to set the stage.

Forty years ago and more there was a spate of books and article on automation and its social impact. To simplify, a lot of people were very impressed by the sharply rising capacity of humans to design machines to substitute for human labor--machines that could do whole categories of work faster, better and cheaper than people could. Of course, assembly line use of machines predated the 1950s, but the scale and sophistication of machine tooling and automated processes really took off after World War II, and we'll not delay here to go into the sociology-of-science reasons why that was. Suffice it to say that it dawned on some people to ask the following kind of question: What if, twenty or thirty or forty years from now, we reach a stage where only a fraction of our labor force--say 10-20%--are able with the use of sophisticated technology to produce all the core products we really need: food, energy, shelter, transportation, medicine? What will the other 80-90% of the labor force do?

In some versions of the automation thesis, it seemed inevitable that Western economies would have to devise some means of collectivizing not the means of production, but the means of distribution. The basic idea was there there were core, indispensable economic functions, as described by the categories just mentioned, and everything else that was secondary, or tertiary. So if so many working Americans were not necessary for core production, how would food, shelter, transportation and the rest make it from the producers to the whole population? How would the nonessential buy it? Where would their spending power come from?

These rather old-fashioned types concluded that, well, we'll just need to give them what they need; they won't have to buy it. How will the superfluous 80-90% spent their days, get satisfaction, feel purposeful and maintain their dignity? That was a tough one, and answers varied: Arts and crafts; lots of leisure; and whatever other non-essential activities that transcended just laying around shooting pool and drinking beer people could think of. (Yes, I'm being a little glib here, but not that much. Don't believe me? Go read this stuff for yourself.)

What actually happened, of course, was different--but for some strange reason is still not well understood by a lot of Americans because, after all as the saying goes, a fish is the last to discover water. What happened was, to make a very complex matter simple, a consumer society, complete with the generation of artificial "needs" manufactured from naked "wants" via the genius of advertising. That consumer society came complete with planned obsolescence, with, for the first time in human history, whole factories making products no one really needed that were planned to break and be disposed of--thrown away. So the way nonessential workers got money to buy essentials and filled up their work hours so as not to feel completely marginal to creating social wealth and welfare was by doing things on the outer edge of necessity, but which were rarely if ever discussed in those terms.

Now, running a society and an economy this way accelerates the use of raw materials and accelerates the creation of waste. It also requires massive social delusion, wishful thinking, or non-thinking, by equating the social value of someone producing food or steel or quality education with someone working in a factory making sea-monkeys or plastic-ware. If any American from the 18th or 19th century were to somehow be plopped down in late 1950s, 1960s, 1970s America and witness how most people were making their livings, they would simply not have been able to understand what they were seeing. Take the aphorisms in Poor Richard's Almanack and they harmonize well with pre-World War II America; look at them in the context of the throwaway, fast-food culture of postwar America and they seem a kind of bad joke. Such a person, whether Ben Franklin himself or some lesser typical man or woman, would look at us and conclude that some mysterious derangement had occurred.

Now, as I say, this is highly simplified. One way it is simplified is that science and technology made more products available to people, so that "want" turned not unreasonably into "need." How about an electric washing machine? It beat the hell out of washboard and tub. How about a refrigerator instead of an ice box? How about power tools? Better automobiles, radios, record-players and medical care, in particular? It is no easy matter for anyone to say objectively where "need" stops and "want" starts as time moves on--everyone knows that. Do you really "need" a microwave oven, despite the fact that people lived well and never missed one for more than 99% of recored history? But sure, you "need" one. Heck, I have one, too.

Fair enough--it's a tough call between need and want at the margins. But beyond the margins it is sometimes not a tough call at all. Who "needs" a hand razor that vibrates? Who needs pre-packaged food full of preservatives? Who needs room deodorizers that last six months? There is simply no doubt, in my mind at least, that a great deal of demand in our economy is artificially produced by prodigious amounts of advertising in all forms, of which television was the key original delivery vehicle, and really still is. Do an experiment, if you watch television. Monitor all the commercials you see over a period of, say, a week. Write down what's being sold. Then, after a week or whatever period you choose, review the list and ask yourself: "Which of these products and/or services advertised do I really need?" Not "food", but a Wendy's double-cholesterolburger with cheese and pickles that's actually pictured and advertised. The answer, of course, will be none of them. Not one thing; not one service. If you really need something, there is no reason for anyone to advertise it, save, if necessary, to let you know it exists.

Of course, bad feelings about the throwaway consumer culture and the madness of television in being the delivery vehicle for it all have existed for a long, long time. A lot of traditional people, religious people, conservative people did not like what they saw the first time they saw it. But these were a growing minority.

It's true, too, that in the mid-to-late 1960s and into the 1970s the environmental movement, the ecology movement and the counterculture generally were all motivated by opposition to this kind of artificial economy and the social effects it produced. Lots of people warned that these social effects, not to mention the literal long-term costs of this kind of social organization, were not sustainable. Daniel Bell wrote a book in 1976 called The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism in which he tried to suggest the mechanisms by which this system would undermine itself. (Bell was, and remains, a social conservative but also a socialist, something most people think of as sort of an odd combination but which I understand intuitively.) Twenty years later, when Bell wrote a new introduction to the book, some critics took him to task for being wrong about practically everything. Capitalism was alive and well, socialism was discredited, the American economy was going gangbusters, and so there, Danny boy, in your eye! Now who looks to be closer to the truth, perhaps--Bell or his critics?

In short, what I am suggesting is the possibility that a cultural cycle is finally drawing to an end, a cycle in which consumerism, material fetishism of all kinds (where depressed people go shopping to relieve their depression; after all, every age has its specific psychological illnesses), and disdain for or the discounting and ridiculing of traditional social restraints associated with religion are ebbing. Maybe consumer spending is down so sharply not only because people are worried about not being able to make core-need ends meet, but because ever more people are sobering up and asking themselves, what do I need all this crap and clutter for anyway?

I don't know if that's really so. Maybe I am giving the typical American way too much credit for straight thinking. I probably am; most Americans, I am sure, are spending less because they're frightened of losing their job. But what if it is so, or what if one day not too long in the future it becomes so? What are the implications for American recovery from this mess we're now in, and for the future of the American economy?

One implication would be that a lot of the jobs now disappearing in nonessential (or downright harmful) sectors of the economy will never come back, and should never come back. So assuming we don't move to collectivized means of distribution (which would be a bad thing, to be sure), what will new and useful jobs look like?

It's not up to me, you know. But if it were, I would not be shy about making a few suggestions about the kinds of long-term investments America ought to be making.

One would be to revitalize American agriculture--make it far less capital-intensive and agribusiness-oriented than it is now. I could imagine a new Homestead Act of sorts, where the Federal government revises the old "40 acres and a mule" formula, and gets more distressed and socially stranded Americans back to the land, an expanded agricultural extension service there to help them learn best practice in growing food and animal husbandry. There's nothing wrong and a lot right with producing high quality food, and that looks to me like a major export bonanza lies ahead, as well. (I could go on about the environmental damage created by agribusiness and the political distortions its lobby is responsible for in Washington, but I'll set that aside for now.)

Another would have to do with education, the development of the highest quality human capital being the best investment any society can make in its future. And that's very labor intensive. It also means that we should open our doors to smart, creative entrepreneurial talent from abroad. We don't do that well anymore; seems we'd rather let in, or allow to stay, immigrants capable only of being gardeners, maids and bedpan emptiers. Boy, is that stupid.

Then, as everyone knows, there are new jobs in green energy paths. I love when people talk these days like this is something new. There hasn't been a new concept here in 40 years, though there have been some new technical breakthroughs. We could have done this sort of thing decades ago had the Congress any guts or foresight, or a President who made it a top priority. We've had no such thing, of course. Maybe we do now, however.

We can skip generations of technology in infrastructure development, too, and also in medical technology. Lots of high human-capital input jobs there.

And I believe that any truly liberal society also needs art, craft, music and literature. These are not superfluous to core economic functions; they inspire them in the first place.

If I try hard enough, I can close my eyes and see America several decades hence as a healthier, wiser and better society, with many more farmers and shepherds and teachers and artists and musicians and writers, and lots fewer advertising executives, K Street consultants, TV salesmen and repairmen, and fast-food "restaurants."

Of course, I have to close my eyes to see this America, because as far as I can tell it's all just a dream. Look at where we are with this stimulus package, and the debate over it. There is little to nothing transformational, in any sense, about what the President and the Democrats in Congress have proposed. And the Republicans, lord love a duck, are even worse right now: There is nothing too short-term for them. They want the stimulus package to be even more short-term than it already is! These are supposed to be real conservatives? Do they even know what word means?

Final thought for today: Maybe we're not talking just about a business cycle, or even just a culture cycle. Maybe we're talking about a civilizational cycle that involves the whole world, or most of it. We've had periods of globalization before, though less fully planetary in scope. There was the "other" gilded age of the late 19th and early 20th century. There was, it can be fairly argued (though I don't have time to describe it), the fairly well integrated Euro-Mediterranean culture of the high medieval era (say, late 12th to mid-14th centuries). There was also the integrated world of late classical times, say early 2nd to mid-4th centuries. None of them lasted. The earlier two were destroyed, you will be amused to learn, by pandemics (Justinian's Plague and the Black Death, respectively) enabled in part by climate change, and wars that erupted from the social chaos that followed. Note also that both World Wars I and II followed sharp economic downturns that followed in the wake of heightened material expectations.

Does that mean I expect this sharp global recession to kindle major wars, or be attended by a civilization-scale pandemic? Oh, I'm just a magazine editor; how on earth would I know? Barack Obama is the President. He's the one who understands that this is no run-of-the-mill recession. He's the one who needs to know. Does he?


Next up, several blogs describing my ill-fated but never-ending presidential campaign....


Monday, February 9, 2009

I took another extended weekend off from this blog, which would ordinarily lead me to apologize for so doing to all my expectant and disappointed readers. But since virtually no one is reading this blog, for reasons explained earlier, I don't have to do that. It doesn't mean, however, that I haven't been thinking about Obamanation and the Newest Deal while I was sleeping, reading, playing music, getting my brains beat out at bridge, walking in the woods, baking rye bread and making an eggplant parmesan that truly kicked culinary ass. I have indeed been thinking, and I'll come to that in a bit. But first a little public service notice, or better, some backstory to a public service notice.

In Sunday's Washington Post, front page on the right above the fold--in other words, the Post's Sunday lead--there appeared an article by Karen DeYoung (one of Colin Powell's biographers, as it happens) entitled "Obama's NSC Will Get New Power." You can read what General Jim Jones has in store, evidently with the President's approval, for yourself. What you can't read in the Washington Post is about where these ideas came from. They came, in the main, from a two-year Congressionally-funded commission called the Project on National Security Reform (PNSR).

PNSR was conceived and led by James Locher, the man who also conceived the Goldwater-Nichols reform back in 1986, the one that revamped for the better the structure of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Not only was General Jones one of about two dozen commissioners who have been with the PNSR effort pretty much from the start, so was the new DNI Admiral Dennis Blair. You can go to the PNSR website for a list of the other members; if you're more or less attentive to the American national security/foreign policy scene, you'll recognize plenty of the names.

If you want really to understand the analysis behind what Gen. Jones is thinking and has said and plans, you have two choices. One is that you can read the PNSR Commission study, which will be available to the general public pretty soon, but that's about 650 pages--a small hernia, in other words. Or you can read the executive summary to the study, of some 5,000 words, published in James Locher's name in the January/February issue of The American Interest. The American Interest is, of course, the magazine of which I am the founding editor, and it so happens that I helped the PNSR commission, in the latter weeks and months of its effort, to craft that executive summary upon Mr. Locher's request. Translation: I wrote it, and that's largely how I managed to snag this important piece of work for my magazine.

That doesn't mean that I'm on an intimate basis, politically speaking, with General Jones. Never met the man (yet). I did go to one PNSR Commission meeting toward the end of the effort, in case anyone in attendance wanted to ask questions about my draft executive summary, and I did see Admiral Blair there--and we spoke a bit. We've since exchanged a few emails and I sent him the intell material from the March/April issue of the magazine (essays by Gordon Lederman and John McLaughlin).

We'll see how this new NSC works out. I am optimistic that General Jones understands the system and its flaws, and has a good line to how to make things work better. But one thing is already clear, however: The transition to a stronger, more authoritative NSC is not likely to be a smooth one. The system in transition has already scored one doozy of a boner.

Jones apparently offered General Tony Zinni the post of U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, replacing Ambassador Crocker who is leaving real soon. Possibly seeing this as a power grab, Secretary Hillary scotched the idea, apparently arguing that it wasn't a good idea to have military guys in both Baghdad and Kabul (General Eikenberry, a 3-star, is headed there). So Chris Hill got that job instead--Chris Hill of the Six-Power Talks negotiations, Chris Hill who I met and worked with on Air Force II (and on the ground) when I travelled to India, Pakistan, Korea, China and Japan with Secretary Rice almost exactly four years ago. But that's not important.

Anyway, this was pretty embarrassing, obviously. Jones then reportedly apologized to Zinni for the mix-up and asked him if he'd wanted to be our man in Riyadh instead. Zinni, again reportedly (heck, I certainly wasn't there), general to general, Marine to Marine, told Jones where he could shove that job.

Boy, isn't gossip fun, especially when it has that strong, musky odor of verisimilitude about it?

You can see why Hillary felt as she did, assuming she did and this was not just an innocent start-of-administration communications mix-up. The Arab-Israeli portfolio has been rented out to George Mitchell, the Afghan-Pak portfolio to Richard Holbrooke. Vice-President Biden has staked a claim to policy on Russia and NATO. What does she get to do? Stare down Hugo Chavez?

But maybe she's lucky. Look what these folks have drummed up for Afghanistan alone. You've got a 4-star in Washington at Centcom, General Patreaus, with overall authority on the security side. You've got another 4-star in the field there, Gen. McKiernan. You've got a 3-star soon in the Embassy, Gen. Eikenberry. You've got Holbrooke as special representative of the President. You've got the lurking Biden, who has taken a special interest in Afghanistan for some time, and one of his longtime aides, Tony Blinken, in a hot seat with a joy stick at the NSC. Someone down there is the Assistant Secretary of State for Central Asia, too, presently Richard Boucher but probably not for long. And so the question: Who the hell is in charge?! Beats me. Hillary is wise to stay out of the way until this gets sorted out.....if it ever does get sorted out.

Anyway, I have had lots of other thoughts this weekend, mainly about cycles, bicycles and tricycles. And I want to tell you all about my failed Presidential campaign as well--not the rubber chicken I never ate but the ideas I developed. But later for this......later. I have other things I need to do.


Posted 10:47 AM 0 comments
Thursday, February 5, 2009

Boy, things just get stranger every day around here, in Washington. The Montgomery County government is threatening to curtail public transportation. This is a replay of what it tried to do last year, even with my commuter bus, the wonderous #37 Ride-On. We arose to stop the stupidity back then, trying to explain to the county executives that eliminating efficient modes of transportation and forcing the substitution of more expensive ones would not save county government money in the longer run. This is obvious. We also tried to explain that their proper metric of accounting was not their own parochial budget but the good of the community people who elected them. This was a hard concept for them to grasp.

Apparently, they are not alone. In the New York Times yesterday, there was a front page story, dateline St. Louis, about the paradox of there now being more riders on buses and trains and less of them to ride. It's not a paradox, but a sign of stupidity, and of the Federal system not meshing properly. You cut public transportation routes and you will increase unemployment in the class segments that can least afford it, people who have no other viable, affordable way to get to work. You create a cascade of disconnection. You harm the economy double: not only do you not create jobs, you destroy ones that exist. The stimulus package would be more efficient by far if it saved jobs that already existed than tried to create new ones. But that's not how the thing seems to be designed with respect to mass transit.

The result? We will end up delivering new buses and train cars in three or four years time to transportation systems that have eliminated the routes on which those buses and train cars are supposed to go, and have mothballed all the vehicles they used to run. And later on, the people who are in charge now will say, Oh, well, we didn't realize. Horsefeathers. If I can see that now, and you can see that now, so can they.

Also amusing (yes, you have to have a graveyard sense of humor these days) is another New York Times item -- Maureen Dowd's columns. Maureen Dowd was savagely funny and insightful during the Bill Clinton watch. With George W. Bush, however, she lost her muse entirely. She was in an over-the-top competition where she had no real comparative advantage, for there was so very, very much for liberals to be over the top about. Now, she seems to be back in her element. In a way she's a kind of Benjamin Button columnist, a backwards critic who excels at skewering her own kind better than her ideological opposites.

As always, there is plenty more to say, but I lack the octane right now to say it. So a brief blog today; forgive me, those who may be listening in.

Posted 3:16 PM 2 comments
Wednesday, February 4, 2009

I have now collected nearly a half dozen comments saying, in effect, that President Obama has called off the "war on terror." I'm sure I could have collected many, many more such statements if I read more widely. The most noteworthy of these comments was one by Dana Priest, a highly regarded journalist, and Priest was referring, of course, to the fact that with the stroke of a pen during his first week in office the President reversed a whole raft of legal interpretations related to the state of war, notably policy concerning the treatment and status of detainees, made during the Bush Administration.

This is true, of course, the President did do that. I am not qualified to judge that subject this way or that, not myself being a lawyer. Others are busy doing it--fine. But the concept of a "war" on terrorism is not limited to legal issues. This is a complicated matter, with legal, political-strategic and psychological elements that don't neatly overlap. (You remember, perhaps, from before, one of the definitions of a temperamental conservative? Well, here is an example of that way of thinking in action.) I am at a loss to understand how anyone can say that Obama has called off the war on terror in the face of what he has said and done in that regard.

Let me remind you, if I may, that in his Inaugural address the President said the following: "Our nation is at war against a fair-reaching network of violence and hatred." How does his use of the word "war" square with a judgment that he has called off the war?! Does anyone suppose that he and his speechwriter just made a brain fart? (No, folks, at that level brain farts don't make it through into the final draft.) How does the idea that Obama has called off the war square with his authorization of deadly (and apparently effective) drone strikes into Pakistan, for example?

Maybe he should not have said "war" in his Inaugural, however. Here is why.

Calling the terrorism problem a war from the start, after 9/11/2001, was, in my view, justified and sensible, and not only or even mainly because of the legal flexibility it gave the President as Commander-in-Chief. It had to do with an appreciation for how the Clinton Administration's legalist approach backfired crucially. As some of you may know, the U.S. government has a chance to intercept Osama bin-Laden's plane en route from Khartoum to Kabul in 1996, and declined to go after him for fear that we would be unable to convict him in a court without revealing classified information. We all know what that kind of thinking led to, and Bush Administration principals were determined not to repeat that generic error.

That does not justify the stupidity of stepping in the classic terrorist trap--of getting the target of terrorism to be untrue to his own principles. And we have certainly stepped in it, having mis- and overreacted badly to the threat. I, for one, don't think the Patriot Act went too far, but honest people can disagree about that. (Most liberals, however, don't share that assessment: They think anyone who disagrees with them is evil, although in most other non-political contexts--religious ones, for example--they will deny the existence of evil. But never mind......) I do think that a lot of the other things we've done have gone too far and have harmed us strategically. (I have written about this: "Comte's Caveat: How We Misunderstand Terrorism", Orbis (Summer 2008).

Anyway, back to the point: While it made sense to use the "war" concept after 9/11/2001, to mobilize the consciousness of the American people and to shatter the legalist mindset of the past, it pretty soon became problematic, for several reasons.

It became problematic because Vice-President Cheney and his aide, David Addington, used the legal implications of "war" to lard on their minority view of what Executive power entailed. That is largely what the President reversed--he de-larded the law as understood, interpreted and hence practiced.

It was also problematic because it didn't align with what most of our closest allies thought was going on, and so over time hindered coooperation.

It is also problematic because it debases the meaning of war. Very few Americans outside of the armed services have had to sacrifice anything in this "war." It hasn't felt like wartime to most of us, even with the protracted campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to its eternal shame, the Bush Administration never asked the American people to sacrifice for the common good. President Bush told us to go shopping. There probably will be a real war somewhere in America's future, sad to say. When it happens, the silliness of having called the 2002-09 period "wartime" will come vividly clear.

It was problematic, too, because of the amorphous and open-ended nature of the struggle against jihadi violence. The Alien and Sedition Act, what Lincoln did with civil liberties during the Civil War, what Wilson did with them during World War I, what FDR did with the Japanese internment during World War II, were ugly, but they were temporary because the problems that gave rise to them had a clear-cut end. This "war" isn't likely ever to have that kind of end, so the legal and psychological problems that are not severe from the outset might grow more severe over time.

In short, I think it's too soon to say that Obama has called off anything. So far he has thought and acted on this issue like the lawyer he is. We will see if he comes to understand the complexities of the matter well enough to think and act like a statesman. Time will tell.

.
Posted 8:26 AM 0 comments
Tuesday, February 3, 2009

So, Tom Daschle has withdrawn, as has Nancy Killefer, both for reason having to do largely with tax evasion issues and other legally questionable practices. Timothy Geithner made it under the wire, though most people admitted that in normal times he might not have made it. Gov. Richardson never even made it to the inauguration. They're falling like flies.

What does this prove, if anything? It proves that our tax code is absurdly complex, hard to understand, tempting to evade and in dire need of radical simplification. I have never been particularly fond of Mr. Daschle, but the whole idea that he could owe more than $250,000 just for the use of a car service seems absurd on the face of it. As for Nancy Killefer, I sympathize with anyone who has to deal with DC government bureaucrats over anything, let alone taxes.

The bigger picture, however, is even more frustrating. I believe President Obama has been sincere all along in wanting to attack the transactional K-Street politics that has destroyed good government in this country. But I think he has been terribly naive in supposing that just changing the ethics laws and banning lobbyists from an administration could really solve the problem.

Had he understood better what the real situation was, and here a new book by Robert G. Kaiser of the Washington Post, So Damned Much Money, might be illuminating, he would have known that a stimulus package could not avoid getting tangled up in the web of lobbyists who pollute this city. The talk here in town has been about whether a stimulus package could simultaneously be used to jump-start some needed reform. Rahm Emanuel has supposedly captured this advance spirit by commenting on how it's a sin to let a crisis go unused. That's the wrong question. The issue is not whether a bill can stimulate job-creation and jump-start reform simultaneously, but whether it can stimulate job-creation and strangle the transactional morass simultaneously. Apparently, it can't. Apparently, some of the would-be stranglers need to be strangled themselves.

As for jump-starting real reform, whether in education, energy policy, health policy and so forth, what really stands forth from what we've seen in the past few weeks is that the Democratic members of our political class have no new ideas. And that includes the President, as I've said before. Almost nothing in the stimulus package that is supposed to be reform-engendering is new, and way too much of it may be fairly described as rancid old pork. What have these people been doing for eight years in opposition, anyway, that when their chance to make a difference in the midst of a crisis lands right in their lap, they can't think their way out of a Seven-Eleven?

It's not because there aren't ideas out there either. Liberal think-tanks and magazines have had and have propagated some good ideas over recent years, and some centrist and conservative groups have done so, too. The American Interest, for example, has promoted the idea of a Baby Bond-Service culture, along with CityYear and others. Now that's an idea that would really make a difference, sort of like a second GI Bill but wider and bigger. There are lots of ideas out there, some of them well developed and promising--why doesn't President Obama or the Democratic leadership in the Congress seem to know about them? Don't they read? This I find a lot more disturbing, and depressing, than what has happened to Mr. Daschle, Ms. Killefer and may happen to still others.


Posted  2:18 PM 0 comments
Monday, February 2, 2009

I've taken a few days off from this blog, which I know bloggers are not supposed to do. Tough. As I have already said, I don't really like the whole blogging subculture, so I have no intention of being obedient toward it beyond necessity. I was just tired. But now I am not tired, and I have plenty to blither about. I'll limit myself, however, to three semi-random comments.

First, I noticed that one of the answers in Sunday's New York Times crossword puzzle is "Powell", the clue referencing his autobiography. Did I send my old boss an email advising him that now he'd really hit the bigtime? He has a finely honed sense of humor, but I thought better of it. I'll save it. Another, less royal friend once provided the quote for the Times' quote acrostic puzzle, from his book Modern Dictators. This was some several years ago. I told him about it; he, no puzzle doer himself, never otherwise would have found out. He was delighted and appreciative. So one never knows about such things.

Second, I saw that President Obama, in the early flurry of things he can do by Executive Order alone, reversed several Bush Administration edicts having to do with labor relations. Hurray! This, to remind myself and others, is why I once was a Democrat and never was a Republican. It is unfair to caricature Republicans as the party of big business, who have no interest or compassion for the "little guy", while Democrats are the party of real, working Americans and are against corporate concentrations of power. In fact there are compassionate conservatives; this is not just some sort of deflectionary slogan. And in fact, if you look at the record, Democrats have been in bed as much or more with the Wall Street muggers than have Republicans. Many if not most of the deeply unfortunate decisions made about the deregulation of financial markets in recent years were made during the Clinton watch, not the Bush watch.

All that said, yeah, it's true: Rank-and-file Republicans are unsympathetic to labor unions, while at least most Democrats are sympathetic. Even my colleague and friend Frank Fukuyama, a Republican who nonetheless pronounced himself pro-Obama, opined recently that we should not overreact to the present economic crisis, and one example of overreacting he gave was that we should not want to return to the union-dominated labor markets of the 1950s and 1960s.

Well, there isn't much chance of that, but why would that be such a bad thing? There isn't much chance of it because we don't have the kind of industries anymore in plentitude sufficient to support such a shift. Our manufacturing sector in this country is a pathetic shell of its once thunderous self. This is bad, for reasons I'll get to later. And the recent growth of the percentage of the workforce in unions is mainly a result of the growth of public sector unions, teachers unions and, worse, things like AFSCME. These are to real industrial labor unions what a mere Brussel sprout is to a full-grown cabbage.

Now, it's true that Labor unions -- AFL-CIO and International Brotherhood of Teamsters -- did abuse their power and their rank-and-file in some respects some decades back. It's also true that high labor costs put many American manufacturers at a competitive disadvantage in a world of liberalizing trade. But what's wrong with the kind of collective bargaining that insures that skilled workers get paid a living wage? Do Republicans think that only unions skew the market, that without unions there would be a completely fair labor market -- that large concentrations of corporate power are not capable of unfair practices, of tipping the playing field in their direction by, not least, suborning Congress and shaping, say, tax laws, in their own favor? Wake up, wake up, little GOP-children.

We have a law about all this stuff, of course: The National Labor Relations Act. It's a good law, too. But like all complex laws that beg regulators and interpretations, there are ways to bend it this way and ways to bend it that way. The Bush Administration bent it in ways that hurt labor; all these little subversions at the margins, which I will not stop to describe here, have been undone with the President's pen. Good for him.

Now third: What really got me toward the end of last week was John E. Potter, the postmaster general, who went on Wednesday before a Senate committee and broached the idea of ending Tuesday mail delivery to bail out the ailing USPS -- that's United States Postal System, for those not in the postal "know."

Mr. Potter noted before the Congress that new technology has depressed first-class mail volume, which is true; there is no doubt that the post office faces a long-term structural problem. But that isn’t its only problem, which is proved by the fact that USPS inefficiency long predated the technology/structure issue. After all, increases in first-class rates have significantly and consistently outpaced the rate of inflation for more than 40 years.

As I understand it, the real sources are threefold and internally related:

(1) An obscenely complex rate structure that gets worse every year. Gratuitous complexity is very expensive. It takes tens of thousands of over-paid middle managers working in acres of needless office space to manage this completely pointless baroque rate structure.

(2) The postal union, which strikes me most days as institutionalized featherbedding that does not really benefit the heroes of the postal service, the clerks and especially the carriers, but all those overpaid middle managers mentioned in point 1.

I suspect that the complexity of the rate structure derives in part from an infatuation with technology that violates Occam’s Razor in spades, and which, combined with the union problem, explains why the USPS is the only large organization I can think of that adds labor-saving technology without ever saving any labor costs!

(3) Congress’ success over the years in turning the USPS into a business subsidy. All that advertising crap in our mailboxes six days a week is tax deductible for business. You didn't know that, did you? The USPS claim that it makes money off 3rd-class mail would turn out to be inaccurate, I suspect, if one counted all system costs over time, including the middle-manager, rate-complexity-induced bloat I’ve already noted, since most of the rate complexity is business/advertising related.

If it were up to me (obviously, it isn’t) I would simplify the rate structure dramatically, getting rid of as many of the transactional costs it takes to apply it as possible. We need first class, parcel post, media mail and a special rate for advertising, but within those simple categories there should be no subdivisions for zip-plus four or machinable packages or bulk-mail. The rates should be set in a way to raise the necessary revenue while simplifying the whole affair, it being understood that simplification in the end will trump all the glass-bead-game like "incentives" cooked up to try to get USPS patrons to accommodate its absurdly complex machinery.

I would also get rid of ounce-by-ounce distinctions under a pound within the rate structures, since it has been many, many decades since the fine weight of a package was the main factor in determining how much it costs to deliver (how many hands and machines have to move it now matters a whole lot more): 1 ounce and under; 2-6 oz.; 7-12 oz.; and 12-16 oz should do it.

I would also significantly increase costs to advertisers and significantly decrease costs for both individual/individual and business/individual exchanges. We should be making it easier to buy and exchange goods and services via the USPS—that’s good for the economy—and using advertising revenue to subsidize that: not the other way around! I think most manufacturers would love a deal that decreases their shipping costs more than it raises their advertising budget. That would be good for everyone, except of course the special interests that make their livings dumping printed garbage into our homes and offices. Well, screw `em; let them learn to do something useful for a change.

Seems to me there is still a role for the postal service as an inherently governmental function that, in my view, should allow competition but not be completely privatized. It may have a smaller role on account of technology, but it still has a role. For Mr. Potter to propose eliminating Tuesday service, without even hinting at what’s really wrong, is a depressing sight to see (or to read about the next day).

I realize that efforts have been afoot for a long while now to deal with the real problems. I know that the Postal Regulatory Commission was created in 1996, and I know about Vision 2013 from this past October, a study designed to look out to the future and get ahead of the USPS' problems. But I frankly don’t think that these efforts so far have been bold enough to save the system from its problems—the structural ones combined with the self-inflicted ones.

Well, by now you're saying "Who cares? Who gives a shit or a giggle about the post office?" (Well, maybe you didn't say it quite that way, fair enough.) Yes, fair enough, but it's interesting all the same at least as a minor example of a major problem: Bureaucratic aging, the encrustation of layers of memo-and-meeting nonsense in governmental functions that prove the old adage of committee life that "where there's a will, there's a won't." Good heavens, folks: If we can't even tell ourselves the truth about something as insignificant as the post office, let alone figure out how to fix it, how on earth are we going to fix Social Security and Medicaid, the Homeland Security Department, the intelligence community, Defense Department acquisition and personnel policy, our bizarre food safety system, our health care mess, our failing schools (I could go on)?

I won't however. Next time something, maybe, about Davos, about free trade, about whether this economic crisis is really all that bad...... is economic growth really the "master" social good? Rather than assume that, as most do, perhaps we ought to think about it for a change.


Posted 11:44 AM 0 comments
Thursday, January 29, 2009

I keep telling you: Barack Obama may be a closet temperamental conservative. Don't believe it yet? Here is more evidence.

When one looks again at the inaugural address, carefully this time, one sees the three paragraphs I earlier identified as being of Presidential caliber. They are of such caliber not just because they are well written, but because of what they say. One that I have in mind starts like this: "For as much as government can do and must do, it is ultimately the faith and determination of the American people upon which this nation relies." That is a statement any temperamental conservative will agree with, and also any pragmatist, which echoes with the inaugural line about the size of government not being the issue, but its effectiveness, some ten paragraphs before. And indeed, my former State Department colleague Phil Zelikow, now teaching history at the University of Virginia, said as much in a post yesterday on the Foreign Policy magazine website. (Not as good a publication as The American Interest, but not so bad.)

The most telling line in the inaugural, however, that gives credence to my hunch, is the one in which the President urged the country to recognize that while our problems may be novel, "those values upon which our success depends--hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism--these things are old." (I wish he hadn't used the words "values" and "things", but never mind.) And then, even better, "These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress through our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths."

This is Obama as restorationist; this is not a man unmoored from the past; this is no hubris-drenched liberal. And if that were not enough, he told the American people that we all have "duties" and "responsibilities" as well as rights and entitlements. John McCain could have said that, and no doubt would have said something like it had he gotten the chance. We have "duties" to something larger than ourselves; we owe institutions for the quality of our social life-- it's about "we", not "I." If that's not temperamental conservatism as I have described it, nothing is.

As I pointed out to Phil, and as many others have noted, Obama is also shaped in part by the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr, and this is a very good sign. (If you do not know what this means, do not know who Rev. Niebuhr was, you should do something about that as soon as possible.) So there is a theological as well as a philosophical aspect to the foundation of Obama's pragmatism, or temperamental conservatism. You know that he mentioned Scripture in the inaugural and invoked God twice, do you not? Was this just pro forma; was he just checking off a political box? Maybe; but I don't think so.

What about Rick Warren, whose role in the inauguration ritual so pissed off the homosexual lobby (what others may want to call the "gay community", but hey, this is my blog, not theirs, so I will describe what it objectively is)? Obama has pronounced himself opposed to "gay marriage." Is this just expediency, a position that he would fold up and forget if it were to potentially cost him politically at some future point? A lot of people think yes; I am not so sure.

One more item of evidence, and then I promise I will get off this particular horse, at least for a while. When Obama went up to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to talk about the stimulus package, he apparently had a real heart-to-heart with some GOP Representatives. It was not a political drive-by, just for show, which some expected it would be. Here is what Zach Wamp, a Republican Congressman from Tennessee (and I swear that, as much as I admire The Onion, I am not making up that name) said after the encounter: "He knows that the debt and the deficit are huge long-term problems as well, and he made a compelling case. He sounded, frankly, like a Republican." (New York Times, January 28, 2009, p. A16) If you can't believe a guy named Wamp, who can you believe, eh?

A real temperamental conservative, and a real pragmatist, believes in contingency and in human agency. Believes in fact-based, not faith-based approaches to policy. Is not, in others word, lazy. This is why leaks about the new approach to Afghanistan trouble me. Obama, and General Jones, his very capable NSC Advisor, want to put more U.S. troops in Afghanistan and have them do less nation-building and more combat. This is saying, implicitly at least, that the solution to the problem there is more military, less non-kinetic than the posture adopted by the Bush Administration. Anyone out there have a taste for irony? Well, open wide, for here it comes.

This is not so good a sign of things to come. U.S. goals cannot be achieved in Afghanistan by military means short of mass murder, and seconding the nation-building tasks to the EU side of NATO just won't work. Now, it may be that nation-building in a place like Afghanistan is a fool's errand to begin with, for Afghanistan is not and never has been a state in the conventional sense. I'm not sure, but I tend to think that it is indeed a fool's errand. But I am absolutely sure that the country cannot be stabilized by an occupation force. You don't have to know anything about Alexander's travails in what was then called Bactria to reach this conclusion, but it certainty would help. You don't even have to remember what happened there to the Red Army. What you do have to know is that the problem has nothing to do with religion. The "new" Taliban is not the same as al-Qaeda or even the same as the old Taliban, the regime we attacked in October 2001. It is a form of mobilized Pashtun tribalism, and an attempt to preserve the ethos of pashtunwali. (Look that up if you don't know what it means.) I can imagine without much difficulty a situation in which the Pashtun clans have their autonomy from Kabul and from NATO, find a way to balance their interests among one another and with the country's Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazara, and still not pose a threat to the United States by allowing its territory again to be used as a staging ground for mass casualty terrorism. By fighting them on their own territory, we're going to continue to kill innocent people, piss them off, and drive them into the arms of religious crazies.

The idea of being tougher on Karzai, because he's allowed a lot of corruption, is similarly questionable. Corruption is culturally relative. When there is no strong state, horsetrading and bending the law are the only ways to get what you want. If areas under government influence can't grow and prosper from growing poppies, then the trade will migrate to areas the government doesn't influence and help fund al-Qaeda. Why on earth would we want to do that? A real pragmatist certainly wouldn't. A real pragmatist would start by doing what I suggested 5 years ago when I worked for government: We ought to buy the damned opium crop ourselves, all of it.

I like some others fear that Obama's misunderstanding of Afghan history and society will lead him into his own personal Vietnam. It's not either/or: either we escalate militarily or try harder at nation-building. We can't reliably achieve either of these goals; we can't win militarily and we can't develop that country into a unitary state, let alone a modern democracy. What we can do is help to organize political elements inside the country and some around it--including Iran--to make the country off-limits to terrorist plotting and staging. That is the core interest we have there anyway. Dealing with the more serious salafi menace is bound up instead with our policy toward Pakistan, which is a problem connected to but still distinct from Afghanistan. One thing is for sure: More U.S. soldiers shedding more Pashtun blood in Afghanistan is not going to help us in Pakistan.

Talk about path dependency: We might be witnessing the beginning of a trail of tears for the Obama Administration.



Posted  10:18 AM 0 comments
Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Enough blog foreplay: time to get down to the business of specifics, of details, which is where not only the proverbial devil dwells, but much else besides. I have thus far introduced myself a bit, had a word or two to say about the new President, even ruminating on the extent to which he might be a closet temperamental conservative, and had a little fun with names and Semitic languages. I promised, however, that once certain preliminaries were given their due -- you might call it prolegomena if you want to be fancy, or simple throat clearing if you want to be more honest--I'd get down to the day-to-day chronicle and commentary that is, I have been led to believe, the lifeblood of a daily blog.

But first another preliminary! I actually don't feel all that comfortable with the whole idea of blogs. Essays, which until recently required actual paper and ink, connote some rigor as to logic and presentation, some attention to rules of evidence, and some respect for actual knowledge. There is no such thing as a first-draft ready essay. Blogs, which require only electrons, connote instead intellectual impressionism rather than rigor, little or no attention to facts or evidence, and no respect for actual knowledge. Blogs are antithetical to the qualities of temperamental conservatism, and there seems to be no such thing as anything but a first-draft ready blog.

I don't like the whole subculture, and I don't like the premise that seems to lurk below the whole affair--namely, the postmodern nonsense that there is no reality that can be plumbed, no facts, no foundation for any non-relativist epistemology. If it were true that there are no facts, only narratives, then the difference between informed analysis and opinion and analysis and opinion based mainly on anal wind would disappear.

I say this is nonsense because it plainly is. Not even a postmodernist lit-crit fanatic would take a sick child to just anyone with an opinion about how to save the child's life instead of to a credentialed medical professional. When it matters, science is trump, and romantic gibberish takes a back seat. If it were really true that there are no facts and no way to establish causality, then none of the machines we use could exist. Where did this nutty idea come from? Some say it came from young anthropologists looking for a convenient pretext for not having to do actual fieldwork--that was the late Ernst Gellner's suspicion, in any case. But it probably came from a misunderstanding coupled with the widespread academic malady of wanting to be outrageous in order to be different in order to get noticed in order to maybe get tenure in order to persuade said academic that his or her professional life actually mattered to someone. In any event, what was the misunderstanding?

To simplify some, before Immanuel Kant came along, people used to think that human senses simply discovered reality. What people saw was what was really out there. Our senses simply copied reality, as it were, and conveyed it as such. It then dawned on some people that the human senses shape and filter sensory impressions, and that societies collectively shape reality for people through the assumptions they bring to it. As one man put it (Erving Goffman, an old teacher of mine), "social life takes up and freezes into itself the conceptions we have of it." In other words, human cognitive processes and the social psychology of groups meet reality half way. This means that different cultures will over time construe the world differently--will adopt different symbolic systems and means of categorizing reality, as they clearly do. This is called idealism, in the broadest philosophical sense of the term (not to be confused with that word's more common meaning). Now, it's one thing to say that our brains interpret the objective world and help to constitute it in our heads through language and other symbols, and quite another to say that our brains create the world irrespective of objective reality. This is what postmodernists seem to be actually claiming, or at least that's what it really comes down to despite their occasional protestations otherwise. This is silly, of course. It's a little like imagining a condom working properly with nothing inside of it, something that, as best I can tell, cannot be.

All that said, my blog, this blog, is not an implicit endorsement of postmodernism in any shape or form. It is not an implicit endorsement of the view that logic, rules of evidence and knowledge really don't matter because, hey, what the heck, all opinions are pretty much equally valuable or worthless, depending on one's view of the human species. I don't believe any of that. So why the blog at all? I already told you, in the first post: I need to shed words during the day so that I won't burden my family and friends with my incessant babbling.

OK, now, a week after President Obama may be said to have gotten down to work, we have something of a track record to examine. People pay excruciatingly close attention to beginnings, searching them solid to find some indication of deeper meanings that might allow prediction and better understanding of things to come. Sometimes people read too much into things; they "fill in" excessively, and that's natural. So for example my friend Fouad Ajami saw (in yesterday's Wall Street Journal) in a few phrases in Obama's inaugural address the abandonment of democracy promotion in the Arab and Muslim worlds as part of American policy. I don't doubt that Obama's understanding of this issue differs from that of his predecessor, and thank God for that (I am long on record opposing the Bush-style "forward strategy for freedom" as counterproductive and liable to lead to disaster, as it has in Gaza and arguably elsewhere, but never mind....). But I think Fouad reads too much into the language Obama (and his speechwriter) chose, and he ignored other language that might suggest the opposite, if you're looking to find it. "To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit based on the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history", he said, adding: "But that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist." That can be read as pro-democracy promotion language if you want to read it that way.

So we do have the Inaugural address to go on. We also have the President's interview with Al-Arabiya, the first he gave as President. And we have the President's comments on Capitol Hill yesterday, and of course the stimulus bill itself. We have, too, some behaviors in foreign policy, like drone attacks on Pakistan's Pashtun region and a willingness to let the U.S. Navy board a ship carrying Iranian weapons to Syria, presumably for re-routing to Gaza for Hamas. Secretary of State Clinton, too, has spoken some of Iran, North Korea and Pakistan. There have been some authoritative leaks about a new approach to Afghanistan and its erstwhile President, Hamid Karzai. There's actually a lot to talk about, a lot to reckon at the beginning of the journey that, like all such journeys, establishes the origins of a path dependency.

Indeed, so much has happened so fast that one hardly knows where to start. So let me just speak very briefly and telegraphically about a few items that, to me stand out as interesting and potentially important.

First, the Inaugural was not a particularly good speech. It was mercifully and properly brief, and it did contain by my count three paragraphs (out of more than two dozen) that qualify as Presidential-level stuff. The rest of it was sort of clunky in places, a lot of it was excessively vague, and no overarching and memorable theme can be taken from it. I wrote speeches for Colin Powell and a few for Condoleezza Rice, so I sort of know what this black art, as Peggy Noonan, one of President Reagan's speechwriters once called it, is about. After the campaign, during which Obama could be mesmerizing and electrifying, the Inaugural was a let-down for me. Of course if you voted for the man and love him to pieces you won't agree. You know the old saw: Love a man, love his wart; hate a man, hate his wart. But as someone who did not vote for him (or McCain) but still very much wants him to succeed, I say it wasn't a very good speech.

Why? Some say he did it on purpose, so as not to raise expectations too high. But I think that a 27-year old speechwriter who captured Obama very well as a politician and campaigner did not succeed in capturing him as President on day one. Good morning, folks: This is not the same thing! Writing for a President is a fundamentally different kind of task than writing for a candidate, even if the two are the same flesh-and-blood human being. It's not easy to do, and it's not easy to make the switch effortlessly.

The Al-Arabiya interview, also, I found troubling. His impromptu speech in it was not especially eloquent, which is surprising considering how eloquent that man usually is. As others have also noted, his toss-off phrase that we had good, mutual respectful relations with the Arab and Muslim world "as recently as twenty or thirty years ago" suggests that he doesn't know much about that part of the world. The period between 1979 and 1989 was not exactly calm and lovely for U.S.-Arab relations. He also said that a Palestinian state should be "contiguous." What does that mean--that the West Bank and Gaza should be connected by a slice of Israeli territory, which would (look at a map, and you'll see) make Israel discontinuous, dividing Beersheba off from direct access to Eilat? Evelyn Shuckberg of the British Foreign Office cooked up a truly mad idea back in the 1950s, called "dancing triangles" at the time, to reconcile this problem, but I am reasonably sure Obama has never heard of this this particular piece of archival esoterica. So I have no idea what he means by contiguous in this case.

Most of the interview was fine, at least in the sense that he did not say anything genuinely gaffe-like. Some of it was pretty tough, too, which is good, since that compensated for a remark toward the beginning in which Obama criticized previous American approaches. That's not presidential. He can believe whatever he likes, but a President cannot just say out loud whatever he believes.

What irked me most, perhaps, is that three or four times he did something George Bush frequently did that drove me crazy: He spoke of himself in the effective third person, speaking about himself as a kind of object. Bush used to start off little impromptu talks by saying things like "I'm here today to tell you that....." instead of just telling them. This dissociation of Presidential authority from the person of the President is always a bad idea. It diminishes Presidential authority. It's a kind of schizophrenia to publicly refer to the purpose of one's own efforts, of one's own job. Obama did it repeatedly: "Now, my job is to communicate the fact that the United States has a stake in the well-being of the Muslim world." Why not just say, "I believe that the United States has a stake...."? And then he said, "And so what I want to communicate is. . ." and "And my job is to communicate. . ." and so on. He's the President. It's not a job; it's a role. His authority needs to be portrayed as unitary and indivisible. He needs to stop calling attention to what he is doing while he is doing it, as with theatrical asides, because it diminishes the drama, and that in turn diminishes his own power. Someone needs to take him aside and tell him to knock this stuff off.

The stimulus plan, as I said in an earlier post, is disappointing. It doesn't touch the transactional K-Street culture; it feeds it. It's not creative or well thought through. Our civil engineers are deeply disappointed with the infrastructural parts. I like Alice Rivlin's idea that we vote the tax cuts and the simple, immediate stuff now, but wait and and be more careful with the longer-term aspects of the plan. Divide the thing into two, in other words--excellent idea. We will surely waste a lot of money if we don't stop to think through the consequences of what we're doing right now. It's not every day--thank God, again--that the government goes and spends $800 billion.

As for all the rest, just one comment. I think the hard power drone strikes into Pakistan are meant to balance out the impressions created by the "soft" decision in principle to close down Guantanamo. Or at least I hope some thought was given to balancing impressions, to the orchestration of words and deeds which is, whatever else it is, what diplomacy is largely about. One can, after all, hope.


Tuesday, January 27, 2009

The words conservative and liberal are very slippery words. In different contexts they mean not only different things but sometimes opposite things. As most educated people know, "liberal" arose some centuries ago, mainly in Britain, meaning anti-statist, against the control of central authorities, against mercantilism and against extortionary taxation, military impressment and property expropriation. Liberalism in the American context today means the opposite: more government authority, more taxes, more programs, more de facto if not intentional centralization of political authority.

Conservative used to mean, in its original European context, someone who was pro-monarchical, pro-social hierarchy and pro-established church. That means they were anti-republican (with a small "r"), anti-egalitarian and anti-intellectual in the widest sense of that term. By that definition, there has never really been an American conservatism, because the very founding of America was pro-republican, pro-egalitarian (within certain limits that Madison approved but Andrew Jackson did not) and anti-establishmentarian. (I've always wanted to use that word in an actual sentence, and now I have; what fun!!) In short, our founding was liberal in the original sense of the term. The conservatives among us at the time, the Tories, mostly left for Canada.

Unfortunately, a lot of people who fling the words liberal and conservative around do not appreciate their delicacy, or their etymologies. This matters because one cannot even ask a question like, "Is President Obama--and some "Blue Dog" Democrats, too--in some ways conservative?" without running into a hailstorm of misunderstanding.

The first common reaction to that question is that, no, it's impossible that Obama could be in any significant way a conservative, because everyone knows that Republicans are conservatives and Democrats are liberals. This is a most unfortunate premise. As noted in an earlier post, President Obama is in some ways inclined to social conservatism because of his own family history. Coming from a broken family, he has built a traditional one for his own family--he has taken them to church (maybe the wrong church, but at least some church), and appears to have insured their capacity for self-discipline and gratitude. (That's actually what prayer at its best is about in any church or house of worship: learning really well how to say please and thank you, not just to God, but to everyone; it's not about asking adult versions of Santa Claus to give you a new car, like maybe you once asked for a new bike.)

But how conservative might President Obama be? You can't answer that question without a working definition of what a temperamental conservative (and in contradistinction a temperamental liberal) is. And I stress the notion of a temperamental conservative, not an ideological or programmatic one. That's hard to specify anyway, because American conservatism as it has developed over the past century or two really consists of three streams, not all of which meld well with each other: the liberatarian, the "moral majority", and the Burkean streams.

I think temperamental conservatives have more in common with the Burkean stream than any other, but that, admittedly, is just my view. In any event, here, in very brief form, is my definition of a temperamental conservative. It consists of four parts.

First, values taken to be intrinsically good in and of themselves do not align in reality, but generally conflict. There are, as Isaiah Berlin used to say, incommensurate with each other--they cannot be measured off and calculated against each other. Creativity and innovation are good, but so is some measure of order and stability. Freedom is good, but so is responsibility toward others in a community. Justice is good, but so is mercy. Music is wonderful, but so sometimes is silence. And so on almost infinitely, with result that the maximization of any one value or set of values will harm others deemed to be equally good. In other words, trade-offs are inevitable. All roads do not lead to the same benign end. There is no end. Temperamental conservatism is above all things anti-utopian in basic disposition. Politics is not about revelation and final victory; it is about learning from cumulative experience and a never-ending need for balance and prudential judgment.

Second, because politics by definition cannot end, there is always the possibility of tragedy. Progress both moral and social-economic is possible but not inevitable. And it is usually slow and difficult: It is harder to build something fine than to destroy something fine. A temperamental conservative will instinctively bristle if he or she hears someone say, "Well, sure why not do that?; things can't get any worse." Things can always get worse, and often do--both because of mistakes people make and because people cannot control all of the influences that impinge on their challenges.

Third, reason is precious but limited, for there is no denying the passions--the emotional side of human nature. We are not wise enough, individually or in conclave (even within a well-intentioned government!), to find the answers to all our problems, and we are often not able to define or act on them objectively. Science is precious, too, but it cannot resolve moral issues; it can inform us of the consequences of our choices, but it cannot tell us what those choices should be, for those choices cannot be exhausted through the operation of reason alone. (If that were not so you would never have heard the word eugenics, but you have.) Because of this, temperamental conservatives tend to appreciate (at the least) the social value of religion in constraining and directing emotion in society, and tend to be more humble when facing the open-ended moral dilemmas that arise when values equally good clash.

Fourth, it follows that wisdom, at least when it comes to social life, is cumulative and collective, that it inheres in institutions (properly defined) rather than individuals. Temperamental conservatives believe in metis, a Greek word that, roughly translated, means knowledge that derives from an intimacy with one's own surroundings and experience, that is widely shared within a community, but that is difficult to formalize and transmit to others who are not members of that community. Precisely because wisdom is cumulative and collection, they accept that they owe something both to their forebears and to their progeny. By acknowledging inter-generational responsibility, they become hesitant to overthrow received ways of doing things unless they are certain that news ways really do mark an improvement. They do not oppose change; those who do are better called reactionaries, not conservatives. But they do not assume that all change leads to progress (see premise number two), do not assume they can use reason to know the all consequences of their decisions (see premise three); and do not assume that enhancing some values will have no downside with respect to other values (see premise number one).

How would a temperamental conservative handle the current economic crisis? He would understand that there might be a downside to anything he does. He would understand that mistakes can be made, and that bad things can happen despite the best of both intentions and actions. He would understand that there is a limit to how much we can know and predict. And he would understand that it would be bad to overreact, to throw out with what requires change institutional arrangements that do not require overhaul or renovation.

I think one can make a case, so far at least, that Barack Obama may be something like a temperamental conservative. I hope he is. In any event, I think we shall see in due course.



Posted at 8:43 AM 0 comments
Monday, January 26, 2009

First impressions are important, for better and for worse. The Obama presidency is now in the process of making its first impressions, and the record so far is mixed. I say so as someone who did not vote for either major party candidate, as indicated in a prior entry, so I can at least claim objectivity. That is more than most print and electronic journalists can claim, most of whom voted for and are now fawning and otherwise bending over backwards to spin positively what has been going on over most of the past week. I now better understand Robert Samuelson's decision never to vote for fear that it would distort his capacity for journalistic objectivity. What once struck me as an affectation or a quirk now actually makes sense.

On the one hand, the accumulation of Executive Orders the President has issued overturning a range of Bush policies--on presidential authority regarding counterterrorism, on environmental issues, stem-cell research, on abortion within the domain of U.S. foreign aid practices--has shown two things, both of them positive. First, this Administration experienced a functional transition period, unlike the Democratic administration before it; it knew at least some of the things it wanted to do, which shows that the Presidential team was processing policy flow properly. Second, it shows that the President is in charge, and that he has taken charge in a non-confrontational, matter-of-fact, low-rhetorical fashion. That is very good; it is much better to let one's deed do the talking than to mistake one's talking for deeds.

On the other hand, the main business at hand--the economic stimulus package--is unimpressive in the extreme. It is, as many commentators have pointed out, a grab-bag of Democratic Party pork-barrel favorites that will not help the economy quickly, that are very expensive and that show no obvious sense of thoughtful intent about how to take advantage of the economic crisis to really shape the future for the better. It is, once again, the "this old house" proclivity at work. Instead of laying 3,000 miles of new wire, for example, why not get smart and start burying the electrical power transmission system underground? It's more expensive on the front end but saves a lot on the back end; ever wonder why the more advanced European countries do not experience massive power outages when there are storms? Because they don't put their power lines up in the air like a bunch of ninnies.

Obviously, there are complications here. This is a big country; most of them are small so the economics work out a little differently. But what this really has to do with is the capacity to plan and to do so synergistically, comprehensively. One gets the feeling that we've practically lost the ability to do that in this country, except perhaps in the military, where outcomes rather than mere processes actually matter. Where once our town meetings were full of civil engineers, now they're full of lawyers and consultants. Oh, boy.

Even worse, the Congress is still operating as it has for years -- in a culture of transactional patronage. The bill under discussion is all about this transactional culture. It's all about Congressman doing favors for lobbyists who, in return, will help them raise money for re-election -- got to buy those TV ads, you know. If Barack Obama really wants to change American politics and make them functional again, he needs to attack this K-Street mafia, transactional culture head on, and he needs to do it now. He clearly isn't.

From time to time in the campaign Obama gave reason for us to believe that he understood all this. Yes, he voted for the farm bill, that atrocity and paragon of transactional politics, but the Iowa caucasus were afoot and the man wanted to win. But he still seemed to know what the problem was. Does he still?

It isn't easy to attack this problem, to be sure. He has an uneven relationship so far, let's put it, with the Democratic Congress, and there is an underlying reason why this relationship is liable to get worse: Obama cares about poor people, people of color, and wants a kind of redistributive justice for them short of formal reparations. This is the one constant in his view of the world of American politics; he seems to have few other specific programmatic convictions. Whatever it says, the Congress acts like it cares about the so-called middle class squeeze, not about poor people. This disjunction can be finessed for a time, but it cannot be ignored. Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Reid have power, and their priorities, whatever they may claim, are not Obama's.

So in the face of that difference, how is the President to attack the infrastructure of Congress' political power -- precisely the transactional culture that sells the public trust to special interests with their lobbyists, aggressive "professional" associations and exclusionary public-sector "unions" that bear no resemblance to real unions of laborers who actually make things people can use. How can he take on the transactional culture, assuming for the sake of argument that he wants to, when any attempt to do so will sour his young working relationshp with Pelosi, Reid at al.? I honestly don't see how he can, right now; if I knew I'd tell him. And the more's the pity for it.


Posted at 1:47 PM 0 comments
Saturday, January 24, 2009

I promised yesterday that we'd have a little fun, appropriate for a weekend, about names like Barack and Rahm. Some Obama Administration enthusiasts, who think they know Semitic languages, have put up on the Internet the idea that Obama and his White House Chief-of Staff Rahm Emanuel, are a team of thunder and lightning, or rather, lightning and thunder. The claim is that Rahm means thunder and Barack means lightning. This is wrong, except in the slightly far-fetched sense that half of it is right.

Huh? Bear with, please.

Barack is derived from the Arabic for blessed. The Hebrew equivalent is Baruch. Some people think Barack means lightning because they apparently know that former Israeli Prime Minister and current Defense Minister Ehud Barak's last name means lightning. No, the difference has nothing to do with the letter "c" being present or absent. In Arabic and Hebrew, the names Barack and Baruch are spelled with three key consonants, as nearly all Semitic roots have three consonants, and none of the letters in these alphabets are vowels. These are "b", "r" and a letter that, in one of its two forms, has no equivalent in English, a gutteral "k". (If you put an "m" sound in front of these three letters, which Semitic languages like to do for various purposes, you can get Mubarak, as in Hosni Mubarak, which comes from the same root.)

Now, Barak meaning lightning in both Hebrew and Arabic is spelled differently: "b", "r" and another sound that English does not have, a glottal-k that is technically transliterated as a "q". This is the same letter that starts the word for "holy" in both Arabic and Hebrew, which is why Arabs refer to Jerusalem as "al-Qods", and the Hebrew word for holy is "qadosh."

So Barack does not mean lightning, except that it does in the innocent ear of native Arabic and Hebrew speakers, because Americans, and the President himself, say the word in a way closer to its being "lightning" than "blessed" in those languages. A lot of Arabic and especially Hebrew speakers get lazy and don't always fully glottalize their "qofs" these days.

As for Rahm, it does not mean thunder. It means something closer to mercy or grace, and is the Hebrew equivalent of the Arabic word "rahman", which is important in Muslim liturgy as "rahaman" and "rahamim" are in Jewish liturgy. It's Hebrew spelling is "r", 'khet" (another, third different lighter gutteral sound that Arabic and Hebrew have but that English does not) and "m". (I wish I could import Arabic and Hebrew letters here to show you exactly what the differences look like, but I don't know how.) The word for thunder is ra-am, spelled "r", "ayin" (a fourth letter not existing in English), "m". More or less the same sound, spelled just "r", "m", means high or lofty. But Rahm Emanuel is neither thunder nor high and lofty.

There, got that? Don't worry, by the way; English has some sounds that Arabic and Hebrew lack. Like "ch", for example.

Hussein, by the way, means "handsome", more or less. Emanuel means "God is with us." I don't know what Biden means.....hardly ever.

Posted at 4:11 PM 0 comments
Friday, January 23, 2009

Of course, my newly birthed blog really should have begun on inauguration day, or on election day this past November, or when Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination in the summer. But, alas, it didn't, so before I can get to the present, to January 24, 2009, I have to reach back and briefly record my impressions of this man and his candidacy.

But even before that, some premises. I have thought for quite a while now that American politics were essentially broken. Not evil, not criminal, just broken. Here are, in short, the four main reasons for this.

First, television has distorted the political process by making the cost of campaigning so high. The only way to raise the exorbitant sums necessary to pay for the TV ads is to go to concentrations of usually corporate power, which does not "sell" the policy process--that is cynical and literally inaccurate--but sure does rent it. It's not a good thing when members of the staffs of professional business associations actually draft laws for congressional staffers. Money has distorted American politics ever since the Washington Administrations, of course, so this is nothing new. But the scale of it is excessive by any reasonable measure. So busy are politicians raising this money that they rarely even talk to voters anymore. They sit at telephones calling rich people, so we have a greatly diminished national conversation about what matters to us. This is the fault of not controlling television, which has ruined lots of other aspects of American society in the past half century, and from the list I do not exclude baseball (of which more later).

Second, there are the consultants and pollsters who tell the political class not to actually think or explain anything to their constituents. Just preen and look at polls, they say, and look good on TV--again, TV. Joe Klein has covered this problem best; read his stuff.

Third, the quality of press coverage of American politics has tanked. Most Americans depend on electronic media for news these days, and that has been disastrous. Pictures do emotions; print does rational thinking. Electronic media is about entertainment; print media is, or used to be, about thinking and the public welfare. As technology divides our time into every smaller fragments, or bytes, we have imbecilized ourselves as a society, and that has translated into a politics of impressions, of images, of appearances, not of substance or thought. It is something like the "bread and circus" of degenerate Roman times, I think -- although, to be honest, I was not literally present in late classical times and so do not know for sure.

Fourth, for nearly a century American Federalism has become badly imbalanced, away from the design the Founders intended and sharply toward centralized Federal power. One could write a whole book on this alone, and some have. But certainly since the 17th amendment in 1913, a bad idea though it seemed wise at the time, our system of government has become too center-heavy, and it is one of the reasons why we suffer so much today from bureaucratic aging and excessively hierarchical government structures in a world that rewards speed, flexibility, agility and creativity. The U.S. Government today is none of these things, and you cannot implement genuinely new policies with a high-19th century form of government. We need structure and process renovation in the worst way in government, and we need to appreciate the uses of subsidiarity in Federalism much better than we do now. I do hope President Obama understands this. I see no sign yet, however, that he does.

There are other reasons we're "broken", but this is a blog, not a real essay. So enough of this.

Anyway, I have an essentially "on the one hand"-"on-the-other-hand" assessment of Barack Obama. I have tried to be objective, like social science Ph.D.s are presumably equipped to be (that's often a laugh.....but not, folks, in this case). Same goes for how I tried to look at all the other candidates, including John McCain.

Obama impressed me as very smart--the guy in the room who always first got the essential point. He also impressed me as a uniter, by which I mean someone able to synthesize and present a view in a compelling way. His personal story lent empathy to the whole business, and his youth and energy impressed younger people who instinctively knew that the old guys just didn't get it anymore. All fine; and as the campaign season proceeded, it was clear that a whole generation of youthful enthusiasts might be permanently alienated from politics should McCain or someone like him win. I also sized up Obama as a special kind of social conservative, despite his being the most leftist Democrat in the Senate. He came from a broken family, and he made sure his own family was whole. I take him at his word when he stresses the importance of self-discipline, manners, hard work and, above all, education. Those are socially conservative values in this society. It is not an anti-nuclear family "it-takes-a-village" approach to social stability. I am altogether fine with that and, as I said before, as a union-household baby, I had and still have no problem with his basic approach to issues of political economy......insofar as I know what his views are, and there is a lot he has left to our imagination on this score (also of which more later.)

Ah, but. But the man has not accomplished anything in the Senate. He wrote more autobiographies than bills. His ambitions, it seemed to me, exceeded his right to claim them. His campaign consisted, when you went in and read the stuff on offer, of a pastiche of policy fragments that had been out there for years on the Democratic side. He made no effort to specify them. He made no effort to gather them into a coherent policy theme. He made no effort to sort out the contradictions among them. He made no effort to see a budget, to tell us how much all this would cost and how to pay for it. And above all, try as a I may (and I did), I could not find one single new policy idea, not one innovation, not a single novel thought, that was Barack Obama's. This man, I thought, might be smart or he might just be glib to a highly skilled degree. But either way, he's an empty suit, or so it has seemed to me. And I have to confess that nothing I've seen yet convinces me otherwise -- this, and his inexperience in national security issues, is why I could not bring myself to vote for him.

I can already hear the complaint, the standard complaint: "Oh", it will be intoned, "but he has advisers, and good advisers can see to all of that."

People who say that, whether about domestic affairs or foreign policy, are surely well meaning. But they have also surely never been in government at any sort of higher level. Yes, there are advisers, lot of them. And on any issue of significance, anything difficult and open-ended (which nearly all decisions that reach the President's desk are), advisers will disagree. Sometimes their bureaucratic position will define their views, sometimes not. But I have never seen and never heard of any hard call being made because all the President's advisers were unanimous, or even close to unanimous, as to what he should do and how. Never. Don't believe me? Get into government at a high level yourself -- say somewhere near the 7th floor of the State Department -- and you'll see.

Obama also called for change, but he voted for the farm bill--the mother of all corporate welfare outrages in Washington. He said he would accept public campaign financing and then changed his mine when he saw the money wagons lining up. Obama's campaign got more very large donations--defined as over $25K per pop--than did McCain's: so much for the MoveOn.com strategy of political financing. He has hired a bunch of Clinton retreads to run his Administration, too. This comforts some people, that the man in not a wild and reckless type. Fine, but......where's the change? We have an opportunity with this deep, deep economic crisis to skip a generation of technology--in infrastructure, energy, military procurement, in all sorts of things--and Obama sounds like he just wants to rebuild "this old house", as David Brooks put it. The Clinton Administration, in my view, wasted a huge opportunity for genuine zero-based innovation in foreign policy and national security affairs at a molten, malleable time; I fear that this new Administration, in an equally malleable time in domestic policy, will do the same.

And the mainstream press? It is pointing all this out, yes? No. It is in full frontal fawning posture right now. There are hundreds of examples. My favorite is the supposed news story about the inaugural address, which informed readers that the speech was not just a bunch of sound bytes pasted together, but was mean to be appreciated from start to finish as a whole. Well, having worked as a speechwriter for two Secretaries of State, and having known several White House speechwriters, I think I am safe in saying that all speeches strive to be integral products, and most manage to be that, more or less skillfully so. People are reading into some of Obama's remarks hopeful and supposedly profound meanings that simply are not there. This is very entertaining, watching an otherwise deeply cynical liberal media embrace a hero. They are positively gushing, and Obama is wise to keep pointing out in the face of all this that "this is not about me." We'll see how long all this lasts. Maybe a real long time.

As I have said, I did not vote for the man, but I certainly wish him well. I think every true patriot does. Just the fact that he got elected has dumbfounded much of the world; despite our troubles, we still inhabit the imagination of much of the world just because we seem to be able to do what they can't: change. Just the fact that he got elected shows that, whatever the President does or doesn't mean by "change", the American people have shown once again that they have a knack for reinvention, and that is very, very good, so long as they--er, we--don't throw out the Founders' formula for success in a burst of excessive haste or confidence. That, too, we will see about. As for what this means in practice, well, observers, foreign and domestic, exaggerated the decline of American power under George W. Bush because they didn't like Bush and wanted to blame him for it. Now the same observers exaggerate the rebirth of American power, for the same self-interested reason -- as if American power can really change that much that quickly. How silly.

Aside from power there is principle, and here an interesting phenomenon is also at play. With a single exception (I'll tell you what I think it is later), I don't think Barack Obama has any core beliefs about political life or philosophy. He doesn't have any new ideas of his own, as far as I can tell, as I have already said, and it follows that a lack of core principles is responsible at least in part for a lack of new ideas. But that also describes Franklin Roosevelt, a man who came to the White House in hard times not really knowing his own mind on many things. But because he was not tied to some dogma he could be flexible and, though he made lots of mistakes between 1933 and 1937, say, things worked out not all that badly. He was a great President. Events made the man, not the other away around. The same thing, more or less, might happen again. I sure hope it does, except I hope it doesn't take a world war to prove the point.

And I might point out the obvious -- something so obvious that no one seems to mention it: World recessions and depressions and acute discombobulations like the one we're in do tend to cause or at least contribute a great deal to wars, large ones like World Wars I and II. This is worth pondering, no?

More next time on the crazy "name game" -- all about what Barack and Hussein and Rahm really mean, in Arabic and Hebrew. You'll love it. You'll be amazed. Don't miss it.


Posted at 10:52 AM 0 comments
Thursday, January 22, 2009

My Blog Birth

An announcement to the blogniverous of the world:

I am probably much too old for this sort of thing, but I have decided to birth myself as a blogger. Some of my friends--some even older than me--have done it, so it seemed to me something to consider. I considered it, and decided to go ahead.

Here is why.

I am, I have to confess, a congenital blabberer. So I figured that if I blab in a blog, maybe I'll have fewer words left over to hurl at family and friends. That'll make me a better listener--that, anyway, is my hope.

More important, with a new administration begun, and me with lots and lots to say about it as it progresses from day to day, month to month, year to year, this blog will double as a sort of open diary, a memoir of the times in the making. And I hope, I also confess, that after four or eight years, I might have the makings of a book from the blog raw materials I sketch out.

If this is my main reason for blogging, there are lesser ones, as well. As the editor of a well respected magazine situated in downtown Washington, DC, only about a mile or so from the White House, I am hardly isolated intellectually. Some of the most fascinating and stimulating writing around ends up on my desk one way or another. But the wise man, says the Talmud, is the man who knows how to learn from everyone--so the more interaction I can have with thoughtful people, the better. And if they live outside the proverbial beltway, even outside the country, so very much the better. It can get stuffy inside interstate 495.

But that begs the question of who should, or might wish to, read Obamanation-The Newest Deal, which is what I have ended up naming this, since neither part of the name was available by itself. Obviously, this is a decision others will make, but I owe it to potential readers to describe myself, politically at least, so that those decisions will be more informed. I will try to be brief.

I am a 57-year old male, born in Washington, DC -- the old Columbia Hospital for Women -- grown up in the Commonwealth of Virginia when segregation still existed. An only child (sort of.....it's complicated), I have a wife and three grown children, and have had only one wife ever and intend no others. I have a social science doctorate from an Ivy League university (I can hear the rush to the door even as I type), but have never worked full-time for any university despite teaching here and there at several. Before my editorship at The American Interest magazine I was a State Department speechwriter, mainly for Colin Powell and briefly for Condoleezza Rice. I was not, however, a schedule C political appointment; that could not be since I am not and never have been a Republican. Before that, I edited another magazine, and before that I was a staff member on a Federal commission (the Hart-Rudman Commission), and before that I worked at a think tank in Philadelphia and for only a short time just after finishing Ph.D. work, barely worth mentioning except that I learned a good bit from it, worked a little as a Senate staffer.

I used to be a Democrat before around 1990, that day when most Democrats in the U.S. Senate voted against authorizing the use of force to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi aggression. (That was the last straw; I took out my little card and tore it to pieces. I considered mailing the pieces to Sam Nunn, but thought better of it, for he had given Senator Jackson use of the space I had literally sat in. So it would have been too churlish to do that, it seemed to me, besides which I was not angry at him so much as disappointed.) Rather, I was a schedule B appointment at the State Department, an "expert" hire, which, when applied to a speechwriter residing in Policy Planning, tells us all something about the state of the English language in contemporary America.

As befits a political independent, perhaps, I voted this past November 4 for neither major party candidate. I wrote in instead the person who I thought would do the best job: Colin Powell, my former boss. It was between him and Bob Dylan. Dylan lost out, but I never play any Colin Powell record albums, so call it even. (I will explain later, in a future post, why I could not bring myself to vote for Obama or McCain.)

Labels are dangerous and often misleading as substitutes for thought rather than exemplars of it, but I promised to be brief so I have no choice. I am in the main a realist when it comes to international politics, a reluctant hawk in the sense that although I am in no principled way against the use of force in the national interest, I believe that the United States tries to do too much, with too much arrogance, too much self-absorption, and way too little capacity for either genuine strategic thought or forward planning. In domestic policy I am a cultural conservative for the most part, but more than left of center when it comes to issues of political economy. My father, may he rest in peace, was a Teamster and I grew up in a union household. Just can't help myself, I guess.

I have always been this way (well, since I was more or less an adult--say since the mid- to late 1960s); this is not a recent adoption to suit the times, and it is one of the reasons I never became a Republican. My conservatism--and I am conservative by temperament, not by ideology--is Burkean in character, not libertarian or moral-majority in nature. (If you do not understand these terms, you probably won't like this blog.) That's why my favorite columnist these days is David Brooks.

Besides that, all you need to know about me is that I own a 1952 Cadillac (Fleetwood) that I wish was in better shape (oh, it drives fine, not to worry); an F-4 Gibson mandolin and a Martin D-35 guitar that I wish I played better; a stamp collection that I wish was more complete; a modest library of Jewish religious texts I wish I studied more; and a photo of Walter Johnson that hangs on the wall of my office. If you don't know who Walter Johnson was you can still read my blog, but you really ought to be ashamed of yourself. You don't have to go out to Rockville Cemetery every December 10 (his yahrzeit), but, well, never mind. So fair warning: at any given random moment, I may spice political commentary with references to automobiles, music, baseball and Lord-knows-what-else. There's just no telling.

That'll do it for now, save to present this little poem I wrote the other day. It's not very good, but I had some fun writing it when sleep escaped me, as it often does. If you don't like it much, I don't blame you. If you do like it, wow -- you can be my friend. But your taste in poetry might be reckoned questionable.

Here goes:

Madoff Made Off

Madoff made off with fifty billion dollars,
Uncle Bernie sure burned `em, and that really bothers.
In affinity theft the man was a maven,
Seems he well understood the Cayman safe haven.
But he missed the plain logic of a Ponzi cascade:
To exit stage left before the police raid.

The judge slapped his wrist, which must have stung so
And bade him off, to his penthouse go.
Bernie's victims objected, but feared to shout out;
For the gentiles might twist what this was about.
The city of Shushan, it's written, once was confused;
Now we know why: No one san savvy the Jews.


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