Right Reason

A Campaign of Identity Politics?

From "The Democrats Screwed Up" by Frank Bruni:

Other factors conspired in the party’s debacle. One in particular haunts me. From the presidential race on down, Democrats adopted a strategy of inclusiveness that excluded a hefty share of Americans and consigned many to a “basket of deplorables” who aren’t all deplorable. Some are hurt. Some are confused.

Liberals miss this by being illiberal. They shame not just the racists and sexists who deserve it but all who disagree. A 64-year-old Southern woman not onboard with marriage equality finds herself characterized as a hateful boob. Never mind that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton weren’t themselves onboard just five short years ago.

Political correctness has morphed into a moral purity that may feel exhilarating but isn’t remotely tactical. It’s a handmaiden to smugness and sanctimony, undermining its own goals.

Much like any other year in politics, 2016 will not be understood until a generation out. Only then will have future events revealed the year's long-term consequences and only then will have historians studied the events and personalities involved in sufficient detail. Alas, as Søren Kierkegaard once wrote: “It is perfectly true, as the philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.”

With that caveat, I quite like Mr. Bruni’s post-mortem on the strategy and fortunes of the Democratic party in 2016.

 

One has to wonder how this devastating defeat will affect people’s estimation of Barack Obama’s legacy. For the past couple of years, he has been as smug as they come. Yes, his smugness has appealed to people who sympathize with him and who learn Democrat. For other people, that smugness has been quite vexing and has served to alienate many of the voters Mrs. Clinton would have needed to win. As Jonah Goldberg has noted: “One of the central insights of both the Obama campaign and administration (the difference is subtle but real) is that Obama benefits when his critics overreact.”

The strategy of trolling conservatives, however entertaining it may have been, has the necessary effect of making a portion of America a butt of a joke. By attacking the prestige of many of the White working-class workers who once provided the winning coalition of Roosevelt’s New Deal or Johnson’s Great Society, Mr. Obama may have done his party long-term harm for short-term praise from its more vocal segments and all for next to no gain in terms of actual policy. Yes, there is the Affordable Care Act, but let’s not forget that the legislation was so popular in 2010, when it still had yet to be voted on in the Senate, that Massachusetts voters voted a Republican vocally opposed to the bill to succeed Ted Kennedy upon the late senator’s death. Obamacare has not gotten any more popular since then. When he leaves office, the unofficial leader of the Democratic party shall be turning over all three branches of the federal government to a Republican majority.

Still, even GQ, otherwise a magazine of fashion, was quick to acclaim Mr. Obama earlier this year as being “Mt. Rushmore great”. One has to wonder how such a manifestly great president could hand over all three branches of government to his opponents. I think the answer comes down to identity politics and to the fact that, during his administration, President Obama raised the social prestige of the kind of people who tend to read magazines such as GQ. 

A Meditation on Democracy

 

Simon V Montfort, comte de Leicester

On this day in 1265, Simon de Montfort summoned the first Parliament to Westminster Palace. After seizing power after defeating the Plantagenet King Henry III, who still remained king but who had to surrender his son Edward as a hostage, de Montfort was loosing his grip on power. His mandate to power was defeating a great noble in power and his allies were drifting away, concerned with both de Montfort’s treatment of Henry as well as his use of foreign knights. Whatever one’s opinions about monarchs, it’s a curious historical accident that Simon de Montfort, who certainly ruled no less autocratically as the worst Plantagenet kings in his short reign as quasi-king, would come to be known as a progenitor of democracy.  

And that brings me to the main topic of the day: In “One Cheer for Democracy”, the Adam Smith Institute’s Eamonn Butler provides us with a classical-liberal meditation for the day:

Today (20 January) is hailed in the UK as Democracy Day – the 750th anniversary of the establishment of the first parliament of elected representatives in Westminster. Let’s not get too dewy-eyed. We classical liberals are democrats, but we are sceptical democrats. Yes, some (minimal) functions require collective action. We think that the public, not elites, should make those decisions – and that representative government is probably the best way to do it.

But we are fully aware hat the democratic process is far from perfect. It is not about reconciling different interests (as markets do), but about choosing between conflicting interests – a battle in which only one side can win. Democracy is tainted by the self-interest of electors, of representatives and of officials; it can produce deeply irrational results; and all too often it leads to minority groups being exploited, and their liberties curbed, all in the name of ‘democracy’.

Any democracy worth praising wouldn’t take de Montfort as its ancestor. Simon de Montfort was a warlord who gained immense power by surreptitiously marrying the king’s youngest sister, whose aggressive campaigns in in Gascon saw him being summoned back to England to face a trial and who continued to advocate war in France even while all hope for holding the old Angevin realms died out. Although it is certainly romantic to think of a figure waging war against the king for the rule of law and for democracy, to think of de Montfort motivated principally by those concerns would be fantasy. 

William Gladstone, that great liberal statesman, repeatedly proclaimed that he would support the masses over the classes. At its root, praiseworthy democracy is an outcome of our bourgeois era. With the great enrichment of the masses has come their demand that they have a voice in politics. While I’m certainly skeptical of representative government, I’m not skeptical of economic prosperity and one does lead to another. We’ve just got to be careful, on this Democracy Day (let’s just assume we’re all British for the day), that we’re careful to identify the way the arrow of causation goes.  

So, one cheer for representative government. Three cheers for prosperity! 

Everyone Wants Peace on Their Terms

 

As for me, I cease not to advocate peace. It may be on unjust terms, but even so it is more expedient than the justest of civil wars.

-Marcus Tullius Cicero, Letters to Atticus

 

In “Does anyone really want a settlement in the Middle East?”, Daniel Hannan asks the question of what anyone has to gain from the current flare up of the conflict in Gaza:

What is Hamas trying to achieve by firing rockets into Israel? I’m not asking about its right to do so, or what the alternatives are, or the pros and cons of the whole 70-year-old dispute. I’m asking a narrower strategic question. What are the people who run Gaza trying to achieve by lobbing ordnance across the border?

…

The most rational explanation I can find for Hamas’s renewal of hostilities is that it’s trying to shore up its support in Gaza. The Syrian civil war and the Egyptian coup have deprived the paramilitaries of, respectively, their chief sponsor and their most immediate sympathiser. Isolated and bankrupt, unable even to pay the salaries of their 40,000 government employees, Hamas leaders seem to have decided to stake everything on a military campaign. Possibly, like Galtieri’s junta in 1982, they feel they have little to lose. At best, a new ceasefire might result in concessions, such as prisoner releases or – the big prize – a reopening of Gaza’s borders. At worst, the conflict should rally people to their regime.

 

Pareto efficiency is an important concept here. Less important as a positive standard for policy as much as a via negativa for eliminating policies we think shouldn’t work.

The world is Pareto-efficient when no one can be made better off except at the expense of somebody else. Or, as Andreu Mas-Colell and Michael D. Whinston express the idea in their text book Microeconomic Theory: “(A world) that is Pareto optimal uses society’s initial resources and technological possibilities efficiently in the sense that there is no alternative way to organize the production and distribution of goods that makes some consumer better off without making some consumer worse off” (Mas-Colell and Whinston 1995, 313). 

Pareto efficiency is a standard which conforms very much to how we would like politics done in a liberal democracy. After all, would not benevolent citizens choose to vote to avoid a world in which somebody can be better off without hurting anybody else? If Jim could be given a new home without hurting Jill or Bill, wouldn’t Jill or Bill let that happen? So clearly Pareto efficiency does conform to the ethos of a liberal democracy, and expresses the basic sentiment motivating liberal democracy (especially of the social democratic variety) that people can come together through the voting booths in order to solve their problems in an amicable fashion. Yet, though Pareto efficiency is interesting in speculations about policy, it absolutely fails in being a useful standard for guiding policy, and the reason for that is that Pareto efficiency is so weak a condition that pretty much every conceivable state of the world beyond economists’ models is already Pareto efficient. 

  

At this point, somebody who looks at the world from the point of view of economics alone can point out how much is being wasted over the struggle between the two nations and how much their citizens could gain by living in peace with each other. However, politics is about identify as much as about policy, and so for the political situation between Palestine and Israel to change, somebody’s identity has to lose, and so somebody has to be made worst off. Maybe not in profane terms (in fact, they might be made better off from the Max-U point of view), but certainly in the sacred terms of identity. 

Indeed, I can’t even find a neutral term to describe the region inhabited by the two nations without giving off signs of non-existent bias between either faction. If I call the region, Palestine, I imply that the Palestinians should win the conflict (whatever that means) and vice versa for calling the region Israel. Even importing the Latin word Judea or the Greek Παλαιστίνη doesn’t work. There’s just no way of talking about the situation without hurting somebody’s identity, which implies that the entire situation is some weird equilibrium, and kept there because changing it would require pain that no one wants to feel.  

 

We are all tethered by history in a world of utility maximizers, both in terms of the sacred and the profane, and that is felt no more strongly in Israel/Palestine/Judea/Παλαιστίνη/whatever-you-want-to-call-the-region. For there to be peace in the region, because of the initial endowment given to us by history, somebody will have to walk away from the negotiating table unhappy; yet, because we live in a world of utility maximizers, that won’t happen. 

The Greatest Democracy on Earth: The Free Market

 

 

The businessman who has made a fortune on the free market is the person who has served the interests of the nation, and the greater world, the most. He who has put resources into the most productive uses possible, and has satisfied the demands of his fellow human beings. He has demanded nothing of them but to be free to invest his property as he sees fit, and he has offered them the fruits of his efforts for suitable recompense. He has never had to coerce others into associated with him, every person who did so did so willingly knowing that their lives would actually be improved by doing so. When historians discuss whether or not he had a positive effect on humanity, no more is needed than to open his accounting books and see how many people voluntarily bought his products. The businessman at every moment in his career has had to position himself in order to serve the demands of his fellow human beings in the best possible way in order to stay competitive. Anyone is free to either buy from his competitors or to compete against him if they think that they can do a better job and serve society better. Despite this constant threat to his position, he manages to survive, and he does so only because he improves people's life in a definite manner. The businessman is thus the greatest servant to society, his means are neither fire nor force, but putting himself in a better position to serve others than his competitors.

Ultimately, the free market is the greatest of democracies. It demands no loyalty and the door is always open if anyone wishes to leave. Each person on the market is free to dispense with their resources as they see fit and those that they choose to associate with using those resources will prosper. In addition, how many resources one has is a direct result of one's voluntary cooperation with other human beings. Those who have more by either luck or inheritance must either put them to work for the good of others or see them waste away with time. There are some who may not like how individuals choose to use their wealth, or may think this to be inhumane system, but those are they who wish to use force and fire to impose their will upon society. They cannot make their vision possible by voluntary association, so they result to hegemony. By doing so they show themselves to be less than the businessman for when their vision fails, rather than accepting the choices of other human beings and trying to find a new vision that is more in accordance with those choices, they do not abandon it, but think that they are the wise sages who need to construct society in their image. The attempt to have voters choose the direction of government is a poor substitute to the power that consumers have to direct the processes of production within the market. There may be democratic elements within representative governments, but they are never as democratic as markets that allow the 49% to simply switch who they buy their goods from them. Within the markets, though, each individual has the ability to associate with whomever he wishes and it is this attribute that makes it the greatest democracy on earth. 

 

Of course whenever the government gives advantages to some whether that be in the form of tariffs or subsidies, they weaken the democracy of the market. A producer who has to lobby the government to create a tariff against a foreign competitor who is persuading consumers to buy from him with lower prices or a better product is resorting to hegemony. By asking for the protection, he is implicitly admitting that he cannot serve the best interests of consumers as much as his competitor, and needs to resort to force to associate with his customers. This is certainly a great evil. It is not an evil of the free market nor should it distract us from the democratic qualities of the free market. The problem is not even that he is asking for the tariff, the problem is that some human beings are given the coercive power to force others to pay a tariff. It is not a problem of the markets, but a problem of the government's use of its power within them, “crony capitalism” as many call it.

Voting: Individually Costly Yet Often Beneficial to the Group

 

The queue, one of the many costs of voting.

 

Voting is certainly a costly norm for the individual voter. There is much to do n life and as has been shown elsewhere, voting is more than likely to have a very small payoff. The man who merely cares about the expected pay-offs of his behavior is unlikely to be a man who votes since each vote has so little effect on the general election (). From a purely Benthamite position, it could even be said that voting is irrational with some justice to the topic because of how low the payoffs are compared to the costs of voting. However, ending the investigation here, as all too many who discuss the topic do, would be to end before considering what may be one of the most powerful reasons to vote: allegiance to a group norm.

Voting may certainly be an individually costly norm, but it is also a norm that greatly benefits the success of a group, say Republican or Democratic. The groups that are constituted by individuals who follow the norm of voting come hell or high water will have a much greater chance at winning elections and this will result in those groups that have voting members becoming dominant. If every single Republican were to vote with mechanistic certainty, then Governor Romney would have a much greater chance of winning the election just as President Obama would have a much greater chance of winning. This can be true at the same time as it is true that the expected cost of voting exceeds the expected payoff. Yes it may very well be individually costly to vote, but if one wants to be a member of a winning group in politics, then one needs to adopt the behaviors that help define such a group and one of those behaviors is voting. Of course, people may need a reminder or two that plays on their moral sentiments to vote, and the successful groups will be those that are able to motivate their constituents to go vote despite the costs.

 

So the question to vote or not becomes less about the individual costs and more about the question of whether one is apart of a group that can benefit from a high election turn-out. So, even though your vote may not matter much, the votes of one's group may very well matter and the success of the group may depend on individuals adopting costly behaviors.  

The Euro Crisis and the Assault on Nation-State Democracy

Who is loyal to this flag? Mostly bureaucrats.

 

The ongoing crisis in the European Union allows us to be witnesses to perhaps one of the most important assaults on freedom in this generation. It is not a conscious assault of freedom, for the most part, but rather a process by which politicians are willing to sacrifice the freedom of those that they are supposed to represent and those of nearby nations in order to fight against the inevitable. The Eurozone is doomed or it will have an extravagantly high cost, focused in the Mediterranean nations, to save. The entire project of putting heterogeneous nations with little economic similarity under a common currency was a bad idea to start off with and its implementation was just as faulty.

 

The institutions of nation-state democracy may be an object of great trust to modern day Libertarians, and this is not entirely without justification. After all the institutions of nation-state democracy have done little to nothing in either guaranteeing liberty or to preserving it against erosion. The parliamentary reforms in the United Kingdom, for instance, opened the gates for Fabian socialism and the hey-day of the Liberal party was short, one could even go as far as to say the Liberal Party died with Gladstone. In the United States, the Progressive belief in the absoluteness of democracy brought with it not only Federal encroachment on the lives of each citizen, but also a regulatory ecosystem in which an alphabet soup of bureaucracies regulate largely without the oversight of Congress. Nation-state democracy brought along with it a superstitious regard for democracy as a means of creating society anew and it contributed to the decline of the rule of law as it became popular to deny any authority about the representative body. Those that thought democracy would protect liberty were mistaken and the experience of the last two centuries better corroborate the opinions of the franchise's bears than it's bulls.

It could be said that we live in a world of the second best. It could very correctly be pointed out that, especially in Europe, the alternative to nation-state democracy is a Federal European state. Either the sovereignty of nations like Greece and Spain to tax and spend, certainly a sine qua non of nation-state democracy, as their governments decide is upheld, or the European parliament usurps that power by deciding how those nations may tax and spend. That is certainly true, but something braver and more pertient can be said: that despite its many problems, nation-state democracy has been the best set of political institutions for the maintenance of human prosperity the human race has ever discovered.

 

Yet, if the Eurozone is going to be salvaged, then nation-state democracy must be cast aside and the powers given to a body that claims sovereignty above the representative bodies within the nation-state. The reason for this is that the Euro Crisis cannot come to a close without an influx of capital into the Mediterranean economies, and this cannot happen without German and other Northern European investors buying assets in those countries. For that in turn to happen, these investors need to expect their investments to bear fruit in the future and they will only have this expectation if the local governments have their fiscal and monetary hands tied by an outside sovereign who ensures that local governments limit their spending and are irrevocable joined to the Euro. Only closer political union will bring the Northern, Germanic capital that the Mediterranean, under their present conditions, so desperately need and it will only travel downward when there is closer political union.

Closer political union, though, would mean the sacrifice of the Mediterranean nations' self-determination to a legislative body in Strasbourg and Brussels that is no longer accountable to the peoples of those nations. Where the Connecticut Compromise was able to balance the power of the smaller and larger states of the United States, the abrogation of nation-state democracy in Europe would mean that the Mediterranean states would be more or less giving up their power and agreeing to terms set by the Northern states. There is no give-and-take, there is simply the agreement of some states to the conditions set by others. Let's not forget that the EU is the organization that when the Irish rejected the Lisbon Treaty in a referendum, simply figured they had it wrong and forced another referendum. In addition, if the political union were to ever happen, the entire process of recovery for the Mediterranean would be for what should be considered foreign investors going into nations and buying them. Not only will nation-states like Greece and Spain be under the political terms set by Germany, but they will also by the end process be owned by German capitalists.

 

The good news is then that this union will never succeed. Europe is not a polity. It is united neither by tongue nor law nor religion nor common experience. The language of Spain is Spanish, that of Poland is Polish and that of Austria is German. There is the Napoleonic Code in France and the Basic Law in Germany. Greece comes from a Orthodox religious tradition while Dutch religious tradition is highly influenced by the events that followed the Protestant Reformation. The only thing close to an experience shared by the entire continent was the Second World War, but that was won by soldiers who are foreign to the nations now in the EU. The entire project of the EU is primarily bureaucratic in nature and it has been explicitly created by treaties rather than the loyalties of people.

There is simply no social fabric to hold a Federal European state together and any attempt to make one will fail. The road to that Federal state would be an arduous one, especially for Mediterranean nations, and there is simply nothing that will hold it together through that arbor. Nations like Greece and Spain will find it much easier to simply leave the Euro, though they may never do so explicitly, than to accept the terms of an artificial European state. Though they may travel down that road for the time being, when the real sacrifices have to be made and when hope of recovery is all but extinguished, the national governments of many nation-states will simply not be able to withstand the protest against the usurpation of their nation-state democracy.        

A Short Manifesto for Budgetary Government

 Any sound system of modern democracy must start with budgets if our nations are not to drown themselves in debt in order that those who are to be its stewards are to promise that which cannot be paid. As described in the book Democracy in Deficit by James Buchanan and Richard Wagner, in the 1970s, the moral restrictions upon spending and the tacit, though often unfulfilled, understanding that it is the duty of the government in power to balance the budget have been broken asunder. Since then governments have been running unparalleled deficits while promising unparalleled privileges to their citizens.

Some of this is certainly politicians promising more benefits (often while promising to simultaneously cut the deficit) to voters during election seasons in order to match their opponents own proposals, but the main cause is certainly the lack of any structural traits in government to actually keep spending in check. Year after year, politicians can continue to run government that borrow a considerable portion of their entire operating expenses without any constitutional measure that provides disincentives against such practices.

A free and open society is not a society governed by the arbitrary actions of politicians, aristocrats or emperors. King Charles II learned that the hard way in 1688 and even the British monarchs have been subservient to their parliaments in the years since then. Instead, it is ruled by general rules of conduct, laws, that apply to everyone, every where and under all circumstances. In his book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Part III, Chapter VI), Adam Smith writes about how the virtue of justice is one that is at all times dictated by general rules of conduct:

The rules of justice are accurate in the highest degree, and admit of no exceptions or modifications, but such as may be ascertained as accurately as the rules themselves, and which generally, indeed, flow from the very same principles with them. If I owe a man ten pounds, justice requires that I should precisely pay him ten pounds, either at the time agreed upon, or when he demands it. What I ought to perform, how much I ought to perform, when and where I ought to perform it, the whole nature and circumstances of the action prescribed, are all of them fixt and determined. Though it may be awkward and pedantic, therefore, to affect too strict an adherence to the common rules of prudence and generosity, there is no pedantry in sticking fast by the rules of justice. On the contrary, the most sacred regard is due to them; and the actions which this virtue requires are never so properly performed, as when the chief motive for performing them is reverential and religious regard to those general rules which require them.

Free people are then guided not by the will of others, but how the general rules of society obligate them to act. Tyranny consequently is the usurpation of those general rules for the discretion of individuals.

 

There is no more of a sacred obligation of the politician to the people he serves than to guard the public treasury. It is certainly true that the government does need resources to operate, but it is similarly true that the government does not ask its citizens to contribute. Taxmen do not walk door to do holding usher's baskets requesting contributions; instead, they just take the contributions that they need. Whether the tax-payer consents or not, this done with the the promise that the government will use that money in order to provide certain services for the tax-payer's benefit. The entire enterprise of proper government can then be seen as the process of turning the tax-payers' money and to transform it into desired services. Hence to take the tax-payers' money within the public purse, and to spend it negligently on expenses that do not better his interests should be regarded as treason.

Deficits, though, inflict havoc upon this process. The reason that they do so is that the government can spend more than it has in order to provide its citizens more services that they could otherwise afford therefore corrupting the connection between paying taxes and receiving services. Every dollar that the government borrows is a dollar that will have to be taken in future taxation. When the event that calls for deficit spending is a war, the accumulation of debt does not nearly have the corruption affect as it does when government's in peacetime since a war is understood by the public as a temporary event that must be financed with credit. This cannot be said of the massive amount of deficit spending that has been taking place within the United States to support both its welfare state and its military-industrial complex. Neither are temporary. When it comes to deficit spending to support both, politicians tell their voters that the government can supply services to them that Americans' contributions to the treasury can support. As a result, it forces politicians to be dishonest about the quantity of services the government can supply and it rewards those who provide the most convincing lies about how the government can continue to provide services without having to take more from the public.

 

Any system that encourages dishonesty must be reformed. Deficit-spending in peacetime is little more than politicians using the power of the financial markets to evade the great inconvenience of scarcity during their time in office. It is in ultimate juxtaposition with the ethos of a government whose officials serve as stewards of the public treasury. As such, it must be reformed and it must be reformed constitutionally for the only solution to this problem are now designed checks and balances that forces politicians to guard the integrity of the treasury. What we need is a government that forces politicians to actually grapple with scarcity in providing government services and to frankly tell tax-payers that they must reduce their expectations of government services or expect to pay more in the future.

Besides a law that obligates the sitting government to balance the budget, what we need is for the budgetary process to be the defining moment in any year in politics. Politicians need to fight over the budget, to ear-mark every cent of government spending (the entire phenomenon of “mandatory spending” is a conceit, all spending is really discretionary and can be ended if necessary), and release budgets that fit their expenditures within the contexts of a balanced budget. If politicians want to increase spending on certain programs. Fine, but they have to show either what other programs will be cut or how they will be taking more money from the people they represent. Anything less is not only a failure of accountable government, but also a failure to ensure that citizens truly know the costs of their government. 

Who Pays for the Federal government?

I Want YOU to pay for YOUR government!

 

Who is paying for the Federal government? Perhaps one of the most illustrative ways of answering that question is not to think in terms of percentage points, but how long the government can run on different people's contribution. From "Uncle Sam's Fiscal Year Disaster" by James R. Herrigan and Antony Davies:

For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume that the federal budget plays out over the calendar year. By comparing how much different groups of taxpayers pay, we can get a clear picture of who actually pays for government, and how much.

So who does pay?

Let’s start with the poorest Americans. According to the Congressional Budget Office’s latest figures, the poorest 20 percent of Americans paid three-tenths of one percent of all federal taxes. This year, tax revenues cover only 70 percent of federal spending, so that segment of the population paid for two-thousandths of federal spending.

If the government’s fiscal year started on January 1, the poorest 20 percent would pay for all the government spending from midnight through 6:30 p.m. on New Year’s Day. In other words, they would be done paying for government at about the same time your New Year’s Eve hangover was lifting. For sports fans, it would be during half-time of the Rose Bowl.

The next poorest 20 percent of Americans pay enough to fund the government for the next 10 days, taking us to January 11. Middle-income Americans pay for a little over three weeks, taking us to February 4. In other words, when half of Americans pool their taxes together, the total only pays for 35 days of government spending.

Those from middle-income up to, but not including, the wealthiest 10 percent pay for February 5 through May 2. We’re only four months into the year, and 90 percent of Americans have paid all they are going to pay toward the government’s spending.

Those in the top 10 percent but not the top one percent pay for May 3 through July 17. The top one percent pays for the 56 days, from July 17 through September 10. And for 2012, September 10 was Deficit Day. That’s the day that the tax revenues ran out. From September 11 through December 31, every dime the government spends is borrowed money. The people who will pay for this lion’s share of the year—112 days—can’t vote because they haven’t been born yet. At least for these people, this is taxation without representation.

The absurdity of it all is that despite half of America only funding the Federal government they have voted for for only a month and despite the top one percent of the income distribution paying almost double that, people still beleive that they can self-richteously assert that the rich are not paying a fair share. Gone is the classical notion of citizenship in which the citizen is responsible for bearing the costs of the government and that it is by bearing the costs of the government that they are just in enjoying the benefits of citizenship that government provides. Instead, we have a notion of citizenship in which it is acceptable simply to give someone else the bill because they somehow deserve to pay for what somebody else consumes.

Another dimension of this problem is the perverse incetives it creates. When citizens can vote for more government and recieve tangible benefits from that decision without having to pay tangible costs, there is all the incentive in the world for people to vote for more government. Indeed, that is one of the reasons why just about four month's of the government's costs are pushes onto those who have no voice in the process: no one wants to pay the costs of government. Far too many are living in a fantasy world in which they may argue we need government to pave the roads, or to keep the peace, or to regulate the banks, but they're no where to be found when it comes time to pay. When the tax-man comes along, everyone is oh so quick to talk about how the 1% needs to pay more or about how paying the costs of government would hurt the middle call resulting in a situation in which no one pays for a third of it. Despite the deficit being a relatively popular issue, almost no one is talking about the fundamental crux of democratic public financing: we, the People, must pay for our government. 

I think that the only way out of this is when we finally accept that the costs of government cannot be pushed onto a minority of America. A vote for more government, right or wrong, has to result in a vote for higher taxes for everyone. The middle class cannot afford higher taxes? Well then, the middle class cannot afford the government that they've been so happy not to pay for which in turn is a perfectly legitimate reason not to vote for it. 

I thus have a modest proposal: Instead of borrowing money next fiscal year, the Federal government calculates how much money it needs to opperates, equally divides it up by the population and sends each American citizen their share of the bill. Watch how quickly paying for the deficit becomes the number one issue across politics. 

Roundtable: What is Democracy?

From On the Laws by Cicero, I.41:

Now every people (which is the kind of large assemblage I have described), every state (which is the organization of the people), every commonwealth (which, is, as I said, the concern of the people) needs to be ruled by some sort of deliberation in order to be long lived. That deliberative function, moreover must always be connected to the original cause which engendered the state; and it must also be either assigned to one person or to selected individuals or be taken up by the entire population. And so, when the control of everything is in the hands of one person, we call that one person a kind and that type of commonwealth a monarchy. When it is in the control of chosen men, then a state is said to be ruled by the will of the aristocracy. And that which everything is in the hands of the people is a “popular” state – that is what we call it. And of these three types any one, even though it may not be perfect or in my opinion the best possible, still is tolerable as long as it holds to the bond which first bound men together in the association of the commonwealth; and any one may be better than another.

This is a rather classical view deriving from Aristotle's taxonomy of different types of poleis within the Hellenistic world. The emphasis on who within the population deliberates on the functions on the government, though, is an attribute of democracy that any sound notion of it must capture. T

he notion that democracy is the deliberation about laws among the entire population has been emphasized by contemporary theorists like Amartya Sen. In his own work, Sen has argued that the reasons that there has never been no major famine in a modern democracy is this deliberative aspect of democracy. Since everyone can have a say in the deliberation of policies within a democracy, few within government cannot hide the facts behind famines for long and the outcry for famine-relief cannot be long kept quiet.

 

Another aspect of democracy is highlighted by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies Vol I., pg. 124: 

(W)e may distinguish two main types of government. The first consists of governments which we can get rid (sic) without bloodshed – for example, by way of general elections; that is to say, the social institutions provide means by which the rulers may be dismissed by the ruled, and the social traditions ensure that these institutions will not be easily destroyed by those who are in power. The second type consists of governments which the ruled cannot get rid of (sic) except by way of a successful revolution – that is to say, in most cases, not at all. I suggest the term “democracy” as a short-hand label for a government of the first type, and the term “tyranny” or “dictatorship” for the second. This, I believe, corresponds closely to traditional usage.

Popper's assertion that a democracy is a changable government brings to mind something that Edmund Burke said in Reflections on the Revolution in France: “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.”No doubt, the authoritarian style of the Bourbon kings and the centralization of political power in the halls of Versailles created a political climate in which change could only be achieved via bloodshed and the great tragedy that was the French Revolution.

Ludwig von Mises also emphasizes that a democracy is a government that can change as to best suit the will of the governed. From Liberalism, pg. 21:

Democracy is the form of political constitution which makes possible the adaptation of the government to the wishes of the governed without violent struggles. If in a democratic state the government is no longer being conducted as the majority of the population would have it, no civil war is necessary to put into office those who are willing to work to suit the majority. By means of elections and parliamentary arrangements, the change of government is executed smoothly and without friction, violence, or bloodshed.

 

When speaking about what democracy is, it is also important to keep in mind what democracy is not and Friedrich Hayek writes about this in The Constitution of Liberty, pg. 103:

Equality before the law leads to the demand that all men should also have the same share in making the law. This is the point where where the traditional liberalism and the democratic movement meet. Liberalism (in the European nineteenth-century meaning of the word, to which we shall adhere throughout this chapter) is concerned mainly with limiting the coercive powers of all government, whether democratic or not, whereas the dogmatic democrat knows only one limit – current majority opinion. The difference between the two ideals stands out most clearly if we name their opposites: for democracy it is authoritarian government; for liberalism it is totalitarianism. Neither of the two systems necessarily excludes the opposite of the other: a democracy may well wield totalitarian powers, and it is conceivable that an authoritarian government may act of liberal principles.

There can be both illiberal and liberal democracy. Of course, as both Popper and Mises have noted, the benefit to an illiberal democracy as opposed to, say, an illiberal monarchy is that an illiberal democracy can be changed if there are enough votes against it.

 

Finally, we have our last perspective in this roundtable from “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” by Immanuel Kant:

A republican constitution is founded upon three principles: firstly, the principle of freedom for all members of a society (as men); secondly, the principle of the dependence of everyone upon a single common legislation (as subjects); and thirdly, the principle of legal equality for everyone (as citizens). It is the only constitution that can be derived from the idea of original contract, upon which all rightful constitution of a people must be founded. Thus as far as right is concerned, republicanism is in itself the original basis of every kind of civil constitution, and it only remains to ask whether it is the only constitution which can lead to a perpetual peace.

While Kant does not describe here his notion of what “Democracy” is, but our modern notion of democracy is so close to his notion of republicanism, just as it is close to what the American founders like Madison thought of as republican government, that he mind as well be talking about modern democracy. That modern theorists like John Rawls have tried to create normative standards for democracy around notions like Kant's original contract is even more evidence that Kant speaks here of what we call “Democracy” today. Then again, we need to keep in mind Hayek's lesson that we cannot equivocate Liberalism and democracy.

This is a typical Kantian attempt at trying to understand something as well. Like Aristotle, I often think of Kant's philosophical style of taxonomic: he tries to augment our understanding of philosophical objects by immediately creating categories and systems of classification. Indeed, one of the reasons the Critique of Pure Reason can be so intimidating is just how many new words Kant creates in order to classify reason in its many functions.

However, I am greatly skeptical of the entire philosophical project of trying to deduce the nature of government via a priori constructions like the original contract. I think that Burke succinctly summarized all the errors of this rational constructivist approach when he wrote in his Reflections: “The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori.

 

 

Bibliography:

Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2004.

Cicero, Marcus Tullius. On the Commonwealth in One the Commonwealth and On the Laws ed. James E.G. Zetzel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Hayek, Friedrich. The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Kant, Immanuel. “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” in Political Writings ed. H.S. Reiss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Mises, Ludwig von. Liberalism: The Classical Tradition. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund Inc., 2005.

Popper, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966.