Bain for Dummies

cross-posted from Dagblog

Over the past week much of our national media, especially the national pundit corps, was consumed with two questions: Was the attack about when Mitt Romney left Bain Capital fair? and Would Romney choose Condoleeza Rice as his running mate? These are both silly questions. The correct answers are, "Yup," and "Of course not." That part of the press corps took the second question seriously at all, even for one day, shows how disconnected they are from reality. Their chatter about the Bain question is just as clueless.

The question many pundits asked themselves was whether it was accurate to claim that Romney did not leave Bain Capital in 1999, just because he was listed in SEC filings as the company's  "CEO, Chairman, President and sole stockholder" for another three years? Pundits asked themselves this question because only pundits would not know the answer. Of course, they also asked a number of GOP sources, for balance's sake.

The "Is it fair?" question follows the earlier concern-troll version of the question, "Will attacks on Romney over Bain backfire?" (In fact, you still get some of that.) That question, too, defies and denies the obvious. Mitt Romney has run against a Democratic opponent in exactly two elections. The Democrat who hit him on Bain, hard and early, beat him comfortably. That isn't the whole story of either election. But what part of that record says going after the Romney's work at Bain is a bad strategy?

The argument for the "fairness" of the attacks is on a complete lack of perspective. It takes for granted that what is "fair" is what is considered normal within a tiny sliver of America: the wealthiest and most powerful sliver. Romney's Bain arrangements between 1999 and 2002 were within accepted business practices among high-flying financiers. They were vetted by lawyers, and involved legal fictions that have become standard in Romney's slice of the business and social worlds. And so to people who are accustomed to moving in those worlds questioning Romney's complicated but perfectly routine and legally-vetted relationship to Bain seems somewhere between impolite and outrageous.

But if you have reached the point where being "on leave," and CEO, and sole stockholder, and drawing a $100,000 salary, and having nothing to do with the operations of the business that pays you to be CEO, all seems normal to you, you are in the bubble. Part of the problem is that you have lost any sense of how most Americans would view these arrangements, and indeed any sense that the rest of the country does not share the perspective of private-equity managers or publishers of major newspapers. You have lost the basic understanding that your particular world view might not be shared by the whole universe.

Only someone in the bubble, for example, would think of Condi Rice as a great running mate. As hilarious as it would be to see Mitt Romney paired with someone stiffer and less natural on the campaign trail, it will never happen. There's a reason that Rice has always been appointed to office, and not elected. That reason is Condoleeza Rice. If you're used to seeing Rice on her home court, at Georgetown social events or government functions or press availabilities, you could lose sight of some basic things about her, like the stiffness. You might "realize", having spent more time around her, that she's not as stiff as she looks. But this "realization" is an illusion fostered by proximity, and only the tiny segment of the population that's spent a lot of time around Condoleeza Rice could fall prey to it. Seen from further away, Rice is revealed to be even stiffer than she initially looks, which is impressive. Also, seen from a greater distance, she looks uncannily like someone who downgraded the priority of fighting Al-Qaeda and then signed off on a disastrous and unpopular war, because that's who she is.  You can't send her to the Iowa State Fair and have her shake swing voters' hands. You also can't have her debate Joe Biden, who was in the War Room when bin Laden was killed. Either would be a disaster. If you can't see those things about her, the problem is that you're too close. You have lost perspective.

And once you lose touch with the fact that not everyone sees the world the way the people immediately around you do, you start to lose touch with basic reality. You can begin to accept absurd things as perfectly normal. You become unable to hear how silly, and how transparently dishonest, a phrase like "retired retroactively" sounds. Or, like Bob Woodward, you can go on Meet the Press and declare that "everyone knows that SEC filings are meaningless." That statement only makes any kind of sense at all if you have a very restricted sense of who "everyone" is. But the bigger problem is that if "everyone" knows SEC documents are just nonsense, then "everyone" has lost touch with basic moral realities. "Everyone" is corrupt and doesn't know it.

But once you get your head far enough outside the bubble to notice why saying "retroactively retired" insults other people's intelligence (if not your own), you might start to notice some other very strange things that are invisible inside the bubble.

For example, four years after crisis in the financial sector threw the country into this massive recession, the Republicans have nominated a guy from the financial sector for President. He claims that he can make everything okay again, by going back to the old policies from before 2008.

That may not sound odd to our investor class, or our politicians, or our mainstream journalists. But actually, it's really odd.

Not seeing why Bain is a problem is part of not seeing why nominating Romney was a problem in the first place. Not seeing why Romney is a problem is part of not seeing what's wrong with our financial class or our economy. And many influential people in our country are deeply committed to not seeing those things.

They are committed to not seeing why even modest new financial regulations are necessary. They are commttted to not seeing that the banking sector needs reform. They are committed to not understanding why Obama has been "so hard" on Wall Street, let alone seeing how soft Obama has actually been on Wall Street. They are committed, God help us, to not seeing why years of high unemployment would be bad for the economy. They are committed to not seeing even the most obvious solutions to America's economic problems, because they are passionately committed to not seeing the problems.

This election isn't just about America's future, and its economy, and basic questions of fairness and the American dream, although it's about all those things too. This election is about something even bigger than that: the reality principle. The next four months are going to be a bitter, dogged campaign to break down our ruling class's fundamental disconnection from real world. They aren't going to like it.  Not one bit. And that's why they're so upset over the Bain Capital attacks: because those attacks are true. And once this election begins to be about the truth, the truth is really, really going to start to hurt.

No Privacy, Only Privilege

cross-posted from Dagblog

The media can't resist talking about Congressman Weiner's penis. That's no surprise. The American entertainment industry exists to talk about penises and the things various penises like. And our news media is only a minor subsidiary of that entertainment empire.

On the other hand, the news media has no interest, zero, in the fact that Clarence Thomas leaves his wife's income off his financial disclosure forms, despite the, ahem, plain reading and original intent of those forms. Bor-ing! So technical! No one wants to hear a story about financial technicalities and legal loopholes. Blah, blah, blah, some loophole exists somewhere that allows people to funnel large sums of money to a Supreme Court Justice when they have a case in front of the Court. Who cares about loopholes?

Of course, Weiner's misadventures are tied to an overwhelming public interest: voyeurism. He's an exhibitionist, we're voyeurs, there's no point interfering in the course of nature. But no other "public interest" is involved. No crime. No public policy, no public funds, no harassment of employees and no harm done to anyone over whom Weiner had power. (Dave Letterman really isn't allowed to scold.) Weiner didn't even flirt with his own constituents. And any annoyance he was causing unwilling recipients could have been stopped easily. Creeps are easy to block.

So what's the crucial news angle here? Nothing. Weiner's behavior is creepy and compulsive and sad, but it has nothing to do with the public welfare. We just want to talk more about penises, and he's obliging us.

The important thing is that no one has any privacy anymore. Privacy is so 20th century. It's boring, like talking about checks and balances or public integrity or the right to a fair hearing before the Supreme Court. Privacy is for old farts. And so is observing other people's privacy.

You can argue that Weiner violated his own privacy by texting and tweeting his private business. But he texted and tweeted to private citizens, in private. And various third parties published them, with no justification whatsoever.

If a politician were writing racy letters, longhand, to women he met on bars along the campaign trail, and enclosing a naughty Polaroid or two, that would be creepy and bizarre. But if one of those women went to a newspaper or television station with those letters and photos, the appropriate question would be, "What public interest is served by publishing these?" The only rational answer is "None." That the illicit blathering took place through digital technology doesn't change that. The press has no right to publish people's letters or transcripts of their phone calls, unless there's a reason. If the FBI is a wiretapping a criminal and he begins to indulge in phone sex, they're legally obliged to stop taping and come back later.

But we now live in a society where major news organizations will publish embarrassing sexual material on no pretext at all. We have a British tabloid, and perhaps other newspapers, wiretapping private citizen's phones in order to publish details of their private lives. We have creeps like Andrew Breitbart and James O'Keefe hacking and snooping and secretly taping, answerable to nothing but their own slender consciences.

Back in the Iron Curtain days, Communist secret police would wiretap dissidents and then publish whatever dirty laundry they overheard. (Milan Kundera writes about the Czech secret police taping the dissident Jan Prochazka kvetching about his friends over a few drinks, and then playing his back-biting gossip on the radio.) That's what a police state aspires to: a world without privacy.

Now we're approaching that secret policeman's dream world, except we've outsourced the secret policing into private hands. Everyone is allowed to wiretap everyone else. Everyone can publish each other's e-mails, pass along each other's pictures. We've chosen a world where the freedom to humiliate each other, and to stare at others' humiliation, is treated as the bedrock right, and freedom from humiliation is a privilege that can be revoked on a whim. Anybody's whim.

Sure, you can say that Weiner had it coming, that he got himself into trouble. But that's what they'll say about you, too. You should have known better than to send that e-mail or that text message. You should have known better than to pay for that with a card. You should have known better than to go to that website. You should have known better than to write that down. And you can say that Weiner is a public figure, and so has no private life at all. But when it's your turn to be humiliated, there will be some colorable excuse: you're a schoolteacher. You have a blog. You commented on the internet, or a gave a quote to your local paper. There will always be a convenient excuse. But the real reason is this: the rest of us want to dig through your business, and we've decided that it's our business, too.

Clarence Thomas, on the other hand, has decided that his wife's income is no one's business, the letter of the law notwithstanding. Justice Thomas doesn't want to tell us who his wife's clients are, or how much she's paid. And if he doesn't have to, anyone who wants to pay off Justice Thomas simply has to hire Ginny Thomas and pay her more than she knows it's worth. Sure, they won't be paying the Justice. He'll just have access to the money and the things it buys.

I'm not accusing Justice Thomas of being on the take. He has revealed enough of his joint finances to support any such accusation. But what he is doing is creating a precedent (which any Supreme Court Justice should surely understand), by which a federal justice can be bribed with impunity. In fact, his behavior creates a clear road map to bribing a Supreme Court Justice and getting away with it. And that is a shameful precedent to set.

There's no privacy for private citizens in 21st century America. There's just privilege, and secrecy, for the privileged few.

When Clarence Thomas was the guy who allegedly chatted about porn movies in the office, we were utterly fascinated with him. Now that he's subverting the basic integrity of the highest court in the land, no one's interested. And this scandal, unlike the salacious twittering, is very literally our business. Clarence Thomas is sworn to do the people's business. He is not allowed to contract himself out while he does it. But evidently, these are the new rules. Big Money is going to be allowed to funnel all the money it likes to Supreme Court Justices. As long as the Justice taking the cash doesn't spend it on hookers, he'll be fine. And the rest of us won't notice how our world has changed. We'll all be looking at someone's crotch, twittering about what a scandal it is.

Torture Is for Liars

cross-posted from http://dagblog.com/users/doctor-cleveland

A week ago, with barely a pause for breath, advocates of torture began claiming that torturing prisoners had been the key to finding Osama bin Laden. Indeed, some complained that the Obama Administration had been insufficiently deferential to the torturers from the last regime.

They made this assertion with no real evidence and no solid facts. This should surprise no one. If they were interested in facts or evidence, they would not advocate torture.

Here's the thing to remember:

Torture is not about discovering the truth.

Torture is about imposing the torturer's version of reality on others.

Torture is a technique for making people say what you want them to say. As a technique for getting people to reveal their secrets, it's wildly unreliable. As a technique for dictating heavily fictionalized confessions, it's as reliable as they come.

The specific techniques used during the Bush Administration were taken from the military's SERE program, which teaches military personnel like fighter pilots or Navy SEALs how to evade capture and resist torture by enemies. And the tortures people were being trained to resist were taken from regimes, such as the former Soviet Union, which excelled at extracting false confessions from victims. (Lt. John McCain did not confess to being a war criminal and "air pirate" because he was a war criminal; he confessed to being a war criminal because his captors were.) It's not that the torture methods used by the last Administration sometimes lead the victim to lie under duress. It's that they were designed to make the victim lie, in whichever way the torturer dictated. These are facts.

The torture regime of the last decade was not designed to make the United States safer or to learn anything about al-Qaeda. It was designed to impose the regime's own fantasies upon the real world, making prisoners "confess" what the torturers wanted to hear and using those confessions to support the Bush Administration's alternate version of reality. (For example, those reporting to George W. Bush came to want, very badly, to find a connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq, especially a connection involving weapons of mass destruction. And because they needed to hear their prisoners confess such a connection, they kept torturing certain prisoners until those prisoners "confessed" the things that the torturers wanted to be true.)

Now that reality, once again, has proved uncongenial to the pro-torture crowd, they are resorting to their standard tactics: baseless assertions, polemical fantasies, and the promotion of alternate realities through assiduous lies. These lies are not simply a defense of the torture policy. They are the essence of the torture policy.

The torture crowd, despite their swagger, are the very opposite of tough. Toughness requires one to cope with the world as it is. Because they cannot cope with this world, the partisans of torture deny this reality and assert another that they find easier to deal with. That's why they're torturers: they can't handle the truth.

Run, Donald, Run!

cross-posted from Dagblog

So, Barack Obama has given in to the birther lunatics -- or rather, to their enablers in the national press -- and released his long-form birth certificate. Which of course, won't stop the lunatic birthers. But it's not clear that Obama actually intends it to. This is in many ways a classic Obama move. Obama does seem justly and genuinely exasperated with the press corps, but he also likes to position himself as the reasonable alternative to unreasonable opponents.

More vexingly, at least on the surface, the timing of the release gives aid and comfort to Donal Trump, who is already taking credit for the release. That's very annoying, in that it feeds the national media's silly obsession with Trump and prolongs The Donald's free-media "campaign" for the presidency. It even makes it more likely that Trump will actually put his big money where is bigger mouth is, and attempt to get on primary ballots. He's riding high, and the media is stoking his already-formidable self-regard. If Trump's grandiosity is sufficiently cultivated, he may decide that the White House is his for the spending, and start staffing up.

That result, as I say, would very annoying. But that doesn't mean Obama would be displeased. If the White House just released a document that seems to validate Donald Trump's candidacy, we might consider that the Obama people want to validate Donald Trump's candidacy.

There's a saying that Obama's been extremely lucky in his opponents. And that's true. But it hasn't always been luck. He's shown a talent for attracting such opponents, and for subtly goading them into self-immolation. And he's certainly developed an appreciation for the pleasures of campaigning against a turbulent freakshow of an opponent.

Donald Trump is the media freakshow personified. He's been doing reality TV since before reality TV was invented. He's spent decades making himself ridiculous on camera, and his special gift as a media star is his utter inability to realize how silly he is. The joke is on Donald, and the funny part is that he isn't in on it. He is not a serious candidate. He's not a serious anything. And if someone decided to run negative ads on Trump, the sheer wealth of material boggles of mind. Only another narcissistic buffoon could believe, even for a second, that people would vote for someone like Trump. That any media figures floated the idea only shows that they are doing entertainment and not news.

Trump would be a dream opponent for Obama, a kind of white Alan Keyes. But more interestingly, he could be a monumental headache for Republican hopefuls in the primaries. If he actually took even a half-serious run in the primaries, he could make advertising in the earlier states crazy expensive. He's certainly capable of wasting a hundred million dollars, even if he doesn't actually have that much money to waste. And even if he doesn't run, he sucks up media oxygen that other candidates need, and he makes it even harder to placate the crazy part of the base by pandering to them so shamelessly. (Maybe you could say that The Donald is giving cover to the other Republicans by keeping them from press scrutiny. But the press doesn't do serious scrutiny any more. And if they do find a mini-scandal about a candidate not named Trump, the later it breaks the more it hurts.) Good luck trying to build name recognition when the TV is obsessing about Trump like he's a royal bride. And good luck trying to get past the crazy conspiracy theories in the primaries when Trump and the cable news hover over them like flies on a horse apple.

Obama's deepest political instinct is to pose as the reasonable centrist, so that the other side has to either make a deal with him or risk looking crazy. This can be frustrating because it leads him to make deals again, and again, in order to perform his "reasonableness," even when the question should be out of doubt. Releasing yet another form of his birth certificate is like his various compromises over health care and the budget: splitting a difference that he long ago split. But where this should pay dividends is when the other side refuses to take the deal. Barack Obama didn't release his long-form birth certificate to prove that he was born in Hawaii. He released it to prove that the doubters are too insane to care about proof.

What messes with this strategy is a press corps which is fundamentally unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality any more, a group that takes both reasonable and insane positions as equally valid, and presents them as equivalent. They can't tell a serious budget position from a cooked one. They can't bring themselves to cover national news instead of conspiracy theories. Almost nine percent of the country is out of work, at a minimum, and they want to talk about birth certificates. They have absolutely no idea how crazy they sound. Obama isn't just fighting the Republicans. He's fighting the press. What he needs to do is communicate past them to the American people, who actually care about actual things.

The question for the next two years is this. Will the real world pop the media bubble at last? Or will they manage to distort the debate so much that the voters lose touch with reality?

There Is No Center

cross-posted at http://dagblog.com/blogs/doctor-cleveland

Since the election, and in fact for some time before, pundits have been demanding that President Obama move to "the center." They don't have a lot of details, usually, about where that center is, and if they do suggest a detail it usually comes from one side of current debates, but they're all convinced that Obama needs to go there. But there's a reason that pundits can't describe this magical "center" better. It doesn't exist.

Obama can't move to the center, at least on the question of the economy, because there is no center. It's been his attempts to stand on that non-existent middle ground that have left him with nowhere firm to stand.

Usually I am all for discussing the middle ground. And I despise the "false dilemma" scam, which pretends that there are only two extreme choices when actually there are dozens of better ones between them. In most debates there is plenty of middle ground and only charlatans or fanatics deny that. But there are questions that actually do come down to only two choices, because the debate isn't just about practical details but about an underlying theory of how things work in the first place. Debates about strategy and tactics have many possible answers; debates about fundamental models often have only two. Our economic arguments are arguments about basic models of the economy.

Here are some questions that have no middle ground:

Does the Earth orbit the Sun or the Sun orbit the Earth?

Is disease caused by germs?

Do childhood measles vaccinations cause autism?

Can witches cause illness and harm livestock?

Does my car have anti-lock brakes or not?

These questions (and there are many like them) don't entertain compromise, and people who tried to offer "reasonable compromises" on the question the Earth orbiting the Sun and the Sun orbiting the Earth really came up with gobbledygook. It's one basic model or it's the other. And the theory we have about the basic way things work locks us into some pretty high-stakes decisions. Most of the time it doesn't matter whether I have anti-lock brakes or not, because I'm keeping a safe distance from the car in front of me and braking gradually. But if I suddenly need to stop in fifteen yards, because of the car in front of me on the highway crashes, it matters a lot: either I need to step on the brakes as hard as I can, without fear of locking them, or I need to keep them from locking, even if it slows my braking speed. I really have to choose.

If vaccines really did cause autism, I would need to protect my (hypothetical) infant children from autism; since they don't, I need to protect them from measles, mumps, and rubella. If I believed in witches with magical powers, Rebecca Nurse would be a menace to everyone in Salem; since I don't, I think the real danger is Reverend Parris and his murderous witch hunts. There is no middle ground on the Salem question: either Rebecca Nurse or Rev. Parris is a serious public danger. There's no room for saying "both sides" are to blame. They can't be. And, as in the Salem case, attempts to stake out middle ground only help the wrong the side; if you say, "Witches are a serious public danger, but we should pay more attention to procedure when we try them," then you are supporting the witch trials. (And forget about the more cautious legal procedure. That's off the table.)

You can and should concede practical points to people on the other side of policy debates, when both sides agree on the basic underlying realities. But if you try to
"compromise" by conceding that your opponent's basic model of reality is true, you have lost. If you concede that there are witches, people are going to get hanged. If you concede that vaccination "apparently plays some role which deserves further study" in childhood autism, then some kids are going to go unvaccinated and get the mumps, and some of those kids will die. Don't pump and pump your anti-lock brakes just to keep a backseat driver happy, if you're a couple yards from crashing into a pile-up. Just stop the damned car.

Our current political debates are full of basic arguments about underlying models, debates in which there is no middle ground for compromise. Either carbon emissions are causing global warming or they are not; what we should do next depends on the answer. Once one accepts that global warming is real, and caused by carbon emissions, there are all kinds of practical questions about what to do about that, and reasonable compromises, but there's no compromising with the belief that global warming isn't happening. There's no point in trying to find "middle ground" with the birthers, or more seriously with Republicans who want to eliminate the FDA. Either the FDA is necessary to protect public health or it isn't. But the most important either/or question at the moment is this one:

Does cutting government spending help or hurt an economy that's stuck in a bad recession?

It is very clear that the Republicans, especially the ones who were most triumphant the other night, believe that cutting government spending will improve the economy. John Boehner promised to focus on "cutting spending and creating jobs." It sounds like he believes that the first helps accomplish the second. Rand Paul, who is nothing if not firm in his beliefs, wants to balance the budget, right now. This of course, is what Herbert Hoover did the last time we had such a grievous economic setback. Of course, from the other point of view, frequently explained by Paul Krugman, this is the worst possible thing to do. Since recessions are caused by a massive overall cutback in spending (in fact, since everybody cutting back on spending at once is what a recession is), having the federal government suddenly enact massive spending cuts only deepens the problem. There is no middle ground between these theories.

There is no arguing this policy on the details. It is a choice between basic underlying models of how the economy works. John Maynard Keynes was basically right, or basically wrong. Milton Friedman either understood how recessions work, or he profoundly misunderstood them. We should hit the gas or we should hit the brakes. Hitting the gas and hitting the brakes at the same time is not one of the choices.

The economic middle ground that Obama is supposed to move to, the brakes-and-gas-pedal strategy so beloved by dignified, respectable, and fundamentally innumerate opinion columnists, is where he started out. The early 2009 stimulus package, which Krugman rightly decried as too small for the shortfall in national demand, was put together by people who couldn't decide if government spending was good or bad. The result managed to be the worst of both worlds: not enough to turn the economy around, but more than enough to worry people about the expense. And worse, as Krugman points out, Obama has a bad habit of conceding the "spending is bad" model:

I felt a sense of despair during Mr. Obama’s first State of the Union address, in which he declared that “families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same.” Not only was this bad economics — right now the government must spend, because the private sector can’t or won’t — it was almost a verbatim repeat of what John Boehner, the soon-to-be House speaker, said when attacking the original stimulus. If the president won’t speak up for his own economic philosophy, who will?

We have a choice. We can cut government spending, and throw cops and teachers and firefighters out of work, and see how that picks up the economy. Or we can take advantage of the ridiculously low current interest rates on government debt in order to spend on things which we actually need and can use: fixing our roads and bridges, improving our transportation system, funding crucial technological research before competitors like China get ahead of us. We can choose between a model in which government spends in the lean years and pays down debt in the fat years, or a model in which it cuts harder when times are tough. And President Obama can choose between championing one theory about how the world works or another. It can't be both. The Earth orbits the Sun, or it doesn't.

There is no middle ground. It has already collapsed under our feet.

Realism About the Housing Mess

cross-posted at Dagblog

Most public debates over the mortgage and housing mess have been running aground on the false-dilemma problem, framing a problem with several possible solutions as a choice between only two options. At least one of the options in false dilemmas is always completely moonbat crazy, and frequently they both are. The false dilemma I've been hearing these days goes like this:

"We either have to give mortgage lenders a free hand, and forget about the legal details, or just let borrowers keep their houses for free without paying anything!"

Obviously, this is not the actual set of choices. It's the two most extreme choices within that set. The point of this either/or formulation is to make one unreasonable course of action seem sane and necessary by pairing it with an even crazier course of action. Letting banks foreclose on people's homes with forged documents is so clearly insane (and such an attack on basic property rights) that it can only be justified by pretending that there are no other options except giving away six-bedroom homes as gifts to deadbeats.

Of course there are other options. How could there not be?

I tend not to trust people who tell me there are only two ways to, especially when both ways are extreme. The world really is not a set of choices between Galt Gulch and Soviet Communism, between repealing the Fourth Amendment and accepting Sharia law, between life in a religious commune and life in a Vegas brothel. And generally when somebody tells me that I have to make a choice like that, I presume that person is trying to hustle me. The choice between "never foreclose on any home for any reason" and "foreclose on people whether you actually have title to their home or not" is obviously a hustler's presentation of the choice. And of course, you can't take a time out to think, because we have to foreclose now! Right away! There's no time to think over the actual rights and wrongs! (This is why it's called hustling.)

Ezra Klein has a characteristically excellent post running down four practical solutions to help homeowners in realistic ways that help homeowners without simply ripping off the lenders. The whole piece is worth a read, and the options are basically sensible. They include simple things like requiring mediation before a foreclosure and changing HAMP so that banks have to opt out instead of opting in, bigger things like allowing bankruptcy judges to modify the principal on mortgages for primary residences, and practical fixes like the "right to rent," in which borrowers lose the house and their equity but can remain as tenants paying market rents for a set period.

All of those sound reasonable to me. I'm personally a big fan of cramdown, the modification of principal by bankruptcy judges. That could allow banks and borrowers to split the difference between the inflated house prices on which the original loan was based and the current market price, so that both the lender and the borrower take a haircut on their mutual bad investment. That would also help separate the borrowers who can actually pay from the ones who never could, and the borrowers who genuinely bought much more than they could afford from the homebuyers who, because of the bubble, had to spend a million dollars for what would usually be four hundred thousand dollars of house.

In other news, here's Digby recommending serious jail time for the people who actually turned fraud into something routine. I have to admit that sounds pretty reasonable, too.

Bewitching Jesus

cross-posted at Dagblog

So, Saturday night the news was that Christine O'Donnell "dabbled into witchcraft" before becoming a hard-line evangelical Christian. And you know what? I wasn't surprised at all. Surely I wasn't surprised that a candidate like O'Donnell was attracted to the supernatural, since all of her politics are about magical thinking. I shrugged it off, and Sunday morning I went to church.

The readings at my Church, as they often are, were about the obligations of the rich to the poor. My denomination, for all its flaws, makes sure to read the entire the New Testament, and a big chunk of the rest of the Bible, on a steady three-years-of-Sundays rotation. Because the person giving the sermon doesn't get to cherry pick the Bible for texts to preach about, issues come up on Sunday about as often as Jesus brings them up in the Gospels. Most of the hot-button culture war issues, the ones now perceived as signature "Christian" issues, almost never get mentioned. Jesus seldom talks about any of them. On the other hand, justice for the poor comes up a lot. It is on Jesus's mind all the time. He will never go more than a few weeks without coming back to the topic.

So as so often happens to me on Sunday, I was reading along with the day's Biblical passages and getting a set of pretty clear instructions that seem very different from the instructions that many of my vocal fellow-Christians in this country claim to have received. I certainly am not going to speak about their Christianity. It isn't for me to judge anyone else's faith. Nor would many of them perceive me as a "real" Christian. Frankly, America has freedom of religion precisely because Christians can't agree on what the real Christianity is; the religious disagreements are older than the country. On the other hand, at least some of my duties as a Christian seem too clear to escape. If a mob's forming to drive the outsiders out of town, I had better not be in that mob. If the poor need food, I had better not be lobbying for them to be fed even less. I'm not the Christian I'd like to be, much less the one I ought to be, and I'm not the one to explain what God wants. But I know what I feel is expected of me, and it takes me a long way from what some of the Christian political movements in this country advocate.

But as I was leaving church and thinking about the many different Christianities in this country, I thought about Christine O'Donnell again, and her travels from occultism to her specific version of Christianity and how unsurprised I was. It seemed to me of a piece. Yes, evangelical Christians view witchcraft as their absolute opposite, the other end of the spectrum. But the two camps share a lot that I don't share with either of them.

First of all, both occultists and Christians like O'Donnell believe that magic is real and powerful. Witchcraft is a scary thing to evangelicals because they believe witchcraft to be one of the major problems facing our society today. They believe that the Devil can actually use it to make inroads into human souls, and when you come right down to it, they believe that magic can do things. In fact, Michelle Malkin is defending O'Donnell for exactly this reason, because O'Donnell "learned" the true dangers of witchcraft which helps her to understand dangerous practices such as Halloween. (No, I'm not making that up.) The two opposed camps share a mindset in which Halloween is full of actual occult power. I, to put it simply, do not.

And more to the point, the kind of Christianity O'Donnell espouses in public is essentially witchcraft by other means, a kind of magical practice that empowers and protects believers. I can't judge her actual practices and I know nothing about her private faith, but the Christianity she describes views the world in essentially magical terms. O'Donnell is on record as saying that she believes God "would provide a way" to avoid lying if Nazis were searching one's house for hidden Jews. And that's pretty much the magical view of the world: behavior is judged by how well it confirms to ritualized prescriptions and taboos, such as "never lie," rather than by the moral results of one's actions. One does not in fact make moral choices at all. The moral consequences of one's action are off-loaded onto divine Providence, which is responsible for making things work out well as long as you follow the Simple Rules.

(In fact, God did not provide any such providential assistance for the good people who protected Jews. They all had to lie. This is why Christians long ago provided the "necessary evil" or "lesser evil" principle, which allows you to fib rather than connive at genocide.)

And while, again, I am not fit to judge anyone else's Christianity, I am very fearful of the ways one can fall into what is essentially idolatry while persuading oneself that one is still a Christian. It's very easy. You just dress up your idol as Jesus. If you trade the ethical philosophy, which is complicated, for a simpler set of practices and taboos, and begin to address Jesus (or YHWH or Allah or the Tao or what have you) the way you would Mammon or Dagon, making propitiations in exchange for favors, you might as well just carve a new god for yourself out of a pumpkin. It's the same old business proposition: "I will do what you want, if you bring good things to me." Making that proposition to Jesus doesn't change its nature. I don't believe in Christianity because I believe Jesus can make good on that deal. I believe in Christianity because I believe Jesus does not make that deal.

There are no real wars between religions. There are only tribal wars that use some tribal idolatry to rally the troops, and sometimes the idolaters hijack the name of some better religion's god. The real wars are inside religions: struggles between the obligations of your religion as a set of ethical teachings, which forces you to face difficult realities, and the temptation of turning your religion into a set of magical practices that holds those unpleasant realities at bay. That struggle goes on every day, inside every major religion in the world, and always has. There is no struggle between Christianity and Islam. There is a struggle inside Christianity and a struggle inside Islam, and inside Judaism and Buddhism and Hinduism.

This struggle does not split along traditional denominational lines inside religions, either. As I was walking out of Church on Sunday, I passed a young woman who touching the base of a religious statue and energetically whispering an involved prayer, perhaps having a conversation and asking for a specific favor. I don't know what she was doing, but it was something I'd be uncomfortable with myself, and I'd sat in the same pews listening to the same readings and the same sermon. I'd be pretty surprised if the pastor would encourage parishioners to use a statue to focus an intercessory prayer, but every congregation is a little multitude. There are people worshiping God through sincere ethical commitment in every Christian congregation, even the oddest-seeming ones, and people sitting in the most rational and modern congregation busily propitiating their little folk-magic idol. To tell the truth, most of the idol-worshipers don't even know it.

Ask Tamburlaine: Burning Korans Is a Bad Idea

cross-posted at Dagblog

Who on Earth is crazy enough to burn the Koran? Until two weeks ago, my answer has always been "raging lunatics in Elizabethan drama." You know, stage characters from the age of Shakespeare, the kind of people who are prone to cutting off their own hands, biting off their tongues and spitting them on the stage, or baking their enemies in pies and serving them for dinner. The people who make Hamlet seem well-adjusted. Certainly, I didn't think of it as the kind of thing real people did.

The Koran burner my students know is Tamburlaine the Great, the world conqueror in Christopher Marlowe's two-part extravaganza Tamburlaine the Great. This was one of the great hits of its time, likely bigger than most of Shakespeare's plays, and Shakespeare's own characters quote it from the stage. But since no one teaches it in high schools, and almost no one teaches it in college, here's the basic story:

A raving megalomaniac conquers most of the world and makes speeches about it. Nobody can stop him. The crazier he gets, the more he wins. Then he burns the Koran (just because) and BAM! He's dead.

And yes, this play was written in a Christian country, for Christian audiences who tended to think of Muslims (like the Pope) as agents of the Devil. But even they thought Koran-burning was a no-no.

Now, I have actually exposed unsuspecting college students to Tamburlaine. And they all say the same thing: the dude's crazy. For ten acts, he's running around putting women and children to the sword. He's putting heads of state in cages and using them as footstools. He's making enemy kings draw his chariot around the stage, like they're horses. He cuts himself with a sword, to show one of his good-for-nothing sons who the real tough guy is. He generally behaves like Kim Jong-Il off his meds. And no matter what crazy thing he's done, he comes back later to top it with something crazier. Then, in Part Two, Act Five, he sets a Koran on fire. And that's just too much for everybody.

And what does he have to say after he does that?

But, stay. I feel myself distempered suddenly.

That's right. It's the Don't Burn People's Holy Books Flu, and it kills him within a scene.

So take it from heavily fictionalized crazy people, kids: don't burn Korans, or any other religious works that hundreds of millions of people value. It only leads to trouble. Try to behave like the saner and more rational characters from English Renaissance drama, like Titus Andronicus, Richard III, or Lady Macbeth.

I wouldn't bring this up if Tamburlaine were only an imaginary character. But of course, fictional characters have their way of influencing real people, and some of Tamburlaine's admirers were so excited by him that they set out to be little Tamburlaines themselves. But they were going to make it happen right there in London! And if Tamburlaine the Great had been a big hero by killing so many many filthy foreigners like Arabs and Egyptians and Turks, the little Tamburlaines would kill some filthy outsiders themselves! Which filthy outsiders?

The Protestant refugees from Europe who'd taken refuge in London. Like bakers and shoemakers.

Some of them left a note on a church door in 1593, promising to murder all of the refugees and their children (who were foreigners, after all):

Since words nor threats nor any other thing
Can make you to avoid this certain ill,
We'll cut your throats, in your temples praying
Not Paris massacre so much blood did spill.

It goes on and on like that for dozens of lines.

It's signed "Tamburlaine."

And there's the lesson. When you train people to focus their rage and fear on some foreign scapegoat, to imagine Muslims or Turks or some other group of "strangers" as frightening and inhuman, there can come a moment when the people you've gotten worked up unpredictably switch their fear and hate and thirst for blood to another group of "outsiders" that you didn't expect, some group that's closer at hand and easy to get at.

And once the mob forms, it's too late to say, "No no, we didn't mean them." Once you start whipping up a mob to go after those stinking foreigners, you don't get to tell them exactly who counts as a stinking foreigners and who doesn't. They know who's not one of them. Mobs don't listen to lectures about details. It's the principle of the thing they care about.

Obama vs. The Magicians

cross-posted at Dagblog

President Obama's response to crazy conspiracy narratives about him is predictable and cool. He doesn't want to wade into the nonsense, and in that much he's absolutely right: you can't argue people out of their irrational beliefs. And in general, Obama has put his faith in the public's preference for real-world results over conspiracy theories.

"I trust ... the American people’s capacity to get beyond all this nonsense and focus on, ‘Is this somebody who cares about me and cares about my family and has a vision for the future?’ ” Mr. Obama said. “And so, I will always put my money on the American people."

Obama is right. Americans prefer results over crazy mumbo-jumbo. And that's why Obama's in trouble.

If Obama's going to overcome the nutty mumbo-jumbo with practical results, he needs an actual plan that will lead to practical results. Reason trumps fantasy by bringing home the groceries at the end of the day. If all reason has to offer every day is yet another sensible, pragmatic explanation for why the cupboard is still bare, fantasy starts to look like the only game in town.

The various strands of right-wing lunacy over the last two years, the birther conspiracies and "secret Muslim" fantasies, the scapegoating and hatemongering and Glenn Beck's chalkboard and the recent Palingenetic "Rebirth of a Nation" rhetoric (h/t Digby) are all just various kinds of magical thinking: attempts to deal with overwhelming or insoluble realities through acts of belief. Can't deal with the fact the President of the United States is black? Believe that there is a piece of paper somewhere, a secret document, that will undo the election. (The giveaway with the birthers is that they don't demand that Biden be sworn in, but fantasize about overturning the last Presidential election entirely and getting rid of the Democrats.) Can't cope with the rubble of our economy? Blame a conspiracy by ACORN or The Tides Foundation or the Jewish Freemasons, a conspiracy whose effects can be reversed if you can just find and punish the conspirators.

People indulge in magical thinking for the same reason people once believed (or still believe) in magic, because it helps them deal with things they can't control. Drought killing your crops? Sacrifice a ram to Zeus, or dance the Rain Dance, or make an offering to the crocodile god. Mysterious illness killing your livestock? Use a ritual to redirect the evil magic onto a goat, and if that doesn't work, find the witches who've caused the illness and kill them.

Magic doesn't do anything, but it makes you feel like you're doing something. It takes away feelings of powerlessness before they become intolerable. And it allows you to release your fear and rage in the unholy pleasure of the witch hunt.

People give up on magic when they get better options. If you can irrigate your crops and take your cattle to the vet, you don't bother making sacrifices to the gods or dunking witches in the pond. You don't need magic to make you feel like you're doing something, because now there's actually something you can do. Modern people still resort to fantasy and superstition, of course, but mostly when their circumstances make them feel powerless or when science fails them. Superstition seems much more attractive when you can't see your way out of poverty, or when you depend on someone else for your livelihood. The anti-vaccination movement is a classic example of turning to magical thinking when science disappoints; medicine hasn't got a great list of solutions for autism yet, and so frustrated parents of autistic children look for a scapegoat to attack, and that lets them feel like they're doing something.

The sorry truth is that a large percentage of the human race, even those of us surrounded by modern technology, don't quite believe in the principles of science and reason. It's more that people believe that the bus comes in the morning, and that food you put in the fridge stays good for a few extra days, and that if you point the remote at the TV it will show you the channel you want. The average person on the street doesn't necessarily believe, deep down, in anything that happens at the Large Hadron Collider, because those things can't be seen or touched. But if the Large Hadron Collider eventually leads to, say, a new generation of tiny, powerful batteries, people will totally believe in the batteries. Reason beats superstition because it's better at miracles.

Our country is full of anxious and frightened people, who are right to be anxious and frightened. Our economy is broken. Our foreign military engagements look bleak. The future is unpredictable, so few people feel safe. People need to know that there is a plan for them, and their family, and a vision of the future, and they need a little more than that. They need that vision to start paying off.

Telling voters that the stimulus saved the economy from being much, much worse isn't useful. That statement is true, but it's only a description of the past. It does not answer the practical question, "How will we make this better?" If you're the smartest and most pragmatic leader in the world but unemployment is at 10% and you don't offer any way to fix that, people are going to start looking for someone dumber and less pragmatic. And if there are genuinely no rational solutions, you might as well sacrifice a chicken or two.

Glenn Beck is a huckster, but he's not just a huckster. He's a shaman. A white-bread witch doctor. He offers to solve his followers' problems with political voodoo. He's going to bring back the buffalo and make everyone impervious to bullets. He's going to make Obama disappear. He doesn't have real solutions, but he promises the illusion of solutions, and an illusion with no real solution looks better than no illusions and no solutions either.

Obama and his Administration can no longer appeal to "confidence" or "optimism" about the economy over the long run. Nobody pays their rent in the long run. And if the only solution people are offered is magical thinking, people are going to flock to those who can at least make that magical thinking entertaining. Obama is never going to beat our country's political witch doctors at their voodoo game.

Nor can Obama wait for the nation's economy to fix itself. The whole country can't bear to wait and do nothing. So if they're forced to wait, more and more people are going to gravitate to the magicians' tents and listen to what the magicians tell them. That has already started. And sooner rather than later, the magicians are going to tell them what every shaman or witch doctor says when their spells and and chants don't work fast enough: Someone must be interfering with the magic. Someone is keeping the spell from working. Then the magicians will send their followers to cast out the sinners, the witches, the evildoers responsible for the evil magic, and to punish them. And once that hunt begins things will happen that no reason can repair.

To Refudiate (verb)

So the whole blogosphere has been tweeting and retweeting about Sarah Palin's accidental coinage of the word "refudiate," and her subsequent comparison of herself to William Shakespeare. (If that's the standard you want your prose judged against, sister, be my guest.) It's a big serving of the regular Palin-coverage stew: mockery of ignorance, defensive anti-intellectualism, just enough genuine condescension to lend the anti-intellectuals credibility.

So let's get this out of the way: Palin did not misuse the word "refudiate." She used it exactly as it was meant to be used.

Now, if you're going to ask people to do something, as Palin's original tweet pretends to do, you don't want to use a word like "refudiate," because it's not really a word and people might not understand what you'd like them to do. But Palin was not really asking anyone to do anything. There's nothing she actually wants to happen, and she's not really speaking to the "peace loving Muslims" her sentence addresses.

Palin's tweet is doing something else, which politicians have come to do far, far too much: pretending to ask someone to do something the politician doesn't actually want done. Palin wants to make a public show of demanding some people do something, so she can get credit for demanding that thing and so she can blame those people for not doing it. The audience for the statement is not the people she is pretending to address, about whom Palin does not care a wet rag. Her audience is her own following, and she wants to show herself standing up to the dastardly villains of whom she makes her basically fictional demand. It's a posture, not a request.

Palin has to know, somewhere, that Muslims aren't going to repudiate building mosques, the same way Christians never repudiate building churches and Jews never repudiate building synagogues. If you repudiate building mosques, you're really not a Muslim anymore. (And yes, of course, it's actually a Muslim community center and it's actually not at Ground Zero. Palin doesn't give a wet rag for facts, either.) Who is going to say, "That's right, the basic practice of our religion is a terribly insensitive thing to do, inseparable from religious-based terrorism?" Palin knows perfectly well that no one is going to do that. That's why she demanded it.

She's also not interested in actually communicating with "peace loving Muslims." She's interested in defining Muslims as NOT peace loving and in suggesting to her followers that no peace loving Muslims exist. First off, she's addressing "peace loving Muslims" as if the people building a community center in Manhattan, who got permission from their neighbors, were somehow not "peace loving." She's calling on some imaginary alternative group of "peace loving" Muslims to intervene against the villainous community-center builders, who are by implication a bunch of damned warmongers. Her first rhetorical goal is to disguise the peace-loving nature of the community-center builders, who are trying to do public outreach and promote non-violent Islam, and who Palin wants to demonize. (For those of you confused at home, it's like this: the Muslims putting up the buildings in Lower Manhattan are the peace lovers. QED.)

Palin's second rhetorical goal, which is even more insidious, is to define what a "peace loving Muslim" is. What she's implying, of course, is that we'll know the peace loving Muslims when they "refudiate" the mosque. And when nobody does speak out against building a place to peaceably worship their God, it will just go to show that none of the Muslims want peace! They're all confrontational warmongers, who want to put up thirteen-story buildings exactly at the moment in American construction industry badly needs work! How much more devious could they get? (Hint: it's about zoning. The evil plan is always, always about zoning.) See that? Sarah Palin asked the peace lovers to do the peace loving thing and "refudiate" and none of them had the common decency to refudiate anything! They're monsters, I tell you!

Again, if you're asking people to actually do something, it's important to use commonly accepted words to communicate what you want. But when you only want to make a theatrical demand that parties unknown do something that you're secretly hoping won't happen, then using real words doesn't matter. Actually, it kind of helps. If you can get people to buy it, demanding that people do something that actually isn't anything, because there's no such thing as "refudiating," is a kind of insurance policy. If you asked people to denounce or repudiate or deplore something, there's a tiny chance that someone will actually do that and mess up your plan. But if you make a demand that isn't actually in English, demanding they do something that you don't quite describe, then they can't actually do it. And if they try, you can say they did it wrong, because you didn't mean that; you meant refudiate.

If Palin could swing it, she'd make more phony demands using even sillier and less meaningful words. What she would really like to say, on national television is something like: "I think Barack Obama owes it to the American people to schnarfenoggle right away, and to keep schnarfenoggling until this country's frablejam is back oshkenizing again!" Then she'd go on Fox News every seventeen minutes and hammer Obama for not schnarfenoggling enough. And Obama would never be able to schnarfenoggle satisfactorily, because it's Palin who gets to decide what schnarfenoggling actually is.

Calling her stupid misses the point. Her words follow the same malicious logic that Humpty Dumpty uses:

`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.'

`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master -- that's all.'

Sarah Palin wants to make up the words and define what they mean, however and whenever it suits her. She doesn't intend the rest of us to get a say in it. In her private language, putting up a building and blowing up a building are pretty much the same thing. And whatever else that is, it's not funny.

Why Can't Education Reporters Read?

Last week The Delta Cost Project, a non-profit that studies the cost of higher education, released a detailed report on revenue and expenses at American colleges and universities over ten years: "Trends in College Spending, 1998-2008." The report broke down the various sources of revenue, the different activities on which money was spent, and most interestingly the rate of increase of spending on each separate category. If tuition went up X percent, and university expenses went up Y percent, how much did each category of expenses go up? It's a smart, interesting and badly needed approach, but apparently too complicated for reporters who cover education to figure out.

Education reporters at important mainstream institutions, including The New York Times and Bloomberg News, blew the story in various ways. They didn't blow it because they misunderstood the context, or the complicated back story, or the subtle implications. They blew the story because they did not understand the plain language of the report.

The only other possibility is that they blew the story because they didn't actually bother reading the report. They already know what they think about education policy, and rigorously-researched data can't change their minds. Even if they physically read the report, they could not or would not process any information that didn't fit their pre-existing conclusions.

Here's the basic takeaway of the report:
1) Higher education prices continue to soar, vastly in excess of inflation and evidently even faster than prices of prescription drugs.
2) The costs for colleges and universities do continue to rise, and the amount they spend on everything, controlled for inflation, rose. However spending on actual instruction (mostly on teacher salaries) rose much more slowly than spending on other categories. So between 1998 and 2008 the amount that major private universities pay to put teachers in the classrooms went up 22 percent, but spending on administration and on student services each went up 36 percent. Big public universities spent 10% more on teaching in 2008 than they spent in 1998, but the amount they spent on administration had gone up 20%.
3) Private universities, with bigger budgets, spent much, much more on teaching than public universities did, or than community colleges did.
4) However, the cost of attending a four year public university went up a lot faster than the cost of attending a four year priavte university. The costs of the Ivy League schools (and their less-famous but equally-pricey peers) and so on is going up fast, but the cost of the state universities is going up even faster.

Sam Dillon at The New York Times wrote a relatively solid piece that was initially ruined by a bad headline: Colleges Spend More on Recreation Than Class. That headline is not even close to the truth. Education is still the biggest expense at every university. The problem is that rate of spending on things other than instruction is growing faster than the rate of spending on instruction. It's not about the amounts spent in a given year, but about long-term trends in spending. That's why the study is called "Trends in College Spending."

By the time The Times corrected its headline, various other people had picked up the headline's story, based on no facts whatsoever, and run with it. Here's Daniel Lurzner at Washington Monthly, expressing his outrage at the Times's misleading sloppiness. But I would have a lot more sympathy for Lurzner if he had not written his own blog post based on the headline instead of reading the actual article or (heaven forfend!) the Delta Cost Project's report. (or even the Project's press release about the report. I don't ask much.) So Lurzner started to inform his readers, authoritatively, that a

new study by the nonprofit Delta Cost Project demonstrates that American colleges are spending less of their money on actual education and more on administration and recreation.

Again, entirely untrue. The spending on actual education went up, although other spending went up even faster. The Times headline is extremely sloppy. But that's no excuse for Lurzner's own sloppiness. Education is his beat. He's supposed to read what he's reporting on and actually pay attention to it. The fact that the headline did not match the claims in Dillon's article is embarrassing. The fact that Lurzner did not notice that the headline's claim was not backed up by the article itself is worse than embarrassing.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg's news wire reported this (as their lede):

Private research universities spent twice as much as their public counterparts to teach each student in the 2007-08 school year, widening a cost gap that can make private colleges unaffordable to students, without the help of financial aid.

So they get one fact right (private colleges do spend more money on teaching students), but another wrong. The cost gap between private and public college isn't widening. It's narrowing. Public colleges are getting closer and closer to charging Ivy League prices, while spending much less per student. Bloomberg's takeaway is exactly backwards.

(The report does talk about a growing gap between public and private universities, but it's an educational gap. The schools whose students need the most resources have the least resources to give them, and this problem is getting worse. But Bloomberg's reporter either didn't grasp that or didn't care.)

What's depressing about this is that the DCP's expensive, painstaking research doesn't even seem to penetrate the minds of people who cover education stories for a living. Those reporters simply plugged in the conclusions they expected to see, even when the report's conclusions (and its data) say precisely the opposite.

Now, maybe I'm biased because I'm an academic. That means that I have some experience reading articles whose actual claims doesn't quite match the claims made up front. It also means that I have a professional bias toward research that changes the existing narrative rather than confirming it. I don't think conducting an exhaustive ten year study to find out exactly what people already know, or think they know, would be a good use of energy. But I think facts that make us change our minds are interesting. I see the point of doing research as changing people's minds by giving them a clearer, more accurate sense of the world. Perhaps those things are only valued inside the world of higher education. Clearly, at least some of the people who express an interest in "reforming" education don't value them.

Higher education policy is an important issue, in which everyone has a stake. Certainly, higher education is facing serious structural problems, and they need to be thought through carefully. But it will never by fixed by people clinging to their preordained conclusions in defiance of the facts. It's fashionable for people to criticize the hidebound vested interests inside the academy, but at least some of the vested interested outside the academy seem at least as stubborn and resistant to evidence as any "old-fashioned" or "outmoded" academic could ever be. Some people have already decided that they know how to fix what's wrong with America's colleges, and they're not about to let facts get in the way.

cross-posted at Dagblog

Libertarian Wonderland Is Not So Great

cross-posted at dagblog

It is a truth universally acknowledged that lower taxes and smaller government lead to economic growth, while higher taxes and bigger government hold the economy back. And like many truths that are universally acknowledged, it is frequently contradicted by easily observable facts and that makes no difference. Economics especially seems to be full of these ironclad universal rules that only hold true some of the time, in elegantly controlled micro-economic examples. The rest of the time these "truths" are obviously not true, and no one would be fool enough to behave as if they were true except when it's time to set crucial government policy. Then, anyone who argues against the Universally Acknowledged Truth is just "not facing facts."

Now, since many of our lawmakers, policy wonks, and media pundits still believe in the fact that low taxes make stronger economies, and that this fact is true in virtually all cases, let me propose a small thought experiment that I will call "New Hampshire."

New Hampshire, of course, has no broad-based taxes of any kind: no state income tax, no sales tax, and no politicians with a prayer at state-wide office unless they take "The Pledge." What Pledge? The Pledge not to have any sales or income taxes, ever, you pinko. This basically means that New Hampshire is Galt's Granite Gulch, and libertarianism is a major part of the state's political culture. (Maybe twenty years ago I was in a bookstore a couple of blocks from the Capitol Building in Concord, and my first thought was: That's more Ayn Rand than I've ever seen in once place.) And of course everyone knows, deep in the granite of their bones, that having almost no state taxes is good for the economy.

New Hampshire's southern border is with Massachusetts or, as we called it in the 1980s, "Tax-a-chusetts," which has state income tax AND state sales tax AND all kinds of other state licenses and fees: like Cuba with cranberry sauce, really. You may remember this from the Bush/Dukakis election of 1988, when The Elder Bush pointed out to America what kind of punitive socialist redistributionist joint Dukakis was running, and everyone agreed that we'd all be crazy to want any part of that. New Hampshire's taxes are of course lower than those of its other neighbors (Maine, Vermont, Canada, and the Atlantic Ocean) but the contrast with Massachusetts is especially sharp, especially since the vast majority of New Hampshire's population lives in the southern part of the state, close to the Massachusetts border.

Naturally, New Hampshire's low-tax, small government environment should long ago have left Massachusetts' creaky outmoded welfare state in the economic dust. But reality, evidently, lacks common sense. Because New Hampshire's economy is much, much smaller than Massachusetts' is, and isn't gaining on it. Low-tax Libertarian Wonderland is poor. Taxachusetts prospers.

Really, my experience growing up wasn't so much that New Hampshire had an economy as that it was allowed to borrow Massachusetts' economy on weekends. Massachusetts was the main economic engine, and southern New Hampshire basically an adjunct to that economy. A huge percentage of southern New Hampshire's population actually work in Massachusetts or else serve clients and customers from Massachusetts; one way or another, the income comes from south of the state line. The big economic strategy is to put a big mall, sales tax free, right across the state line in order to lure Massachusetts shoppers. That's really it. When I was fourteen, I thought it was clever to respond to the slogan "Make It in Massachusetts" with "Spend It in New Hampshire." My excuse for that was that I was fourteen. What's unfortunate is that my shallow 9th-grade jeer was actually the plan at the top levels, and still is. New Hampshire's main approach is to try to drain off what it can from the bigger and more productive economy to the south.

Now, some of the economic differences are surely about size and about pre-existing development. Boston wasn't created overnight, and you don't create an equally attractive and economically developed city just by cutting taxes in Nashua and waiting. The universally acknowledged truth that lowering taxes and "getting out of business's way" is the optimal plan simply denies reality; getting out of the way of businesses that doesn't exist isn't even a plan. But even if you control for size and existing development, taxless New Hampshire isn't pulling away from high-tax Massachusetts, and it isn't just Boston that New Hampshire can't compete with. Portsmouth, NH may not be able to slug it out with Boston, by can't it outshine Newburyport, MA? Manchester, Nashua and Concord should be more economically vibrant than Worcester, Springfield, or Lowell. But they aren't so much. Even the inglorious mill towns in northeastern Massachusetts, declining places whose factories closed in the 1960s, are still economically more powerful than their Granite State neighbors, the center around which New Hampshire border towns orbit. And the high-tech businesses along Route 128 in the Boston suburbs somehow stay where they are, instead of migrating an hour up the interstate.

When I lived in New Hampshire we all simultaneously believed the Universally Acknowledged Truth about low taxes and acted as if precisely the reverse were true (because it is). If you'd asked us, we would have told you that New Hampshire was clearly whipping Massachusetts, because living tax free was so much better than being one of those poor overtaxed socialist drones. But we also acknowledged in virtually everything we did that the real source of the money and economic energy was overtaxed socialist Massachusetts. That was clearly where everything was going on, and where our own economic lives were made possible. After all, that's where the jobs were.

New Hampshire libertarianism only makes sense if many of the people talking about the free market and economic opportunity actually want exactly the opposite of what they claim. New Hampshire and its tax laws make a lot of sense if you actually want to keep it economically underdeveloped. If what you value about the place is that it is rural, and generally inexpensive, then making sure that it doesn't develop either much of an economy or much of a public infrastructure becomes a comprehensible goal. When people say "Low taxes are good for the economy," they mean precisely the opposite; they want to keep one side of the border a relative backwater. They're not lying. They're simply expressing an ideology, a Universally Acknowledged Truth that they experience as always true, especially when it is not.

If you dislike cities and crowds and other signs of economic progress, a nice libertarian enclave is just the place for you, and when you say "a good economy" you really mean lots of undeveloped land and not many jobs. Of course, if you put your libertarian enclave too far from an economically developed area, you won't be able to make a living yourself, so it's ideal for libertarians to commute.

Most American libertarianism is like this, in one way or another: economically dependent upon the very things that it claims are holding the economy back. Libertarianism is essentially the pretense that your suburb would be better off on its own. Of course, without the big dirty leftist city the suburb wouldn't exist at all. Libertarianism isn't really a philosophy. It's a theme park.

American History Before America (The 1689 Rule)

cross-posted at Dagblog

Ta-Nehisi is running some excellent comment threads about how deeply torture runs through American history, prompted by George W. Bush's appalling endorsement of torture. In those threads, I realized something about my own perspective on American history: because my academic work is on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I see the Founders not so much as founders but as people responding to their own ugly history. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights are not starting points, but pointed replies; not abstract term papers for some philosophy class, but a practical summary of the history that the Founders did not want repeated.

So, when a lot of Ta-Nehisi's commenters see the United States as a country which has always officially disavowed torture but often tacitly permitted it, and point to a long, compelling trail of evidence, I see a country taking the step of officially disavowing torture after centuries in which torture was an official part of the judicial system -- hell, after centuries in which public torture was considered morally edifying. It's certainly true that various kinds of torture have flourished without legal sanction in this country, but that comes after hundreds of years of mind-boggling cruelty perpetrated by the law itself. I'm talking about courts sentencing people to bodily mutilation, confessions being extorted with the strappado and the rack and the wheel, defendants being crushed to death under heavy weights if they did not enter a plea. That the Founders explicitly rejected that history makes a difference. An America that lives up to its ideals and an America that only pretends to live up to its ideals have never been the only choices. We could have had, could have, an America that pretends to no ideals at all.

I have a classroom rule that I phrase as a joke: I don't discuss current events in class, and my definition of "current events" is everything after 1689. In part, I began blogging in order to have a venue for the strong opinions and the partisan politics that would be inappropriate in my classroom. When I formulated the 1689 Rule, only six years ago, it seemed perfectly safe to me. The great political-philosophical questions of my period were thoroughly settled. Obviously, the 1689 Rule would always keep me well out of whatever cable-news debate was raging at the time. Nobody could still have hard feelings over the execution of Charles II. But gradually, to my real horror, I found that the 1689 Rule no longer worked completely, because American conservatives began to reopen debates that had been settled three hundred years before.

One day, delivering a brief lecture about Christopher Marlowe, I mentioned that some of the scandalous accusations against Marlowe can't be taken as completely reliable, because they were obtained by torture. And I saw a strange expression, a flicker of deliberate self-control, cross a student's face. I realized, suddenly, that he thought I was politicizing the class, taking a stand on a public debate. Obviously, I was commenting on the Bush/Cheney torture policies. But just as obviously to me, I was not. I hadn't formed my opinion about Elizabethan torturers because of Bush, or Cheney, or any of their minions. I'd come to my understanding of that question before Bush ran for President; statements taken under torture are essentially dictated by the torturer. (I've seen cases where this becomes obvious even on the grammatical level, as the document shifts back and forth between first and third person.) I hadn't broken the 1689 rule. 2006 had.

Over the past few years, modern "conservatism" has kept encroaching on my 1689 boundary, turning questions I had considered entirely non-controversial into objects of partisan debate. Once they got around to habeas corpus and the right to a jury trial, I realized we weren't even back in the 1500s anymore. Our contemporary political debates had taken us back to 1214, to a world without a Magna Carta. I couldn't say that I was avoiding current debates by sticking to my field; the arguments had moved back to centuries before my field.

My goal in the classroom is to offer students tools for thinking questions through on their own, and not pre-fabricated conclusions. I avoid bottom-line statements about current events because that doesn't teach them to think. But our degraded national discourse has put me in a position where I can't teach sound thinking skills without taking a position. I can't pretend that the words in a document are a self-evident "fact" when they were extracted from a man hanging from the ceiling with dislocated shoulder blades. I can't responsibly teach students to ignore that context. If I did, I would be actively making them stupid. And that brings Bush and Cheney and John Yoo into my classroom when they don't belong there. I can't keep contemporary debates out of my classroom because so-called "conservatives" are bent on disputing the foundational truths on which America was built.

So what worries me these days is not the dark underside of American history, but the dark preludes to that history. Most progressives still frame the debate as a choice between the ugly parts of the last two hundred years and the possibility of a better future. But the alleged conservatives are no longer confining themselves to that debate. They aren't satisfied with America's original sins any more. They want to go back to earlier darkness and chaos, to crimes and abuses that the Founders renounced in horror. It's no longer a choice between a nation that gives lip service to basic rights and a nation that genuinely honors them. It's becoming a choice between a nation that expresses certain fundamental values and a nation that openly renounces them. When George W. Bush boasts of ordering torture and brags that he would do it again, he is declaring that torture is an outright good, that it is an expression of justice. And it puts the lie to the pretense of Constitutional "originalism." What part of the proscription against "cruel and unusual punishments" is unclear? What phrase would allow drowning a man until he almost dies, over and over again? Bush is not committed to our nation's origins. He is essentially post-American: no longer believing in this country's foundational principles or feeling obligation to them.

That is not merely evil, but folly. The Founders were not infallible oracles or prophets, God knows. They did not perfectly foresee America's future or its future challenges. But about the past, their own historical past, they were very, very shrewd. Their response to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century history is the fruit not just of reason but of hard, bitter experience. The Constitution is a map to places that the Founders could still see in the fading distance, and to which they never, ever wanted to go back. On that, we should trust them.