An ongoing review of politics and culture

Uncertainty In The Wild

During the depths of the recession, a meme took hold among Republican politicians and a number of conservative wonks about “uncertainty.” The idea was that regulatory uncertainty—that the people who run businesses couldn’t tell which regulations and taxes they’d have to face in the future—was depressing business investment and therefore prolonging the recovery.

This idea was soundly and almost unanimously mocked on the Left. Aren’t our Galtian overlords supposed to be great risk-takers? Isn’t this how they derive the legitimacy of their wealth? Isn’t there always regulatory uncertainty? To many on the Left, the “uncertainty” meme was simply a whole-cloth fabrication.

At the time, I took a frustratingly middle-of-the-road view: on balance and all else being equal, I think, regulatory uncertainty can depress investment and therefore economic growth. That said, in a massive demand-driven recession like the one the US experienced, it’s highly unlikely that this is the main cause of the slough.

Now it’s Morning Again In America and so nobody’s arguing about “uncertainty” anymore. And the progress of the recovery seems to validate lefty arguments that the whole “uncertainty” thing is made up out of whole cloth.

Well, I found an example of uncertainty working as advertised in the wild.

I recently had dinner with a friend who’s an investment banker who often advises on LBOs—debt-fueled buyouts of companies by private equity funds—who tells me most if not all plans for LBOs in France have been frozen. Why? Because François Hollande, the Socialist Party’s presidential candidate and the favorite of the election, has promised a surtax on debt used to finance buyouts. So private equity funds have decided to sit on their hands until the election in May to see what exactly they’ll be socked with and plug it into their models so they can see if the deals they’re contemplating work under the new regime or not. (While presumably vigorously lobbying against any tax at all, I’m sure.)

Now this doesn’t really keep me up at night. From a business perspective, if you can’t make that deal you’re contemplating work without leverage, you probably shouldn’t do it. From a policy perspective, while the LBO boom has probably been a net positive for the economy, putting a brake on LBO activity isn’t the most damaging thing a socialist president could do. Let’s call it mostly-harmless populism. It is, of course, the wrong solution to the wrong problem: the overuse of debt by corporations is encouraged across the economy by the corporate income tax (because debt payments are deductible from the corporate tax) which should just be done away with, but that’s an idea that’s even more politically infeasible in France than it is in the US. (And, of course, one should note that Mr Hollande has an objective interest in depressing and deferring business investment until he becomes President, although I’m sure that doesn’t figure into his calculations. Really. The economy is doing crappily enough without him.)

Anyway: while this tax and the response to it aren’t going to keep me up at night, we do have here a real-life example of real regulatory uncertainty depressing real business activity and investment that would have occurred absent said uncertainty. So “uncertainty” can and does occur.

So there you go, kids: while it’s probably foolish to believe that Obama-led “uncertainty” is responsible for most of the economic morass we’ve experienced over the past few years, it’s equally foolish to dismiss out of hand the idea or the possibility of uncertainty depressing business investment.

This Is Your Head On Blog

At last! I’ve lost my Bloggingheads virginity. I want to thank Reason’s very gracious Matt Welch for doing it. And hopefully if the Bloggingheads people and/or viewers like it, I’ll be able to do more with more people.

In this one, we cover (mostly) the Eurocrisis and the US presidential election from a European perspective. Watch here.

PEG Leads, Peter Thiel Follows?

Peter Thiel has a big interview with Francis Fukuyama in The American Interest. One thing I’ve noted is that he seems to be inclined toward giving kids the vote, or at least lowering the age barrier.

As frequent readers will know, I’m a big fan of Thiel’s and giving kids the vote is one of my hobby horses so I’m feeling excited today.

The whole interview is worth reading and interesting throughout even for people already familiar with Thiel’s worldview. There’s some new stuff and illuminating reflections/explanations of the old stuff.

Best Practices In Education

Most of us remember that (a+b)^2 = a^2 + 2ab + b^2

But why?

Via François Taddei comes this wonderful video:

I’m willing to bet none of us were taught it like that, and yet once you see it it’s so obvious. It’s one of those “A-HA!” type moments.

It reminds me of reading about KIPP schools in Work Hard, Be Nice and reading that the schools had turned the multiplication tables into sing-song ditties that the entire class sings, which of course makes it much easier for children to remember. (I still remember the torture it was to learn multiplication tables as a child, and I still don’t know them. If you ask me what 4×8 is, I do the math in my head.)

There’s of course an important policy point to be made about all this: I’m willing to bet all the money in my pocket that if a fry cook at McDonald’s comes up with a faster way to make a Big Mac, his manager will notice, who will get his team to use it, and the information will trickle up to his manager and so on, and then trickle down and a year later all McDonald’s fry cooks around the world will be using the new, faster Big Mac cooking technique.

Such are the virtues of the competitive sector. Not all private sector companies are like that. Much has been written in the business literature about kanban kaizen the process of continuous incremental improvement which was so instrumental in the trouncing of US automakers by Japanese automakers. Elsewhere, I’ve described bureaucracies as “Institutions which do not see themselves as being under competitive pressure.” In the case of Toyota vs GM, GM became a bureaucracy because it forgot it was under competitive pressure, while Toyota was very aware that it was competing with GM and so the impetus to innovate and then broadly apply best practices was felt throughout the organization.

Forgive me for thinking this is precisely a feature public educational systems lack.

Why Voting On "The Issues" Is Stupid And It's Fine If Voters Are Uninformed

There are tropes popular among elite watchers of electoral contests that are treated as self-evident and that I think are self-evidently wrong and portray a misunderstanding of how democratic elections and governments work.

The first is the idea that voters should vote based on “the issues” and that voting for/against a candidate based on her character is silly.

The ideal voter, in this scheme, would print out all the 10-point plans on the various candidates’ websites, read them, and then make an informed decision as to which policies she likes more. Conversely, she should utterly disregard attack ads pointing out that this guy is a philanderer and that guy is a hypocrite.

This is completely backward to me, and here’s why: what determines policies enacted by a head of government are her political coalitions and managerial/political skills, not her position papers.

Remember when Barack Obama stood apart in the Democratic primary by coming out with a mandate-less healthcare plan? And we ended up with a healthcare law that includes a mandate? It’s not that Barack Obama is a “flip-flopper” or had a change of heart or what have you, it’s that the healthcare plan that ended up being enacted was a function of political debates and coalition-building in the Congress. Conversely, whatever differences there might have been to a plan enacted under President Rodham Clinton would not have been due to the differences in whatever was on her campaign website, but to her managerial/political skill at navigating Congress and public opinion. And the reason why there was a universal healthcare bill to begin with was that the liberal/progressive movement had been chomping at the bit for decades for political circumstances that would allow for such a bill. What mattered was not any candidate’s “issues”, but the political context and the managerial/political skills of the chief executive. And anyone who expected otherwise betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of how American (indeed, democratic) government works.

“The issues”, in other words, are merely positional signaling, ie marketing, ie akin to the TV ads that sophisticated political watchers so disdain.

And yet, to most higher-educated politics watchers, a voter who had said “Well, I’ve read Clinton and Obama’s position papers on healthcare, and I’m going to vote for Clinton/Obama because I’m for/against a mandate” would have been applauded as sober and reasonable, while a voter who had said “Well, I’m going to vote for Obama because he seems more, put together, you know, more charismatic” would have been the subject of Twitter snark. But it strikes me as a much sounder basis for choosing a chief executive to point to their level-headedness and charisma—character traits that one assumes useful to running a government—than any 10-point plan, which is by definition a list of things that won’t happen.

Beyond broad strokes (are they “conservative” or “moderate” or “progressive”—in other words, what kind of coalition will they put in charge of the executive?) and a handful handful of litmus tests (it’s completely reasonable to refuse to vote for someone who advocates something you find abhorrent, whether that’s bank bailouts or foreign wars or what have you) “the issues” are useless in picking a candidate.

As I’ve written before, 99% of what presidents do is appointing and firing people who do the actual work of government. The remaining 1% is the most intangible and the most important—the Cuban-missile-crisis-type decisions, the do-we-go-to-war-with-Iraq-type decisions.

For determining who’s better at either of those, “the issues” are useless. And character, on the other hand, that thing that we are told should be irrelevant, is (nearly) everything. It’s very hard to judge a person’s character, but looking at their biography, their public appearances and so forth is going to give you a better indication than “the issues.”

Famously, George W. Bush campaigned on a “humble” foreign policy, and gave us anything but. Is it because “Bush lied and people died”? Of course not. It’s because 9/11 happened. If you cared about foreign policy, the relevant question wasn’t “Do I agree more with Bush/Gore/McCain?” but “Who has the character to respond more intelligently and competently to the unknown crises that are bound to happen?”

Deciding that based on TV ads, campaign appearances, little details like whether they seem honest, and so forth, is highly imperfect. But it’s a heck of a lot more reliable than “the issues.”

This brings up the broader question about whether voters should be “informed”. Yes, they should be!, we are told. A popular “contrarian” view we see once in a while is that uninformed and apathetic voters should just stay home if they can’t bothered to make an “informed” choice. But, again, this seems to me to miss how democracy works.

Democracy, as a political regime, is worthwhile because it has given us over the long run much superior policy and economic outcomes than alternative regimes. Yes, Singapore is better run and richer than Greece, but on the whole and over the long term, democracies tend to be freeer and more prosperous than non-democratic regimes.

The main reason for that is quite simply the following: leaders who deliver bad outcomes get fired, no excuses. That’s it. It’s the only regime we know where, at regular intervals, if most households feel that things are getting worse, whoever runs the government is out. The “no excuses” part is important, too. What matters is how implacable it is.

In the corporate world, e.g. Cisco CEO John Chambers has been given a free pass for over a decade by supposedly sophisticated investors for not lifting the company’s stock price because he came in during the tech bubble and so has to deal with circumstances out of his control. Supposedly unsophisticated voters, meanwhile, are much too clever to grade on a curve. It doesn’t matter that you “inherited the recession from Bush”—fix it, and fix it now, or you’re out.

This is a wonderful spur to providing good outcomes, and on the long run, in most cases, it works. If we could invent a regime that chose leaders any other way but had the crucial bad-performance-gets-you-fired feature, it would deliver superb outcomes over the long run. (Arguably, this is what the Chinese Communist Party is trying to build, at least if they’re smart.) People talk about a “democratic deficit” in Britain because the constituency, first-past-the-post system “underrepresents” some parties in Parliament and causes a relatively low number of swing voters in key constituencies to decide the fate of the country, but the system works nearly flawlessly: there was an economic crisis under Labour, and now Labour is out, and if the Conservative-LibDem coalition doesn’t fix it, they’ll be out in the next election, as they are well aware. Same thing with the Electoral College in the US.

Therefore, the only question you need to be able to answer when voting in an election is this: Do I feel better now than I did last time I voted? That’s it. You don’t need a PhD. Heck, you don’t even need to be 18. It’s the famous Reagan appeal.

Over the long run, it’s probably better to have a more informed polity, as many political decisions need to be made with the assent of the governed and it helps that the governed have good ideas/notions, but for the specific duty of voting for a president/governing party, these things really don’t matter. Not to mention the fact that being “educated” correlates with positions on social and other issues that are moral/aesthetic/tribal and have on the merits nothing to do with how educated one is, and the fact that the highly educated tend to have a bias toward believing that other highly educated people should run things, a bias which in my view the last decade has thoroughly debunked (in this sense, I would much rather be governed by the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty).

So, in sum, I hope I’ve disabused you of a few notions and convinced you of the following:

• Don’t vote on the issues, vote on character.
• Don’t complain that fellow voters are uninformed, it means the system’s working.

Of CEOs, Private Equity Titans and presidents

Jim Manzi has had an excellent discussion on the relation between Mitt Romney’s professional background and what he might be like as a president. Megan McArdle has also been discussing this at length.

I’ve made no secret that I think Mitt Romney should not get the GOP nomination, as now looks inevitable, and should not be the next President, as looks likely if the economy does not improve over the next year (but, on this score, I’ll probably be lucky).

I believe that the fundamental and egregious dishonesty that has characterized every step of his political career to date ought to disqualify him from city dogcatcher, let alone wielding the launch codes.

All that said, I think the background of a Harvard JD/MBA, private equity investor and occasional turnaround CEO is great for running the executive branch.

The job of a President is basically two-fold: getting his agenda through the legislative branch, and running the executive branch. The former mostly requires political skill.

As to the latter, which is incredibly important in our era of the Imperial Presidency, a widely spread idea is that in the private sector you learn “management skills” and how to “get things done”. That’s the President-as-Jack-Welch meme. I think that’s largely an illusion for three reasons:

• The public sector works very differently from the private sector;
• The Federal government of the United States is immensely more complex than any private sector business;
• Most “management skills”, at least as taught in business schools, are largely a crock.

CEOs actually have much more leeway in terms of management than do presidents. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos famously spends a few weeks each year working in Amazon warehouses to get a better understanding of that side of the business and improve it. President Romney isn’t going to intern in the Patent Office for two weeks to see how applications could be streamlined. A CEO can decide to spin off, merge, or shut down departments. If President Romney (or Perry) wants to shut down the Commerce Department, he’s going to need an Act of Congress.

99% of the work the President does as manager of the executive work is the following: – Setting priorities – Hiring and firing

The other 1% are the Big Decisions, that are the least frequent but also the most important. It’s the part that can’t be taught and where the background is irrelevant.

In other words, the President behaves much more like an “executive chairman” of a company who has a hand over major strategic decisions than a CEO who runs it day to day.

This is also very similar to what a private equity investor does in a buyout: analyze the business, decide on a strategy and hire, retain (and fire) managers. He should have a “nuts and bolts” understanding of the business, but he’s not going to go into the factory to make widgets or tell the factory manager how to make widgets.

In other words, to reprise Ronald Reagan’s excellent phrase, to be a good manager of the executive branch, a President should know who to trust, and how to verify. These are also the skills a (good) private equity investor has in spades. Mitt Romney has decades of experience analyzing stuff and then hiring, holding to account and firing people.

Of course, when someone who is also a fundamentally dishonest liar with obvious contempt for his fellow citizens has these excellent skills, it’s an additional argument AGAINST nominating them to the position where they would have the power to detain fellow citizens indefinitely, appoint judges to the federal bench, and start wars.

But the question of whether Mitt Romney would make a good president is distinct from the question of whether a co-founder of a successful private equity firm, as such, would be suited to managing the executive branch.

Romney & Bain: Intention versus Method

Yuval, Avik Roy, Ramesh, Michael Walsh and Jonathan Last at The Weekly Standard, among many others, have all written perceptively about the relationship between Mitt Romney’s work at Bain Capital and our political economy.

I think that this paragraph from Jonathan Last gets to the nub of the issue:

Romney’s work at Bain differs in some important ways from how he has characterized it thus far. When Romney says that his goal at Bain was to “create jobs,” that’s not entirely true. As a private equity firm, Bain’s goal was to maximize return on investment (ROI) for a small group of high net worth investors. Sometimes that meant giving seed money to a promising start-up. Sometimes it meant rescuing a company and turning it around. Sometimes it meant finding revenue streams a company hadn’t realized—including government bailouts. Sometimes it meant off-shoring a company’s jobs. And sometimes it meant finding a company whose component parts were worth more than the whole—and dismantling it.

Without respect to the electoral politics and messaging for a moment, the predominant form of “bad” capitalism in contemporary America is created by the joining of a capitalist enterprise with the coercive power of the state, not by the impurity of the motivations of the capitalist. This distinction is crucial for defenders of free enterprise.

This perversion of capitalism normally arises in one of two ways: (1) the crony capitalism of state-backed enterprises, or (2) the implicit violence of lawbreaking by dishonest capitalists. The root problems that need to be addressed in finance in the U.S. are things like Fannie / Freddie, too-big-to-fail, government bailouts of specific companies and so forth, on one side, and Madoff-type scandals, on the other. No real political economy is ever textbook-pure, so there will always be some of both of these, but they ought to be reduced from their current levels.

But requiring that businesspeople make decisions based on some putative idea of altruism, even if such a stricture could be defined and enforced, would be a terrible idea. Capitalists should not be restricted as to intention, but as to method. As a rough-and-ready rule, they should be forbidden from using force. The government may also choose to place additional regulations on them (weights and measures rules, minimum wage laws, non-discrimination laws, etc.). While any given regulation is debatable, some formal regulation is required for real markets, and capitalists should have to obey the law. Further, real markets depend to some extent on informal norms – e.g., general commercial honesty, an ethic of a “deal’s a deal,” and so on. This last point can obviously get somewhat fuzzy, but is still important.

Within these constraints, we should generally want capitalists to pursue their self-interest in business dealings. This is not some falling short of humanity, but the way we grow the material wealth of the society as a whole over time. This is the meaning of Adam Smith’s famous aphorism that:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own neccessities but of their advantages.

The valid criticism of Romney as a capitalist would be that he worked government angles to seek advantage for himself, or broke laws or crucial norms. Seeking to make more money within the rules is a good thing, not a bad thing, for a capitalist to do. That is, Romney’s immediate goal was almost certainly to make money, not to “create jobs.” But the effect of Romney’s actions was to do this – though most of these jobs were created indirectly. This is Adam Smith’s famous “invisible hand.”

Romney was working to “create jobs” only in the sense that if you believe in this, you can have confidence that you are doing your part to increase overall material well-being of society by acting as a self-interested capitalist. More precisely, if all capitalists act this way, then over time, society will advance materially. Tracking your indivudal contribution, or even knowing if it was positive or negative, is a fool’s errand. This is why the very act of trying to count the jobs created at Staples, assessing how many would have been created had Mitt Romney not agreed to take the job running Bain Capital instead of somebody else, estimating how many of these Staples jobs need to be netted against other jobs that therefore were not created at other business supply stores, and so forth is so self-defeating. If we could accurately calculate things like that, we would have much less need for markets in the first place.

The key argument made by critics of “financial capitalism” that can be construed as consistent with all of this relates to the idea of informal norms. In simplified and illustrative terms, this argument would be that by doing something like breaking a norm against laying people off after age 50, these firms create value for themselves, but at the expense of the long-term degradation of society, and therefore the transfer of wealth from almost everyone else to themselves. This is a huge subject that will not be resolved in a blog post, but the key problems that critics of leveraged buyouts seem to point to are layoffs and moving production offshore. Restraining business from doing either of these things is a terrible idea for long-run wealth (and job) creation, and goes to the heart of the creative destruction inherent to real free enterprise.

Obviously there are shades of gray, and as I said all markets require regulation, but we need to be grown-ups about the choices we face. Enjoying the growing wealth created by free markets without the pain, uncertainty and risk that they involve is a fairy tale for an advanced economy.

To end with a word on the politics, I agree with Yuval that this implies that Romney’s work at Bain is only a partial preparation for high political office. On one hand, it would presumably help him to see the economy in a more practical light; but on the other, participating in a capitalist economy is a very different task than regulating it. I have no idea how the politics of this will play out, what is the best way for a Romney campaign to communicate these ideas, or even if they should be communicated at all. But I am convinced that “de-politicizing” our now much politicized economy is very important for America’s future growth and prosperity.

(Cross-posted to The Corner)

Win, Place, and Show

Apropos of a couple of pieces linked to by Andrew Sullivan about the future of GOP Presidential politics beyond this year, let me just say this: the race for second place matters, empirically, quite a bit. And the best evidence is this election season.

The GOP has a strong penchant for nominating whoever has next “earned their turn.” And very frequently, the way they tell who earned it is by looking at who came in second last time around.

In 1976, Ronald Reagan gave President Gerald Ford a run for his money. In 1980, he was the nominee.

In 1980, George H. W. Bush won the Iowa caucuses, and came in second to Ronald Reagan in the primary contests. He was selected as Reagan’s VP, became his heir apparent, and got the nomination for President in 1988.

In 1988, Bob Dole, who had been Ford’s VP nominee in 1976, won the Iowa caucuses, and looked like a formidable contender for the nomination. After losing New Hampshire, he faded, but he still came in second to Bush. In 1996, he became the nominee.

The 2000 election was something of an exception to the above rule. George W. Bush had never come in second running for President before. Second place in 1996 went to Pat Buchanan; third place to Steve Forbes. Buchanan was unacceptable to a broad spectrum of Republican leaders, and was effectively drummed out of the party after 1996; he wound up running an independent campaign in 2000. Forbes would have been acceptable ideologically but was obviously absurd as a candidate. So the field was genuinely open – there was nobody who was obviously “next.” George W. Bush didn’t so much earn the blessing of the establishment as inherit it; it was his “turn” on the basis of primogeniture. It didn’t hurt him that the other major candidate, John McCain, ran against the establishment when he was unable to lock up its support.

But, interestingly enough, that opposition to the establishment in 2000, and his flirtation with the Democrats out of pique in the wake of the 2000 election, were not enough to prevent McCain, who came in second in 2000, from winning the nomination in 2008.

And, finally, Mitt Romney, who is overwhelmingly likely to be the nominee this year, has earned that position primarily by coming in second in the 2008 primary contest. I don’t think anybody is deluded into thinking he is a particularly strong candidate. But he ran last time, came in second (in total votes and states won, that is; Huckabee actually came in second in the delegate count), and his full-time job since then has been lobbying for establishment support. That’s how he earned the nomination.

If Romney gets the nomination and loses, whoever hangs in and fights him for the nomination over the long haul, assuming they aren’t wildly unacceptable to the party establishment, will automatically be in contention for 2016. Ron Paul is wildly unacceptable to the party establishment; Gingrich, for different reasons, probably is, too. But Huntsman, Santorum and Perry aren’t. No one should assume that if they lose this time around, they are gone. That’s not the way the GOP works.

Of course, a historical trend is just that – a trend; it doesn’t guarantee anything at all. But Republican Party history suggests that the race to be the “not-Romney” is far from irrelevant, even if Romney winds up as the nominee.

90% Of Life Is Not Dropping Out

So the winner of the “Not Romney” caucus turns out to be a pro-life, hawkish, Midwestern, blue-collar, has-been politician in a non-threatening sweater vest who was polling in the single digits – not just nationally but in Iowa – until mid-December. If Tim Pawlenty isn’t on suicide watch yet, he should be.

Seriously, though, and I’m not a Pawlenty nostalgist – I’m overwhelmingly likely to be supporting President Obama in November, and no Republican actually running was likely to change my mind about that – but let’s look at the handful of things Santorum has going for him that the other “Not Romneys” didn’t. Everybody in the party doesn’t hate him, the way they hate Gingrich. He’s capable of at least remembering his own talking points, unlike Rick Perry, apparently. He’s not an obvious amateur, like Herman Cain, or an obvious crazy person, like Michele Bachmann. He’s not challenging core GOP positions, like Ron Paul is (on foreign policy, the drug war, civil liberties, etc.). His blue collar roots lend credibility to his economic message, whatever it is. He’s a Midwesterner, not a Southerner or a Texan. Every one of these attributes applies to Tim Pawlenty as well.

And his negatives? He has no money to compete nationally, no organization, no support from the party leadership (even Pawlenty wasn’t quite as bad off). He’s an exceptionally annoying person to listen to (call this one a tie). He lost his Senate reelection bid by 18 points (Pawlenty won his, narrowly). And he’s transparently an extremist on both foreign policy and social issues, and even if some GOP voters are thrilled to have a “full-spectrum” conservative to support, transparent extremism isn’t usually considered an asset in a general election. Call Pawlenty what you like, “transparent extremist” isn’t what you’d call him.

All of which goes to prove simply that winners don’t quit, and quitters don’t win. Pawlenty was a pretty uninspiring candidate. But with the exception of Ron Paul, who inspires a relatively narrow slice of the electorate but inspires it a great deal, nobody running is particularly inspiring. Heck, most of the folks running inspire some combination of dread and disgust. Rick Santorum would be a terrible general election candidate. Worse, even, than Mitt Romney. But he earned his hour to strut and fret upon the stage, by refusing to leave it.

Re: Gene to Phene

John, good to see you posting too, and Merry Christmas!

You say this:

Surely it will not be “the fact of our ignorance in this area” that “is likely to be very important to thinking about public policy in the upcoming decades”: rather it will be our increasing understanding in this area. The fact of our ignorance was, after all, around from the beginning of time up to 1953.

Our understanding of both genetics and the biological basis of behavior is proceeding rapidly, and I assume will continue to do so for some time. This has led to many extravagant claims for knowledge that we do not have, i.e., a “gene for depression.” Such claims have obvious policy relevance, and I think that subjecting such claims to rigorous scrutiny will become increasingly important in future decades, because there will likely be many more of them.

Then you ask the following:

And what does this mean: “We do not have the practical ability to understand why person X has normal psychological make-up Y based on analysis of his or her genome”? Do you mean to say this is a thing we metaphysically cannot understand? What is the evidence for that? The name Auguste Comte mean anything?

I know of no metaphysical reason (that I am certain is true) for why we could not ultimately understand this scientifically. We don’t understand it yet, though.

Comte is a great illustration of several kinds of errors, many of which center on unfounded claims to knowledge. You link to one example of this: his claim that we could never know the chemical composition of stars. But Comte is usually thought of as the founder of sociology: a discipline that he saw as scientifically modeling human social organization based on mathematical laws (per a recent set of Corner exchanges, Hari Seldon anyone?). He and Saint-Simon were called out by Hayek as key intellectual figures in building belief in the current (not possible at some future date) capacity to predict and therefore plan society. A key intellectual task of Hayek, Popper and the other mid-20th century libertarian thinkers was to point out the pseudo-scientific nature of these claims.

It may be that someday we will be able to use knowledge of the genome to predict human social behavior sufficiently to rationally plan our political economy, but we are not there yet. We should rigorously scrutinize claims of the reduction of non-pathological human mental states to scientific phenomena, in part because of the potentially profound political implications of such findings. More precisely, all scientific claims should be subjected to rigorous scrutiny, but we should challenge the sloppy popularization of such claims unless and until they are really scientifically validated, because any such popularization may tend to create an unfounded intellectual climate hospitable to the erosion of political and economic freedom.

(Cross-posted to The Corner)

What a Ron Paul Victory Would Mean

He hasn’t won yet, of course, and if he does we won’t get a terribly accurate picture from his supporters of why they gravitated toward him. But in my own wildly speculative view:

- Contra David Frum, Ron Paul is not the candidate of “indifference” to the economic situation. Indeed, I strongly suspect that the main substantive reason why Paul is getting more traction this time than last time around is precisely the economic crisis, and popular fury about it. Paul’s policy prescriptions are, in my view and in Frum’s (and in Andrew Sullivan’s, for that matter), insanely wrong – certain to badly exacerbate our plight, not to ameliorate it. They are reactionary, anti-modern, rooted in ignorance not knowledge. But they are an authentic response. Paul is not saying everything was fine in 2007. His is a deep and radical critique of business as usual. But a vote for him will not mean “I don’t care about the economic crisis.” It’ll mean, “I am convinced that Washington has no idea how to resolve the economic crisis, and, as a consequence, I am open to extremely radical and dangerous alternatives to the status quo.”

- I also don’t think Paul is getting much support because of his radical opposition to the foreign policy consensus. But I agree with Daniel Larison that if Paul wins, the fact that he will have won in spite of flouting that consensus is significant. Andrew Sullivan says his priority is “remaking” the GOP on foreign policy by opening up debate. Paul himself cannot make that debate happen – because he’s a rigid ideologue and his opponents are mostly behaving like thugs and hysterics. A debate of that sort isn’t really a debate at all. But if Paul wins Iowa, and does well in New Hampshire, he’ll have established that, in a post-9-11 world, there is room not to toe the line on foreign policy questions, room for someone with pragmatic views more like Dick Lugar’s (or Mitch Daniels’s) to run and not do what Romney and Huntsman have been doing. To a much lesser extent, I think the same thing can be said of civil liberties concerns.

- But it probably won’t mean anything at all. Mike Huckabee won in 2008. I haven’t noticed that the GOP field this year has been tripping over itself to win Huckabee’s support. Pat Buchanan nearly tied Bob Dole in 1996, but after that the party moved away from him, not towards him, on basically all his issues. Pat Robertson’s constituency has only gotten more important since 1988, but he himself probably reached the peak of his influence that year, and his constituency has remained important in part because it has proven to be domesticable – they have not demanded a radical change in much of anything in exchange for their votes. If Paul’s voters turn out to be similarly domesticable, one can debate how important they will turn out to have been. If not, I find it doubtful that the GOP will consider changing much to win them over.

Speaking Truth to Power

I see, via Daniel Larison that Bret Stephens has been unsurprisingly busy making the opposite argument to the one I just made:

A proper attitude [toward tyrrany] may not have required physical belligerency, [Havel] believed, and it could easily incorporate diplomacy. But it did require a constant posture of spiritual belligerency—a refusal to accept that a regime like Saddam’s or Kim’s was just a normal fact of life, beyond the reach of moral examination. In the context of Cold War Czechoslovakia, Havel called it a matter of “living in truth.” In the context of countries like North Korea, Russia or Iran, Havel told me it was also a matter of truth-telling. “We can talk to every ruler,” he said, “but first of all it is necessary to tell the truth.”

There’s a very important insight there, an insight Larison should acknowledge even though Stephens does his best to bury it. The insight is that truth, because it cannot be answered honestly and directly, has a corrosive effect on a structure that depends on lies to survive. Speaking truth to power can frustrate and even defeat power. Not always, of course. But sometimes, and to a surprising degree.

But the Iraq War was not “speaking truth” – because it wasn’t “speaking” at all: it was action. Without even going into the issue of the distortions – and self-deceptions – involved in building the case for war (in both of which I participated in my own small way, I should readily admit), action is not speech. Action cannot be truth; action creates truth, in the sense of facts, through the exercise of power.

The article that Vaclav Havel signed in support of the Iraq War was not an instance of speaking truth to power. It was an instance of speaking for power. The principal argument in the article is that unity is strength; that is to say, inasmuch as we want strength – power – it is more important to agree than to debate the truth. A secondary argument is that credibility is strength; that is to say, inasmuch as we want strength – power – it is more important to mean what we say than to debate the truth.

These are not specious arguments. They are entirely legitimate arguments – sometimes, they are persuasive ones. Once you have power, you have to consider these kinds of arguments. And it is juvenile to reject power as such – power is a fact of life, neither to be abjured nor idolized, but to be dealt with like other facts. I’m just pointing out that they are arguments about the accumulation, exercise and preservation of power – not about truth, and certainly not about speaking truth to power.

As a head of state, Vaclav Havel was implicated in power. Moreover, as a Czech, and not an Iraqi, he had only an indirect relationship with the sorts of truth that he might wish to speak were he not so implicated. Those aren’t cop-outs – they’re just more facts of life, things to be dealt with. It’s pleasant to imagine that the moral stature derived from one’s noble actions as a dissident is perfectly fungible, but it isn’t; it’s as context-dependent as everything else. With respect to the Iraq War, Havel wasn’t a dissident – not because he agreed with President Bush and disagreed with President Chirac (had he gone the other way, one could just as easily claim he was being a yes man and a conformist, but a conformist to European expectations rather than American), but because he was a head of state.

Stephens quotes Havel saying in a 2007 interview that “[t]he world . . . could not be indifferent forever to a murderer like Saddam Hussein.” Margaret Thatcher famously said that there is “no such thing as society” – by which she meant not that we are all atomized individuals without communal obligations but that there is no separate entity called “society” that can act. Individuals can act; they can direct institutions to act; but there is no “society” to which one can make an external appeal. Obligations imposed upon “society” turn out to be obligations imposed upon individuals. Similarly, there is no “world” to be indifferent or to take an interest in or to be indifferent to a murderer like Saddam Hussein. There are only the various governments of the various countries, and the various institutions those governments created to work within. We are not, once again, talking about speaking truth to power; we are talking about using power, and Havel was speaking as part of that power structure, not an outsider to it.

In my own view, Havel made the right call on Iraq for the right reasons. He had every reason to be grateful to the United States for its role in opposing the Soviet Union (even though we did essentially nothing to oppose the Soviet Union’s crushing of the Prague Spring – because, prudentially, there really was nothing much we could do), as well for, after the end of the Cold War, cementing Czech membership in the Western club of nations by expanding NATO to include them. He had every reason to trust the United States in its estimation of the Iraqi threat. And he had every reason to believe that the NATO Alliance and the United Nations between them held out the best hope for an international relations structured around simultaneously preserving peace and promoting freedom. One of the many negative consequences of the Iraq War is that, in its wake, people like the Czechs have every reason to feel that those feelings of gratitude and trust were exploited. But the blame for that lies with us, not with them.