More Farms, Smaller Farms

Now made with real fruit!I'd like to respond to Josh's last post by modeling what I see as the obverse. Economies of scale in agriculture are desireable when the alternative is crippling poverty. Nevertheless, in developed economies where starvation remains of secondary concern to self-inflicted overeating, more food of less homogeneous nutritional composition and higher quality even at higher costs is sorely necessary for the public welfare. Looming over all of this, the Mathusian insight that gave birth to both modern agriculture and modern economics remains true - the human population will always increase at a greater rate than food production efficiency. (My theory is that the Mathusian condition is an emergent consequence of the tendency for humans to be unrealistically optimistic about the future.) 

For this reason, in developing economies, it remains prudent to hedge against economies of scale in agriculture and some of the evils born of placing ourselves too far from the source of our sustenance via extreme and unnatural occupational specialization. (Indeed, it's possible that all of culture comes from food. And "you are what you eat" is wise on several levels.) The Summer 2011 issue of Lapham's Quarterly does a good job of balancing and weighing all the complex considerations at the intersection of development, agriculture, poverty, and nutrition.

The short version of my counterpoint to Josh is that what we need in America is different than what we need for countries that can't feed themselves. It might even be that there's a natural developmental arch that all civilizations must follow, and the stage that a particular civilization is in determines what course of action that country should take to maximize welfare: first (1) there's a community wrought of nature based on equality and living harmoniously, where everyone is a subsistence farmer or hunter/gatherer and everyone lives and dies at the whims of the seasons; then (2) primitive accumulation goes down and a primitive capitalist society develops - whether this is a result of contact with other capitalist societies or natural forces, it's safe to say this is where Africa is; next (3) capitalism matures until it can mature no more - intra-industry national power emerges concentrated in few hands, and these hands - instead of toiling honestly to coordinate supply and demand for the well-being of all - begin to build walls and moats around their citadels (see regulatory capture, patent over-filing, health insurance tethered to corporate employment, credentialing and licensing, etc.); (4) diminishing returns compel a premium to be placed on solving social problems or coerced egalitarianism - this is the stage where the United States and other mature social democracies find themselves; Marx went on to speculate that societies after this stage advance to (5) perfect, blissful communism as the profit motive is grdually removed from aspects of socety where it is (deemed) detrimental to the general welfare. Many others (generally social democrats) think (4) is as far as we can and should go. I think these intellectual frameworks are dangerously naïve and/or cowardly; we can combine lessons learned from (3) and (4) in a self-similar federalist/libertarian/anarchist structure that allows for unfettered individual expression and positive-sum cooperation while minimizing the effects of individual recklessness and coercive association.

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On August 2nd

You don't want this baby seal to be clubbed to death, do you?The brouhaha over August 2nd as a firm deadline to raise the nation's debt ceiling has at least some element of Washington Monument Syndrome.  From Wikipedia:

Washington Monument Syndrome, also called the "Mount Rushmore Syndrome", is the name of a political tactic allegedly used by government agencies when faced with reductions in the rate of projected increases in budget or actual budget cuts. The most visible and most appreciated service that is provided by that entity is the first to be put on the chopping block.  The name derives from the National Park Service's alleged habit of saying that any cuts would lead to an immediate closure of the wildly popular Washington Monument.  The Washington Monument Syndrome emerged as a euphemism for cutting the most visible services after George Hartzog, the seventh National Parks Director, closed popular national parks like the Washington Monument and the Grand Canyon for two days a week in 1969. The intent of the closures may not have been to get people to complain to Congress, but the effect was that Congress received complaints, Hartzog was fired, and the funding was restored.

Here are some more examples of the phenomenon in ascending order of ridiculousness:

The Zakim Bridge from Cambridge to Boston is one of the Boston's most popular landmarks.  In April 2009, the MBTA faced budget cuts and billions in debt still lingering from the Big Dig and decided to turn off the bridge's famous lights, which would save a whopping 1/30,000 of the organization's debt.  The ignorant public responded to this stunt by demanding that the MBTA's budget be raised so the lights could be turned back on.

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Rejoinders to a New Political Dialectic

I posted some rejoinders to my original piece "A New Political Dialectic" in the comments at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen.  I have reproduced them below:

1.  A possible litmus test for what constitutes “positivist New Atheism” is that they tend to make the argument that religion is unfalsifiable as if that is an indictment of religion.  Really, religion does not hold itself to the same standards as science (why should it?).  The two work best when kept separate.  Just like I can be a scientist who enjoys art or a scientist who enjoys nature, I can also be a scientist who enjoys religion.

Again, this doesn’t speak to the question of whether or not God exists, (which I made explicit above) and I was hoping not to get into that since it’s been hashed out billions of times and no one has made any progress.  But, since people seem to want to talk about that, from my own personal journey, I know that “Does God exist?” is a difficult question to define precisely.  I’ve settled into a sort of noncognitivist/Spinozan outlook on the divine that places me closer to both a Sufi mystic and a Nietzschean atheist than one who believes I’ve been “saved” by a personal Jesus or the group of people that make vast amounts of money antagonizing believers in personal Jesuses (Jesi?) because their beliefs are not based on the scientific method.

2.  To be honest, I’m really disappointed that comments tended towards an old-fashioned Internet atheist debate, but I fault myself for putting so much about Harris and his positivist atheism at the beginning of the piece.  Burt Likko’s comment is one here that actually engages my argument, which is that political debate should be driven by a dialectical relationship between libertarianism and socialism; I was hoping that more comments would address this contention.

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Recognizing Convenience

Like many I’m sure, I take for granted the ease with which I walk into my corner store and get the things I need without having to bother or hassle with traveling further to a large grocery store once every three weeks or so to restock.  More likely I bitch - like many - about how high the markup is on items (under my breath) and move along. Something happened to me yesterday as I was in my corner store chatting it up with the day-guy and the night-guy came in for his appropriate shift and while doing so he patted me on the shoulder and said “What’s up Chip?” This little effort made the day a little better and, I obviously remember it.

So I’ll cut to the quick here. Our good country has forgotten just how good we are, and you’ll take notice I didn’t say great; it currently seems impossible to utter the word with any truth where the U.S. is concerned.  It's time to stop whining and take (some kind of) action. I don’t buy in to the theories that technology and progress is the reason for our collective asses not getting off the couch. There has always been some kind of technology. Blowing smoke has apparently become the status quo. I don’t like having to apologize for wanting to save the world and I live in the country that used to be number one in that department in everyone’s eyes. Unlike Gordon Gekko I don’t think greed is good, it's more like Jonestown Kool-Aid.  And our whiney little attitudes and the preservation of politicians who only protect themselves and their campaign donor’s butts just won’t cut it anymore. Through fear, intimidation and some good-old-boy appeasing we have been force-fed that bitching is just how it is and there is no reparation. Hogwash.

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The Best of State Tax Expenditure Disclosure

President Obama proposed comprehensive corporate tax reform in the State of the Union.  An crucial first step is disclosing who benefits from expenditures.  Currently the federal government offers no insight into where an estimated $1 trillion in tax breaks go every year.  Some states are beginning to provide information about which corporations benefit from local tax spending programs. None of their state websites are perfect, but their strong suits could be combined to create a powerful tool for disclosing federal corporate tax expenditures. Here are some highlights from state tax expenditure websites:

Best Graphics: Michigan

The Michigan Economic Development Corporation’s Project website literally shows users where their tax dollars are going. They can zoom in on their community and see who got what. As beautiful as the site is, it would be nice to have a database mode for easy access to the raw data. Besides, showing private investments on the front page, while requiring a click through to see how much in taxes a company avoided is burying the lead.

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Cutting the Gordian Knot Between Socialism and Libertarianism

Alexander cuts the Gordian Knot

It is popular within the libertarian blogosphere to label pejoratively any recommendation of the use of state power to achieve liberty as "statist", as if any policy suggesting the use of the state apparatus to solve problems of insufficient liberty is objectively evil and destined to lead us all down the road to totalitarianism.  Not only is this tantamount to mindless orthodox hackery, but it is also quite absurd.  

In a liberal regime, state power is best understood as what ultimately (I use this term in the sense of "finally" and not "fundamentally" as I generally support vigorous primary social restraint on undesirable behavior, i.e. shunning or boycotting) prevents the war of all against all.  Indeed, the present scope of state power can be best understood as the result of historical forces and individual aggregate self-interest operating within the liberal program.  In the words of Alexis de Tocqueville:

(In a democracy) no man is obliged to put his powers at the disposal of another, and no one has any claim of right to substantial support from his fellow man, each is both independent and weak. These two conditions, which must be neither seen quite separately nor confused, give the citizen of democracy extremely contradictory instincts. He is full of confidence and pride in his independence from his equals, but from time to time his weakness makes him feel the need for some outside help which he cannot expect from any of his fellows, for they are both impotent and cold. In this extremity he naturally turns his eyes toward that huge entity which alone stands out above the universal level of abasement. His needs, and even more his longings, continually put him in mind of that entity, and he ends by regarding it as the sole and necessary support for his individual weakness. 

Of course, state power has tended to excess, and it must be controlled by the collective balancing forces of a bottom-up, democratically-conscious populace (which explains why democracy-building seldom works) and liberal, private institutions, but there are elements of state power which all citizens can (and have) agreed are for the best at least in principle if not in practice: proscriptions against murder for instance, the national defense, the police, even anti-trust regulations to prevent private institutions from subtracting from the general aggregate welfare (or challenging the government power monopoly).

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Minipost: the Table of the Worthy

I commented at LoOG:

It seems to me like there is always a Table of the Worthy of sorts that gets to weigh in on national industry policies. Instead of coming up with policies that are beneficial for everybody, we work on ways to throw bones to all the relevent parties. How can we switch to a system with more central control without destroying private enterprise? I know, let’s just nest a layer of corporations between consumers and legislators. How can we improve food safety while keeping costs low? Let’s put it all under the umbrella of FDA control, but we can compensate with more farm subsidies and restrictions on foreign competitors.

What you wind up getting with such a system is a kind of mercantilist, privatized oligarchy that can only really leverage its own clout against other rival mercantilist, privatized oligarchies to succeed. The constitution sets down and elaborates on a specific set of principles designed to avoid this intractable situation, yet we’ve stretched and gerrymandered it to the point where it provides the putative justification for the exact opposite of its intentions.

I'm going to call this kind of special interest unfreedom club the Table of the Worthy from now on.  Look for it in our archives.

Obama's Perpetual Mulligan

If there's anything the recent ridiculous Nation/Mark Ames/Yasha Levine incident has revealed other than absurd tribalism or that Mark Ames is the Gwar of journalism, it's that liberals have been giving the Obama Administration a pass on civil liberties violations in favor of pointing out how conservatives did the same thing when Bush was President.  From a Harvard Law Bulletin Jeri Zeder review of Charles and Gregory Fried's new book, "Because It Is Wrong: Torture, Privacy and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror":

The book explores three issues presented by Bush administration policies, primarily from ethical but also from historical and legal perspectives: torture; eavesdropping, surveillance and the right to privacy; and executive prerogative.

f course I think the work the Fried's are doing is great in principle, and I haven't read the book, but this passage in the review ignores the fact that, while the Obama Administration has closed Gitmo and opted for Stalinist show trials instead of secret dungeon torture, the Administration has escalated da warz and the intrusiveness of our security state.  There has also been the unprecedented step taken of ordering an American Citizen to be assassinated.  I mean, holy shit, we're talking like these issues of Executive power are all in the past and the real question now is how do we clean up the mess and deal with the fallout.

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"Patriotism, That Least Discerning of Virtues"

How many American flags are there in this picture? Closest without going over gets a free Inductive coffee mug.I thought of titling this one "Conservatism Eats Itself". but we've already got one of those, so I'll attribute the title of this post to Borges without providing a link. (press me on it and I will.)  What does it mean?  It skips over the incoherent question of whether or not patriotism qualifies as a virtue and goes straight to saying that patriotism is the easiest virtue to attain.  To be only patriotic is to settle for the lowest common denominator of goodness and to do so without thinking, without considering that there may be conflicts between patriotism and more sublime virtues.  To be patriotic is to acquiesce to groupthink for its own sake.  I'll leave it at that, because I don't want to violate Godwin's Law.

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The Pendulum Swings

Yet Another Rally on the National Mall - by Ep_JhuIn 1969, in the wake of a massive anti-Vietnam rally on the National Mall, President Richard Nixon called for the support of "the great Silent Majority."  At the time the forces of doctrinaire liberalism called for radical change in government and a "revolution" in cultural, sexual, racial and political terms seemed imminent.  That revolution proved unable to affect the course of the country militarily- the end of the draft made it possible for the U.S. to fight with muted domestic outrage- but it continues to reverberate in other ways.  Now things have reversed and a massive Conservative outrage has crystallized into marches on the National Mall.  Just like Nixon, I believe that most of the country does not support the stridency of the those calling for revolution, but the movement is so visible that it has to be acknowledged.

What if instead of asking the majority to stay silent, Nixon asked them to speak up?  That seems to be the central point of John Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity.  It will be an extremely visible rebuttal to Glen Beck; you got a bunch of people to the mall, but so can we.  Stewart says that isn't what he's doing.  It doesn't really matter what his intentions are, that's what this rally is.  Timothy Noah at Slate says that's why it shouldn't happen (Slate taking an absurd and contrarian position, shocking).  Why not let people who think the U.S. is ok demonstrate? It will be a powerful refutation of the histrionic calls for revolution.  I'd like a better government, but I am willing to work towards it rather than impose it through incoherent outrage.  That's why I'll be at the Rally to Restore Sanity.

Read It or Leave It

Do you want a roundhouse kick to the face from a guy wearing these bad boys? I didn't think so.There is an unjustified consensus among expats that living in East Asia ruins your English ability.  It's true I find myself forgetting how to spell simple words and making high school mistakes when it comes to word choice or style, but in general my English has improved since I came here. 

To follow up on my last post, this is because English teachers have to think about literally every word that comes out of our mouths; we gradually habituate to using terminology and grammar that our students can understand. 

When I came upon the works of Kay Hetherly a few weeks ago, it became clear to me that not only could expats write well, but that they could write well because they were expats.  Hetherly's Hemmingway-like paucity of words and exactness is something to which I aspire. 

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ESL American Politics

Bush and Perot engage in preoccupied banter during Clinton's soliloquy.A student today was telling me about the recent awarding of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Chemistry to Japanese scientists and a scientist from Purdue, and it led into a discussion of Indiana and how that state fits into American electoral politics.  This in turn devolved into a gross oversimplification of the whole American scene.

We discussed the geopolitical history of the United States from roughly the time of the French and Indian War up until the U.S. Civil War as defined roughly by maintaining the balance of power between northern states with interests in manufacturing and industry and southern states interested in agriculture.  When we discussed the westward expansion, I maintained that this distinction between southern "slave states" and northern "free states" was very much preserved, and forms the basis from which much of modern American geopolitics has come.

We skipped over the Gilded Age and mentioned the New Deal only in passing as primarily concerned with the size, scope, and responsibility of the government before moving on to the Reagan and post-Reagan years as primarily defined by incoherence (although future political historians may be able to overgeneralize about the present as I have here done about the past) since Reagan's Big Tent.  I made her look up the word "incoherent" in her electronic dictionary.

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The Taxed and Unrepresented

A Mad Tea Party

"(With Democracy) No man is obliged to put his powers at the disposal of another, and no one has any claim of right to substantial support from his fellow man, each is both independent and weak. These two conditions, which must be neither seen quite separately nor confused, give the citizen of... democracy extremely contradictory instincts. He is full of confidence and pride in his independence from his equals, but from time to time his weakness makes him feel the need for some outside help which he cannot expect from any of his fellows, for they are both impotent and cold. In this extremity he naturally turns his eyes toward that huge entity which alone stands out above the universal level of abasement. His needs, and even more his longings, continually put him in mind of that entity, and he ends by regarding it as the sole and necessary support for his individual weakness." - Alexis de Tocqueville

Joe's post from Monday got me thinking about the Tea Party and our two-party system: 

It's tempting in a democracy to represent the policies of our elected officials as the center, but this is not an accurate picture of the American republic.  Extremists of every political and ideological stripe exist (I don't necessarily mean that in the pejorative sense).  The Tea Party's existence shows both that our politicians are out of touch with what the people want and that the people themselves are out of touch with what they want.  The Tea Party's anger may be justified, but it is incoherent.  Why should it be coherent?  Different people want different things.

I'd like to conduct a thought experiment to see if we can get any closer to the origins of the Tea Party movement: who is really unrepresented here in America?  Let's look at the three traditional policy axes under the presumption that the stated goals of policy are the actual goals of policy.

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A Tea Party is Better than Two Party

From Ms. Murkowski's flckrWhen Lisa Murkowski launched her write-in campaign for the Alaskan Senate seat she currently holds it might have formally come without the blessing of Republican establishment, but their secret sympathies must lie with their former caucus member.  As the Tea Party's Republican body count grew, the marriage of convenience's true cost must have dawned on all but the most pure hearted of conservatives.  Sure, all this ginned up anger points left, but from a vantage so far right that even stalwart conservatives have become targets for venial ideological transgressions.  At some point politician self-interest had to kick in and Ms. Murkowski drew the line in the sand.  If the Tea Parties want to weaponize low-turnout primaries to punish even minor dissent then ousted Republicans can make their case to the general public.  Murkowski, and Charlie Crist, offer a path for moderate Republicans who fret about their seats.

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Posture not Policy

I consider myself a deficit hawk.  It's really unconscionable to me that we allow our government to run a permanent budget deficit.  It's a sign of the feverish illness in our politics that we rarely agree on something as basic as only spending the money you have.  Now, my proposed solution to the budget deficit- dramatically increased government revenues- isn't broadly popular.  Nonetheless, I feel that I and my conservative fellow policy travelers at least share a common concern for the importance of balancing the budget.  What I hope everyone can understand is that balancing the budget is a long term goal.  For now it's a truly fantastic proposal akin to curing cancer by fiat.  So when I hear that Rand Paul is threatening to filibuster any budget that isn't balanced I am disgusted.  That's the talking point of a liar or a mad man, not the "intellectually honest" politician Dr. Paul is made out to be.

Chris commented that "at least considers [Dr. Paul] not stealing from future generations important."  I'm not impressed.  The budget deficit and national debt is a huge problem that has accumulated over many years, for many reasons.  It's going to take a long time and a lot of painful tradeoffs to even get within spitting distance of a balanced budget- let alone Clinton era surpluses.  Since Dr. Paul obviously doesn't have tax increases in mind, what he is proposing would be nothing less than immediately firing thousands of federal employee, including a huge part of the military, drastically and immediately cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits and probably shutting down government for awhile.  That's the only way to balance the budget immediately without tax increases.  Now, I bet Dr. Paul probably wouldn't that much of a problem with any of that.  I do have a problem with him pretending that balancing the budget can be done by stubborn theatrical tricks without mentioning that you want to perform budget surgery with a chainsaw. 

Dr. Paul offers a ridiculous way to govern, but a fine way to play to the cheap seats.  The complete unravelling of whatever broad appeal he might have had continues apace.