Michael Bérubé - American Airspace

Emergent new feature: Liberal Thursday!

Welcome, everyone, to Liberal Thursday! On Liberal Thursday, we’ll look at what people are saying about What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? (Those of you who have already heard enough on the subject can give this blog a pass on Liberal Thursdays and wait for Arbitrary But Fun Fridays, which, I promise, will be 100 percent free of my-book-this and my-book-that. And also fun.) We’ll be sure to take note whenever someone says something that is inaccurate and/or unfair, and we’ll try to learn a few things along the way as well, because we know the Internets are full of people who have helped to shape (or change) our thinking on any number of subjects. And we’ll stop referring to ourselves in the ~~third person~~ ~~second person~~ ~~fourth person~~ first person plural right now!

This week I’m pleased to find that renowned libertarian economist Tyler Cowen recently posted some comments about the book. Professor Cowen is the author of, among other things, In Praise of Commercial Culture (2000), What Price Fame? (2002), Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Cultures (2004), and, most recently, Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding (2006). His remarks on Liberal Arts start off like this:

Having been pilloried by The Weekly Standard for praising American universities and their diversity, I feel I have the liberal credentials to take a sideways whack at this new book…

OK, so this isn’t a book review so much as Fun with a Piñata. But so what? I’m a big guy, I can take a sideways whack or two.

I did enjoy and indeed finish it. The book defends the liberal nature of the university but more importantly it has an excellent discussion of “the postmodern novel” (the author’s field, apparently), including a brilliant take on William Dean Howells and a good discussion of The Great Gatsby.

This is very sweet, and I’m quite flattered. It’s too kind, actually. About 40 percent too kind (I have a meter in my office). My reading of William Dean Howells is merely careful—really garden-variety stuff for any literature professor with a sense of historical context. But I’m especially glad that Professor Cowen liked those parts of the book that deal with literature, and I’m truly grateful that he read them. Literary criticism is my specialty, after all.

Its portrait of the American university, however flawed, is closer to the truth than what one finds in the right-wing scaremongers.

I’ll take this faint praise—I’m not proud about such things. And now we get to the flaws:

But reading this book shows me—contrary to the author’s intentions—why so many college students have turned to the so-called “Right.” Michael Bérubé, the author:

1. Believes that David Horowitz is a very powerful man.

2. Claims that libertarians are simply ignorant of poverty and therefore wrong. At least libertarians are “quite smart now and then” and yes that is a quotation.

3. Repeatedly rejects political views by citing the (supposed) moral failings of their undergraduate proponents.

4. Claims conservatives hate social security “because it works.” By the way, that is also why conservatives hate universities.

5. Argues that “the real scandal of public universities is that they have become increasingly beholden to right-wing demogoguery...”

6. Believes that he is holding genuine dialogue with alternative political views.

Ouch! Those six sideways whacks hurt. I’m gonna hafta handle them one by one. I’ll leave aside the claim about students turning to the “so-called ‘Right,’” because survey says Professor Cowen doesn’t actually have any evidence for that one.

1. Believes that David Horowitz is a very powerful man.

Well, that’s not quite right. My book actually says this:

Though many mainstream pundits and commentators consider Horowitz a fringe figure, a former far-left ideologue turned far-right ideologue, his Academic Bill of Rights is no joke, and has won him audiences with sympathetic state lawmakers like Ohio’s [Larry] Mumper, Minnesota’s Republican state senator Michele Bachmann, and Colorado’s Republican governor Bill Owens.

These days, Horowitz also has the ear of John Boehner, Majority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, and, as you probably know, his book The Art of Political War and Other Radical Pursuits is among Karl Rove’s very favorite things. Whether that makes Horowitz “very powerful” or not is your call, of course.

But you know, I’ve run into this kind of thing before—and almost always from smart academic conservatives. “David Horowho?” they say. “Dinesh D’Somebody? Never heard of them. Fringe figures, really, my boy—seriously, it’s not as if these people have any influence on public discourse. Quite frankly, you do yourself and your work a disservice by attending to them.”

So no, I do not believe that David Horowitz is a very powerful man. I do not say such a thing in my book. But I believe that his criticisms of American universities and certain “dangerous professors” are pernicious and influential (though notoriously slipshod and factually challenged), and must be dealt with.

2. Claims that libertarians are simply ignorant of poverty and therefore wrong. At least libertarians are “quite smart now and then” and yes that is a quotation.

OK, this falls into the “inaccurate and/or unfair” category. Because yes, it’s a quotation, but it’s not a very responsible one. In chapter 4, I talk about students of all political persuasions (and not, say, famous libertarian economists), and here’s some of what I say about those post-adolescent libertarians:

The libertarians are, for me, the most peculiar assortment in the mix. They’re usually well-informed on civil liberties, abortion, gay rights, and the sheer cruelty and foolishness of America’s drug laws (and no, it’s not just a matter of keeping your laws off my bong). They’re generally confused but nonetheless rigidly dogmatic on economic issues, having little or no understanding what unregulated, scorched-earth capitalism actually entails and little or no concern about poverty or disability. They’re quite smart now and then about the intrusive, in loco parentis style of campus management that they identify with what I call the aggressive Lutheran liberalism I encountered in the midwest (the kind in which your public-spirited but nosy neighbors pull over your car to make sure you’re wearing your seatbelt, because it’s good for you) and that they consider the local version of the so-called “nanny state”; but they’re reflexively and sometimes ignorantly opposed to any regulatory or redistributive scheme whatsoever, as if tainted soup, securities fraud, defective automobiles and toxic-waste dumping will all get sorted out by the wisdom of the market and the work of many invisible hands.

So why do I say that they’re only quite smart “now and then” about campus policies? Because right now, for example, their biggest concern is Penn State’s banning of the consumption of alcohol in the football parking lot during games, that’s why. They’re treating this as if it constituted a human-rights offense on the order of Mao’s cultural revolution. So yeah, sometimes college libertarians are quite smart. Sometimes they’re not. That’s the way it goes. (Whereas if I’d wanted to be all snarky and dismissive about young libertarians, I would have cited Kieran Healy’s immortal line, “Ayn Rand. Fourteen year olds of the world unite! The car keys shall be yours by sheer force of will! Objectivism requires it!”)

And as for Cowen’s line about how “libertarians are simply ignorant of poverty and therefore wrong”: note that I actually said they have little or no concern about poverty or disability. Indeed, I might add that some libertarians can’t even bring themselves to type the word “disability.” But that would be mean.

3. Repeatedly rejects political views by citing the (supposed) moral failings of their undergraduate proponents.

You know, I think this is about the dang libertarians again. Because in reality, chapter 4 criticizes the campus left and the campus right too, and argues that certain forms of campus leftism provide “a powerful device for driving young independents and libertarians straight into the arms of the College Republicans.” So it’s kinda ironic in a post-postmodern way that Professor Cowen claims that my book does the same thing.

4. Claims conservatives hate social security “because it works.” By the way, that is also why conservatives hate universities.

Guilty as charged! Though I note that some conservatives also hate universities because they don’t like those areas of cultural life that don’t answer directly to the state. And some of them hate that gay-and-lesbian studies thing we got goin’ on.

As for Social Security, I think the history of conservative opposition to the program bears me out pretty well. But then, I would think that, wouldn’t I?

5. Argues that “the real scandal of public universities is that they have become increasingly beholden to right-wing demogoguery...”

Penalty on the offense, fifteen yards, illegal ellipsis. (We’ll decline the five-yard misspelling penalty.) Here, Professor Cowen makes it sound as if I’m talking about right-wing demagoguery on campus (and how ridiculous that would be!), when in fact the passage makes it quite clear that I am doing no such thing:

The real scandal of Social Security is that the truly rich are largely exempt from contributing to it; the real scandal of public universities is that they have become increasingly beholden to right-wing demagoguery with respect to “the public” (as in, “why should your taxes pay the salaries of these America-hating liberals”) even as right-wing demagogues in elected office have managed to cut our public funding from the states. The result is a weird and thoroughly dishonest political two-step, whereby your local Republican state legislator or Democratic (but not that tax-and-spend kind of Democratic) governor alternates between (1) cutting funds for public colleges, demanding that State U. find ways of “doing more with less” in the name of fiscal austerity, and (2) crying that it is an outrage that State U. staged “The Vagina Monologues” with the tax money of the good God-fearing people of upper Appalachia or rural Oklahoma, regardless of whether that venerable Eve Ensler standby was sponsored by any public funds. It’s a neat trick, invoking the public with one hand and privatizing the enterprise with the other. But it works, and as a result, tuitions are indeed higher than they should be. That’s what “partial privatization” is all about: passing the social costs of public goods onto individuals, leaving students and families to fend for themselves as best they can. If this is fine with you, so be it: you’re a conservative or a libertarian. If you think this is a suspect or foolhardy enterprise, you may already be a liberal or progressive. In that case, more power to you.

6. Believes that he is holding genuine dialogue with alternative political views.

This item, preceded as it is by the first five, suggests that I am self-undermining—if not a simple hypocrite. But for the record, when I wrote What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? I did not think I was holding genuine dialogue with alternative political views. Actually, I thought I was writing a book with an argument, and disagreeing with any number of other people’s books and essays along the way.

Cowen concludes:

If we bundle this all up and put it against the “...the world is a fragile place and liberty is dear. Let us start with an ethic of individual responsibility, family values, strong national defense, low taxes, and a deep belief in the sacred nature of mankind, and no we cannot elevate every injustice,” I know which vision the American people—including their undergraduates—will choose. (For new MR readers, I should note that those are not exactly my views, it is just one shorthand description of parts of the American right.)

Bérubé, by the way, has a brilliant performance art-worthy fantasy segment on why 50 percent tax rates would not (should not?) deter anyone from working or producing. Excerpt: “I find it hard to imagine a Clever Entrepreneur who thinks, “Well, I’ve made ten million this year, but if I make another two million I only get to keep one million of it, so I’m going to stop developing and promoting my product right now."” (p.286). Ah, if only all taxes fell on pure profit. It is even sadder to learn that many wealthy people are “hoarding it [their money],” rather than creating jobs with it.

Well, we’re all about brilliant performance-art on this humble blog, so, second thing first: it really and truly is the case that conservatives and libertarians argue that high marginal tax rates on income discourage “growth,” by which they means the amassing of wealth by individuals. I don’t understand that at all, and though I freely admit that I’m out of my depth on this one, Professor Cowen’s sniffy dismissal does not enlighten me. (Later in the very paragraph Cowen cites, I wrote, “dammit, Jim, I’m a literature professor, not a tax specialist,” though my editor forced me to delete the first two words in page proofs.) But my point was that I don’t believe that all the ultra-ultrawealthy are really creating jobs with their profits (and yes, I was talking only of income taxes, even though I know that other taxes do exist; for the record, I favor taxes on investments and inherited wealth, too), and that I don’t see why a tax code in a democracy shouldn’t try to discourage the hoarding of great wealth by individuals.

But I do thank Professor Cowen for reading my book, for liking the discussions of literature, and for disagreeing openly with me on those matters about which we disagree.

And now first thing last. As for the fragile world and its unelevatable injustices and the vision the American people will choose, well, I’m tempted to remind readers of Professor Cowen’s vision of New New Orleans, free, free at last from the shackles of building codes (“the city should help create cheap housing by reducing legal restrictions on building quality, building safety, and required insurance”). As he wrote in Slate this past April, the construction of post-Katrina shantytowns might be a good thing for music lovers:

Shantytowns might well be more creative than a dead city core. Some of the best Brazilian music came from the favelas of Salvador and Rio. The slums of Kingston, Jamaica, bred reggae. New Orleans experienced its greatest cultural blossoming in the early 20th century, when it was full of shanties. . . . Just imagine the chant: Shantytowns for New Orleans now.

I have indeed imagined that chant, as it happens. And if you bundle up those shantytowns and contrast them with a fair and balanced representation of the vision of America I offer in my book, I think I know which vision the American people—including their undergraduates—will choose.

Posted by on 09/14 at 07:58 AM

Well, I tell you what Michael, maybe if Prof. Cowen moves into a shantytown he’ll become even more creative. Nothing like poverty to get those creative juices flowing.

This young New Orlean’s film-maker did a documentary on post-Katrina New Orleans. I bet she’d have some creative ideas on what to do with that income that’s stiffling Cowan’s creativity.

captcha: “serious” as in “r u serious?”

Posted by Bill Benzon on 09/14 at 10:34 AM
Dude.

I’ve been waiting for years for you to be wrong about something. Now I’ve found it! Hooray!

Here it is: you weren’t referring to yourself in the third person, but in the first person plural. Take that, Mr. Smartypants.

Now I’ll read the rest of the entry.

Posted by on 09/14 at 10:45 AM
Damn you, rm! You eat me to it--I was going to point out the same thing!

Posted by BikeProf on 09/14 at 10:56 AM
And of course instant karma hits me--that was supposed to say “beat me to it” and not “eat me to it”! I am an idiot, apparently.

Posted by BikeProf on 09/14 at 10:57 AM
I can’t believe this, Michael. It’s absolutely astounding. The world is coming to an end, or my name isn’t Karl Rove.

Your editor wanted changes in page proofs?????

Posted by Sherman Dorn on 09/14 at 11:08 AM
Thanks for again showing it is possible in public debate to be both respectful and carnivorous.

Table 1 (p 7-8) of the linked survey shows Kerry out polling Bush across the college spectrum except for Science / Math. Odd, I not sure it is possible for a representative government to show any more contempt for Science and Math than has the Bush Admin. Apparently not paying attention to national politics is a side effect of lab courses.

Captcha: sales. (Publishers and authors: improve your sales)

Posted by black dog barking on 09/14 at 11:13 AM
The tax thing from Cowen is odd. Your statement went precisely to the question of the impact of a tax on effort, not on “pure profit.” (In some models a tax on pure profit has no adverse impact on the economy.)

I don’t know what you wrote about money hoarding. If you meant stuffing it in a mattress, in mainstream economics the notion is that such behavior has no impact in the long run. If you meant just dropping it in a savings account, then the an implication of no impact on the economy is wrong, since somebody somewhere will borrow that money for something (presumably not for stuffing in a mattress).

Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to impoverish myself and live in a refrigerator carton so I can write the great American novel.

Posted by Miracle Max on 09/14 at 11:34 AM
I believe this mode of reference is known as the royal “we.” All hail King Michael!

Posted by Bill Benzon on 09/14 at 11:34 AM
Well it’s a tough call. A safe healthy environment for all New Orleanians, including the least privileged, or more Jazz! Let me think about it.

Posted by on 09/14 at 12:08 PM
No, no Markg. It is a safe and healthy New Orleans vs. the POSSIBILITY of more jazz. After all, great music came from the slums of Kingston and Rio but we don’t hear much about great music coming from the slums of Calcutta. It is a calculated risk, but one Professor Cowan is willing to take.

Although, come to think of it, those kids in Oliver! seemed to break into song and dance with great ease in the workhouse so maybe Professor Cowan has a point.

Posted by on 09/14 at 12:19 PM
Not to mention, of course, the happy ragamuffins in “Annie” or the Shirley Temple movies.

Posted by emily on 09/14 at 12:24 PM
I guess this means you’re not in favor of incorporating Cowan’s emergent reconstruction ideas. It’s too bad, “Visualize Rockin’ Shantytowns” might have made a good bumper sticker.

It’s not the music per se that’s important—the important part is ensuring the existence of brutal poverty so that good music can be made. Is that what Williams means by process over product?

Posted by on 09/14 at 12:35 PM
I can’t believe this, Michael. It’s absolutely astounding. The world is coming to an end, or my name isn’t Karl Rove. Your editor wanted changes in page proofs?????

Actually, no, Sherman. I was kidding. I didn’t write “dammit, Jim,” either, though I was sorely tempted to.

The page-proof-changing demon was me, of course.

Which brings me to the subject of embarrassing errata!

I’ve been waiting for years for you to be wrong about something. Now I’ve found it! Hooray!

Here it is: you weren’t referring to yourself in the third person, but in the first person plural. Take that, Mr. Smartypants.

D’oh! That was a sorry-ass late-night mistake, and it is right that I be ridiculed and chastised. Now I will go fix it in such a way as to leave a faithful record of my embarrassment.

Posted by Michael on 09/14 at 12:40 PM
I completely disagree with Cowen about important things like politics and economics, but Marginal Revolution is still one of my favorite blogs. Does this make me morally incoherent? I have a similar problem with Snoop Dogg.

Posted by Sean Carroll on 09/14 at 01:50 PM
No, it doesn’t make you morally incoherent, Sean—after all, I like much of Marginal Revolution too, and whole big chunks of In Praise of Commercial Culture, which, however I may disagree with them, really do serve as a useful corrective to media moralists left and right (those “media effects theorists” I was complaining about in the third Williams post) who believe that mass media would be better for everyone if only they owned the whole shebang. And I really am flattered that Cowen read the—hold the phone! are you telling me that Snoop Dogg guest-blogs on Marginal Revolution? And you have a problem with that?

Posted by Michael on 09/14 at 02:02 PM
Snoop Dogg has a blog?

Posted by on 09/14 at 02:02 PM
This is a tangent, I know, but I can’t help a curious question for the author having recently finished What’s Liberal myself --

The postmodernism chapter was one of the nicest such presentations I’ve encountered, especially the Rorty part. Bravo! But I was surprised when you declined to follow Rorty in coupling your rejection of moral realism with a parallel rejection of metaphysical realism more broadly. Why does the physical world get a pass? The argument in the book distinguishing mind-dependent moral stuff from mind-independent physical stuff seemed more logical positivist than anything else--Rorty mixed with Ayer?

Posted by on 09/14 at 02:18 PM
I am surprised he didn’t quote Tony Snow’s now famous (albeit fresh and new--and expensive) dictum:
We just don’t have that kind of granularity in terms of the relationship. And therefore, we’re not going to outrun the facts.

Posted by on 09/14 at 02:25 PM
black dog barking: Table 1 (p 7-8) of the linked survey shows Kerry out polling Bush across the college spectrum except for Science / Math. Odd, I not sure it is possible for a representative government to show any more contempt for Science and Math than has the Bush Admin. Apparently not paying attention to national politics is a side effect of lab courses.

I’d agree with that last sentence, but looking at the categories I would also guess that the engineers were lumped into “science/math.” In my experience, engineering students as a group are among the most conservative (though not typically in the “movement” sense) on campus, and engineering departments are huge. While respect and funding for “pure” science have dwindled in the past five years, funding has increased for military applications. There is a vast pool of money for projects even obliquely related to surveillance or weaponry, and it’s not just engineers but many scientists in the applied fields who benefit. If all engineering/science/math folks are grouped together, the grumbling of scientists engaged in “pure” research probably doesn’t influence the overall numbers very strongly.

On top of that, funding shifts usually don’t manifest in ways that demand the attention of undergrads. Students who are not made politically aware by other means are unlikely to be provoked by their science classes. (That’s one reason why, based on my own experience, I’m an advocate of the general education system.)

Posted by on 09/14 at 02:27 PM
Just ordered my copies of Michael’s book so I don’t know his particular take on ben’s question, but I don’t see how the distinction between mind-dependent morality and mind-independent physical stuff comes from logical positivism.

With the possible exception of Neurath, the postitists didn’t write a lot about social reality, they were interested in putting the physical sciences on a logical basis. They drew a distinction between analytic sentences (which refer to the world) and synthetic sentences (which refer only to other sentences) but this doesn’t seem to be the same thing as the distinction between morality and the physical world.

John Searle’s book, THE CONSTRUCTION OF SOCIAL REALITY draws the distinction between social reality (dependent on human intentions) and brute reality (independent of human intentions) which seems closer to the mark.

Posted by on 09/14 at 02:32 PM
[frantic splashing noise]

Oh, sorry, that was just me again, out of my depth as I read the last few comments.

Carry on.

Posted by on 09/14 at 02:38 PM
"Shantytowns might well be more creative than a dead city core. Some of the best Brazilian music came from the favelas of Salvador and Rio. The slums of Kingston, Jamaica, bred reggae. New Orleans experienced its greatest cultural blossoming in the early 20th century, when it was full of shanties. . . .”

You know, that’s a damn good point. I hadn’t thought of it before, but I’m struck all of a heap. I bet there’s some really brilliant music percolating away in that part of northern Pakistan where the earthquake smashed all the houses and most of the people and left the survivors living in snowy mountains with no shelter. Somebody should head up there and record it before it’s too late.

And of course that’s what Barbara Bush was thinking when she said that profound, insightful thing at the Astrodome last year. “This is working out very well for them” - because soon they’ll all have recording contracts and platinum records, because there’s just nothing like poverty and crap housing and being vulnerable to floods and earthquakes to inspire people.

Posted by Ophelia Benson on 09/14 at 02:43 PM
If Cowen had written these lines more like the following, he would have better presented his line of reasoning, well that or he would have not been hiding his own private idaho (i mean “agenda") {idaho being a raging hotbed of the most radical of libertarian conspiracy theorists fearful of one world government and wicked little bureaucrats who might not let them bulldoze their forests and use dynamite to fish} [i just had a meeting with some of these, and they tend to make eco-terrorists seem like Horowitzian normalists].

3. Repeatedly rejects libertarian views by citing the (supposed) moral failings of their undergraduate proponents.

4. Claims libertarians hate social security “because it works.” By the way, that is also why libertarians hate universities and public education.

5. Argues that “the real scandal of public universities is that they have become increasingly beholden to libertariandemogoguery...”

6. Believes that he is holding genuine dialogue with libertarianpolitical views.

See, now doesn’t that just read better and with more internal coherence???

Posted by on 09/14 at 03:08 PM
Cowen is guilty of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy (if he really says the thing about shabby housing and jazz—it is so often the case that professors cite one another only to bear false witness against them). Arguing that what follows a thing must be caused by it.

One wonders about the context and whether he was joking, or expecting us in some way to see through the madness of his statement.

The most common fallacy for the left is ad hominem. So and so is conservative, therefore they must be an idiot. So and so is a libertarian, therefore she should die. Horowitz can’t think because he’s no longer one of us.

It’s fun to think of the Latin names because these problems have been around a while.

But for some reason this kind of thing doesn’t get taught much any more.

Appeals to pity are what is taught.

Sometimes rightfully so, I might add, as in the case of the Katrina victims in which case the appeal to pity is legitimate.

I’m still not very happy about the “Lutheran liberalism” comments as they are put down here. Most of the midwest is not Lutheran. Only a few places in Minnesota are overwhelmingly Lutheran, and though many of them are liberal, many are not.

It just seems like a shotgun blast in a general direction, even shooting from the hip.

Lutherans voted for Bush in about 60% of the cases according to studies.

So the assumption that Lutherans are necessarily liberals could even be considered somewhat inconsistent. It feels like an ad hominem attack. , but one that doesn’t even fit its description.

I for instance am a Lutheran but I never badger anybody about infractions of the rules of the road. I make my kids wear their seatbelts, and I do think the author of this column should wear his, but I wouldn’t have ever thought to pull him over. Moreover, I doubt if this has ever happened to the author even in a single actual instance, and if it did, I really doubt if the person who did it was a Lutheran.

We are thinking about the afterlife, you know. It is Calvinists who want this world to be godly.

Lutherans expect the worst in people and are rarely disappointed.

Posted by Kirby Olson on 09/14 at 03:20 PM
Folks, of course Kirby is a Lutheran Surrealist (click his name), and therefore he is the kind of person who pulls you over in order to give you a Jello salad full of melting clock faces.

Kirby, seriously, it sounds to me like the first half of your post has some of the same shotgun-blast generalization you complain about in the second half. (I agree that Michael did that, albeit with humor). I teach a lot of composition, and I think am in reasonable touch with current practice, and I want to ask where, and who exactly is teaching kids these days to appeal to pity all the time? And who is not teaching them that ad hominem attack is faulty? I don’t know about using all the Latin names, but most writing teachers are teaching argumentation. It doesn’t help that our journalistic world adheres to absolutely none of these ethical standards, so some students think argmument means loudly stating one’s opinions while insulting one’s opponents. Academic argument is much more fastidious than the vitriol they get from radio and TV. I don’t want to be a naive media theorist; I’m just saying that if they rely on commonplaces and pathos they have lots of models outside of what people are teaching them.

Posted by on 09/14 at 04:05 PM
Guilty as charged. Thank you for this. I stand condemned.

Posted by Kirby Olson on 09/14 at 04:13 PM
A little bit more from Cowen’s April 2006 article:

“Low rents make it possible to live on a shoestring, while the population density blends cultural influences.”

He’s absolutely right. In fact, urban planners, anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, record producers, and book publishers can calculate the rate of cultural productivity of any shantytown anywhere in the world by using this simple formula:

(Unemployment + Infant Mortality + Population Density) ÷ (Average Monthly Rent + Building and Safety Codes) = Cultural Productivity Rate

The higher the CPR, the more culture you got!

Posted by J— on 09/14 at 04:50 PM
No, wait. I meant what I meant. I had to think about it.

When I used to each at the University of Washington as a teaching assistant (early 90s) I would get papers—esp. from studies in Black Studies and Women Studies where the logic basically went—we are oppressed, and therefore we are right.

But it was wrong to argue that this is a universal trend. It was just my limited experience in one corner of the vast Gulag of the university system.

I do believe that in many other places rhetorical nomenclature is still being taught. I think those students are being better served, and will profit from their education.

Mind you, this was also a little over ten years ago.

How prevalent is that oppressor/oppressed, victor/victim ideology still used in terms of who’s right?

I’m not sure how pervasive it is.

It strikes me as an appeal to pity (calling on sympathies not directly relevant to the issue); but used to work almost as well as a slam dunk—even in graduate seminars—where standpoint politics determined whether or not you were right (in certain seminars overseen by PC faculty).

If you argued against it you were positioned as wanting to “maintain your privileges” or something quite gauche along those lines.

Even within the PC ranks there was an extraordinary new hierarchy of who was right based on standpoint—if you were a heterosexual white woman you were always wrong if you were talking to a transexual white woman (class usually didn’t matter, but gender and race really did).

This is what I mean by appeal to pity: race, gender, class (if I could write a line through class, I would, to indicate that it was sous rature, as the Derrideans loved to scream).

That’s what I meant by this.

But of course in composition classes rhetorical nomenclature is probably still regarded as useful.

But I don’t think it trumps r g c in many places, although it should.

Posted by Kirby Olson on 09/14 at 04:55 PM
Cowen’s comment about the correlation of abject poverty and affecting music (ah, what about but affecting novels, affecting operas? or indeed where did gospel come from?) reminds me of some of comments Virginia Postrel has made on her blog. Really, these libertarians, particularly those who are trained economists, should refrain from art and literary criticism at least in print, as their examples usually show them to be tone deaf as we humanists think they are.

It also reminds me of my favorite academic joke (it’s my own invention): Why are do English Department exist anyway? Because there is no Accounting for Taste!

Posted by Rob Crowe on 09/14 at 05:01 PM
Michael, don’t forget to tell people to look for you in the NYT Magazine this Sunday. Nothing new to this crowd, of course, but still.

Posted by Orange on 09/14 at 05:07 PM
This is a tangent, I know, but I can’t help a curious question for the author having recently finished What’s Liberal myself --

The postmodernism chapter was one of the nicest such presentations I’ve encountered, especially the Rorty part. Bravo! But I was surprised when you declined to follow Rorty in coupling your rejection of moral realism with a parallel rejection of metaphysical realism more broadly. Why does the physical world get a pass? The argument in the book distinguishing mind-dependent moral stuff from mind-independent physical stuff seemed more logical positivist than anything else—Rorty mixed with Ayer?

Thanks, Ben. I’m really glad to hear this. The short answer is that the physical world gets a pass precisely on the ground that it doesn’t care whether I give it a pass or not. (OK, that might be true of much of the moral world as well, but you know what I mean.) But hey, while I’m doing all this book-promoting, ixnay on the ogicallay ositivismpay, okay? We don’t want to scare people off by making them think the postmodernism chapter is full of such philosophical abstrusities. We want to stay on message, namely, that chapter six is just lots of Happy Furry Puppy Story Time with Postmodernism. So don’t forget to tell everyone about the Pulp Fiction excursus that kicks it all off.

Besides, jpj is right—I rely in such matters on the brute fact/ social fact distinction as laid out in Searle’s The Construction of Social Reality, with the proviso that I argue that the distinction between social fact and brute fact is drawn by social fact. (And this forms the basis of my essays on the Sokal Affair in the first section of Rhetorical Occasions, just to get back to the book-hawking.) One of the things I like about Searle’s book is its agnosticism about whether color is or isn’t observer-independent (electromagnetic radiation surely is, but when it comes to color there’s—ahem—no accounting for taste).

Kirby, I hope you know that the phrase “Lutheran liberalism in the midwest” does not imply that (a) all midwesterners are Lutheran and (b) all Lutherans are liberal. And I hope you know that I shot from the hip, as I always do, with love.

Orange, thanks for reminding me to do some article-hawking amidst all this book-hawking. I do indeed have a short essay in the front of this week’s Magazine. How’s the crossword, by the way?

Posted by Michael on 09/14 at 05:24 PM
Nobody gets a crack at the crossword online until Saturday night. But TimesSelect lets me read Magazine highlights on the Wednesday before. It’s great—then there’s nothing left to look forward to by the time Sunday rolls around.

Posted by Orange on 09/14 at 05:45 PM
Well, now I can’t wait for my copy of the book to arrive since I’ve learned:

1. My John Searle guess was, like, totally right.

2. The “postmodernism chapter” is not “full of...philosophical abstrusities” which will be the first time ever such a thing has occurred.

And I won’t even tell anyone that when I had my social theory class read Otto Neurath last spring they all thought his ideas sounded a lot like Derrida. They won’t hear that from me here on this blog-thing.

Posted by on 09/14 at 05:55 PM
"ixnay on the ogicallay ositivismpay, okay? We don’t want to scare people off by making them think the postmodernism chapter is full of such philosophical abstrusities.”

I’m not sure where you’re coming from, since most of the logical positivists, however wrong, were vastly clearer writers than most people who get labeled postmodernists, Rorty being an exception. Compare/contrast Carnap or Ayer with Spivak, Agamben, or Lacan.

Posted by on 09/14 at 06:12 PM
Thanks to Michael for the reply and thanks to jpj for the assist! ‘twas quite helpful, even if I do find Searle rather unsatisfying.

And I will speak of ostivismpay no longer, no worries. From here on out it will be all Jules, Vincent, foot massages, and overcoming incommensurability now and then.

Posted by on 09/14 at 07:36 PM
Thanks, Ben. And Kalkin, it’s not that I think the ogicallay ositivistspay were difficult to read—it’s just that I tried to discuss incommensurability and the Habermas-Lyotard impasse in such a way as to be intelligible to general readers (as well as my students). Not that we have to overcome incommensurability, either—just that it wouldn’t hurt to try to be oriented toward understanding without necessarily being oriented toward consensus.

Posted by Michael on 09/14 at 09:20 PM
That line about Shantytowns is so plain stupid, that I had to report the news (via Billmon ) of Mike Judge’s new film about the future triumph of morons:

The favorite channels of the future being The Masturbation Channel and Fox News. The favorite television show being “Ow! My Balls!” and the favorite film being “Ass” (a single shot of a bare ass, which farts every few seconds). The size of a Costco being bigger than a large city. Starbucks being a place where you can get a lot more than a coffee (if you know what I mean, huh huh)

Posted by on 09/14 at 10:38 PM
Since Sokal came up - recently I stumbled across an ongoing experiment in hoax conference papers. You, too, can be published in the field of computer science!

An Automatic CS Paper Generator

Posted by on 09/14 at 10:57 PM
I thought we had a 50% tax rate. My wife almost does. 28% to federal income tax, 5.3% to Massachusetts, 7.65% to SS, 7.65% more taken from the employer for SS. Plus, her job carries the health insurance and the health care spending account—seems like we should call that “taxes”, too, since most civilized countries fund health care out of taxes. So, one of this married-filing-jointly is paying about 50% taxes on (almost) her entire earnings.

Posted by on 09/14 at 11:30 PM
And the really outrageous item in that list, dr2chase, is the Social Security tax—which is not a flat tax but a capped flat tax, from which all income over $90,000 is exempt. That’s right, the person who makes $4 million in income and the person who makes $90K pay precisely the same amount of annual Social Security tax.

Posted by Michael on 09/15 at 12:08 AM
i’m flabbergasted. critics of liberalism like nietzsche and, in softer tones, tocqueville argued that liberalism’s focus on material well-being and individual safety and comfort would rob the world of “true culture” and other stirring but vague things like “human greatness.” but cowen has apparently figured out the solution: a permanent underclass of shanty-dwelling artists (mostly darkies, as cowen himself says) who will produce “creative” music to be consumed by an over-class of professionals and professors like cowen. is there any other way to read this?

Posted by on 09/15 at 01:09 AM
When I worked on the railroad, I used to make a point of getting the Southern Pacific’s Annual Report each year and calculating the total taxes they paid--corporate income tax, capital gains tax, property tax on tens of millions of acres in eleven Western states, sales taxes on everything they bought from paper clips to locomotives. It always came out to between 12 and 13 percent of their gross income. I and my fellow-workers--skilled, unionized craft members, locomotive engineers and brakemen et al.--typically paid 45-50% of our gross income in taxes of all types, chiefly income tax, SS, and property tax on homes.

When Prop. 13 came along in 1978, California’s Democratic legislators, organized labor, and everybody else even remotely progressive offered an alternative which would have permitted a “split tax roll” (then as now prohibited by the state Constitution) so that income property could be taxed at a higher rate than residences. I fondly imagined that this would appeal to workers more than 13, with its huge giveaways to big landowners, its threat of cuts in services, etc. Silly me! My friends patiently explained to me that taxes--never mind whose--were “too high” because of “politicians” spending “taxpayers’ money"--never mind which taxpayers--on “welfare.” And the service cuts, they added (they thought I was a little slow for not getting this myself) would only affect “the n-----rs.”

I think that may be when I started having serious misgivings about basis and superstructure.

Posted by on 09/15 at 01:30 AM
At the end of Spike Lee’s HBO film on New Orleans, I could not understand why FEMA was providing people with trailers when it was obvious that houseboats might soon prove more practical.

Posted by on 09/15 at 03:50 AM
With this phrase—“might soon prove more practical”—it seems to me your query answers itself. These yahoos are out to demonstrate just how useless and dangerous it is to have a big and intrusive federal government and they’re doing a mighty fine job of it. Just you wait. Next year they’ll introduce a Constitutional ammendment to dissolve the federal government entirely. And we’ll bite.

That’s when the Elders of Finland will come out of the woodwork and take over. It’s there in the Protocols.

captcha: “your” as in “yourup”

Posted by Bill Benzon on 09/15 at 06:31 AM
Here it is: you weren’t referring to yourself in the third person, but in the first person plural. Take that, Mr. Smartypants.

I myself read this “error” as sophisticated meta-commentary on this post. Here, Michael delicately straddles the fault line between serious literacy criticism and the flogging of books - the mind simulataneously occupying Olympian heights and quotidian practicalities of moving the product off the shelves. What is not to admire then in the intimation of this tension by the clever placement of an “error” that such a divided mind might produce - a minor abuse of the language, easily missed on a quick, superficial scan, but clearly evident to the careful reader. It is a device both novel and subtle, yet unlikely to be adopted anytime soon by either literary brahmins or base merchandisers.

D’oh! That was a sorry-ass late-night mistake, and it is right that I be ridiculed and chastised. Now I will go fix it in such a way as to leave a faithful record of my embarrassment.

Well, then again, maybe not.... ah but wait, to then “admit” the mistake and cleverly correct by ... Emergent doesn’t half begin to cover it.

Posted by on 09/15 at 08:00 AM
Ok, what fascinates me here Michael (since you’re using my first name, I feel entitled to use yours, making us on a first name basis), is the weirdness of the left in terms of the discipline and punish model.

You’re against it in some places (being pulled over and forced to put on your seat belt by a superego named “Lutheran” Liberalism), but then at the same time you yourself trumpet a liberalism which is really Marxism (the Raymond Williams variety), and are wanting to pull over entire corporations for breaking the speed limit and not putting a safety belt on the consumer.

So what’s fascinating to me here is the unwilling to put on your own seatbelt (or else why would you have been pulled over?), and yet you want to harness the corporations.

But by not putting on your seatbelt you are jeopardizing your own life which in turn jeopardizes your child, because without a father, and not just the income, but the love and care that a father provides, you are jeopardizing the well-being of the entire community. Exactly like a corporation run amok!

This is what’s weird about the left. They themselves want to recognize no brakes whatsoever. They want to establish the ID as the joy and verve of life against any kind of superego (hence the popularity of Foucault and his mentor Nietzsche). Freud said that he himself got the notion of the ID out of Schopenhauer—as the name for the monstrous will. And the children of 68 said go baby, go, and no seatbelts for us, man, like, like, man.

On the other hand Lutherans believe that personal responsibility begins at home. God the Father would be the translation for the Superego (or the Panopticon as Foucault would again translate it). We believe that it is possible to have a decent superego that is in accord with the dictates given to us by God, and founded in the Ten Commandments.

And one of those dictates is not only to kill others, but to help them save their lives. Which is why a Lutheran Liberal would maybe have pulled you over out of love for the neighbor to ask you to please put on your seat belt.

Please do. Please do.

One more thing—just because your commenter Cowen is brazenly foolish on the question of jazz and shanty towns doesn’t discount his other remarks. His fallacy is post hoc ergo propter hoc. Yours, I think, is a kind of bait and switch. He’s dead wrong on jazz and shanty towns, but he’s absolutely on target in #3 of the above,

At least I see in this a pattern. You try to reject the viewpoints of others because a single failing, and then globalize. This is the straw man fallacy where you attempt to position an individual based on one goof-up, and then body-check them to the stands based on that. It makes me wonder whose blood is on the shirt in the picture above.

Posted by kirby olson on 09/15 at 10:32 AM
Kirby, if Cowen is right on target with #3—dismissing a whole set of ideas because some if its undergraduate proponents are feckless and silly in their misuse of it—then I think that may be what you are doing to “standpoint” liberalism (race/class/gender stuff). It’s not fair to say that universities are overrun by PC nonsense, not only because that’s not true, but also because you are calling it nonsense on the basis of a 20-year-old’s fervent but simplistic version of it.

However, it remains true that the stereotype of the ultra-PC university is false, and I think the existence of that false stereotype forms the occasion for Dr. Berube’s book. And here you are asking if it is true—I’m guessing the responses you want are in the book.

Your own vagueness about the “id” and what “they” on “the left” all want to do with it is an example of what happens when one tries to form big world-explaining patterns out of ideas that one hasn’t mastered in much detail or nuance. It can happen to anybody. It happens a lot, naturally, to undergraduates, so I, for one, tend to be pretty tolerant and understanding of young folks who are getting things a bit wrong. So if I hear some simplistic argument in my classroom, or read it in a paper, I don’t try to condemn the view but teach ways in which the argumentation could be more solid. This doesn’t mean I teach much “rhetorical nomenclature” in the Forest of Rhetoric sense, any more than improving performance in grammar means teaching many grammar rules.

I say all this to suggest that if we stick with topics we know in some detail, and show a healthy humility in topics we don’t know, we can avoid what you are doing: demonstrating bad argument while decrying bad argument.

Posted by on 09/15 at 11:02 AM
The Lutheran home is equipped with God’s own seatbelts! Cool! I’m heading out to Ikea right now.

Posted by on 09/15 at 11:06 AM
Kirby: Corporations are not people. I thought Lutherans shared the “worship no idols” ideology isn’t confusing legal abstractions with human beings a case of the worship of idols ("fetishizing" as our eurocentric little marxist friends call it) ?

Don’t feed the Moloch.

Posted by on 09/15 at 11:16 AM
And where do the Lutherans and Foucault and the Marxists come down on the issues of infant car seats and booster seats? Whose blood is on the onesie now? If the straw man is not properly restrained during automobile industry crash tests, does he not bleed?

Posted by Orange on 09/15 at 11:23 AM
Kirby: Corporations are not people.

I don’t know, but I think the Supreme Court ruled on that in Charlton Heston v. Soylent.

Posted by on 09/15 at 11:34 AM
Michael, I do think Tyler Cowan may have a legitimate beef on point #2. I’m not sure I’ll talk about this in my upcoming contribution to a certain blog symposium about a certain book about the liberal arts, but on point #2, smart or complex libertarians might protest that you’re using a kind of generic “dumb” or crude libertarian as a representative type even in the longer quote that you put up here. This is at least one of the things that many of us find ourselves complaining about when people talk about “liberals” or “the left”: which liberals? which left? And when they attribute a position that says, “Liberals think....” that you and I and others know to be associated with a highly particular subset of liberals, or when they say, “Leftists are all at protests marches carrying ‘Blood for Oil’ signs”, we’re irritated at the gloss.

So first, it does seem to me that sophisticated libertarian thinkers do think about poverty, and address it. It’s wrong, I think, to suggest that to a man (or woman) that they’re empirically uninformed about what poverty entails, as if they would magically change their minds if they hung out in the inner-city a bit more, or if the Ghost of Christmas Present just showed them Tiny Tim some night. The smarter ones just disagree with you about what the answer is to poverty, and in a fairly divergent variety of ways. There would be those who would suggest that relatively unfettered markets will positively ameliorate poverty over time in a way that states cannot by their very nature. There would be those that suggest that some poverty can never be ameliorated, and that it is ethically wrong to try. Both of those would be arguments that I think you would disagree with; I would too, though circumstantially I might acknowledge that the first claim may have a lot going for it in particular contexts.

But I think there’s something that Cowan can squawk at with a bit of cause in the suggestion that libertarian economics is wrong on poverty because it doesn’t really know poverty exists, and in the over-casual conflation of all libertarians with semi-sentient objectivist assholes posting in comments threads at the Volokh Conspiracy.

Posted by Timothy Burke on 09/15 at 12:06 PM
Whoops, sorry, on my way to a meeting and writing that in a rush. It’s CowEn.

Posted by Timothy Burke on 09/15 at 12:08 PM
This is what’s weird about the left. They themselves want to recognize no brakes whatsoever. They want to establish the ID as the joy and verve of life against any kind of superego (hence the popularity of Foucault and his mentor Nietzsche).

Man, things get confusing when people keep tripping over their own talking points. Kirby, you’re supposed to say that the Left is full of humorless moralizers who want to put everyone in PC training camps. Let’s keep the caricatures straight, shall we? Which brings me to Timothy Burke:

Michael, I do think Tyler Cowen may have a legitimate beef on point #2. . . . This is at least one of the things that many of us find ourselves complaining about when people talk about “liberals” or “the left”: which liberals? which left? And when they attribute a position that says, “Liberals think....” that you and I and others know to be associated with a highly particular subset of liberals, or when they say, “Leftists are all at protest marches carrying ‘Blood for Oil’ signs”, we’re irritated at the gloss.

So first, it does seem to me that sophisticated libertarian thinkers do think about poverty, and address it. It’s wrong, I think, to suggest that to a man (or woman) that they’re empirically uninformed about what poverty entails, as if they would magically change their minds if they hung out in the inner-city a bit more, or if the Ghost of Christmas Present just showed them Tiny Tim some night. The smarter ones just disagree with you about what the answer is to poverty, and in a fairly divergent variety of ways. . . .

But I think there’s something that Cowen can squawk at with a bit of cause in the suggestion that libertarian economics is wrong on poverty because it doesn’t really know poverty exists, and in the over-casual conflation of all libertarians with semi-sentient objectivist assholes posting in comments threads at the Volokh Conspiracy.

Fair enough as usual, Tim, and I agree that Cowen may have a legitimate beef in # 2 (I still think # 3 is a misconstrual of chapter 4, because if it isn’t, then I have rejected every political view under the sun). I am intensely curious to find what other libertarian critics make of my book, and I’m perfectly willing to have them correct my impressions of their beliefs. But you know, I really didn’t say that libertarian economists are ignorant or uninformed about poverty. I said that the libertarian undergraduates I’ve met have been pretty damn blithe about the question, but I don’t conclude from this that “sophisticated libertarian thinkers” are the same kind of creature, any more than I conflate the sophisticated progressive left with the late-teens wearing Che T-shirts and “no blood for oil” buttons.

Posted by on 09/15 at 12:38 PM
No, the left is humorless in one way, but humorous as heck in another way. There are odd crosscurrents in it.

Foucault and Deleuze for me, is what they say, but Marx on the corporate ass.

I’m thinking of three people in particular when I say, the left.

How many are you thinking of when you say “libertarians”...?

There IS ANOTHER LEFT that I could think of (one person) who wants to put everyone into a PC training camp. But she’s not my friend. In fact, I feel quite humorless in thinking of her, and think instead of intracontinental missiles and the like.

The first three I was thinking about are my friends. Because I can laugh with them. And when I think of them I think of coffee houses, and late night walks, and chess games, trying to upend their world views, but never very seriously. It would be easier to change someone else’s haircut than to change their politics.

All friendship must begin and end in humor on that topic…

Hee hee.

Posted by Kirby Olson on 09/15 at 03:13 PM
"But you know, I really didn’t say that libertarian economists are ignorant or uninformed about poverty. I said that the libertarian undergraduates I’ve met have been pretty damn blithe about the question”

I was going to say that yesterday but then I read the rest of the post and got to the favela bit and decided to comment on that instead. But when first reading the post I was struck by the obvious discrepancy between # 2’s “Claims that libertarians are simply ignorant of poverty and therefore wrong. At least libertarians are “quite smart now and then” and yes that is a quotation” and what Michael actually said which was entirely about undergraduate libertarians. Come on, Tyler Cowen - that’s a Keith Burgess Jackson-worthy trick. Play fair.

(Playing dirty is effective. He fooled Tim Burke. I hate it that playing dirty is effective.)

Posted by Ophelia Benson on 09/15 at 03:19 PM
The moral falsity of glibertarianism was explained in great detail by Hayek when, as he toasted the Pinochet government, he pointed out that “economic freedom” was surely worth a few mass graves behind the secret police offices. Nothing like breaking a couple of fingers and turning on the electric cables to help an unfree slave of marxism appreciate the power of the market.

Wow, it’s been 30 years, and still I can’t listen to that crap without feeling sick and really angry.

Posted by on 09/15 at 10:47 PM
Darn, those libertarians do play dirty!

But really, I wasn’t so much fooled, Ophelia, as I was trying to see it how the other guy sees it. Meaning, I can see how even a precise reference to a particular subset of a particular ideology’s shortcomings is reasonably understood to have general implications. Partly because we (whomever we might be) often expect our best arguments, made by our smartest people, to be met on the ground that is offered. I grant you that this is an expectation that, should I hold it too seriously, ought to also include not one but two free ponies, but I can see why a smart libertarian might get his back up reading that particular passage.

Posted by Timothy Burke on 09/15 at 11:41 PM
bikeprof, you fell foul of the First Rule of Usenet, which is he who spelling-flames or grammar-flames another poster, will himself commit the same offense in said comment. Hail Tyope, the Muse of the Internet!

Posted by bellatrys on 09/16 at 11:36 AM
Citizen k, wow, Hayek praised Pinochet? Do you have a cite for that that I can read? (And how come the praisers of the Free Market who insist that Communism is responsible for all human rights abuses, never bring this up anymore than the Republicans acknowledge that Rumsfield was shaking hands and selling WMDs to Saddam?)

Posted by bellatrys on 09/16 at 11:39 AM
Michael, this isn’t the place, I suppose for a discourse on Social Security, but I respectfully submit that you’re wrong about it. Social Security is not a welfare program, it’s a social insurance program. FICA is not a tax, it’s a form of forced savings/insurance premium payment. Most people will receive more in benefits after retirement than than they will make in contributions (including a fair rate of return), and everyone benefits from the security created by the social insurance aspects- payments to workers who are disabled, payments to minor children and spouses when workers die. Social Security put an end to poverty among the elderly, which was a reality for most old people prior to the 1940’s.

The employer match aspect of social security also benefits workers - it is in effect a mandated pay increase. If the match weren’t there, do think employers would give their employees raises? No, the money would go straight to the bottom line.

Thinking of it as a tax plays right into the hands of the Bush administration and the privatizers - “it’s your money.”

There’s a lot more to be said about this and I’d be happy to send you an email if you’re interested- but you’re simply incorrect when you call FICA a scandal. It’s the centerpiece of progressive politics in America.

Posted by on 09/16 at 12:50 PM
JR, thanks for the correx, but on one crucial point I think you misunderstand me. Social Security is not a scandal. The way it’s financed is a scandal—by means of a capped flat tax (OK, premium payment—I take the point) on income, one of the most regressive schemes on the books. Freelancers and other self-employed people, of course, know full well that the full freight is a whopping 15.3 percent, but I agree that for everyone else the employer contribution amounts to pay. The thing is that SS is what I call socialism American-style, paid for in such a way as to exempt much of the income (and all of the investment income) of people making over $90K / year.

And don’t even get me started on the shenanigans by which the FICA tax/ premium was raised in the 1980s so as to allow the Reaganauts to do some fancy spreadsheet-shuffling with the federal deficit.

Posted by Michael on 09/16 at 01:43 PM
Ending item 2 with Kieran Healy’s comment about Ayn Rand disciples had me giggling like ... a fourteen-year-old. Thanks for that!

Oh and the rest of the post is pretty good, too.

-

Posted by etbnc on 09/16 at 06:37 PM
Bellatrys: It is now easy to find on the internet.

http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2002/09/12/hayek-and-pinochet/

While Hayek’s lying apologists argue that he never has been proved to have said something explicit like “a needlenose pliers and a lime pit in the back are the bulwarks of liberty”, he did go to Chile during the worst days of the regime, he did make laudatory speeches, he did provide a sickening interview to El Mercurio where he spoke in lightly veiled terms that nobody misunderstood of the advantages of economic liberty over, liberty-liberty, and he never condemned the government that employed so many of his and Friedman’s students. So he can go rot in hell along with all the other shanty-town digging glibertarians. It’s not at all a surprise that they’ve continued to scream about the authoritarian nightmare of public day care while not saying much at all during the Al Gonzales “it’s not torture if major organ damage is not intended to be life threatening” era.

I don’t see any point in continuing to pretend that there is any moral or intellectual respectability to glibertarianism or that it can claim the mantle of J.S. Mill who would have been as sickened as I am by their putrid hypocritical worship of despotism.

Posted by on 09/16 at 09:17 PM
Sorry to be a bore, BUT-

It’s true that the FICA contribution is capped. But the retirement benefits (which are scaled to income) are capped as well. If the contribution weren’t capped, then either you could have uncapped benefits, or you could continue to cap the benefits. There is no reason to have uncapped benefits - people who can afford to can manage their own retirements above SocSec (that’s what 401k’s are for). And, if you had no cap on contributions but you did have a cap on benefits, you would no longer have a social insurance program- you’d have an income redistribution program. You’d have moved from a liberal program to a socialist program. We can talk about whether that would be a good thing, but we can agree, I think, that it would not be a politically possible thing. But there is nothing regressive about the current system, because the contributions are paid back in full and then some.

The 1983 reform was not a Reagan “shenanigan.” It was a completely bi-partisan reform. Among the members of the Commission that recommended it were Lane Kirkland, Rep. Claude Pepper, the champion of the elderly, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. It was passed in the Senate 58-14 and in the House 239-102, with massive majorities in both parties.

The 1983 reform was actuarially driven. Social Security had up until then been pay-as-you-go—one generation of workers paid for the retirement of the prior generation. This worked fine, even with increasing levels of benefits, because wages were increasing. But it was clear by the 1970’s that, when the baby boomers retired, the next generation of workers would be too small to pay for their retirement without reducing benefits. So, after much procrastination, Congress passed an increase in the FICA contribution that was designed to have the baby boomers pay part of their own retirement (over two decades) as well as that of the prior generation. The idea was that the money would be paid in to the Social Security trust fund, which would grow until about 2010, and then the fund would be paid down until about 2040, when it would be empty, all the baby boomers would be dead, and the system would return to pay as you go.

Obviously, you don’t want to leave the money that is being paid in just lying around. It is invested in US treasury bills- the most secure investment in the world- which are backed by the taxing power of the US government. The plan was that, when the baby boomers retired, the T-bills would be redeemed with tax revenues that would be available without requiring tax rate increases, due to the growth of productivity and the size of the economy over two decades.

This would have worked just fine, except that when you get a big pile of money together, you attract burglars and con men. In this case the crook is named George Bush. What he did was fiendishly simple. First, he passed a massive tax cut for the rich. Then, he planned a scheme to fund that tax cut by reneging on the promise to pay back the social security funds that had been invested in US treasuries. He called this scheme “privatization,” and then when that term didn’t focus group well, he changed it to “peronal accounts.” Under either name, the goal was to loot the trust fund in order to pay for the tax cut.

In order to do this, he had to con everyone into believing that Social Security was in such bad shape that no one should care if it were dismantled. So all the issues that had already been dealt with in 1983 - the retirement of the baby boomers, one worker for two retirees - were trotted out as evidence that the system was unworkable. And the very features of the 1983 reform that had been designed to deal with the baby boomer problem- the fact that the trust fund was about to turn from growing in size to shrinking, and would be paid down completely in thirty-jfive years - were invoked as a crisis, as a sign that that Social Security was going to go broke. It was the biggest con in American history. It almost worked. It may work yet if both houses of Congress stay Republican.

I’m sorry to be such a bore, but this really is important. I don’t know about you, but I have been paying FICA contributions for twenty years, and I will be damned and go to hell before I let these thieves and liars steal my retirement. And besides my own personal interest, if these criminals do repeal social security, that will truly be the end of the New Deal. We will be back to the Guilded Age of William McKinley and Marc Hanna with a vengeance.

Posted by on 09/17 at 12:18 AM
Citizen k, thanks - and remember, these are the same folks who said nary a word about the Shah’s SAVAK and finger-nail-pulling machines, back in the day, either.

Posted by bellatrys on 09/17 at 12:53 PM
The underyling message of “libertarianism” is total state power, so Hayek was consistent in that sense. Both the Marxists and “libertarians” commit the error of pretending that state and capital are oppposed, as if property ownership could ever be something separate from the use of organized violence to enforce it. Hayek is a master of deceptive use of language and frames his absolute despotism of state power in the service of the elite as if he were discussing Locke/Jefferson/Mill liberty. But Jefferson and Mill were cognizant of the arbitrary nature of property ownership and advocated it only as a means to the end of maximizing human liberty. Hayek identifies liberty and oligarchy and then waxes eloquent about liberty even though he has no objection to malcontents getting lessons on liberty from the local sadist in the secret police office. In my humble opinion, the Marxists make the same error of identifying some form of economic and political organization as a goal instead of a means to a moral end.

Posted by on 09/17 at 02:34 PM
JR,

Social Security is a tax and insurance program stitched together.

It provides very fast increases of benefits from zero to a certrain very modes level (as a function of contribution), then it has another threshold up to roughly 45k per year in SS taxable income, and then the ratio of extra contributions to extra benefits is roughly halved.

Something has to give: SS provides extra protection for the lowest incomes, and decent disability and survivor benefits. To afford that, SS redistributes from 45k-90k bracket to lower brackets, and to widows and orphans. Because a person in a larger bracket also has contributions make in a lower bracket, my estimate is that starting from 60k bracket most of the extra contributions are for the benefit of others.

Which is perhaps as it should be. But why the richer people should be deprived those joys of seeing your money helping the needy?

Additionally, Bush proposed to reform SS in such a way that benefits would be cut, but not on low income people. This reform would convert the entirety of the contributions from 45-90 bracket into a tax for the benefit of others.

Posted by on 09/18 at 02:17 AM

Next entry: ABF Friday: Mordant Celebration edition!

Previous entry: Theory Tuesday Act V scene iii

<< Back to main

Emergent new feature: Liberal Thursday!

These Comments Are Aware of All Your Sublime and Funky Internet Traditions

Monthly Archives

Most recent entries

Syndicate