Friday, October 01, 2004
The More Things Change ...
Writing on "Our Fractious Foreign Policy Debate" in the Fall, 2004, issue of The Public Interest (no link to the article available), Fred Baumann demonstrates how both sides of the Iraq war debate still operate (and talk) in the shadow of the Vietnam debate -- which he says was never really resolved.This is why the first Gulf War was approved by only one vote in the U.S. Senate and why intervening in the Balkans (not to speak of Rwanda) was so difficult.
September 11, the author claims, changed things only a little. Our use of force in Tora Bora, Fallujah and other places was constrained.
Reversals in Iraq now bring out the Vietnam-type legacies of isolationism, conspiracy suspicions, and moral condemnation. "This has led conservatives when in power to fight wars on tiptoe. They tend to counter dogmatic pessimism with a forced and precarious optimism. By cutting the margin of error too thin, they end up, paradoxically, strengthening the very fears their policies were meant to avert or placate."
And , " ... it is likely that even if Iraq ends reasonably successfully, the internal debate has already been so debilitating that no American administration will do anything like this for decades ..." In a world with too many failed states, nuclear proliferation and ruthless terrorists, this may be the real price we pay.
Baumann tries to end on a somewhat positive note: "Much depends on whether we look back on the period of 'Bush lied, people died' and Fahrenheit 9/11 as an episode of periodic craziness, like the Palmer raids, or whether, under the pressure of domstic anger and demoralizing foreign threats, it marks the entrenchment of a new style of American politics." Nothing in his fine article suggests that the latter is likely.
Thursday, September 30, 2004
The Mother of All Reforms
With election-year nuttiness about to peak this evening, it is time to refer to Leanard E. Read's proposal to pick our leaders by lottery. Here is an excerpt from the link:"The first reaction to such a procedure is one of horror: 'Why, we might get only an ordinary citizen.' Very well. Compare such a prospect with one of two wrongdoers which all too frequently is our only choice under the two-party, ballot-casting system. Further, I submit that there is no governmental official, today, who can qualify as anything better than an 'ordinary citizen.' How can he possibly claim any superiority over those upon whose votes his election depends? And, it is of the utmost importance that we never ascribe anything more to any of them. Not one among the millions in officialdom is in any degree omniscient, all-seeing, or competent in the slightest to rule over the creative aspects of any other citizen. The recognition that a citizen chosen by lot could be no more than an ordinary citizen would be all to the good. This would automatically strip officialdom of that aura of almightiness which so commonly attends it; government would be unseated from its master’s role and restored to its servant’s role, a highly desirable shift in emphasis.
"Reflect on some of the other probable consequences:
a. With nearly everyone conscious that only "ordinary citizens" were occupying political positions, the question of who should rule would lose its significance. Immediately, we would become acutely aware of the far more important question: What should be the extent of the rule? That we would press for a severe limitation of the state seems almost self-evident.
b. No more talk of a "third party" as a panacea. Political parties, which have become all but meaningless as we know them, would cease to exist.
c. No more campaign speeches with their promises of how much better we would fare were the candidates to spend our income for us.
d. An end to campaign fundraising.
e. No more self-chosen "saviors" catering to base desires in order to win elections.
f. An end to that type of voting in Congress which has an eye more to re-election than to what’s right.
g. The mere prospect of having to go to Congress during a lifetime, even though there would be but one chance in some 10,000, would completely reorient citizens’ attention to the principles which bear on government’s relationship to society. Everyone would have an incentive to 'bone up,' as the saying goes, if for no other reason than not to make a fool of himself, just in case! There would be an enormous increase in self-directed education in an area on which the future of society depends. In other words, the strong tendency would be to bring out the best, not the worst, in every citizen."
Leanard Read enumerates just some of the advanatages. A moment's reflection suggests many more. Imagine politicians and their many acolytes having to join the productive economy.
Wednesday, September 29, 2004
No-Fault Transit Planning
Having spent $300-million per mile to build LA's rump Red Line, LA's leaders now want to spend another billion dollars to extend it. Council Backs Expansion of Red Line ... The officials agree that 'congestion has reached a breaking point' and support building the subway system westward .."This is all getting tedious but silence in the face of craziness is not an option. The Red Line ridership forecast (Segment 1 and 2) made in the official 1983 EIR was for 376,000 daily boardings. The actual FY 2003 daily boardings for these segments was 95,100 (thanks, Tom Rubin).
Of course, $300-million per mile to build (and many more millions to operate since then) was not part of the 1983 vision.
Finally, the impact of the project on congestion reduction is nonexistant.
This is all old news -- except to the folks ready to move forward. Yesterday's LA City Council vote to start pushing was unanimous.
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Wealth and Angst
Gregg Easterbrook's The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse is worth reading. While Simon and Lomborg and others have documented the material improvement part, they said little about why many people were not taking delivery of the good news. Easterbrook is very good at surveying both.Actually, the book has three parts; in addition to a fine exposition of the details of expanded material welfare and corresponding increased grousing (especially by smart people), Easterbrook adds two chapters on how to improve the world. So, skip the last chapters (how to reign in greedy CEOs, calls for universal health care, a higher "living wage" and more foreign aid) and enjoy the author's thought-provoking surveys of material success and the accompanying widespread (though non-universal) angst.
Monday, September 27, 2004
Smart Growth and Smart Diets
Most of the popular media (and others) have been taken on by the cachet of "smart growth" and the many dumb ideas that it includes.John Tierney, however, got it about right in yesterday's NY Times. He even writes, "... I don't like my own car ... But I no longer believe that my tastes should be public policy ...."
And, referring to experiments, as on the I-15 near San Diego, he notes, "The toll lanes have become so popular that they're being extended 12 miles further out of town, and the concept of variable tolls has become highway engineers' favorite solution to traffic jams. After decades of working on technological fixes like beam-control roads, they've turned to basic economics instead. They now see traffic jams as equivalent of bread lines in the Soviet Union, a consequence of an unimaginative monopoly run by politicians loath to charge the market price for a valuable commodity. To be fair, the Soviet politicians, though, at least they didn't blame the public for the problem they created. They didn't promote a smart-diet program urging people to eat less bread."
Sunday, September 26, 2004
Debt and Mega-Debt
The National Debt Clock puts the U.S. national debt at $7,394,068,208,622.52 as of 8:27:10 PM GMT, Sep 26, 2004. It will soon hit $10 trillion and not look back. Rightly, many are concerned.Thomas R. Saving recently wrote in the WSJ that the Social Security and Medicare unfunded liability is $73 trillion, 10 times the national debt. The new drug benefit will quickly make this worse.
The national debt got to where it is because politicians like to spend money and cut taxes and because of wars and the problems with raising taxes during economic recessions. The Bush tax cuts are widely cited for their regressivity but the Social Security "payroll tax" is the most regressive federal tax we pay -- and the fastest growing.
Yet, many of those who fret most over the national debt and the Bush tax cuts vow to defend the Social Security status quo.
Perhaps it's back to the idea that the "smaller" numbers are more comprehensible. Elite opinion can fathom trillions but balks at tens of trillions.
