James Fallows, whom I've read since I was something like 16 yrs. old it seems (and that is a long time ago), follows an immigrant reader into an interesting mistake in yet another of too many bits in The Atlantic. (Does anyone still read David Brooks for interest alone? Even the best, hardest working columnist-for-life just wears on us when they don't go to the well deeply enough.)
Fallow's reader writes:
He [Putin in his NyTimes Op Ed] is making his case, a case that the world will not understand as Americans understand it. He has protected his interest in Syria under the banner of advancing an international interest. He has established, further, a precedent. That the United States does answer to the council, that it cannot act unilaterally and that our nation can be made to suffer a geopolitical consequence. If you were a country in the Middle East, whose protection would you want right now?
I brought up Khrushchev not incidentally. I currently view our recent impasse as very similar to the Vienna Summit. Americans are quick to hand-wave the foreign apparat, but slow to realize what just happened. We got duped into having a fight we didn't want to have. We wanted limits on Assad's power, and we now have significant limits of our own by way of this precedent.
This is all fine and clever and quite wrong. Fallows follows by implication this classic realpolitik error, so commonplace in modern times.
The idea that America must be free to act preemptively, without much constraint, and that such actions, like drone strikes, make us safer.
In reality, such actions degrade our security in a clear and definite way.
When we kill people who haven't directly attacked nor are directly attacking us or our contracted allies, everyone senses that we are in the wrong.
Putin, as a Russian controller, manipulator, whatever, is quite beside this point.
By becoming an Evil Empire, we are ensuring not only our eventual fall, but fallout, the very best case of which is losing our freedoms to a security/police state. The worse and more likely fallout is suffering retribution that kills not a few dozen or a few hundred, but 2 or 3, even 4 magnitudes higher in body count. Eventually.
In short, the common delusion that we can make ourselves safer by killing punitively or preemptively.
That someone wiser said "He that lives by the sword shall die by the sword" should not only give us pause or make us add in another layer of checks and balances -- it should lead to deeper introspection, or something. Anything. Anything but this realpolitik.
In reality, billions of people know when a state is in the wrong, and like water building behind an obstruction, the opposition to the wrong grows. Everything seems fine to the self-fooling until the sudden and inevitable result.
This will come, unless we recant.
And yes, a religious term is the most appropriate.
Because such a belief in killing as the first or 2nd solution, endlessly supported in our media, our movies, books, language -- it is a mythos, or a religion. But not a good one.
This does seem a mythos. So we do have a battle of religions more or less.
Since this battle is in our hearts and minds, we could change in a day, and that change unfurl over a few years, like Gorbachev's Glasnost. A harmful Wall would fall.
And that could save a lot of American lives. After all, it is never too late for us to change.
We can renounce unprovoked attacks and killing, we can apologize, we can reform, and we can begin to listen more to the better angels of our nature, and less to the impartially, putatively objective realpolitik of the law-of-the-jungle crowd.
Not sure the law of the jungle isn't best?
Consider: Which nation is safer right now, in the big sense -- the U.S. or China?
Like the U.S., China has an initial level of safety (if it acts neutrally) that arises from its sheer size and weight. To the extent, extensive, that China has not taken on so many fights of the world, China is by far the safer.
The time to fight a Nazi Germany or an Al Qaeda, as always, as in all of time, is as it begins to attack.
We do always need to wisely prepare, we need to watch and be ready.
We should never preempt.
Showing posts with label The Ideal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Ideal. Show all posts
September 13, 2013
June 11, 2011
What Government Does Well/Poorly (Updated 6-20: fixing Social Security & Medicare)
Among the popular American commentariat -- that is, the "Left" and the "Right" -- seeking out real insights from many views is simply absent. Other views are presented in caricature or included only if they have some obvious flaw, as a convenient straw man. A substantive alternative view isn't of value for the ideological purpose of the forum, and if one appears, it is ignored or shouted down and mischaracterized and then it's time for the commentary from the guru. The real story is: You are either for us or against us.
Government is either a good solution to any problem...or is an unfortunate, necessary evil to be shrunk for the better whenever possible.
It would be one thing if this was only the fringes.
It has become predominate.
This has become so normal, for so many years, Americans don't even realize how mentally unbalanced most popular rhetoric and commentary has become.
Can a nation whose popular thought is based on mischaracterizations and labeling of our fellow citizens remain civil? Or will it experience a progressive loss of mutual regard...and eventually see the fading of civil rights that mutual regard supports (as in 1930s Germany)?
This is no abstract question, nor is it a phenomena confined to a small subset of America. Instead, even commentary in our top forums is suffused with misinterpretations and characterizations of a degrading nature which encourages us to join camps and oppose our real enemies -- our fellow citizens.
Consider, do many of the popular blogs, talk shows, or columnists you have heard/read, from the yellow to the erudite -- from Fox News to top newspapers and some leading blogs (e.g.-- when they address the 'real' motives of groups) -- have more-than-occasional commentary that paints groups/classes/professions of citizens as following base motives and goals?
When you read/hear that the labeled group isn't of typical mixed character (with isolated malfeasance), but instead has a dramatic pervasive character, a hidden agenda, or the crudest of motives, a natural response is to join in condemnation or a feeling of moral superiority.
One of the oldest games of humanity is being played, sometimes for profit (more eyeballs), but often with sincere, true-believer indignation.
This is the paranoid style of American commentary. And it can lead to a breakdown in dialogue in the body politic.
This is a subject worthy of many significant posts (the link above is a start), or of books, but we have a profound question at hand -- what is government for and what should it do?
...
What if government is neither a general panacea nor a corrupt drag on our lives, but instead is something more native, something not discussed lately in America?
What if government is essentially a universal, or inclusive, co-op?
...
A co-op after all is simply people cooperating for mutual benefit. We are surrounded by co-ops of all manner -- such as school districts, corporations, neighborhood associations, or insurance pools (like the automobile mutual insurance pool you share with other policy holders).
Might it be possible -- exactly as is the case with a co-op -- that government may by nature do some things well and some things poorly?
Why, yes.
But...that would imply much, or most, of today's rhetoric from the "Left" and the "Right" is of little value in solving our problems.
We need to go beyond the Left and the Right to gain insight.
...
At this point, some might be thinking: "What if I'd like to opt out of this big federal government in all ways except mutual defense?"
To consider this, consider that every major function of American federal government arose in direct response to a strong national need, especially during crises.
Flooding led to the modern version of the Army Corps of Engineers. The Great Depression bank run of 1933 led to the creation of the F.D.I.C. -- ultimately backed by the U.S. taxpayer -- which insures you won't lose all of your money deposited at a bank some day (such as for instance a day like September 16th, 2008 when "money stopped" in the famous Frontline phrasing).
Might some of these functions of the federal government be no longer needed? Which?
This is a central issue of our time.
This post will address the most general form of this question: What is government best for?
....
If government is simply a co-op by nature, then it follows that the structure of government determines whether it is effective.
When government is well-structured for a particular need, then it can effectively secure that necessity and support the lives of its citizens.
Quality of life depends on the effectiveness of co-ops: if we aren't worrying about carjacking or bridge collapse, then conversation can turn to something fun -- like a musical performance, or the antics of boys who have been trying to gain your daughter's attention.
To consider whether government should fulfill a certain need which people find hard to accomplish on their own, we must review whether government can be well-structured for that activity.
If it can be well-structured for the need, and act to the benefit of all citizens (directly or indirectly through secondary effects; see more below), then this is an activity government could do well.
...
Let's look at what peoples around the world have done well with government. Why does government exist to begin with?
Modern nations exist because of our history of war.
When city-states faced concerted attack from large forces, only broader alliances could protect them. Nation-states were born in bloodshed generally, as groups of people sought to secure their mutual way of life.
National government exists first to defend us, in mutual cooperation, against attack.
Next, government is always used to defend its people from criminal activity, organized or individual. The police and judiciary are some of the most essential functions of government -- to meet the most primary of the human needs: security in our persons and property. We want our police and our judges to be impartial, so that they cannot be bought.
People want government to defend them in all ways, including any new way we see our security of person or property threatened.
I state this in a general way to recognize that governments are looked to not only for protection against aggression, but against all forms of events that threaten security -- from hurricanes to epidemics, from burglary to fraud to stock front-running.
When a people feel threatened, they wish for action. If you see a family or city suffer a catastrophe you wish something done, as you know the same could happen one day to you.
But it isn't only direct security people have sought from governments around the world and throughout time.
As we look around the world, we see governments have been universally considered a good way to build roads, water works, and infrastructure that generally benefits all citizens directly or by secondary effects. In others words, governments are used to build and maintain publicly used goods and services that typically support a country's way of life.
It makes sense that Rome built aqueducts.
And it makes sense that most nations build more and higher public schools to provide progressively higher and lengthier levels of free education -- which allows the poor to gain useful education and thus be able to engage in useful work, instead of crime, as a means of income.
Education not only enables economic growth that makes the entire nation -- rich, poor and middle class -- richer. It also reduces the number of criminals and aids security from common crime.
So often, upon examination, we find most governmental activities enhance common security.
At first it might appear free education is just a indulgence, like having fancier parks and roads. But careful examination shows effective education increases economic growth, reduces crime, and pays for itself.
These common or "public" goods benefit all citizens because an economy is interdependent by nature -- that which spurs or allows economic growth enriches everyone.
All jobs and income and all investment returns are dependent in the end on all the working people: all forms of income depend on customers with the means to buy. Workers earn money and thus are potential customers.
All wealth is entirely dependent on the totality of all workers.
(Yes, I know this is a major point, and deserves its own post, so I'll put it on the short list.)
Further, economic growth itself depends significantly on education. In an economy where education spreads new knowledge, businesses that provide common goods and services become more productive. Where a loaf of bread after a local dry spell might once have cost 1/5th of a day's income, it costs 1/20th or less after technology and trade progress sufficiently. This increasing productivity allows economic expansion because newly freed disposable income (since some basics cost less than before) allows the purchase of new goods and new services and funds new investments.
The whole society grows richer, and that tends to make it more secure also.
Education is a public good that pays. The lack of education is a real source of threat, of insecurities.
...
The only question for such basic public goods as education and roads is who is the best provider?
Should we have publicly-built roads, free to all, supported by gasoline taxes?
Should we have publicly-owned toll roads (or universal metering), resulting in improvements being more rapidly built, supported only by those that use the roads, in proportion to use?
Should we have privately-owned toll roads -- sometimes controlling the only available good right-of-way in an area and free to raise tolls far above maintenance and capital costs? Free to sometimes extract a monopoly rent in spite of the fact of using what is ultimately the land of a nation? Is that the best system for roads?
Which is best for the economy, the wealth, of the nation?
For goods like education, where universality helps lower crime, or roads, where public ownership gives a better deal to citizens, nations around the world have decided that public provision is best.
It's a matter of structure. Of what works well for a particular need.
...
Sometimes in these debates people confuse rights and interests, giving what is only an interest the high status appropriate to a right.
A right is something natural to a human being, such as the right to breathe, or the right to speak, or the right to be secure in one's person from arbitrary search or seizure.
An interest is typically a possibility of gaining more of some good such as land or money, or sometimes even gaining something at the expense of other people, such as freedom to emit pollutants without paying the costs those pollutants impose on others. Many interests we see politically are often about something like additional subsidies for instance, or variations on subsidies.
Lately, we have seen an interest in escaping paying taxes for our current level of common public goods (even though tax payers benefit from public goods in proportion to their wealth -- from the economic and secondary effects of most public goods). I don't mean to obscure the complexities that exist in many cities and states -- sometimes there is significant local public corruption and reducing revenue is mistakenly thought to be a counter to this corruption, while only law enforcement actually is.
Broadly, many arguments against public goods fail to recognize their real benefits. Those opposing or wishing deep cuts in free public education fail to recognize that economic strength is created by education and that this creates the national strength needed to live free from foreign coercion in the future. Military might depends on economic strength.
Strong military might depends on publicly funded education.
Economic strength can even allow us a way to protect ourselves (should we choose) from more subtle levies imposed on us by foreign nations -- such as job losses across our borders caused by currency manipulation and its effects (which build over time). Unlike a lesser economy, the US does not have to choose between free trade and allowing China to impose tariffs and subsidies against our industries. We can chart our own course exactly because of our economic strength.
Publicly-funded education is one of the fundamental supports of our freedom.
Education is not an indulgence like more and better park benches, but instead is a fundamental necessity to our way of life.
Once we recognize universal education (regardless of wealth) is beneficial to all, the only question is structural: how to best pay for various levels of education.
We still want to get a good deal. That should concern us all.
So the question about public education becomes more about where and how -- about what is effective to give us quality universal education. For the sake of our freedom and quality of life.
...
At first, providing an universal safety net against old-age sickness and poverty might seem less a real public good which benefits all, and more a "intergenerational transfer" (there can indeed be intergenerational transfers).
But why do Americans strongly favor having Social Security and Medicare? Perhaps because it is a fundamental form of security to know that you won't die of simple starvation or an easily-cured illness when you are 70 or 75. Even the young would like to have that future security.
We tend to like the idea of there being an ultimate safety net, so that if a series of unfortunate events pushes you towards poverty as you lose your physical ability to do gainful work, there will still be a basic support to allow you some golden years while you still have your mind and heart.
Considering this, we might reasonably conclude that what matters in Social Security and Medicare is not extravagant medical care or rich benefits, so much as a security against more basic dangers -- such as dying from lack of heat or cooling, from simple infection, an easily repaired broken bone, or from being unable to afford sound nutrition.
Social Security provides an absolute safety net for all in retirement, come what may, rich or poor. Americans value this. We want to preserve it.
Social Security is currently projected to remain solvent until 2036. While some suggest Social Security could be means tested (retirees qualify for benefits according to income), fairer ideas are already widely known and accepted. After all, it's part of our social contract that Social Security is more pension system than a pure welfare system.
You make your contributions and you get your retirement benefits, with a modest insurance effect of partially leveling out incomes and paying benefits to survivors. This fairness was the basis of its original political viability, its original contract.
The mostly widely considered idea to fix future Social Security is for retirement qualifying ages to rise some modest amount (beyond that already planned), perhaps even some fraction of changes in life expectancy of retirees. Indexing to lifespan makes sense so long as lifespans change.
More than one idea is needed here though.
Consider that Social Security benefits rise with inflation. This implies total (nation wide) contributions should rise by some measure that typically paces accumulated inflation over long periods of time.
One related measure performs well against inflation over long periods: nominal average income, or GDP per capita.
The best idea then is to increase the cap on income subject to Social Security withholding beyond the current $106,800 cap proportionate to the change in GDP per capita -- if GDP/capita rises 3%, the Social Security wage base should rise 3%, etc.
The rate of the tax remains the same, but Social Security is made profoundly solvent.
A family earning under the withholding cap would still pay the same amount of total annual tax. And the increased payments for richer households would be only a minuscule portion of the wages above $106,800, as the increase is a small portion of a small portion of those wages.
For instance, as GDP rises 3%, a family making around $150,000 will typically get a raise of 2% - 4% (several thousand dollars), but would pay an increased withholding of only 6% of 3% or about 2/10ths of a percent (a few hundred dollars).
Regardless of the exact adjustments we make, modest Social Security benefits are a fundamentally good idea for a society. This retirement benefit provides an absolute safety net for all -- even the rich can lose wealth and need this income insurance. It's real insurance.
Medicare, a far more potent fiscal problem, can be adjusted in a somewhat different way as already addressed by this blog -- does the medical care work (is it really going to extend life)? If so, it's worth paying for in a competitive way after those benefits are proven.
...
So what does government do poorly?
To address many aspects of government even in rough detail would take a far longer post, but it is possible to draw some powerful, broad brush strokes here.
One of the most popular notions of what government can do to solve problems is regulation. Unfortunately, past really basic crimes like forms of fraud, violence, etc., regulation is not so effective as many people imagine.
Consider, we implemented food safety inspections to control the outbreak of deadly contaminations of food stocks long ago. We've had an agency responsible for food safety for decades, with deep experience.
The result? Recurrent, deadly outbreaks of food borne illness.
While regulation will temporarily work for anything, every few months this seeming food safety we think we have is entirely reversed or inadequate, resulting in sometimes massive food-borne illness and death, in all major, advanced nations.
The fault of regulation?
Yes.
The problem: knowing there is a regulator gives us a false sense of security, when we really should be on our guard.
What could protect us from recurring, massive food-borne illness?
People knowing that there is no regulator, and that they themselves must learn to choose providers, brands, that they can trust.
The resulting brand loyalty in the abscence of regulation is extremely valuable to a business.
That result? Those businesses would be profoundly motivated to have perfect food safety.
Trust is not something to risk when there is no regulation, because losing trust would be devestating to a respected brand. Fatal to the brand, and the company, and it's stock value and bottom line.
That's real safety. The bottom line aligned with safety (instead of against it, as a having regulator sets up -- a race to the bottom, when the blame will go to the FDA instead of a provider).
A key insight is that we can't really control human nature. Instead, we must harness it as well as we can.
Often, regulation is not the answer. More often, the true safety from being taken advantage of depends on creating the right economic incentives, the structure of the market.
Here's a prime example -- power generators emitting harmful, often deadly, toxins while they are regulated, who would quickly cease to do so if they had to actually pay the costs the emissions of those toxins create.
...
So, when we leave behind ideology and ask "What works well," we get better answers.
We get a guide to what kind of government we should really want.
Government is either a good solution to any problem...or is an unfortunate, necessary evil to be shrunk for the better whenever possible.
It would be one thing if this was only the fringes.
It has become predominate.
This has become so normal, for so many years, Americans don't even realize how mentally unbalanced most popular rhetoric and commentary has become.
Can a nation whose popular thought is based on mischaracterizations and labeling of our fellow citizens remain civil? Or will it experience a progressive loss of mutual regard...and eventually see the fading of civil rights that mutual regard supports (as in 1930s Germany)?
This is no abstract question, nor is it a phenomena confined to a small subset of America. Instead, even commentary in our top forums is suffused with misinterpretations and characterizations of a degrading nature which encourages us to join camps and oppose our real enemies -- our fellow citizens.
Consider, do many of the popular blogs, talk shows, or columnists you have heard/read, from the yellow to the erudite -- from Fox News to top newspapers and some leading blogs (e.g.-- when they address the 'real' motives of groups) -- have more-than-occasional commentary that paints groups/classes/professions of citizens as following base motives and goals?
When you read/hear that the labeled group isn't of typical mixed character (with isolated malfeasance), but instead has a dramatic pervasive character, a hidden agenda, or the crudest of motives, a natural response is to join in condemnation or a feeling of moral superiority.
One of the oldest games of humanity is being played, sometimes for profit (more eyeballs), but often with sincere, true-believer indignation.
This is the paranoid style of American commentary. And it can lead to a breakdown in dialogue in the body politic.
This is a subject worthy of many significant posts (the link above is a start), or of books, but we have a profound question at hand -- what is government for and what should it do?
...
What if government is neither a general panacea nor a corrupt drag on our lives, but instead is something more native, something not discussed lately in America?
What if government is essentially a universal, or inclusive, co-op?
...
A co-op after all is simply people cooperating for mutual benefit. We are surrounded by co-ops of all manner -- such as school districts, corporations, neighborhood associations, or insurance pools (like the automobile mutual insurance pool you share with other policy holders).
Might it be possible -- exactly as is the case with a co-op -- that government may by nature do some things well and some things poorly?
Why, yes.
But...that would imply much, or most, of today's rhetoric from the "Left" and the "Right" is of little value in solving our problems.
We need to go beyond the Left and the Right to gain insight.
...
At this point, some might be thinking: "What if I'd like to opt out of this big federal government in all ways except mutual defense?"
To consider this, consider that every major function of American federal government arose in direct response to a strong national need, especially during crises.
Flooding led to the modern version of the Army Corps of Engineers. The Great Depression bank run of 1933 led to the creation of the F.D.I.C. -- ultimately backed by the U.S. taxpayer -- which insures you won't lose all of your money deposited at a bank some day (such as for instance a day like September 16th, 2008 when "money stopped" in the famous Frontline phrasing).
Might some of these functions of the federal government be no longer needed? Which?
This is a central issue of our time.
This post will address the most general form of this question: What is government best for?
....
If government is simply a co-op by nature, then it follows that the structure of government determines whether it is effective.
When government is well-structured for a particular need, then it can effectively secure that necessity and support the lives of its citizens.
Quality of life depends on the effectiveness of co-ops: if we aren't worrying about carjacking or bridge collapse, then conversation can turn to something fun -- like a musical performance, or the antics of boys who have been trying to gain your daughter's attention.
To consider whether government should fulfill a certain need which people find hard to accomplish on their own, we must review whether government can be well-structured for that activity.
If it can be well-structured for the need, and act to the benefit of all citizens (directly or indirectly through secondary effects; see more below), then this is an activity government could do well.
...
Let's look at what peoples around the world have done well with government. Why does government exist to begin with?
Modern nations exist because of our history of war.
When city-states faced concerted attack from large forces, only broader alliances could protect them. Nation-states were born in bloodshed generally, as groups of people sought to secure their mutual way of life.
National government exists first to defend us, in mutual cooperation, against attack.
Next, government is always used to defend its people from criminal activity, organized or individual. The police and judiciary are some of the most essential functions of government -- to meet the most primary of the human needs: security in our persons and property. We want our police and our judges to be impartial, so that they cannot be bought.
People want government to defend them in all ways, including any new way we see our security of person or property threatened.
I state this in a general way to recognize that governments are looked to not only for protection against aggression, but against all forms of events that threaten security -- from hurricanes to epidemics, from burglary to fraud to stock front-running.
When a people feel threatened, they wish for action. If you see a family or city suffer a catastrophe you wish something done, as you know the same could happen one day to you.
But it isn't only direct security people have sought from governments around the world and throughout time.
As we look around the world, we see governments have been universally considered a good way to build roads, water works, and infrastructure that generally benefits all citizens directly or by secondary effects. In others words, governments are used to build and maintain publicly used goods and services that typically support a country's way of life.
It makes sense that Rome built aqueducts.
And it makes sense that most nations build more and higher public schools to provide progressively higher and lengthier levels of free education -- which allows the poor to gain useful education and thus be able to engage in useful work, instead of crime, as a means of income.
Education not only enables economic growth that makes the entire nation -- rich, poor and middle class -- richer. It also reduces the number of criminals and aids security from common crime.
So often, upon examination, we find most governmental activities enhance common security.
At first it might appear free education is just a indulgence, like having fancier parks and roads. But careful examination shows effective education increases economic growth, reduces crime, and pays for itself.
These common or "public" goods benefit all citizens because an economy is interdependent by nature -- that which spurs or allows economic growth enriches everyone.
All jobs and income and all investment returns are dependent in the end on all the working people: all forms of income depend on customers with the means to buy. Workers earn money and thus are potential customers.
All wealth is entirely dependent on the totality of all workers.
(Yes, I know this is a major point, and deserves its own post, so I'll put it on the short list.)
Further, economic growth itself depends significantly on education. In an economy where education spreads new knowledge, businesses that provide common goods and services become more productive. Where a loaf of bread after a local dry spell might once have cost 1/5th of a day's income, it costs 1/20th or less after technology and trade progress sufficiently. This increasing productivity allows economic expansion because newly freed disposable income (since some basics cost less than before) allows the purchase of new goods and new services and funds new investments.
The whole society grows richer, and that tends to make it more secure also.
Education is a public good that pays. The lack of education is a real source of threat, of insecurities.
...
The only question for such basic public goods as education and roads is who is the best provider?
Should we have publicly-built roads, free to all, supported by gasoline taxes?
Should we have publicly-owned toll roads (or universal metering), resulting in improvements being more rapidly built, supported only by those that use the roads, in proportion to use?
Should we have privately-owned toll roads -- sometimes controlling the only available good right-of-way in an area and free to raise tolls far above maintenance and capital costs? Free to sometimes extract a monopoly rent in spite of the fact of using what is ultimately the land of a nation? Is that the best system for roads?
Which is best for the economy, the wealth, of the nation?
For goods like education, where universality helps lower crime, or roads, where public ownership gives a better deal to citizens, nations around the world have decided that public provision is best.
It's a matter of structure. Of what works well for a particular need.
...
Sometimes in these debates people confuse rights and interests, giving what is only an interest the high status appropriate to a right.
A right is something natural to a human being, such as the right to breathe, or the right to speak, or the right to be secure in one's person from arbitrary search or seizure.
An interest is typically a possibility of gaining more of some good such as land or money, or sometimes even gaining something at the expense of other people, such as freedom to emit pollutants without paying the costs those pollutants impose on others. Many interests we see politically are often about something like additional subsidies for instance, or variations on subsidies.
Lately, we have seen an interest in escaping paying taxes for our current level of common public goods (even though tax payers benefit from public goods in proportion to their wealth -- from the economic and secondary effects of most public goods). I don't mean to obscure the complexities that exist in many cities and states -- sometimes there is significant local public corruption and reducing revenue is mistakenly thought to be a counter to this corruption, while only law enforcement actually is.
Broadly, many arguments against public goods fail to recognize their real benefits. Those opposing or wishing deep cuts in free public education fail to recognize that economic strength is created by education and that this creates the national strength needed to live free from foreign coercion in the future. Military might depends on economic strength.
Strong military might depends on publicly funded education.
Economic strength can even allow us a way to protect ourselves (should we choose) from more subtle levies imposed on us by foreign nations -- such as job losses across our borders caused by currency manipulation and its effects (which build over time). Unlike a lesser economy, the US does not have to choose between free trade and allowing China to impose tariffs and subsidies against our industries. We can chart our own course exactly because of our economic strength.
Publicly-funded education is one of the fundamental supports of our freedom.
Education is not an indulgence like more and better park benches, but instead is a fundamental necessity to our way of life.
Once we recognize universal education (regardless of wealth) is beneficial to all, the only question is structural: how to best pay for various levels of education.
We still want to get a good deal. That should concern us all.
So the question about public education becomes more about where and how -- about what is effective to give us quality universal education. For the sake of our freedom and quality of life.
...
At first, providing an universal safety net against old-age sickness and poverty might seem less a real public good which benefits all, and more a "intergenerational transfer" (there can indeed be intergenerational transfers).
But why do Americans strongly favor having Social Security and Medicare? Perhaps because it is a fundamental form of security to know that you won't die of simple starvation or an easily-cured illness when you are 70 or 75. Even the young would like to have that future security.
We tend to like the idea of there being an ultimate safety net, so that if a series of unfortunate events pushes you towards poverty as you lose your physical ability to do gainful work, there will still be a basic support to allow you some golden years while you still have your mind and heart.
Considering this, we might reasonably conclude that what matters in Social Security and Medicare is not extravagant medical care or rich benefits, so much as a security against more basic dangers -- such as dying from lack of heat or cooling, from simple infection, an easily repaired broken bone, or from being unable to afford sound nutrition.
Social Security provides an absolute safety net for all in retirement, come what may, rich or poor. Americans value this. We want to preserve it.
Social Security is currently projected to remain solvent until 2036. While some suggest Social Security could be means tested (retirees qualify for benefits according to income), fairer ideas are already widely known and accepted. After all, it's part of our social contract that Social Security is more pension system than a pure welfare system.
You make your contributions and you get your retirement benefits, with a modest insurance effect of partially leveling out incomes and paying benefits to survivors. This fairness was the basis of its original political viability, its original contract.
The mostly widely considered idea to fix future Social Security is for retirement qualifying ages to rise some modest amount (beyond that already planned), perhaps even some fraction of changes in life expectancy of retirees. Indexing to lifespan makes sense so long as lifespans change.
More than one idea is needed here though.
Consider that Social Security benefits rise with inflation. This implies total (nation wide) contributions should rise by some measure that typically paces accumulated inflation over long periods of time.
One related measure performs well against inflation over long periods: nominal average income, or GDP per capita.
The best idea then is to increase the cap on income subject to Social Security withholding beyond the current $106,800 cap proportionate to the change in GDP per capita -- if GDP/capita rises 3%, the Social Security wage base should rise 3%, etc.
The rate of the tax remains the same, but Social Security is made profoundly solvent.
A family earning under the withholding cap would still pay the same amount of total annual tax. And the increased payments for richer households would be only a minuscule portion of the wages above $106,800, as the increase is a small portion of a small portion of those wages.
For instance, as GDP rises 3%, a family making around $150,000 will typically get a raise of 2% - 4% (several thousand dollars), but would pay an increased withholding of only 6% of 3% or about 2/10ths of a percent (a few hundred dollars).
Regardless of the exact adjustments we make, modest Social Security benefits are a fundamentally good idea for a society. This retirement benefit provides an absolute safety net for all -- even the rich can lose wealth and need this income insurance. It's real insurance.
Medicare, a far more potent fiscal problem, can be adjusted in a somewhat different way as already addressed by this blog -- does the medical care work (is it really going to extend life)? If so, it's worth paying for in a competitive way after those benefits are proven.
...
So what does government do poorly?
To address many aspects of government even in rough detail would take a far longer post, but it is possible to draw some powerful, broad brush strokes here.
One of the most popular notions of what government can do to solve problems is regulation. Unfortunately, past really basic crimes like forms of fraud, violence, etc., regulation is not so effective as many people imagine.
Consider, we implemented food safety inspections to control the outbreak of deadly contaminations of food stocks long ago. We've had an agency responsible for food safety for decades, with deep experience.
The result? Recurrent, deadly outbreaks of food borne illness.
While regulation will temporarily work for anything, every few months this seeming food safety we think we have is entirely reversed or inadequate, resulting in sometimes massive food-borne illness and death, in all major, advanced nations.
The fault of regulation?
Yes.
The problem: knowing there is a regulator gives us a false sense of security, when we really should be on our guard.
What could protect us from recurring, massive food-borne illness?
People knowing that there is no regulator, and that they themselves must learn to choose providers, brands, that they can trust.
The resulting brand loyalty in the abscence of regulation is extremely valuable to a business.
That result? Those businesses would be profoundly motivated to have perfect food safety.
Trust is not something to risk when there is no regulation, because losing trust would be devestating to a respected brand. Fatal to the brand, and the company, and it's stock value and bottom line.
That's real safety. The bottom line aligned with safety (instead of against it, as a having regulator sets up -- a race to the bottom, when the blame will go to the FDA instead of a provider).
A key insight is that we can't really control human nature. Instead, we must harness it as well as we can.
Often, regulation is not the answer. More often, the true safety from being taken advantage of depends on creating the right economic incentives, the structure of the market.
Here's a prime example -- power generators emitting harmful, often deadly, toxins while they are regulated, who would quickly cease to do so if they had to actually pay the costs the emissions of those toxins create.
...
So, when we leave behind ideology and ask "What works well," we get better answers.
We get a guide to what kind of government we should really want.
February 11, 2010
America, Empire And Soul
Let me start off the new decade by asking a question that goes to the root of what is America.
How many in Washington realize that being the world's sole military hyperpower is not compatible with the ideals this nation was founded upon?
Don't mistake me for a pacifist.
I supported Reagan's defense build up well before 1981 and until it became clear Gorbachev was bringing sincere change in 1986. Even more aggressively, I advocated indicting and overthrowing Saddam (Iraq) in 2000 after I pieced together that Saddam had diverted food in order to starve large numbers of Shiite children during a late 1990s Iraqi drought under cover of blaming UN sanctions. (But I pointed out in 2003 we should not try to mould Iraq, but simply should put responsibility for Iraq right back into Iraqi hands (clerics), and remain only as helpers to popular (religious) Iraqi leaders, in contrast to our slow and uncertain effort to first create a Western democracy in Iraq to our own conception.)
So my views on military power originate not from the point of view of a pacifist (Though I do respect this point of view, as taught by the Christ, no less. We are seeing how overwhelming power and the morals of America cannot impose right nor aid peace except when peoples choose peace by their own choice, in their own time.)
Instead, I've had much of my life a pragmatic and aggressive view: we need to take steps to make the world a safer place for freedom and liberty, in terms of actual outcomes.
I supported a large and aggressive military since we had large and powerful enemies.
But this is no longer true.
We face no major enemies.
Look, and you will see no massed armies of millions arrayed aggressively against us and our allies. (North Korea is deterred with only moderate forces. Meeting current deterrence needs while maintaining an excellent military does not require anywhere near our current level of expenditure.)
We spend so much more than needed on defense because it is the ultimate form of earmark: every year representatives hope to send ever more money to defense contractors in their Congressional districts.
Americans have no idea how much defense spending we actually need.
$100 billion, $200 billion, $500 billion -- these numbers seem identical to average Americans.
Really, how many people have a clue whether $200 billion or $400 billion is the right amount of spending?
Americans are easily fooled by comparisons to defense spending levels as a percent of GDP of the last 40 and 50 years...
as if we were still in a cold war with a massive, armed enemy like the Warsaw Pact.
Fooled.
Typical voters are left to blindly hope that most of the money isn't wasted. And they know perfectly well a great deal is.
...
It's like many Americans are living in the past -- stuck in 1983 like flies in amber -- unaware that the world has profoundly, fundamentally changed.
...
The real enemy of America now is a set of ideas which cannot be defeated with guns, nor by killing or arresting momentary leaders. These ideas will be defeated only by better ideas.
In the meanwhile, deterring Iran and North Korea while fighting in Afghanistan and maintaining most of our base strength could all be accomplished with about half the level of defense spending we now have.
...
Few commentators even seem to comprehend that there might be any downside to spending $680 billion a year right now to maintain such a large gap of superiority over any other nation's military forces.
Few grasp that raw power in and for itself might not be a virtue, but a corrupting influence that could eat at the soul of America.
We were warned long ago of this danger by the Supreme Allied Commander and subsequent Republican President Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower was no shrinking violet. He commanded and won WWII, led the new NATO, and finished the Korean War.
But this strong military man warned us explicitly that our great military spending would threaten the very fabric and soul of America itself.
In short, I don't find popular commentators in newspapers and in the media that understand enough of the principles that are the essence of America.
We, as a culture, have even gradually half-accepted using disproportionate force to respond to attacks.
In the last 30 years, we have begun to take military action with less and less justification. Hitting innocent bystanders is inevitable when we try to defeat an ideology (Al Qaeda) with physical weapons. But even those who refuse to see Al Qaeda as true believers, as if they were only a power-hungry gang instead, should then ask if it would make sense for the U.S. in the 1920s to have fought Al Capone and his thugs with a troop surge against Chicago neighborhoods "harboring" Capone?
Now, even the theoretical possibility of a future threat (Iraq, 2003) is used to rationalize broad and sometimes imprecise attack.
Enemies are blown up into massive shadows. A ragtag band of fanatics have been greatly empowered into an equal stature with our nation by our words and action. Criminals that have committed serious mass murder have been elevated up to the stage of playing on the same field as our nation itself. Made equally important. As if we cannot accept their true smallness, as if we need a great enemy.
This is not how we should want to be.
Lacking wisdom in its mainstream national dialogue, America rolls blindly downhill towards a loss of something of far greater value than the temporary gains of military power -- we risk losing the very essence of America itself.
Mark my words, spending about 5% of our GDP, a massive $680bn, on military expenditures while our major economic competitors like China spend less than 2% means that we *cannot* grow our economic strength the way other nations can that have more resources available for investment in their future.
It's not simply that $680bn in a single year is about 4 or 5 times as expensive as the contemplated annual cost of providing health care (even after full subsidies are in effect in 2017) to uninsured Americans under the proposed health care reform for instance.
Realistically, we could spend half as much on defense and still maintain military superiority, and...pay fully for health care reform...and subsidize college tuition costs for all American students. All of this from the current level of defense spending alone.
But the economic cost is higher yet: Pragmatically, maintaining this disadvantage of spending 3% of GDP more on defense than our competitors year after year instead of spending this part of our limited resources on science, technology and education means that US economic power will fade.
Fade.
Education, science, technology -- the future.
Can we expect a secure future without investing adequately in the future?
The current defense spending of the U.S. threatens our security.
...
But even this pragmatic reality of loss of economic and military might is not the center of what I want to communicate here.
No one else in the center is saying it, and it needs desperately to be said:
Being a "superpower" is not American.
We were not born as a nation only to gradually transform ourselves into an empire.
....
I write this as someone who avidly supported Reagan in 1975 years before I would be old enough to vote, who told my college roommates excitedly in 1984 about the possibility that Gorbachev might bring change (he later came to power in 1985 and began real change) and then became excited by the rising Boris Yeltsin in 1985 (years before he gained power and continued moving Russia towards liberalization). I felt great joy at the historic fall of the Wall and of the Iron Curtain.
But...while I supported all this military might in 1979, and in 1984, it was for a reason....not for the sake of power.
We did not need a large military because we were America. We needed it because the Warsaw Pact was massed with tanks and huge armies in the field.
We actually had a significant opponent in those days. Armies with many hundreds of thousands of capable, well-armed troops arrayed in invasion-ready stance specifically against our West European allies.
Those days are long gone.
In the last decade, we have begun to lose ourselves, lose the sense of America, even in this elementary way of what America is about -- what America stands for.
Empires begin in response to having been attacked, whether on a personal level or as a nation, and having a determination to avenge that attack or be on top in a rule-of-the-jungle world.
Those who want power want that power in order to feel safe.
For so many decades, most of our lives, America has been a superpower only because the outcome of World War II made us a superpower and the subsequent necessity of deterring the Soviet Union forced us to remain one.
Most of us have grown up knowing nothing else.
But, people, this necessity has passed. There is no massive enemy facing us in the world today.
Our worst genuine enemies are merely bands of angry, fundamentalist wingnuts, numbering in the thousands. They require a strong response, but not a war.
Let me tell you why.
They will number only in the thousands unless we continue to fight them in other peoples' homelands long enough to give them new allies and thus unite real armies someday against us... Unless we prolong this mistake of provoking new enemies, we appear unlikely to have any large enemy who wants to fight us.
Al Qaeda is based in ideas and ideals. It cannot be defeated with guns or by killing its troops or leaders. Its ideas and ideology will only be defeated by superior ideas and ideals. It is a 'war' of ideals, of belief. We lose if and when our own best ideals are not lived up to. It's precisely that simple. We will win or lose on the basis of our self-conduct.
America became a superpower by necessity in World War II.
We remained a superpower by necessity in response to Stalin, then Khrushchev and finally Brezhnev.
This became so normal for us that we do not know what it would be like to spend a lower portion of our nation's treasure on defense like other advanced nations. Americans today do not know what it would be like to have a proportional military -- proportional to the absolute size of our likely foes. Instead, we know what it is like to be a dominant superpower.
But the world today does not need a dominant power any more than a typical city needs a strong man (a dictator).
A typical city, with criminals and gangs, needs a law-abiding police force.
The world needs stable alliances and organized international efforts at peacekeeping.
The world needs the American character our nation was born with, not this newly-aggressive superpower of late.
If Obama makes one fundamental error, it is to underestimate the American people. We elected him on the promise of real change. We do not want to see him cowed by the military-industrial complex.
Truly, what is ideal is pragmatic.
What is most pragmatic and smart is to follow ideals.
American influence depends on our values and character.
America cannot afford $680 billion a year on "defense" financially or morally.
Eisenhower warned us -- this military power would change our character unless we somehow found a way to remain who we are.
It is time for most of the soldiers to come home, right now.
It is time for America to become America again.
How many in Washington realize that being the world's sole military hyperpower is not compatible with the ideals this nation was founded upon?
Don't mistake me for a pacifist.
I supported Reagan's defense build up well before 1981 and until it became clear Gorbachev was bringing sincere change in 1986. Even more aggressively, I advocated indicting and overthrowing Saddam (Iraq) in 2000 after I pieced together that Saddam had diverted food in order to starve large numbers of Shiite children during a late 1990s Iraqi drought under cover of blaming UN sanctions. (But I pointed out in 2003 we should not try to mould Iraq, but simply should put responsibility for Iraq right back into Iraqi hands (clerics), and remain only as helpers to popular (religious) Iraqi leaders, in contrast to our slow and uncertain effort to first create a Western democracy in Iraq to our own conception.)
So my views on military power originate not from the point of view of a pacifist (Though I do respect this point of view, as taught by the Christ, no less. We are seeing how overwhelming power and the morals of America cannot impose right nor aid peace except when peoples choose peace by their own choice, in their own time.)
Instead, I've had much of my life a pragmatic and aggressive view: we need to take steps to make the world a safer place for freedom and liberty, in terms of actual outcomes.
I supported a large and aggressive military since we had large and powerful enemies.
But this is no longer true.
We face no major enemies.
Look, and you will see no massed armies of millions arrayed aggressively against us and our allies. (North Korea is deterred with only moderate forces. Meeting current deterrence needs while maintaining an excellent military does not require anywhere near our current level of expenditure.)
We spend so much more than needed on defense because it is the ultimate form of earmark: every year representatives hope to send ever more money to defense contractors in their Congressional districts.
Americans have no idea how much defense spending we actually need.
$100 billion, $200 billion, $500 billion -- these numbers seem identical to average Americans.
Really, how many people have a clue whether $200 billion or $400 billion is the right amount of spending?
Americans are easily fooled by comparisons to defense spending levels as a percent of GDP of the last 40 and 50 years...
as if we were still in a cold war with a massive, armed enemy like the Warsaw Pact.
Fooled.
Typical voters are left to blindly hope that most of the money isn't wasted. And they know perfectly well a great deal is.
...
It's like many Americans are living in the past -- stuck in 1983 like flies in amber -- unaware that the world has profoundly, fundamentally changed.
...
The real enemy of America now is a set of ideas which cannot be defeated with guns, nor by killing or arresting momentary leaders. These ideas will be defeated only by better ideas.
In the meanwhile, deterring Iran and North Korea while fighting in Afghanistan and maintaining most of our base strength could all be accomplished with about half the level of defense spending we now have.
...
Few commentators even seem to comprehend that there might be any downside to spending $680 billion a year right now to maintain such a large gap of superiority over any other nation's military forces.
Few grasp that raw power in and for itself might not be a virtue, but a corrupting influence that could eat at the soul of America.
We were warned long ago of this danger by the Supreme Allied Commander and subsequent Republican President Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower was no shrinking violet. He commanded and won WWII, led the new NATO, and finished the Korean War.
But this strong military man warned us explicitly that our great military spending would threaten the very fabric and soul of America itself.
In short, I don't find popular commentators in newspapers and in the media that understand enough of the principles that are the essence of America.
We, as a culture, have even gradually half-accepted using disproportionate force to respond to attacks.
In the last 30 years, we have begun to take military action with less and less justification. Hitting innocent bystanders is inevitable when we try to defeat an ideology (Al Qaeda) with physical weapons. But even those who refuse to see Al Qaeda as true believers, as if they were only a power-hungry gang instead, should then ask if it would make sense for the U.S. in the 1920s to have fought Al Capone and his thugs with a troop surge against Chicago neighborhoods "harboring" Capone?
Now, even the theoretical possibility of a future threat (Iraq, 2003) is used to rationalize broad and sometimes imprecise attack.
Enemies are blown up into massive shadows. A ragtag band of fanatics have been greatly empowered into an equal stature with our nation by our words and action. Criminals that have committed serious mass murder have been elevated up to the stage of playing on the same field as our nation itself. Made equally important. As if we cannot accept their true smallness, as if we need a great enemy.
This is not how we should want to be.
Lacking wisdom in its mainstream national dialogue, America rolls blindly downhill towards a loss of something of far greater value than the temporary gains of military power -- we risk losing the very essence of America itself.
Mark my words, spending about 5% of our GDP, a massive $680bn, on military expenditures while our major economic competitors like China spend less than 2% means that we *cannot* grow our economic strength the way other nations can that have more resources available for investment in their future.
It's not simply that $680bn in a single year is about 4 or 5 times as expensive as the contemplated annual cost of providing health care (even after full subsidies are in effect in 2017) to uninsured Americans under the proposed health care reform for instance.
Realistically, we could spend half as much on defense and still maintain military superiority, and...pay fully for health care reform...and subsidize college tuition costs for all American students. All of this from the current level of defense spending alone.
But the economic cost is higher yet: Pragmatically, maintaining this disadvantage of spending 3% of GDP more on defense than our competitors year after year instead of spending this part of our limited resources on science, technology and education means that US economic power will fade.
Fade.
Education, science, technology -- the future.
Can we expect a secure future without investing adequately in the future?
The current defense spending of the U.S. threatens our security.
...
But even this pragmatic reality of loss of economic and military might is not the center of what I want to communicate here.
No one else in the center is saying it, and it needs desperately to be said:
Being a "superpower" is not American.
We were not born as a nation only to gradually transform ourselves into an empire.
....
I write this as someone who avidly supported Reagan in 1975 years before I would be old enough to vote, who told my college roommates excitedly in 1984 about the possibility that Gorbachev might bring change (he later came to power in 1985 and began real change) and then became excited by the rising Boris Yeltsin in 1985 (years before he gained power and continued moving Russia towards liberalization). I felt great joy at the historic fall of the Wall and of the Iron Curtain.
But...while I supported all this military might in 1979, and in 1984, it was for a reason....not for the sake of power.
We did not need a large military because we were America. We needed it because the Warsaw Pact was massed with tanks and huge armies in the field.
We actually had a significant opponent in those days. Armies with many hundreds of thousands of capable, well-armed troops arrayed in invasion-ready stance specifically against our West European allies.
Those days are long gone.
In the last decade, we have begun to lose ourselves, lose the sense of America, even in this elementary way of what America is about -- what America stands for.
Empires begin in response to having been attacked, whether on a personal level or as a nation, and having a determination to avenge that attack or be on top in a rule-of-the-jungle world.
Those who want power want that power in order to feel safe.
For so many decades, most of our lives, America has been a superpower only because the outcome of World War II made us a superpower and the subsequent necessity of deterring the Soviet Union forced us to remain one.
Most of us have grown up knowing nothing else.
But, people, this necessity has passed. There is no massive enemy facing us in the world today.
Our worst genuine enemies are merely bands of angry, fundamentalist wingnuts, numbering in the thousands. They require a strong response, but not a war.
Let me tell you why.
They will number only in the thousands unless we continue to fight them in other peoples' homelands long enough to give them new allies and thus unite real armies someday against us... Unless we prolong this mistake of provoking new enemies, we appear unlikely to have any large enemy who wants to fight us.
Al Qaeda is based in ideas and ideals. It cannot be defeated with guns or by killing its troops or leaders. Its ideas and ideology will only be defeated by superior ideas and ideals. It is a 'war' of ideals, of belief. We lose if and when our own best ideals are not lived up to. It's precisely that simple. We will win or lose on the basis of our self-conduct.
America became a superpower by necessity in World War II.
We remained a superpower by necessity in response to Stalin, then Khrushchev and finally Brezhnev.
This became so normal for us that we do not know what it would be like to spend a lower portion of our nation's treasure on defense like other advanced nations. Americans today do not know what it would be like to have a proportional military -- proportional to the absolute size of our likely foes. Instead, we know what it is like to be a dominant superpower.
But the world today does not need a dominant power any more than a typical city needs a strong man (a dictator).
A typical city, with criminals and gangs, needs a law-abiding police force.
The world needs stable alliances and organized international efforts at peacekeeping.
The world needs the American character our nation was born with, not this newly-aggressive superpower of late.
If Obama makes one fundamental error, it is to underestimate the American people. We elected him on the promise of real change. We do not want to see him cowed by the military-industrial complex.
Truly, what is ideal is pragmatic.
What is most pragmatic and smart is to follow ideals.
American influence depends on our values and character.
America cannot afford $680 billion a year on "defense" financially or morally.
Eisenhower warned us -- this military power would change our character unless we somehow found a way to remain who we are.
It is time for most of the soldiers to come home, right now.
It is time for America to become America again.
January 26, 2010
Obama, the Pragmatic, and the Ideal
Lately, a significant portion of the fate of our nation is hanging on the seeming necessity of choosing between the pragmatic and the ideal.
We are in two wars on the other side of the world because many Americans presume the pragmatic and the ideal are often at odds.
Obama struck a deal with the pharmaceutical industry at the outset of health care reform on the expectation that pragmatically, it might be politically impossible to pass health care reform if the drug lobby opposed reform.
This deal making though has helped damn the current health care reform bills in the eyes of many independent voters.
Those who might be skeptical of Republican rhetoric against the reform legislation nevertheless could find no way around the fact that backroom deals had been struck at the expense of the American taxpayer.
In 2003, Congress passed Medicare Part D, and did not use the potential advantage of a huge insurance agent (Medicare itself) to negotiate prices with drug makers!
I expect somewhere between 60-90% of Americans would choose the label "corrupt" over alternatives like "beneficial" to describe this aspect of the 2003 legislation -- an apparent giveaway to for-profit drug makers.
What if you had to individually negotiate, as a household, with a toll road operator, for your toll road rates? The toll road operator could consider your address and decide just how much it might be able to wring out of you based on what it guesses is your individual likelihood to be willing to pay more.
When government appears to simply create an extra margin of profit for some corporations when it could easily have solicited bids instead (as it does for many other goods and services), it is entirely reasonable for citizens to view that provision as an instance of corruption.
What label might Americans who view the lack of drug price negotiation in Medicare Part D as corrupt now apply to the 2009 Obama deal with drug makers at the outset of this new reform?
Pragmatism, by its very nature as a word, implies deciding what to do on the basis of the expected practical outcomes of options. But for many people "pragmatism" also implies that simply following principles, ideals, might often be unworkable in terms of outcome.
Was the likelihood of passage of health care reform increased by making a backroom, apparently corrupt deal with drug makers?
Might I suggest a portion of Massachusetts independent voters may have reached the conclusion this was a corrupt deal?
Consider further -- does invading an entire region of parochial tribes to fight a group of wing nut terrorists, at times fighting tribal people that fight us only because we have invaded their territory, make terrorism more likely or less?
In contrast, if we followed a strategy of based on the ideal of peacemaking, while continuing to be on-guard, and simply issued warrants for the arrests of "criminals", what effect would that have over time on the number and passion of terrorists?
If you think peacemaking and labeling known terrorists as "criminals" would lead to a lower number of recruits to their ranks, your pragmatic instincts are quite correct.
Because Al Qaeda is not essentially a group of individuals.
It is a set of ideas.
Obama has made an important and subtle mistake, a disconcerting failure of wisdom.
He has accepted the fallacy of the pragmatic versus the ideal.
...
Life experience gradually teaches us that violating ideals in pursuit of goals is impractical over time.
We cannot win a war of ideas -- the fight against Al Qaeda -- by fighting and killing people who are not trying to conduct a war against us (tribal people in eastern Afghanistan who are not members of Al Qaeda). Such a practice in fact validates the ideology of Al Qaeda and recruits new fanatics to its cause.
No, to fight Al Qaeda and win, we need to use ideals -- ideals that are superior to the ideology of Al Qaeda.
You win a war of ideas by using and practicing better ideas -- ideals -- not by forfeiting your moral standing by fighting bystanders trying to defend their homeland territory against your presence.
To defeat Al Qaeda, we need to use words and ideal actions.
This is an instance of a very deep principle that age and experience gradually will suggest -- the ideal is the most pragmatic option. It is the option that will have the best outcome in time.
The pragmatic and the ideal are one and the same.
We are in two wars on the other side of the world because many Americans presume the pragmatic and the ideal are often at odds.
Obama struck a deal with the pharmaceutical industry at the outset of health care reform on the expectation that pragmatically, it might be politically impossible to pass health care reform if the drug lobby opposed reform.
This deal making though has helped damn the current health care reform bills in the eyes of many independent voters.
Those who might be skeptical of Republican rhetoric against the reform legislation nevertheless could find no way around the fact that backroom deals had been struck at the expense of the American taxpayer.
In 2003, Congress passed Medicare Part D, and did not use the potential advantage of a huge insurance agent (Medicare itself) to negotiate prices with drug makers!
I expect somewhere between 60-90% of Americans would choose the label "corrupt" over alternatives like "beneficial" to describe this aspect of the 2003 legislation -- an apparent giveaway to for-profit drug makers.
What if you had to individually negotiate, as a household, with a toll road operator, for your toll road rates? The toll road operator could consider your address and decide just how much it might be able to wring out of you based on what it guesses is your individual likelihood to be willing to pay more.
When government appears to simply create an extra margin of profit for some corporations when it could easily have solicited bids instead (as it does for many other goods and services), it is entirely reasonable for citizens to view that provision as an instance of corruption.
What label might Americans who view the lack of drug price negotiation in Medicare Part D as corrupt now apply to the 2009 Obama deal with drug makers at the outset of this new reform?
Pragmatism, by its very nature as a word, implies deciding what to do on the basis of the expected practical outcomes of options. But for many people "pragmatism" also implies that simply following principles, ideals, might often be unworkable in terms of outcome.
Was the likelihood of passage of health care reform increased by making a backroom, apparently corrupt deal with drug makers?
Might I suggest a portion of Massachusetts independent voters may have reached the conclusion this was a corrupt deal?
Consider further -- does invading an entire region of parochial tribes to fight a group of wing nut terrorists, at times fighting tribal people that fight us only because we have invaded their territory, make terrorism more likely or less?
In contrast, if we followed a strategy of based on the ideal of peacemaking, while continuing to be on-guard, and simply issued warrants for the arrests of "criminals", what effect would that have over time on the number and passion of terrorists?
If you think peacemaking and labeling known terrorists as "criminals" would lead to a lower number of recruits to their ranks, your pragmatic instincts are quite correct.
Because Al Qaeda is not essentially a group of individuals.
It is a set of ideas.
Obama has made an important and subtle mistake, a disconcerting failure of wisdom.
He has accepted the fallacy of the pragmatic versus the ideal.
...
Life experience gradually teaches us that violating ideals in pursuit of goals is impractical over time.
We cannot win a war of ideas -- the fight against Al Qaeda -- by fighting and killing people who are not trying to conduct a war against us (tribal people in eastern Afghanistan who are not members of Al Qaeda). Such a practice in fact validates the ideology of Al Qaeda and recruits new fanatics to its cause.
No, to fight Al Qaeda and win, we need to use ideals -- ideals that are superior to the ideology of Al Qaeda.
You win a war of ideas by using and practicing better ideas -- ideals -- not by forfeiting your moral standing by fighting bystanders trying to defend their homeland territory against your presence.
To defeat Al Qaeda, we need to use words and ideal actions.
This is an instance of a very deep principle that age and experience gradually will suggest -- the ideal is the most pragmatic option. It is the option that will have the best outcome in time.
The pragmatic and the ideal are one and the same.
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