Wednesday, 4/26/23

Cognitive dissonance in Texas

[T]he gun rights movement is changing. In many quarters of America, respect for firearms has turned into a form of reverence. As I wrote in 2022, there is now widespread gun idolatry. “Guns” have joined “God” and “Trump” in the hierarchy of right-wing values.

David French

Texas has one of the strongest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Tweeting in effect that he knows better than the jury who heard the evidence, and that he knows that this white man was merely “standing his ground,” not looking for trouble and finding it.

It took an Atlantic Ocean of distance to let the Economist spot this juicy bit of weirdness:

The convergence of broad “stand your ground” laws and more permissive gun laws is a toxic combination, says Kami Chavis, a professor at William and Mary Law School. Messrs Perry and Foster were both armed when they encountered each other, thanks to Texas’s lax gun laws. But there is an inconsistency in the logic of Mr Perry’s supporters, who say that he justifiably felt threatened and needed to act in self-defence because his victim was carrying an assault rifle.

If openly carrying a gun constitutes such a threat that someone can shoot you dead for it, why in the hell is it legal to openly carry?

I’m sick of the culture of vigilanteism created by these damned “stand your ground” laws, and open carry only makes it worse. Open carry and stand your ground are perversely lethal laws in the performative name of “safety.”

Civil Service mischief mayhem

While there is a good case to be made for great flexibility in the hiring and firing of federal officials, the wholesale replacement of thousands of public servants with political cronies would take the nation back to the spoils system of the 19th century. Republicans think that they will be undermining the deep state, but they will simply be politicizing functions that should be carried out in an impartial way, and will destroy the ethic of neutral public service that animates much of the government. When they lose power, as they necessarily will, the other party will simply get rid of their partisans and replace them with Democratic loyalists in a way that undermines any continuity in government. Who will want a career in public service under these conditions? Only political hacks, opportunists, and those who see openings for personal enrichment in the bureaucracy.

Damon Linker, on the virtual abolition of merit-based civil service positions in the Federal Government that Trump began shortly before the 2020 Election.

Was Tucker a money-maker?

I can’t help but notice that commentators on Tucker Carlson’s firing from Fox News can’t agree on whether his show was (1) hugely profitable or whether instead (2) boycotts of his advertisers had “intimidated woke capitalists, who declined to advertise on his show” (Rod Dreher) and thus made it marginal or even a money-loser.

I have no idea which, if either, is true.

I do know that my long Dreher fandom has greatly cooled. I suspect it’s because he and I have both changed during the Trump era: he increasingly supportive of illiberal democracy; I, after flirtation with illiberal democracy, returning uneasily to center-right classical liberalism. “Better the devil you know,” y’know.

Constraints on Single-Payer healthcare

“Health” is an extraordinarily difficult concept to pin down, and if unchecked, it will expand to encompass anything and everything as Leviathan’s vanguard and advance scout.

…

A conservative “healthcare system” is one that protects life and prevents disability. Modern medicine is good at resuscitation, reducing the risk of severe yet preventable incidents such as heart attacks and strokes, catching cancers when they can still be treated, and managing chronic illnesses such as asthma and depression. Caring for illnesses both catastrophic and chronic is what a healthcare system is for, and only when there is a strong focus on applying the technical power of medicine to prevent or treat disease, rather than an all-encompassing quest for health, can we speak coherently of a healthcare system worth funding.

Matthew Loftus, The Conservative Christian Case for Single-Payer Healthcare

Bobo power and powerlessness

As the bobos achieved a sort of stranglehold on the economy, the culture, and even our understanding of what a good life is, no wonder society has begun to array itself against them, with the old three-part class structure breaking apart into a confusing welter of micro-groups competing for status and standing in any way they can. So, for instance, the bobos have abundant cultural, political, and economic power; the red one-percenters have economic power, but scant cultural power; the young, educated elites have tons of cultural power and growing political power, but still not much economic power; and the caring class and rural working class, unheard and unseen, have almost no power of any kind at all. Our politics, meanwhile, has become sharper-edged, more identity-based, and more reactionary, in part because politics is the one arena in which the bobos cannot dominate—there aren’t enough of us.

David Brooks, How the Bobos Broke America

The last straw

[M]ost right-wing institutions that depend on a large customer or donor base have embraced a strategy of monetizing the constant stoking of crisis and paranoia as the new True Faith. If the real-world facts prove inconvenient to the narrative, invent new facts to fit.

And Tucker [Carlson] was the high priest of that faith.

I quit Fox after more than a decade as a contributor when Carlson released a “documentary” for Fox Nation, a streaming service for Fox-addicts who can’t get sufficiently high off the basic cable junk anymore. His Patriot Purge, a farrago of deceptions, fearmongering and “just asking questions” conspiracy theories, was put together to leave the viewer with the distinct impression that the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol was some kind of false flag operation or Deep State operation. It was the last straw for me.

Jonah Goldberg at the Dispatch

Vikings and Ninjas

The right wing are censorship vikings and the left wing are censorship ninjas.

Sherman Alexie. (H/T Alan Jacobs)

For all its piety and fervor, today’s United States needs to be recognized for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Making Money

I’ve been intrigued, and troubled, by the concept that “banks literally lend money into existence” ever since I first heard it.

Today a very occasional contributor to Front Porch Republic lays out how it’s done and how the confluence of that and some other factors leaves the economy in great structural peril still. Better yet, he tells how we can get out of it with minimal pain – at least initially.

The contributor, Eric Zencey, is a novelist, essayist, and Visiting Associate Professor of Historical and Political Studies for Empire State College in Europe and New York. His writing in environmental history and political theory has been supported by grants from the Rockefeller, Guggenheim, and Bogliasco Foundations. Today’s essay is a glimpse into his forthcoming book The Other Road to Serfdom: Essays in Sustainable Democracy (University Press of New England, Fall 2011).

That banks lend money into existence is not necessarily a secret worthy of outrage. It is a conscious policy decision at the national level to loosen the federal grasp of a traditionally sovereign prerogative, seigniorage: the difference between the face value money and its cost of production; the profit that comes from creating money.

But outrageous or not, allowing banks into the game changes it pretty fundamentally, especially when the banks are backed by the FDIC is they get so far out there as to create a crisis of confidence and consequent “run on the bank.”

Zency lays it out well if you’re interested. It seems to me that this is a major factor in our manic-depressive economic mood swings.

Goldman Sachs – “the other side” told persuasively

“Goldman Sachs” is not a term of endearment at my favorite websites, such as Front Porch Republic. And I have reflected my own ill-ease with such too big to fail concerns in recent weeks, as well as passing along some counter-arguments.

Wall Street Journal columnist Gordon Crovitz today defends Goldman Sachs in his own way: short selling a derivative signals the market that a sector may be ready to collapse. I certainly agree with that – just as short selling a stock signals that a particular stock may be ready to tank.

The most telling point for me in Crovitz’s column – apropos of why the SEC may lose its case against Goldman Sachs rather than why derivatives are good – is simply that once you accept the premises that (1) shorting a derivative is beneficial because it signals the market of a possible sector collapse, and (2) long buyers in these specially created securities knew someone else was selling short, it seems to follow that “it would be hard to prove that it mattered who [the short seller] was.” That John Paulson was selling short and that Goldman Sachs bundled the derivative for him seems to be what SEC thinks GS should have disclosed.

All this, of course, ignores John Médaille’s, invocation of Aristotle and Aquina to distinguish natural from unnatural market exchanges, but Distributist economics are, for the time being at least, so far out of the mainstream as to be easily ignored. Considering the repeated failures of mainstream economics, that may be ripe for change.

The Democrats have a bright if peurile idea: “Hey, guys! I’ve got a great idea! Regulation utterly failed to prevent the economic collapse, and voters are mad at Wall Street, so lets grab this chance to make Washington bigger with even more regulation! Whaddya think, guys?!” (I’m not sure the Republicans have a counter-plan. They’re just in denial that a market could fail.)

Pretending to regulate something as complex as derivatives is destined again to fail, so I would be remiss were I to pass up, before Congress passes “the most sweeping overhaul of the financial regulatory system since the aftermath of the Great Depression,” not to sing another rousing chorus of “if they’re too big to fail, bust ’em up!”

Is economics really a science at all?

David Brooks at the New York Times describes the history of modern economics as a 5-act play. We’re in act IV currently.

In The Wall Street Journal, Russ Roberts of George Mason University wondered why economics is even considered a science. Real sciences make progress. But in economics, old thinkers cycle in and out of fashion. In real sciences, evidence solves problems. Roberts asked his colleagues if they could think of any econometric study so well done that it had definitively settled a dispute. Nobody could think of one.

“The bottom line is that we should expect less of economists,” Roberts wrote.

Consider my recommendation of the column as a contribution to iconoclasm.

Are factories (mostly) obsolete? Cities?

(James Howard Kunstler blogs and podcasts extensively on urban sprawl. One of the biggest of many motivators for suburbia (the automobile and cheap oil being the great facilitators) was that the close proximity of homes and factories in the cities really was pretty awful for the home owners/occupants.

Yet Kunstler spins a vision of a return to walkable cities. It’s a vision I find quite lovely, but with nagging doubts including how can people walk to their factory jobs without recreating the “company town” in the form of a “company neighborhood” and, if people are walking to their factory jobs, aren’t we back to square one: dreadful living conditions due to nearby factories?

I have read one or two of Kunstler’s books in the past year, and have listened to every single podcast, and can’t recall him addressing this. But Allan Carlson has addressed it, at least briefly, in his keynote address I praised yesterday:

While praising the modern “machine” tool, Borsodi condemned the “huge” factory as “a steam-age relic rendered obsolete by the electrical age,” yet sustained in the twentieth century by the regulatory powers of government. As he wrote, “It is the factory, not the machine, which destroys both the natural beauty and the natural wealth of man’s environment; which fills country and city with hideous factories and squalid slums,” and which robs “men, women, and children of their contact with the soil” and “familiarity with the actual making of things.” He added: “Against the family…the factory wages a ruthless war of extermination…. Industrialism seeks to root out individual devotion to the family and the homestead and to replace it with loyalty to the factory.”

So, what was Borsodi’s alternative? The working home, the economically functional home, he said, had to be restored; and this needed to be done in a revived countryside. As he argued, “Man, no matter how often he has tried to urbanize himself, can only live like a normal human being in an essentially rural place of residence.” Setting an example, Borsodi and his family resettled on an abandoned seven-acre homestead near the Ramapo Mountains, north of New York City. Each family, Borsodi insisted, must also begin “an adventure in home production,” rooted in “true organic homesteads.” Gardens, chicken coops, a few cows and pigs, carpentry workshops, small machine shops, loom rooms: all were necessary in real family homes, he said. Careful experiments showed that a homestead equipped with appropriate tools and small-scale machines was more efficient in producing three-quarters of the products that a family home would need.

Oops! Borsodi thought this “working home” alternative to factories needed to be in the countryside!

While I respect the Agrarians, I’m a city boy man. I not only love big cities (at least to walk as a visitor), but I’m getting a bit old to take up organic gardening, woodworking, etc. at any meaningful level.

So I’m still struggling with where cities fit in human-scale living. Am I confusing my personal situation (“the train pulled out of the station and left you …”) with the bigger picture (“… but your descendants aren’t too late”)?

Lighting an Economic Candle

If it’s better to light one candle than curse the darkness, Allan Carlson, an Editor at Large over at the Porch (and a pretty major figure is real conservative American thought for decades now), has done a better thing recently, and I the curser of darkness pass it along.

Carlson’s keynote address for a University lecture series starts, necessarily, with a little darkness-cursing to set the stage:

Eighteen months of severe recession have brought to the surface old truths that many chose to forget when times seemed to be good: the business cycle has not been eliminated; finance capitalism is by its nature unstable; politically-connected corporations commonly escape market discipline; and there is nothing conservative about the “creative destruction” of a capitalist economy.

…As one commentator noted in the mid 1930’s, the label “conservative” had then been thoroughly “discredited,” twisted by the “apostles of plutocracy” into a defense of “gamblers and promoters.”

He then turns to the more illuminating task at hand, noting recent historic

seekers after a “Third Way,” a social and economic system that in important respects would be neither capitalist nor socialist.

In Europe, these seekers included: Great Britain’s Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton, architects of the Distributist program [to which I will return]; the Russian agrarian economist Alexander Chayanov, who crafted a remarkable theory of “the Natural Family Economy”; the Bulgarian peasant leader Alexander Stamboliski, who turned his nation into a model agrarian republic and co-founded the “Green International” in 1923; Nancy Eriksson, a Member of Sweden’s Parliament who defended a curious political movement that might be accurately labeled, “The Desperate Swedish Socialist Housewives”; and Gilbert Dru, Etienne Gilson, and Wilhelm Roepke, architects of a vibrant mid-20^thCentury Christian Democracy that aimed to build a Humane Economy. These episodes effervesced in events of brilliance and excitement, sometimes reaching fruition, only to fade in the face of the two main 20^th Century ideological contestants: capitalism and communism.

Then he summarizes the true core of his talk:

Tonight, I want to tell you about three American writers and activists who also have been part of this quest for a Third Way: Ralph Borsodi; Herbert Agar; and Wendell Berry. I will also suggest ways in which their examples and ideas may help us understand the current economic crisis and point toward an alternate Conservatism for the decades ahead, one combining a preferential option for the natural family with a more decentralized, human scale economy and a curtailing of the “national security state.”

There’s enough thereafter to make almost anyone squirm. Anyone who thinks Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are genuine conservatives may go postal upon reading it. But it challenges me, too: can my vision of walkable cities and food co-ops survive except as parasitic of those who live in rural areas and burn fossil fuel to get their edibles to my cozy co-op or picturesque farmers’ market? But what becomes of community and “Front Porch” conversations if everyone’s sitting on their own 40 acres with their mule?

I don’t think I can commend it too highly or excerpt its treasures adequately. My PDF version for my archives is already heavily marked up. You must read it yourself if you, like I, suspect that we’re toast economically in the short term but hope for a humane life beyond the coming collapse.