Tensions are getting higher with the election's approach, so I want to emphasize that this post is in no way intended to be disrespectful of either side. A liberal friend brought up an interesting point, and I wanted to bring it to your attention here because of Winds' location right at the center of the blogosphere. My only interest is to expose the question to a larger community, to see if the observations hold true in a broader sense than in the smaller community that reads Grim's Hall.
We were recently welcoming a new reader, and asking her to tell us a bit about herself. In return, I thought perhaps we should all tell her a bit about ourselves. (Which is a useful exercise, actually -- it might make a good concept for the Winds community as well.)
At the end of a long string of comments, Jeffrey -- a committed liberal and Obama supporter, whose friendship I greatly value because of his careful thinking and insightful critiques -- noted that, unlike the rest of us, he hadn't mentioned anything about his family history. He wondered why so many people felt that was important.
The question reminded me of Prof. Althouse's post about one of McCain's earliest commercials, the one that started with old footage of Theodore Roosevelt, then FDR, then young McCain, then McCain today. She wrote:
"I thought: This is the feeling of being conservative — it is a deep emotional sense that the past matters and flows into the present and makes sense out of the future."
For many of us, it's a very strong sense: we see our ancestors behind us, past the parents and grandparents we may have known, we can imagine the ones who came before them from their stories, and from histories the ones behind them. It's a sense of belonging to that sweep of things that rose out of the past, of being part of a long current that -- like a river -- imparts force and direction.
It was an insightful comment she made, and something that I think tends to matter deeply to conservatives. Indeed, it may be the very quality that makes you a conservative.
I got the same sense the day after Sen. Clinton's speech, reading liberal blogs who talked about it. What was (without question or near comparison) the strongest part of her speech for me was her mother/daughter/Harriet Tubman metaphor. That's a force of that kind, where she sees herself as a part of a line that is itself part of a movement, imparting force and direction, and she gloried in it.
Yet I didn't see that quoted by anyone on the left. They quote the attacks on McCain, or the stories about the lady with the bald head from her cancer treatments, or the wounded Marine; but the part that really impressed me didn't seem to register at all with them.
Now, I don't read as many left-wing blogs as some of you do, so it's entirely possible that it was a major focus on a large number that I missed. Nevertheless, Jeffrey agreed that it was an interesting question, and so I want to put it to you.
Do you think that the sentiment is something that conservatives feel strongly, but that a mind that tends towards progressive politics doesn't feel as deeply? Or (if you are a progressive who disagrees) are there different forces that you feel a part of -- movements like the one that Sen. Clinton spoke so well about, stretching across generations, movements that swell around you, imparting force and direction to your life?
I can't speak on behalf of liberals, as I am not one, so I can only speculate. I have always had the impression that the left deems the past as something wrong, in need of correction en route to their nonsensical progressive utopia. They don't see past progress, they tend to dwell on past mistakes and project them to todays issues while almost always ignoring the historical context, or the prevailing sensibilities of the times.
I'm not sure that it's necessarily what you suggest, in terms of importance. The liberal friends I have tend to value their families and histories as much as I do mine (of course, they are also in the South for the most part, so YMMV on what "liberal" means). I suspect that the tendency to talk about family or not and the tendency to be conservative or not may spring from similar roots, rather than being in any sense causative.
Let me approach that a slightly different way. Say that you grow up with constant stories of your family and where you came from, frequent family reunions with large extended families, a great emphasis on history and roots of not only yourself but your people and thus (to the extent that we have a nation rather than a country) your nation, with your family providing analysis of current events in terms of history (informally, mind you, kitchen table talk). Now suppose you grew up with an emphasis on self-actualization/self-realization above all else, stories of how your family was involved in or supportive of some cause or another, social connections mainly to transient friends in the places you lived. You can see, I think, how the manner of upbringing would influence what you think of as important, and thus what you emphasize both in talking about your formative events (which is the essence of what happens when people introduce themselves like that), and also what you emphasize when picking among political ideologies.
By the way, you have an extraordinarily interesting set of commenters.
Grim,
I think you have hit upon the emotional heart, i.e., the fundamental difference, between "progressive" and "conservative" thinking.
Conservatives tend to emphasize that part of the past which needs to be held onto and continued.
Progressives tend to emphasize that part of the past which needs to be improved.
It all depends on what you want out of life and this, in turn, get translated into how you think about politics, civics and history.
There are, of course, a lot of contradictions within both wings, just are there are in each individual. To me, as a progressive, the most glaring contradiction in the conservative critique that you offered above is this: The conservative thinker is more apt to praise the American ideal of the self-made man, making use of the opportunities afforded by democracy and capitalism. Why then, should family history and personal connections to the past be of any concern in choosing leaders? Immigrants, from the Pilgrims onward, have generally come to here to escape what they felt were the stultifying constraints of the past, and to create a new life, if not a new self. Pioneers did much the same.
Clinton's mother/daughter metaphor, btw, was used to emphasize the importance of change from the past. Her chief point being that we have improved over time and, by implication, we need to keep improving.
Thoughts from a lefty, liberal, progressive pinko.
I think this is sort of a false issue. I think, for the most part everyone follows the histories and traditions that are handed down to them. What makes the United States different are the competing histories.
My grandparents were born in Ireland my mother was there as a young girl and witnessed the Black and Tans suppressing dissent. I have a very good friend that comes from one of the oldest monied families in the U.S. Needless to say, his history is different than mine. I grew up in NYC and have heard myriad histories. The most compelling of them that of the Jews.
When I went on the subway as a child in the summer time. the train, coming from far Rockaway was filled with strange looking men reading papers with numbers tattooed on their arm that marked a history so horrific that not only could I contemplate it then, I cannot even now nearly 6 decades later.
I don't think history and respect for tradition is the exclusive territory of any part of the political spectrum, it is just that history is different, which it seems to me is the basis of our need as American for free speech which we all cherish. No man has God's perspective. Hence, every man should be heard.
There is also a split personality built into the American character. For all our conservative values, we are of the New World. We believe in re-inventing the world daily and not being shackled by tradition. We are entrepeneurs, taught not to fear the future and nuture a healthy, though not destructive, skepticism for the past.
People are a lot more alike than they are different. This is the core message of the American Experience. The way I see it now, we need more history all over the political spectrum than we have now.
#2:
I thank you on their behalf, as I'm sure they would all appreciate the compliment.
#4:
Well, that's sort of what I'm after, TOC: to what degree does the idea hold up, and to what degree is it false?
For example, on reflection, the factions of the American left-wing that are driven by identity politics clearly are moving out of a similar impulse (or, perhaps, the same impulse? That's a question I'd like to hear thoughts about as well). They are rooted in the sense of being a member of this or that group, and they have a sense of what that means for them today, and what it means in terms of where they should try to direct the nation in the future.
Identity politics tend to be grievance and/or rights oriented, in a way that this impulse isn't. That's not a universal, though. For example, Sen. Clinton said that her mother was born before women could vote, but her daughter got to vote for her mother for president. That's not really the grievance mode of identity politics, and it's not pushing for new rights, though it both recognizes an old grievance and celebrates the attainment of rights. Rather, it's something much more like the conservative sense that Prof. Althouse was describing: a sense of belonging to a particular part of the flow of history, being part of it, being proud of it, carrying it on.
So the Senator's comments were moving, even to me; I assumed they would be even more deeply moving to her strongest supporters. Yet I found no evidence that the comment registered with them in anything like the same way it did with me.
I think the problem is that more and more each side is buying into its victimization narratives, which is certain to make the opposition into the enemy. Its certainly a downward spiral, and i don't see how its going to stop.
I think liberals and leftists certainly have this feeling you are describing Grim, and do talk about it. Whether liberals & leftists have it to the same degree, or in the same way, that conservatives have it is a matter upon which I feel unable to judge, not being a conservative myself.
I remember talking with an older leftist about the antiwar movement and the fractures and controversies therein. He said that it was a reflection of age-old fractures within the left in general. Staring in about the year 1900, he then described all these fractures, how they came about, and how (or whether) they were resolved, and described how all these separate points of view are expressed today. So I think there are liberals & leftists who are pretty cognizant of history and its connection to today.
One possible reason you haven't seen a focus on historical matters on liberal, leftist & even centrist blogs is that many of them are just laser-focussed on aiding the election of Obama. Many of them see this as being a near-existential struggle against a dangerous and entrenched conservative movement, from which they expect no quarter or respite. Therefore, they are not currently looking at history.
Grim, I think it's an interesting idea, and I think Mark adds good sense into it. I think where you come from matters a big deal too... Coming from the West coast to the South people place a far bigger importance on there forefathers and heritage than I did. (I was always curious, but not devoted to it).
I have also adored history. I see science fiction (the study of tomorrow) as recasting of history to look at the challenges we are likely to face. And like history, it tends to show those things we believe so certainly in one instance can be flipped on their head dramatically. (For example: the platforms of political parties over American history).
In this way I see heritage (personal & familial) as informing my beliefs without declaring them. My parents are much more party-line democrats than I am. My undergrad experience (very liberal) actually leaned me closer to the center. Many people I met in this time (and in highschool) were "radicals" with no political agenda: militant atheists and anarchists, dropouts and drug addicts, college politicians and some over the top fight-the-system fundamentalists.
Although I didn't share most of their beliefs, I listened intently, challenged them on their thoughts, and asked them to leave their radical safety net in privacy. I found the whole thing fascinating, and shaped my beliefs in ways that were unpredictable (ie in no relation to their dogmas). In general, (but certainly not in totality) most conservatives I know are not interested in this sort of character study with individuals who don't share some value set.
I think that this too affects how politics is viewed on the public stage, and how liberals can be horrified by someone like Ayers(or Hitler, or Stalin) and curious simultaneously.
A few points :
1) I don't think 'conservative' and 'liberal' are accurate terms for 'right' and 'left', as per their dictionary definition. Many pro-business capitalists are on the 'right', but are not conservative. Many intolerant, militant fascists exist on the 'left', and are certainly not 'liberal'. 'Liberals' are the most intolerant people in this day and age, so we should not call them that. It would be an injustice to classical liberals who are, in fact, liberal.
About myself, I only care about three things :
1) A strong foreign policy that defends freedom, democracy, and is not hesitant in saying that the worst regimes are, in fact, bad.
2) Low taxes and a committment to free-market principles. This does more to reduce poverty than any 'aid' programs.
3) Judges that actually punish crime, rather than seek some way to justify crimes like child molestation as acceptable.
I only care about these three things. I just don't care about abortion, gay marriage, prayer in schools, etc. to support either side. I just can't bring myself to be interested enough in these issues to care.
I am a registed Independent, who has voted only for Republicans over the past 7 years.
Does all of this make me a 'conservative'? I run a blog devoted to the future of technological change. How is that 'conservative'?
Here are two false and very bad ideas:
1. The right political movement can (somehow) impart a near-ideal existence to a nation, or to the world.
2. A near-ideal existence is being prevented by bad political movements or institutions, which must be removed (somehow).
I submit that these closely-related ideas are standard among "progressives", and that furthermore these ideas demand that historical experience and tradition be radically devalued. And this can extend to personal life experience as well.
I won't say that conservatives or libertarians are immune to either error.
I think mark is absolutely right about the contradictions in American conservatism, and I say that as a conservative. There has always been a tendency in America to want to "wake up from history" and start anew (from Puritans to entrepreneurs to postmodern radicals). But there have also been countervailing tendencies. Hawthorne's "The Birthmark," and the character of Ab Snopes in Faulkner's "Barn Burning" illustrate the dangers of attempting to escape history. Much of Melville's, TS Eliot's, Allen Tate's, and Robert Penn Warren's work explores the same theme.
I also agree to an extent with mark's distinction between the progressive and conservative attitude toward the past. But I'm sure there are progressives who want to hang on to aspects of the radical tradition going back at least to Voltaire and Rousseau.
As a Southerner (born and raised in Louisiana and living in the Florida Panhandle) and a Catholic, I have an ineradicable sense of tradition. And I am proud to be a part of both those traditions. Not that there aren't profound flaws in both, but show me one that has no flaws (the "Progressive" tradition has as much to answer for--The Reign of Terror, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot--as either the Southern or Catholic tradition). I guess the upshot is that Grim is broadly correct, but there are nuances.
I think getting back to the original thrust, for me at least, it breaks down like this.
Conservatives in general do feel that scope. They feel that they are a product of their history and that their movement goes quite linearly from Washington to Lincoln (and if you're like McCain TR) to Reagan to now. And they see the future as an extension of the past that they use the lessons learned in the past to navigate the future.
It seems that the liberals that I know feel differently about this. As I've found it there is a very strong feeling that while they are a product of the past the present is how it is and not how it should be so there is a great temptation to 'break' with the past to create a kind of glorious future.
I think this tendancy emphasizing the break is odd personally because it seems that it's part of human nature to revel or recognize where we've come from. In some ways this is emphasized in liberals, or maybe progressives is a better word, in the form of identity politics over personal identity and is used as a justification for the 'break' I mentioned earlier.
I also thought that was one of her more effective moments, it was clearly one of the things that meant the most to her. Cheers on the good post.
I do think there is a difference in how Progressives(Liberals) and Conservatives look at history. Progressives look forward to the perfectibility of humans and believe that we should throw out the past and start anew. Conservatives look at the 5000 plus years of civilization and want to retain the hard earned gains that humans have made and to build on those gains without repeating the many sins of the past but fully aware of the imperfectability of humankind.
I would like to go a little further. There is a lot of evil in the world, though I think there are relatively few evil people. It is only when those evil people gain power that evil spreads. They gain power when the people are afraid.
I think it was Winston Churchill who said something like, "The dark night of fascism is always impending in America but only falls in Europe."
I mention this not so as mark my agreement with the statement but to point out a kernel of truth contained therein. I think the cacophony of our political debate is our greatest shield against losing our freedoms. It might be because I am a New Yorker, but I like that Americans can't keep their mouths shut, don't take guff from anyone and never let facts get in the way of their beliefs.
Thank God that most of us are only politically involved come election time, we vote and the Republic continues to amble along without us until the next election.
I have been through a lot of Presidential elections that were the most important in my lifetime, many with nuclear annihilation hanging over our heads. One could be uncharitable and say they have produced the following:
A failed Haberdasher, a General, a Philanderer, a Crook, the Anti-Christ, a Non-Entity, a Peanut Farmer, an Actor, A Spook, a Second Philanderer. (I will, out of respect for the office, not characterize the sitting President). Considering this cast of characters, I find it completely amazing that we are still here. When I look it over, Eisenhower seems to be the only guy that had a real job.
Once we start getting too conspiratorial on either the right or the left and try to make our points by painting political opponents as the other, the system suffers and evil begins to flourish. Father Coughlin and Joe McCarthy and George Wallace come to mind.
We are going to have a new President in less than 5 months. He will be flawed, no matter who wins the election. He will also not be evil. More importantly, we the people are going to have to make the best of it, no matter who wins.
This is what I like best about the country and what I think is the central tenet in our history that all of carry in our pocket everywhere we go. E Pluribus Unum
God, it's fun to get on a soapbox.
"(I will, out of respect for the office, not characterize the sitting President). "
But don't you know that it is fashionable to condemn Chimpy Hitlerburton, and that, since World History began in March of 2003*, that he is responsible for all evil and suffering that has ever happened in human history?
*The stealing of the Florida 2000 election is considered to be a pre-historical event, much like the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Anyway, I don't want to degrade this thread with off-topic responses, so I will cut it off here.
Mark B specifically #6
Isn't this is what is going on w/ the WGN on the Air post after this one?
Admittedly I do not run in intellectual circles, but my experience has been the Left is woefully ignorant of history. Everything seems to be about feelings. The solution to anything is either to ban it or throw more money at it. The idea that maybe there are some things the Government has no business involving themselves in is absent. All the evils of capitalism and corporate dominance of America could be solved if only we had the Government of the People regulating it enough.-
Noteworthy is the refusal to admit the Government is the largest corporation of all.
I have never felt "poor", even as a young street kid- I could work, and improve myself. This I have done for all my life,getting my GED, learning a trade, working in logging, fishing, carpentry, etc, with no health care or retirement. My wife and I scrimped and saved and nailed our own house together (literally) and have a small but successful home business. The few times the Government has "helped" me, through "improving" the quality of my life through down-zoning for example, they have cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars in unrealizable property value. Does not matter too much I guess if a person has a nice Government pension ,but for a high school dropout who has worked blue collar jobs and busted his ass, it took away a very significant piece of my financial future. Lots of "compassion" there from the leftist county commissioners. The Left is about controlling people, pure and simple. I would much rather the Government neglect me than "take care" of me. One leaves me with initiative and self reliance, the other burdens me with countless regulations and strictures.
Sorry this got way off topic but maybe someone will find it of use.
The most important thing I have to say is that I owe everything to my Mom, who taught me to read well very early, and my Dad, who taught me to work hard and not complain.
Paul,
Progressives look forward to the perfectibility of humans and believe that we should throw out the past and start anew.
I think that is a mischaracterization. Speaking as a progressive, I most emphatically do not look forward to the perfectibility of humans (surely a chimera, if ever there was one), nor do I think we should throw out the past and start anew. Rather, I think we should continue the step-by-step improvement that is the hallmark of the history of civilization. Women's rights, civil rights, gay rights, etc, which were all progressive movements, were merely the extension of rights already assumed by others. Almost all political progress has been built on the successes of the past--which is not to say there has been a shortage of setbacks.
I would add that the progressive mind-set differs somewhat from the conservative inasmuch as it elevates the concept of fairness to a higher level and, in so doing, minimizes the concept of individual freedom. The balance between those two competing interests is calibrated differently by progressives and conservatives. There are huge (& hilarious) contradictions within both sensibilities in this regard.
Mark: I don't think the accusation against progressivism is really about perfecting humans, so much as the attempt to perfect human society. It's the old problem of reformers trying to immanentize the eschaton and of political movements which try to force governments to move along their perceived path to perfection. (You'll notice a lot of Christianity references on that page, and it's not an accident when laying the charge against a liberal movement with strong roots in the Social Gospel movement of the late 19th century.)
Presumably, conservatives are too smart/grumpy/cynical/unchanging/whatever to buy into the idea of an ideal human society, and prefer societal constructs set up to restrain mankind's inherent tendencies. The justification for such recalcitrant policies are often founded in historical examples and case studies, hence the conservative emphasis on history noted above. Broad generalizations, yes; but I've found the framework seems to fit most consistently instead of the usual flurry of labels and questioning of motives.
Unbeliever,
The desire to make things better than they are should not be mistaken for a belief that society is perfectible. I don't think progressivism implies utopianism, nor do I think most individuals who consider themselves progressive (such as me) believe that perfection is obtainable or that an ideal is obtainable. I don't believe an ideal exists--even in theory--but I do believe that things can get better. (I'm talking here, of course, about things in the political/social sphere. Perfection may exist elsewhere. One cannot, e.g., get any better looking than me. )
The accusations against progressivism as yearning for a perfect society require a fundamental misreading of aims and beliefs.
I can only say how i felt when I was a liberal. I learned of the bad things that happened as the Founders were "getting" the land for our country. In addition, I always knew I came from a Cherokee Indian background and really resented Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act, especially after my ancestors had adopted so many ways of the white-man. Essentially, all of the resentment festered and was compounded by the negative views of my peers at the time. So, my liberalism was based on resentment of the wrongs of America's past and I wanted to right those wrongs. However, I finally realized nothing is perfect in the human experiment, nor will it ever be. But those liberal ideas of societal perfection certainly sounded like what would right all the wrongs of the world. Finally I realized since 6 billion humans can never, never get along, so the best thing to do is exactly what the founders did, preserve individual freedom and liberty, so long as you don't cause harm to another. As I was realizing this I began to see the liberals were leading me to a government controlled illusion.
#5 from Grim at 6:04 pm on Aug 28, 2008
#4:
Well, that's sort of what I'm after, TOC: to what degree does the idea hold up, and to what degree is it false?
I think I am going to recuse myself here on the grounds that fundamentally, I am an optimist. I tend to like people. They really amuse me. For the most part they are pretty confused but they seem to muddle through life fairly well if they are not bullied and are left to their own devices. I include myself in this characterization.
I think that both the left and right had a better idea of history 30 or 40 years ago. History is now hardly taught in our universities. About 6 years ago, Time magazine had an article lamenting the loss of historical perspective, generally, mentioning that only 28 percent of the college degrees required any history courses and even less demanded any knowledge of the Humanities. And, I believe that it is an appreciation for the Humanities that makes us human.
I don't think we are particularly well rounded educationally anywhere on the spectrum. I wonder how many people voting in this election have looked at the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence in the last ten years. How many look to first hand sources for making judgments or do they rely on the puerile crap we see in political commercials. I think neither the left and right have cornered the mark on ignorance.
I am a Republican and a Met fan. Therefore I don't really pay much attention to the American League or the Democrats. Pretty much for the same reason, as far as I can see, neither play baseball.
I will say this, though. For whatever reason, I have yet to see John McCain make any connection to history. As I have ranted on about in a lot of posts, the anti-intellectual, ahistorical Rovian gotcha politics that he has embraced really appall me.
But I guess I am just a PaleoCon. Nevertheless, I tend to look for the best in people.
I commend Roger Scruton's excellent The Meaning of Conservatism . In fact, I'd recommend every book Scruton has written. I think he's the only author of whom I could write that. Here is an excerpt from a series of essays he wrote in the Wall Street journal.
I have nothing to add.
Well, I have something to add, a couple of things.
First: I want to thank all of you for your insight and remarks.
Second: You have, and GK, both brought up the concept that conservativism isn't innovative. I don't think that's right.
Conservativism also offers something critical to the process of innovation, which is to acid test it against the received wisdom of the generations. They are the ones who not only trust, but often do know: we discuss Aristotle with tremendous frequency at the Hall, as applied to current events.
An idea isn't good simply because it is new: but without new ideas, there is no progress. So, for society to innovate in a way that actually benefits mankind, you need both the new idea and the testing process.
Otherwise, you get the Great Leap Forward. But if it does work, you get -- well, America.
The other things conservatives add to innovation is that they bring forward ideas that are forgotten -- and, therefore, effectively new. This has the same effect on innovation as brand new ideas that no one has had before: it puts an idea into the current mind of living men that was otherwise absent.
As we know from the recent post on the Antikythera mechanism, old ideas can often be rich in power and meaning. These older ideas also bring with them a train of associations and intellectual value that doesn't have to be invented out of whole cloth -- but is still new to the discussion, because it has lain forgotten.
In literature, an easy example of this is J.R.R. Tolkien. He returned words to the language long lost -- warg, for example -- but also reinvigorated the old northern European heroic model, and the Beowulf. There is much that is rich in what he returned to us, that would have been lost without him.
That is innovation too, in its fashion.
This definition seems to apply particularly when the "us" are the "haves", while the "them" are the "have nots". The "us" are pretty pleased with the allocation of resources, and consider any alternate opinion to be destructive of the natural fabric of society.
The Founding Fathers of this country were enthusiastic about dynamic systems governed by negative feedback, as embodied in idealized capitalism and in the system of checks and balances in our Constitution. They opposed static class structures, and favored opportunity for all. They recognized that political and economic power has lots of tools to perpetuate itself, so they mandated mechanisms, like multiple branches of government, and freedom of speech and press, that are deliberately designed to make the exercise of power more difficult. And to make it easier for the People to take power away from those who currently hold it.
There are a lot of people who like to wave the "conservative" banner, but for the "us" vs "them" crowd, this really amounts to saying, "I've got mine; You can't have any."
A liberal like me (which presumably is not all liberals) wants to bring more people into the tent, who have access to the opportunities to succeed. Whether they actually succeed will depend on their abilities, their grit, their willingness to work, and on luck.
The conservatives I oppose (which is certainly not all conservatives) are the ones who want to eliminate checks and balances on government power (because they currently hold that power). And want to restrict access to opportunities of various kinds (education, health care, etc.), so that only people who are already above a threshold of wealth have access.
A particularly clear-cut case of this is the conservative opposition to inheritance taxes. I have no problem with Conrad Hilton becoming enormously wealthy by creating a very successful chain of hotels. I even have no problem with him being able to make his grand-daughter Paris Hilton a very wealthy, lovely, but useless young lady. But I don't see why our society should provide a tax exemption so Conrad's fortune can become a self-sustaining entity passed down the generations, without further serious productivity by the heirs themselves.
Summing up: I prefer progress over preservation of privilege. I believe this country has a wonderful historical heritage in the Constitution and the system of checks and balances, which is currently under serious attack by people who call themselves "conservatives". I care about that heritage, and want to defend it. I would hope that true conservatives would be on my side in this.
Read Obama's acceptance speech.
Was there some part of it you felt was particularly relevant to the topic?
The overall theme of the speech mixes the two ideas you brought up, and says that the American ideal, our tradition and heritage, is opportunity for change and improvement. It pervades the speech, but here's a quote toward the end.
Personally, I also think the ideas I put forth in #26 are important, but that is too geeky for a speech like this.
Beard,
What "tax exemption" are you talking about? Unless, that is, you hold to the idea that all wealth is inherently the government's...
Beard, I think Obama's speech is a perfectly awful example of what we're talking about here.
Obama didn't talk about himself, he talked about Barack Obama the way an actor talks about his "character", in his usual third person.
This character lives in "America", which is a vaguely imagined place. America is great - well, it used to be great. It could or should be great. I, or we, or you will make it great.
The only history in this speech is the history of Democratic campaign rhetoric, which is historic in the sense of being pre-Clinton: if expanding the public sector ad infinitum is anything less than glorious, you wouldn't know it from listening to Obama.
Obama is an impersonal and unoriginal speaker - I would even call him cold - yet he aspires to comparison with MLK. He's black, he's got a Lincoln Memorial knock-up, and it's the same day. I'll leave it to you to decide whether that's commitment to tradition, or a simulation of it.
The biggest problem I have with Liberals is that they seem to have forgotten history that is only about 30 years old. The "Great Society" liberalism introduced by Johnson and continued by Nixon (his social conservatism and the hatred he engendered on the left often obscure the fact that in policy matters, he was one of our most liberal presidents) finally collapsed under Carter. Except for Soviet communism, I can't think of a single political program that failed more spectacularly than American liberalism by 1979. You guys think things are bad now? By 1980, Carter's final year in office, inflation was running at nearly 14%; the prime interest rate was 21%; unemployment was about 8%; the rates of crime and drug abuse peaked; the country was suffering an epidemic of teenage pregnancy and venereal disease, including two that were uncurable, one of which was fatal; America was being humiliated by a troop of savages in Iran; and the Soviet Union, seeing Carter's weakness on Iran, invaded Afghanistan. All of that was the direct result of Liberal policy, court decisions, and/or attitudes. But I have yet to talk or listen to a single Liberal who can plausibly explain how either a) the situation in the country has changed such that the policies that failed so miserably in the 1970s will work now or b) liberal policies have changed such that we (Liberals) now have policies that will work (and how they will work). That failure seems to me to illustrate the point that Liberals ("the left," "progressives," whatever they call themselves) have a tendency to feel (even if they know better) that history begins today.
Kirk,
In the early 20th century, we the People decided to put in place certain regulations and taxes to make it more difficult for monopolistic corporations and very large, self-perpetuating family fortunes to dominate the political and economic life of the country.
There are no limits to the wealth a good entrepreneur can accumulate --- look at Bill Gates. But the limits prevent a large fortune from becoming a self-preserving corporate entity. This encourages competition and innovation. It's good public policy. It's within the rights of We The People to enact policies like that. And certain "conservatives" are trying to roll it all back.
How careful of a thinker can Jeffrey be if he is an Obama supporter?
Beard (#26),
There are a couple of points I would like to make in response.
First, we homeschool our children. A big part of their education is teaching them self-reliance and how to get ahead by working. We are reading the Little House books to our children; we tell them stories of our ancestors (particularly the pioneers and crooks, because they are the most interesting) who were dirt poor and how their efforts led to where we are; we have long discussions about what "value" is, and the meaning of human labor, and the way that people behave that causes some things to work and others to fail. This is, I would argue, a very conservative education (really conservative, when you consider that we're also teaching them Latin and Greek). The point is, none of this is about wealth or privilege; it is about self-reliance and work and improving yourself instead of waiting for another to come along and solve your problems. I understand very well that the progressive view of the world centers around envy of the "haves", and creating "fairness" by taking from them the rewards of their labors, but frankly, the vast majority of conservatives, and even of Republicans, are just not wealthy plutocrats out to screw the little guy. Mostly, they are the little guys.
Second, it seems that you would agree with me that limitations on government power are vital to any free society, because the alternative is that government power will eventually be used against the citizens and will deprive them of their freedom of action. I wonder, though, if you will feel the same if Obama is elected. For all the wailing about President Bush's exercise of power (much of which I would actually agree with), most of the expansions of government power, and most of the current attempts to expand it further, come from the progressives rather than the conservatives. I have tried to tell my friends on all sides that the wise thing to do before giving the government any authority is to imagine if your worst enemy had that power, would you be OK with it. If, for a progressive, George Bush wielding a certain power (say, the power to watch over citizens with no court oversight) is bad, then surely the same power granted to Bill Clinton (remember Carnivore?) is also bad. And if a putative President Obama with the power to take money from whomever he wants and give it to whomever he wants is bad, then certainly granting the same power to Denny Hastert is equally bad. Somehow, though, I don't think that the messaging of reducing government power will be granted much credence once the Republicans are out of power.
Third, I think that the inheritance tax issue is a particularly noxious red herring. The number of ultra-rich who leave vast fortunes such that their great-grandchildren never have to work is remarkably small. And while their noxious spoiled brat offspring (hello, Paris) are very annoying, they aren't actually dangerous to society, so much as non-contributory. They aren't even parasites, because they are so annoying precisely because of their unearned wealth. They are not powerful, except in the sense that they can throw money around, but generally its the first-generation wealthy that exercise that power, rather than their descendants. Moreover, the experience of Britain, and its many centuries of inherited wealth coupled with inherited title is that over time, the wealth, title and power all dissipate. This happens even faster in the US, because of the lack of titles (hence, entitlement in the literal sense) to pass. The people who are really hit hard by inheritance taxes are not the ultra-rich, but the moderately wealthy who have managed to grow a successful business or farm, but not one so successful or so profitable as to make wealth a given. Those people have their children's inheritance largely destroyed, because the money to pay the inheritance taxes comes generally from disbanding the business or selling the farm. This is dangerous, because it materially retards the development of the nation and the economy by preventing the creation and preservation of wealth. I know the rhetoric is that it soaks the rich, but in reality the rich put their money in trusts and get by just fine, not losing either money or power because of this disastrous idea, while the ranks of those who could become wealthy are thinned and the national economy overall is damaged. Frankly, I see the inheritance tax as a very elitist and snobbish idea, rather than as populism. The fact that it's been sold as populist, and bought as such by so many people, is a triumph of rhetoric over reality that is clear evidence of genius on the part of whoever came up with the idea.
Oh, and small followup to #33: if it's within the rights of the people to enact a certain policy, it must also be within the rights of the people to rescind it.
really conservative, when you consider that we're also teaching them Latin and Greek
That makes sense conservative standpoint. As a liberal, I would find a way to expose my kids the languages that will be in demand in 10-20 years: Chinese, Hindi and the US government will probably always need Arabic speakers (the government paid a friend of mine to go to school to learn Arabic... unfortunately she can no longer talk about her position...)
Pacific_waters: Care to post more than a drive-by? Try it, you might like it.
.bq Conservativism also offers something critical to the process of innovation, which is to acid test it against the received wisdom of the generations. They are the ones who not only trust, but often do know: we discuss Aristotle with tremendous frequency at the Hall, as applied to current events (Grim).
Indeed. This part of the discussion recalls Eliot's Tradition and the Individual Talent.
The Progressive, the neo-liberal, the leftist, they seem to lack this "historical sense." Now, I would characterize it as a false originality for the reasons Grim has written.
The attempt to use government to "bring more people into the tent" is itself the elimination of the checks and balances that you say you oppose, Beard.
It wasn't conservatives who erected the clearly unconstitutional administrative state that is modern day America. Progressives created the IRS, which combines Judicial, Executive, and Legislative authority in one body. Progressives created the Dept. of Education, which combines Judicial, Executive, and Legislative authority in one body. Likewise with all the other administrative agencies that regulate almost every aspect of our lives, in clear violation of the separation of powers principle. Indeed, it was Progressives who intentionally, and explicitly violated this principle --- with FDR threatening to pack the Supreme Court to get his way --- to allow "experts" to administer society and bring more people into the tent.
To say you reject the break-down of checks and balances in government is to say you reject the entire Progressive project. So, I find your views utterly incoherent, as incoherent as neo-conservatism that wants to embrace the Progessive's administrative state even while embracing individual liberty.
According to Wikipedia (link) it was President Lincoln who created the income tax and the first Commissioner of Internal Revenue in 1862. The current Internal Revenue Service was created in July 1953, when President Eisenhower was in charge.
If you look at the size and budget of the modern US Government, it grew substantially under Presidents Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II, and shrank under President Clinton.
This suggests to me that President Clinton comes closer to being the best conservative in recent history, while those Republican presidents (especially Bush II) were using the "conservative" label to hoodwink voters and impose a particular set of social values on the people.
I'm afraid I don't understand this point at all. Do you mean that the Voting Rights Act, for example, violates the principle of checks and balances? How can that possibly be?
If we have a government of the People, by the People, and for the People, then presumably the People should participate, including by voting. Restricting the vote to property-owning white males might have a certain conservative appeal, but in modern times, we need more people in the tent.
Jeff Medcalf [#35],
I'm glad to hear that you are teaching your children self-reliance and hard work. Those are conservative values I share and am happy to endorse.
I certainly do feel that limits on governmental power would apply to a President Obama just as much as to a President Bush (or McCain). I felt exactly that way about Clinton when he was in office, though I believe he had far more respect for the checks and balances than GWB has.
I think in many ways you have bought into this stereotype about conservatives and progressives that simply doesn't correspond with the facts. See my [#40] above.
The opponents of inheritance taxes have been searching in vain for quite a few years for an actual example of a family farm lost because of inheritance taxes. It appears to be an urban (rural?) legend. In fact, most family farms are lost because the next generation doesn't want to be farmers. Or one of them wants to be a farmer, but the non-farmer siblings want their share of the inheritance, and the only way to split the pie is to sell the farm. (I'm guessing that the same applies to medium-sized family businesses.)
I really don't understand this point at all, unless you are implying that the vastly rich created the inheritance tax to discourage their fairly-rich competitors, which, frankly, seems bizarre.
The point of this tax is not to "soak the rich". I have no problem with people getting rich from productive enterprise. The point is to discourage (not prohibit) the creation of non-productive large fortunes that maintain themselves simply through the magic of compound interest. Far better to encourage more enterprise and wealth creation.
Jeff Medcalf (#35) is spot on regarding the way the inheritance tax works in practice. As Marxists would say, the death tax as an effectively pro-aristocracy program. Old money gets to preserve itself in family trusts and foundations, essentially free of all accountability or risk of dissipation, while preventing the accumulation of lasting wealth by competing classes, breaking up family-owned farms and businesses as soon as the founder's widow dies and the tax bill comes due. Yes, family dynamics come into play, but 45% of all assets is a hefty chunk for any ongoing enterprise to survive. Preserve the aristocracy at the expense of the bourgeoisie – and defend it as basically populist. Brilliant.
And yes, it is bizarre to think that the aristocrats came up with this plan on their own, but that's why they employ tax attorneys and legislators.
How does the Voting Rights Act provide "access to the opportunities to succeed"? And how is the Act anti-conservative? You can't claim all rights ever enumerated are a part of this lofty liberalism you seem to be expousing, which seems to generally consist of "always extend personal rights whenever the question comes up".
And to be very technical, increasing the number of people who can vote is not a "check and balance" on government; it expands political participation, which is a Good Thing and completely separate from any question of political spectrum.
I wonder, does this liberal love of inclusion and expanding rights and opportunities cover a 2nd Amendment right to bear arms? (I already know AL's answer...) How about a 10th Amendment right to keep the government from interfering with my right to freely enter into contracts and conduct business?
Oh please. If opposing nationalized health care/insurance is "restrict[ing] access to opportunities of various kinds", then your defintion of "opportunity" is meaningless.
Wealth lets you do more things; the role of government has never been to eliminate this dynamic, and it certainly isn't designed to provide its constituents with whatever products they can't afford at the time. It may make sense to say the role of government is to ensure its constituents have access to opportunities to become wealthy; it's better to say the point of checks and balances is to prevent a government from actively interfering with persons seeking access to opportunities.
No it wasn't. According to the IRS, it was renamed and restructured, not created under Eisenhower. (link )
You conflate laws and agencies.
Lincoln's IRS did not have the power to pass regulations with the power of law (Legislative authority), combined with the power to enforce those regulations (Executive authority), and the power to deny citizens trial by jury in favor of administrative courts (Judicial authority). That had to wait until 1924 (link ) and the Progressive institution of the modern administrative state.
I have no problem with Executive branch departments, even a department of internal revenue. I'm not even opposed to the income tax. I have a problem with the Progressive agency structure that deprives citizens of jury trials and allows bureaucrats to enact regulations with the power of prison and fines when Congress hasn't passed a bill.
The IRS for example should be limited to enforcement only. No special tax courts where a judge paid by the IRS rules over people accused by the IRS under regulations enacted by the IRS. That's a clear breach of separation of powers, and it was created by Progressives.
All of the agencies have this unconstitutional structure. One of my former professors has written a lot about this. (link link link )
The Progressives radically altered the form of government in the US. That is the problem.
Huh? Demonstrate this.
Again, you are conflating laws and agencies.
'm opposed to the agency structure, not particular laws. By all means pass good laws, but don't deny people jury trials and don't let bureaucrats imprison people without a congressional vote on the laws.
Heh. This is a typical liberal sophistry. The method is to posit an example, then pretend it holds, then impute some terrible belief to the conservative in order to impute some moral turpitude to the conservative.
I can actually play that rhetorical game very well, but I don't need to here.
This is an educated audience. I doubt anyone will fall for it. I suspect you've poisoned your own well, Beard.
Jeff,
I actually agree with you on the substance of the above quote. Note that I have removed the word "Progressive" in the attribution. Regardless of the name used by the people who originally created these Kafka-esque structures, or their motivations (some of which I might agree with), the result is a mechanism that does much damage to our country and its ideals.
You might notice that whoever is in power, Democrat or Republican, seems to preserve and expand these bureaucratic structures, because they are such convenient ways to exert power over the people, with little recourse. How do you like the "security theater" operation run by the TSA?
However, the "starve the beast" radicals get zero sympathy from me, regardless of the presence of bureaucratic abuses. We live in a complicated world, and we need certain complicated structures to handle our responsibilities and our investments as a society. The problem is to design a way to get that job done, without opening the door to too much abuse.
All rights have limits, and trade-offs against other rights. Even my beloved first amendment, and shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater. In the second amendment, I think the term "well-regulated" is significant.
Do I have the right to sell my daughter into slavery to a willing buyer? No. Do I have the right to conduct business by dumping my sewage into the creek for my neighbors to cope with? No. And very reasonably so, in both cases.
Therefore, I think we would both agree that the government has the right and the responsibility to interfere in some cases. But now we are haggling about the details of exactly which cases are reasonable or not. And that's what the legislative process is all about.
Sure is. In the language of the day it meant "well-behaved" or "able to be counted on" -- like a well-regulated clock.
I would disagree that government has rights or responsibility.
Governments have powers. Rights and responsibilities are both possessed by people, some of whom are in place as part of the government.
This is not a technicality; it's crucial to understanding the actual system of US government as framed. A lot of people don't get it, including a lot of people in government, it seems.
Your last line is like something from a Capra film, or perhaps a song from Schoolhouse Rock. I wish it were true. Recent (last 100+ years or so) behavior of all three branches has me doubting it.
That's fine. But doesn't that imply that the right to bear arms by people who are "well-behaved" or "able to be counted on" should not be restricted?
I completely agree that this is not a technicality. The question is actually a deep one, I believe, and one that has implications even beyond the current discussion.
Governments are a particular species of corporation. Corporations have been defined in our legal system as a "legal person". That is, it can own property, enter into contracts, and the like. A corporation is not identical to the set of people who own shares or have jobs within it.
Given those points, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that corporations have rights (such as to buy and sell property) and responsibilities (such as to file their tax returns). They certainly have powers, too, which necessarily include the power to engage in criminal behavior.
According to this view, our society includes two kinds of participants: humans (like you and me), and corporations (profit-making, non-profit, governments, churches, etc.). In many ways, the non-human participants in society dominate the human ones. Nonetheless, the non-human participants are still governed by our laws, which regulate their powers by specifying rights and responsibilities.
We might wish it were not so, but I believe it is.
Nortius [#49],
Re my last line. Yes, well, that is pretty idealized.
There's always a balance between seeing what is, so as to be able to respond to the world in a meaningful way, and seeing what should be, so as to be able to push the world in the right direction.
That comment falls more on the latter side, whereas [#51] falls more on the former.
Interesting claim. I can follow the reasoning, but I am not sure the path is linear. Got an actual cite for that theory? Translation: "Sez who?" :)
The notion that corporations are persons was established in US law by a couple or three Supreme Court decision around the late 1890s, and is one of the reasons I picked the figure of 100+ years in my complaint about all three branches of US government.
The Supreme Court, AFAIK, has never identified any government, duly constituted, as any species of corporation. Smaller governments (state and local) notwithstanding, I am unable to find the expression or clear indication of "a corporation" in any of the US's founding documents.
I agree that human elements of governments are frequently able to slip personal liability. So there's an aura of plausibility about your claim. But a lot of that immunity is claimed to be due to "sovereignty" issues. So I don't think any parallels between limited-liability corporations and governments are much more than coincidental (or obfuscatory).
Nonetheless: got a source, outside your own digestive tract? :) Especially, any dispositive determination by a competent USan expert -- in particular, a court decision -- that governments -- especially the US Federal -- have "rights"?
No fair counting the Hague, France, or any other government.
[Edited]
Afterthought: Even if, e.g., city governments are said to be "incorporated", I question if the US government constitutes such.
No. It means that the right to bears arms is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for a militia to be "well-behaved" and "able to be counted on." This is an obvious grammatical point, since 'well-regulated' modifies 'milita.'
The means to prevent abuse is the separation of powers concept. So, the structure we need is the Constitution, not a society run by experts in agencies as envisioned by the Progressive movement both then and now.
Very true. I agree. But that recourse was stripped from the people by the agency system itself. Such a system can never give back what it took in the first place. Progressives created the agency system intentionally to impose their Progressive views of society upon the unwashed masses. This is not conjecture, this is explicitly stated in the writings of contemporaneous Progressive political leaders then and now.
I couldn't agree more. I am an anti-corporate Capitalist. Indeed, I claim that the modern corporation is not a capitalist entity at all. No one owns it. Limited liability law smashes the cornerstone of Capitalism, that people have concomitant rights and responsibilities for their property.
I say, if one owns 1 billionth of the stock of Exxon, then one is responsible for the liability of Exxon in the ration of 1 billionth.
I also want to know why corporations can donate any sum of money to candidates. Corporations cannot vote. In my view, only voting citizens should participate in the franchise. We certainly restrict other non-voting parties this way.
I am a free-market, conservative, but the liberal critique of over-powerful and legally privilidged corporations --- it is manifestly true.
I go even further, arguing for a more thoroughgoing Capitalism, that corporations be understood as bizarre socialist entities, complete with show trials and cubicle gulags, five year plans, centralized budgetary control, etc.
Whether by genealogy, constitution, constituency, legal form or adherence to private property principles --- corporations are not agents of the free-market but vehicles for coupling government power with private money. Balderdash! I say.
#55 from Jeff Y. at 12:14 am on Aug 31, 2008
Good post. Government gets more intrusive every day and neither party is interested in stopping it. This intrusion is made worse by the fact that much of the intusion appears to be in collusion with corporate elites.
I completely agree with you about the "Corporation as Person" anachronism and wonder why it has never come under serious attack. Don't get me started on the patent system and the whole intellectual property scam that is being shove down the throats of everyone, worldwide.
I'm a conservative, and I am frequently ridiculed because I do not take the definition of Capitalism to be corporate welfare for modern corporations.
If human welfare budget reductions are controversial, we should all be able to agree that fictional persons, corporations, do not deserve welfare. This seems an elementary point for free-market advocates who shouldn't support interventionist subsidies.
Yet, most people both conservative and liberal have come to see the legal structure of the corporation as equivalent to free-markets! How backwards. Big businessmen are usually the worst capitalists, willing to use the force of government and the taxpayer's money to aid their commerce. We need only look at the recent bailouts of Fannie Mae and Bear Sterns for examples. Thousands of laws are passed to aid big business against their competition. Employees and workers are just little businesses, and thousands of laws disadvantage these small business as against corporations. That's not capitalism, that's bullshit.
Conservatives don't do enough to eradicate corporate welfare. Yet, the wonder why they lack credibility in reducing human welfare subsidies. We conservatives should eliminate corporate welfare, first, then we'll be taken seriously. This is another area where liberal critiques are correct.
OMG. You are so right.
Several important free-market economists warned in the 20th century about emerging abuses of the patent system. It has become a thought-crime department, in which ideas are considered to be property and presumably owned by their originator. The stifling effects of this monopolistic nonsense (literally non-sense in the logical meaning) are and will be economically devastating over the long term.
There are many areas in which conservatives and liberals can agree, compromise, and make valuable changes. I would like to see much more of it.
[Edited to add missing word in para 5. --NM]
I wrote "reducing human welfare," but I should have written "reducing human welfare subsidies." I thin k y'all will know my meaning, but it could be taken wrong.
It appears that Jeff, TOC and myself are in relative harmony. Somebody pinch me, I'm not sure I'm not dreaming.
[Sidebar: Re: intellectual property, for a small example, the way Disney has kept "working" the copyright law is a paradigmatic example of an abusive corporate+government maneuver.]
In my typical bleak moods, I don't see a way out of this power-accumulation maze that doesn't involve either catastrophe or some game-changing set of circumstances that will look like catastrophe to many. I hope I'm wrong, but as the old saw says, hope is not a strategy.
#58 Jeff: Fixed that for you.
Well, I can't give you the detailed citations that both of us would like.
However, it seems clear that Supreme Court decisions are frequently concerned with the positive and negative limits to both the rights and responsibilities of governments, local, state, and federal. As well as with those limits for other kinds of corporate entities.
Powers are what an entity is capable of doing. Rights and responsibilities are what that entity is allowed or required to do. Since laws specifying these things can apply to both human and corporate "persons", it seems clear that corporate entities have (or can have) both rights and responsibilities. (Which, like the rest of us, they can choose to fulfill or not.)
I do, however, attribute this idea to the efforts of the central nervous system, rather than to the digestive tract.
Absolutely right!
The original concept of patents is a pretty reasonable bargain: In return for a limited time monopoly on the commercialization of an idea (17 years), an inventor publishes the critical ideas, so they can be built upon by others. This was a way to fight trade secrets, by which innovations were often created and then lost again. In the long run, society as a whole gains unrestricted access to the knowledge, and the cost (17-year monopoly) is moderate.
This has needed debugging in light of modern technology, but what has actually happened is corporate seizure of human intellectual property. Patents have been expanded far beyond that original purpose, and copyrights even farther. "Life of the author plus 70 years" is nothing but corporate welfare.
#61 Beard:
One of my problems with your model is that, factually, governments predate (and generally [claim to] govern) corporations.
I think it was Queen Elizabeth (I) who first, in our lineage of laws, provided legal standing for things like the Honourable East India Company (founded in 1600).
Clearly, before there were joint stock companies, it would have been folly to say that governments either were, or were modeled on, such things. No?
So, magically, after that time, governments became corporations?
{Perhaps in 1886 when the US Supreme Court decided Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific? [I think that's the big "corporations get 14th Amendment protection as 'persons' case" -- and let's leave the rectitude or gross error of that pronouncement -- with the force of a decision -- for some other time]}
...Sorry, not buying it.
I deny the premise that governments, considered generally, are corporations; I especially deny your implicit assertion that the US government is a corporation. Notwithstanding this, it is probably legal fact that cities and townships are corporations under the laws of the several states. In my view that makes them less governments since they can be dissolved easily, which I rather suspect is intentional power-limitation, to the benefit of the nominally "sovereign" state and federal governments.
A bunch of people who act like they can do something and get away with that is a bunch of people, etc.; I don't call all such bunches of people corporations. You seem to. Oh well.
==
Footnote: Political discourse is sometimes further muddied by the expression "corporatism", which has nothing to do with corporations, but rather refers, through shared etymology, to the notion popularized by Mussolini's theoreticians and apologists that the mass of a state's population constituted the "body" (corpus) of the state, which of necessity must be directed by the state's "head" (I know you're not talking about that, but the terminology has confused people ever since because the various factions of the Italian civic assemblies of that time were called "corporations").
Footnote 2: Apologies for suggesting you were pulling the governments-are-corporations notion out of your @$$. But I still see no contrary evidence. :)
[Edited lots]
And it distorts / propels even more things even further into what Taleb (of Black Swan fame / notoriety) calls Extremistan.
Maybe too much more, but WTH:
A. On the matter of "powers": Beard seems to think "powers" are "capabilities", and yes, generally, they are. Perhaps I should have been more particular in my wording.
One of the US's founding documents speaks of governments "deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed". Obviously, if you've got a monopoly on, or an overwhelming preponderance of, force... you don't only have just powers, you have unjust ones too.
I persist in my opinion that governments do not have rights, people do. If Beard wants to equate "just powers" with "rights", I can keep doing the conversion in my head in the interest of amicability. :)
B. For "responsibilities", the closest term I can think of is, perhaps, "obligations" that governments might be said to have. But again, I don't see them as the same. Further, in the Framers' (and my) estimation, many (most?) of those obligations are in Levitical, "shalt-not" form.
And governments (or their agents) not infrequently wind up not fulfilling these obligations, so -- then what?
Governments take no oaths to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution -- people do.
Exploration of the second point above:
After the Waco debacle, "the government" didn't take responsibility for what happened; were it to do so, how would "it" communicate that? Through a voice whispering through a crack in a cave wall, like the Oracle at Delphi? Hardly. Rather, Janet Reno (said she) did; she being a single, natural person in the original and primary sense.
Net impact on her and her career? Zip. I think it's not fair that she could say such a thing and not at least resign in ignominy. But someone (perhaps she herself) moved her to do that thing: to say those words out loud, to a camera broadcasting her image and those words to the public.
Contrariwise: if governments were generally understood to take (or possess) this thing called "responsibility", her speech would have been neither called-for nor sensible.
QED.
[Edited slightly]
#59 from Nortius Maximus at 6:24 am on Aug 31, 2008
In my typical bleak moods, I don't see a way out of this power-accumulation maze that doesn't involve either catastrophe or some game-changing set of circumstances that will look like catastrophe to many.
I do not think you are directly saying what I am about to write on, but I think what you are touching on is tainted by what I find to be the most pernicious meme now loose in our society, that being that we cannot exist without the concentration of power.
The latest being the "too big to fail" mantra that has allowed large corporations and now entire large industries, like the financial industry to be immune relatively immune from atrocious decision making. Bear Stearns, it is said was leveraged at a rate of 170 to 1.
Why would anyone, especially the government back that sort of gambling addiction. From all appearances, this will only get worse.
I wrote here a while ago that we should remove the euphemism of calling the executive body of the Fed a board of governers and call a spade a spade, they are Commissars.
The bottom line is that the people and the economy are being manipulated by fear and I cannot tell you how much I detest this sort of tactic. Aside from Jim Bunning, I have yet to see anyone stand up to this Washington - Wall Street cabal.
From where I, and a lot of Paleo-Cons sit what we see now is a Republican Party buy into this nonsense, support completely monopolistic trademark laws, spend money they don't have like drunken sailors, become a party, not of ideas and Fiscal responsibilities but rather an amalgam of Dixiecrats and dunces, what had been the Democrat's constituaency for years.
I remember very well when Reagan came into office. The mantra then was he was dangerous because of the radical change he would make in Foreign and domestic policy and these changes would "involve either catastrophe or some game-changing set of circumstances that will look like catastrophe to many."
Well, Reagan just went ahead and did what he said he would and the only effect that I saw was a compolete revitalizing of the economy and the nation's spirit. Do you remember the howls from Wall Street when he and Volker publicly strangled inflation.
Republicans are not supposed to sell fear, which I see as the basis of Rovianism. They are supposed to offer hope and spur initiative and let the market take its course. The fact that I see less and less of this in the party spurs my rants.
I have some experience with trademarks and patents, having been in two trademark defenses. One was with Intel. Needless to say that wasn't very pretty, and a couple of patent applications.
Intel claimed that my company name which was one word that began with Intel and continued with another l and 8 additional letters would cause confusion in the public mind. Even though, I did not make chips but provided an on line sourcing application. In essence, Intel was claiming rights to the dictionary. It would have been amusing, except that it was a completely useless waste of time arguing it out with these corporate bureaucrats.
As far as the patent process is concerned, it is pretty much now nothing more than a process by which large corporations attempt to block free trade and access to innovation, not by claiming new ideas, but by having a system in place whose purpose is to cut off competition by blocking, through legal actions, any innovation that will endanger their monopolies. Much like Intel, the idea is to claim the dictionary, patenting organsms is a good place to start. Another part of the strategy is to simply overwhelm the patent office with patent applications. The office is understaffed and the expertise necessary to inspect patents is woefully lacking, talented people can make a lot more money working for large corporations than the government and the brightest gravitate there.
While going through the process, which took three years, 2 of the attornies handling my application left the firm and went to Silicon Valley, one to HP.
After being through it, my patents had to do with advertising models on websites, I came to the conclusion that the entire system should be scrapped. Patent attorney's offices have become not much more than training grounds for young lawyers to learn how to beat the system, and the patent applications, themselves a are written in a manner, or better, genre designed to obfuscate rather than delineate much in the way many contracts were written before laws were passed to make them readable to those ourside the legal brotherhood.
Afterthought: OK, I might be missing your aim here, Beard. Upon review, I see you using a phrase I haven't taken up directly: "corporate entity". So maybe I'm chasing down the wrong rabbit with my "corporation" emphasis.
Would you agree that "corporate entity" ~= "organization" and that "corporate entity" != "corporation"?
If so: Organizations include armies, governments, corporations and informal things like chess clubs. Do all these entities -- qua entities -- have "rights"? I don't think so. But their constituents do.
This semantic stuff I'm contributing to is objectively pretty OT for this thread, but we're at least still being civil while AL is away, so YAY US. :)
#66 TOC: I don't think what you posted gores any ox of mine. I'll need to reflect a bit before I can confirm what, if any, connection I might be able to see to my #59. Cheerio.
Just to reinforce the point by TOC [#67], here is the relevant clause from the Constitution:
Let me emphasize that the purpose of this clause is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
And that the rights in question are "for limited Times".
And those rights go to "Authors and Inventors", not even necessarily to their heirs and assigns.
. . .
While I'm at it, responding to Nortius Maximus [#65], this clause seems to be an example of the Constitution conferring a right on the Federal Government: to enact legislation conferring temporary monopolies for this purpose.
Nortius [#68],
Let me start by saying that while I enjoy many discussions around here, I particularly enjoy discussing things with you, because of your careful quality of thought and argument. Obviously, we disagree on certain topics, but I find discussions that involve thoughtful disagreement are a great deal more profitable than discussions that simply repeat and reinforce a shared point of view.
. . .
Your semantic clarification [#68] is pretty much spot on. Let me expand on my point.
Yes, I really am saying that "corporate entities" composed of large numbers of individual humans can meaningfully be considered individual agents in their own right. Several centuries ago, the legal concept of a limited-liability corporation was created, which embodies certain of these corporate entities with specific rights and obligations, recognized by law. As time has passed, additional corporate entities (like governments and churches) that aren't necessarily recognized as "corporations" in law have acquired essentially the same status.
That is to say, a large corporate entity can and does act, within our economic system, like an individual agent in its own right. The human beings within it are effectively replaceable parts. (Consider Bill Gates and Microsoft!)
The word "large" is important here. Suppose you have a one-person corporation that is your consulting practice. Legally, it is a limited liability corporation, but it is totally controlled by you as an individual human being. Its legal "personhood" does not translate into any ability to act as an agent, separate from you.
Likewise your neighborhood chess club, which is pretty much absolutely controlled by a few dozen people at most (unless you live in Brooklyn). The United States Chess Federation, on the other hand, is a sufficiently large and structured corporate entity to be an agent in its own right. Since it is totally dedicated to chess, it is unlikely to start messing around in, say, foreign policy. (Though it may become more important as US-Russian relations get more delicate.)
Large profit-making corporations like Exxon or Halliburton do participate as peers in negotiations with sovereign states, less powerful than a few, but more powerful than many. In principle, they are governed by the laws of the country in which they are incorporated. But in practice, they keep their headquarters in countries where the laws are congenial, and act globally.
These corporate entities are non-human intelligent agents. That status does not depend on them being profit-making, which is why I include non-profits, churches, and governments. For various reasons, they are able to dominate our economic (and often our political) world.
One reason it is tempting to argue against this concept is that it is difficult to see how a corporate entity can take responsibility. In particular, how can it take responsibility for an error or a crime? An individual human being can be fined, locked up, receive various kinds of pain, or be killed. Mostly, you can fine a corporation, even to the point of killing it.
To my mind, however, this is not an argument against the validity of this view of corporate entities. Rather, it illustrates the danger that corporate entities pose to humans, since they are difficult to control.
Tell me more about my eyes...
Your depiction is just me on an exceptionally good day; and I need a lot more practice omitting needless words.
OK. I still don't think it is appropriate or wise to talk about -- specifically -- governments possessing either rights or responsibilities, for the reasons I mentioned.
"Just powers" and "obligations", I'll go as far as.
One of my old influences is Heinlein's character Professor Bernardo de la Paz (alleged to have been an hommage to Robert LeFevre). There's a really good wrangling question asked by this bird:
Another old source of infuriating attitude but dogged follow-through that has caused me a lot of grief one way and another over the years is-was Lysander Spooner, particularly his work in the pamphlet called No Treason No. VI: The Constitution of no authority
I reluctantly accept that to the body politic, the matter raised by "la Paz" and the Spooner modest inquiry both seem like nonstarters. But they're crucial for me to at least remember, especially when I try to consider:
What is the legitimacy
It is neither prudent nor wise to overpersonify governments.
It makes them even more slippery to reason about and to affect.
I've written elsewhere that Douglas Hofstadter thinks human thinking (not just reasoning) is analogies all the way down and that this seems to tie in with Lakoff and the cognitive linguists' emphasis on metaphor as something like embodied abstraction largely overloading old seemingly prelinguistic hardware.
We (humans) are not really good at this abstraction stuff.
And overpersonifying governments, specifically, is dangerous. Just as "you can't hug a child with nuclear arms", you can't give any government a nice big hug.
Nor should you want to.
OK, and here is a galaxy-sized crux:
By my rough reading, the application of Amendment XIV to joint stock ventures -- in Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific -- was to imbue all corporations with a right... (by fiat; no representation on the point of "personhood" was made nor argued by either side in the case under review) ...a right, I say, to be left alone when pestered by anyone claiming they had any sort of public duty. Because they were persons, and imposing (arbitrary) public duty on a person is involuntary servitude.
Do I need to stress how bad this idea would be if we applied it to governments?
My gut aversion to that might have bullied me into reacting as though Beard had said "governments are corporations" when perhaps he didn't say exactly that.
Bonus (trivial?) question: Do I need to mention how tricky that court's determination is-was, given that true natural persons (fractionally) own the companies in question? Isn't that involuntary servitude imposed on the corporate "person", on the very face of it?
[SFX: Sound of head exploding.]
Reply to TOC, after sleeping on things a bit.
In #59 I wrote:
In #66 TOC replied
Nope. I'm not talking about that. In my most choleric melancholy moods, what I'm blackly musing about is that the only likely paths I can see for possibly redressing the imbalances and infelicities of our current cultural, societal and governmental trajectory include things like, oh,
You know. Little stuff like that. Disruptions. Some of them potentially foisted by utopian / Year Zero loonies, either French Revolution style or technocrats or whatever.
When I'm thinking that way, I don't give the likelhood of a better situation high odds. But I envision that just maybe some lucky breaks along those "catastrophic" trajectories might lead to a better world than the one I anticipate if we keep going the way we're headed and get there unmolested.
Cheery, huh?
Some analogies [#72] are homomorphisms, or even isomorphisms, and thus can serve as the basis for rigorous reasoning.
Other less perfect analogies can lead to the discovery of new categories (such as "intelligent agent"), of which, for example, individual humans and large corporate entities might be two. (This is controversial, obviously.)
I came to this notion by wondering how different intelligent agents could be from our familiar human selves. We don't have intelligent robots yet. Dolphins are likely quite different, because of their different environment and sensorimotor structure. But corporate entities seem to constitute intelligence on a scale sufficiently large that we don't even recognize its existence.
I also fret about the problem that Nortius raises in [#74,59]. That is, we accumulate enough structure in society that the only way to get from the current situation to one significantly better is through some pretty terrible intermediate states that destroy the existing structures.
Takes a long time, and is no fun for the folks involved, since many die, while life gets nasty, brutish, and short for many of the rest.
However, I think there are other paths. Where there are frontiers, and the potential for major abundance, the explorers can find situations open to new solutions. This is one reason to support space exploration. But I believe there are other frontiers, even on this one small planet. There are new regions in conceptual and economic space that sufficiently clever people can find and carve out. We have been seeing this happen over the past decade or two, as the information age has continued to explode. We've barely scratched its interaction with biology.
Scary, yes, but promising too.
As an example of the crazy patent system, I offer this
Microsoft was just awarded a patent for the Page Up/Page Down keys.
The patent office: theater of the absurd.
[Link format was missing a colon char. Corrected. --NM]
Nortius [#72],
I dipped into L. Spooner's "No Treason" essay for a few paragraphs. The key to his argument seems to be that the Constitution obligates only (at most) the people THEN living in the territory of the United States.
I am not a lawyer, and there's an awful lot of legal philosophy I don't know, but I would be willing to bet that the mortgage on your house is not just a contract between you, personally, and the bank, but it also obligates your heirs to pay them back what you borrowed, should you kick off before completing the payments.
There are a variety of legal mechanisms for making this happen, including the lien on your property. The effect is, however, that even without having personally signed the contract, your possibly-unborn heirs acquire an obligation.
The mechanisms for imposing the obligations (and conferring the rights) of citizenship on unborn people may well be different from property liens. But since property liens and other such prove such things are possible, I'll bet they also exist for citizenship. My impression is that the Social Contract is something that you are born into, not something you get to cross out sections of. At least not without moving somewhere else.
Once upon a time, the "sovereign" was a person. He (usually male) controlled the state, which had control of all its territory and the people on it. They owed him whatever he demanded of them. At that time, there was none of this corporate entity stuff" "L'etat, c'est moi!"
Over centuries, covering the Magna Carta and the Constitution, the liberal principal of government "of the people, by the people, and for the people", took the power of the sovereign away from individual human beings, and gave it to the collective entities which are "The People" of each sovereign state.
During this time, the legal entity we now know as a "corporation" was created. Eventually this kind of corporate entity was recognized as a "legal person", and it ends up having rights and obligations similar to human persons. I often use the term "corporation" to refer to corporate entities such as governments or churches, that might not be legal corporations, strictly speaking.
Arguably, making corporations into legal persons was a bad idea, at least for us human persons. But that might be like the dinosaurs failing to recognize that those insignificant furry rats underfoot might actually be a threat in the long term. Even if it is clearly a bad idea, it may be far too late to do anything about it. We'll see.
The above is sort of a "Just So" story, rather than being the abstract of a scholarly argument with appropriate citations. If some of you have useful citations, pro or con this argument, I'll appreciate them.
#77 from Jeff Y. at 2:01 am on Sep 01, 2008
Your post brings back some fond memories. My patent attorney told me to have lots of diagrams and flow charts with lots of boxes. I really liked that one.
He also told me that it didn't matter if I didn't think something was worthy of a patent, because, essentially, anything that was already in existence had a chance to be patented anew if it was done electronically. He agreed with me that this was mad, but shrugged his shoulders in the way that only a bear-like Russian could do and told me in a thick Russian accent that this was now the reality.
I really liked this guy and am chuckling as I remember him. He is the one that wound up at HP. He was blessed with a highly developed sense of the absurd, which served him very well in his chosen occupation.
The sample you picked was rather tame. You can at least make out what they are claiming. After seeing what my attorneys, a large, venerable midtown Manhattan firm with automatic shoe shine machines in both black and brown sitting in their men's room, described my ideas, in language completely unintelligible to me, I realized that I was in an especially arcane corner of human existence, and enjoyed it as much as I could, considering the price of admission.
God's greatest blessing to we mortals is a sense of humor, which, trust me, is indispensible if you submit yourself to the patent process. It is the only think that I can think of worse than going to Big 5 accountants.
#78 Beard says:
The "Social Contract" you mention was a theory that Rousseau coined, possibly in sympathy with the work of John Locke, to knock over the edifice of Divine Right of Kings.
Locke only said (IIRC) that the people must sanction any leader in that role.
I think that Spooner would agree with Locke and disagree strongly with Rousseau.
As a way to rhetorically dismantle the Divine Right problem, Rousseau's theory worked. But the followers of Rousseau produced the French Revolution bloodbath while using his words to justify unconscionable acts.
I don't rubberstamp Spooner. He does provoke thought, though his writing can appear windy and overmethodical to modern readers. Related to your "Debt" claim, an excerpt from the Spooner work, farther down than you might have gotten:
...Which I think he'd apply not only to the signed-by-nobody Constitution but even more so the figurative Rousseau "document".
I have found no way to refute his "tacit understanding" claim; this pain I live with every day of my life. :)
There follows what I consider a capper, which marks Spooner as a spiritual father of the later 20th-Century Libertarian movement--
So there you have your Labor Day dose of Lysander Spooner with a Bernardo de la Paz - flavored cherry on top.
Bon appetit! :)
#81 from Nortius Maximus at 4:05 pm on Sep 01, 2008
Bravo!!!!
"When is it proper for a group to do that which is wrong for an individual to do?"
"Proper" - never. Proper strikes me as a cop out here.
Expedient or even Necessary - Often
I think the question boils down to whether or not one is willing to go against their own personal morality and surrender that to the group. To my mind, this surrender of personal responsiblity is the surrender of personal freedom.
I do not see how you can get around that if you believe in individual liberty.
It also strikes me that every totalitarian philosophy has come up with times when this is not only "proper" but elevated by the state to the level of heroism.
This is certainly a critically important question. While personally, I wouldn't say "Never", I do use a similar philosophy to justify my opposition to capital punishment.
There may be times when deadly force is needed to stop a threat in an emergency, but once someone is in custody, and no danger to anyone, there doesn't seem to be any justification for the state to put them to death, when putting people to death is forbidden to individuals.
"When is it proper for a group to do that which is wrong for an individual to do?"
When the group is a lawfully constituted state, the answer can be "always." For example, when is it proper to extort from a trader passing by some sum of money in return for "protection" or other services?
If you're an individual, levying such tarrifs or taxes is always wrong: the mere fact that the trader is traveling past you gives you no right to his property, nor to force him to accept your 'protection,' even if you aren't using that to mean, "Money you pay to avoid me hurting you" rather than "money you pay for actual protection."
If you're a nation-state, however, the answer is: so long as it is done in a lawful fashion, it is always proper. It may or may not always be wise, but there is nothing immoral about it.
It's also true that other kinds of group categories normally enjoy special powers not available to individualas. The Catholic Church has a right to set doctrine for Catholics everywhere; an individual Catholic does not, no matter how strongly he may feel that the Vatican got it wrong.
I just found something from an article about P. J. O'Rourke, published in the WSJ's Opinion Journal, that more or less nails my operating position about things as they stand, and has the "tacit understanding" thing firmly bracketed when one looks at government in vivo, rather than in theory.
Libertarianism (and with it, Spooner) as "a failed but admirable mission":
And this is why I think so bleakly about Things To Come. 1/2 :)
But it is not so: sometimes they are.
We are just now having a debate that begins with the Medieval understanding of chivalry, and how (or if) it could be brought back into modern life. This is nothing but philosophy and morality.
And it turns out to be immediately relevant to a question of the day: how to treat young Bristol Palin. The old, humane ethic of chivalry -- I believe -- points exactly the right way to deal with the questions posed by today's announcement.
Politics is a damnable sport, but it is not wholly immune to philosophy or morality. Declaring it so lets it off too easily. It may be incompatible with the pure morality of the monastery; but the humane ethics still lay chains on it. A politician who will not do his best is still blameworthy, even if no politician is free to be, or able to be, perfect.
That seems to put you in direct opposition to Lysander Spooner. While Nortius Maximus is not unconditionally endorsing Spooner, he did quote him at length [#81], and with some approval.
This is an irresistible opportunity to use that classic line:
I am always pleased to honor a request for a gentle passage of arms. :)
Grim: That's the WSJ's quote of PJ, and we know journalists and editors' scalpels sometimes slip, don't we. I think he meant something like "philosophy and morality can never serve as conclusive in light of how politics works; politics as practiced always gums things up for somebody."
Perhaps the para that followed the part quoted prior will serve as suitable context for my interpretation (please don't sue us, WSJ):
Indicating, I think, that we can never put any of our "best" ideals into stable form. Even here. And we're the shining city on the hill. 1/2 :)
Which finally connects this long discourse of mine with the theme of your entry, Grim: Liberal v Conservative thought. God, I LOVE it when a plan comes together!
OK< too strongly worded; I'll rephrase my penultimate paragraph:
Indicating, I think, that no matter what, all of our "best" ideals will be inconstantly applied with inconsistent satisfaction for all time. Even here. And we're the shining city on the hill. :)
Ah, well, if it's only that, inconsistent virtue is better than no virtue at all. If we cannot have justice -- as someone once said -- let us at least hope for an occasional lapse in injustice!
Yet even to recognize that small blessing when it comes along, we need to be consistent in our attempts to apply the concept to the reality. If we don't constantly ask, "What is right here?" how will we know when the right thing happens, even if it is only by accident, or in the eye of some storm?
Grim:
Yep. And that's what I try to do. But often I settle for simply doing my best to not run afoul of the tacit expectations of my fellow citizens (and agents of the state). Then there's this, that happened just about 3 years ago...
A dear friend died in the line of duty while responding to a neighborhood noise & loitering complaint. I wrote about it at my blog, Gumptionology. I said there-then that I couldn't say much (what with a trial to be held). There was a conviction and sentencing, I'm feeling garrulous, so here goes.
Some outspoken Libertarian fundamentalists of my acquaintance call cops "members of the 'Blue Gang'". In this case, I couldn't bring myself to see things that way.
Rather than be frisked by my friend the cop, this... ...person... waited til Dan, the cop, was checking another guy's ID, and drew and "unloaded" on Dan, firing and hitting him at least seven times, standing over the body, shooting down, after the first two shots. Then, it was said, he went over and put his last round into the police radio. And got away, for a little while.
Why didn't he want to be frisked? Reportedly, he had multiple loaded concealed - concealable firearms and a bag of coke at least one bag of white powdery substance on him. While in public. While out on parole... with only a few days of his parole term left.
Parole, by the rules, means you give up some things in order to be let out of jail early. I believe it's the only form of contractlike thing executed in situations of duress that US law recognizes. Anyway, once the fellow's ID check came back on the radio as a parolee, Dan was gonna frisk him, because law officers don't need probable cause to do that for those people--it's part of the deal. And then this fellow was just about certainly headed back to the pokey, unless he did something drastic. But just running wasn't drastic enough for him, it seems.
At trial, the best the defense could offer was that he was drugged, had put a fifth of Hennessy in himself, and was terribly scared.
My hardcore libertarian acquaintances say guns and drugs are just "status crime" matters, and status crimes should be abolished -- some, a la Spooner, even said the cop got what was coming to him as an agent of an illegitimate regime. The parole issue cuts no ice with them. None of these people can I count as friends, if I ever did.
Beard would say, if I understand him, that since the accused was already out of action, the state should not put him to death.
I would say, letting this guy live would mean setting the precedent to allow all future punks to kill cops and get off with life in jail if they just told the jury they were drugged, drunk and frightened.
But was the assailant reasonably in fear for his life -- which is the standard for self-defense? No. Nope. Nuh-uh. Bad precedent. No cookie.
And the thing is, the "Blue Gang" model is not invalid. Power invites abuse; in our system, especially if the abuser sees some good in what they are doing. This devolves through "I know this scumbag is guilty of something." And I agree with Left critics that the Patriot Act really was a Christmas wish list for the FBI, and that most of what the TSA does is "security theater."
But my tacit and explicit support of -- at least parts of -- a culture and civilization I find more tolerable than any other remains, even in view of these antinomies. And even though I'd prefer it if the social contract were utterly explicit. "Y'cahn't get theyah from heeyah."
Hypocrisy? I think it's just me trying to be effective in the world. More effective than my purist in vitro Libertarian acquaintances.
[Edited]
I've reread this now, since I couldn't quite figure out what 'you and him,' meaning me and you, were meant to fight about. I'm still not sure.
I've got no problem with hanging the guy you describe. I do believe in very strong restrictions on police power in order to maintain individual liberty; and I might even forgive shooting them, in the extreme case of them conducting a SWAT-style raid on someone who wasn't involved in violent crime, and therefore had no reason to expect a SWAT-style raid on his home. If you kick in the door of a normal citizen at night, he may not hear or understand if you yell "Police!", and might reasonably respond with deadly force to armed men in his house.
It seems to me that we need police who act like police, rather than commandos. If police are going to adopt commando tactics, they take the onus of such tactics wholly on themselves.
However, except for such cases, I wouldn't generally endorse killing police in the performance of their duty. I see no reason it shouldn't be a capital crime, in the same way that intentionally killing anyone in the commission of a felony is a capital crime -- at least, it is where I come from, and should be as far as I can see.
Grim: I suspect that practically, you and I are, as the saying goes, "in violent agreement." :)
#95: So... do you reckon there are 'way too many felonies on the books? I do.
#86 from Grim at 7:52 pm on Sep 01, 2008
When the group is a lawfully constituted state, the answer can be "always."
Isn't this the very self definition of totalitarian states. The Germans at Neurenberg all argued that they were following theorders of a legally constituted state. quite frankly Grim, I don't think you even read the question or thought it through. If you had, I doubt that you would have given this answer.
It's also true that other kinds of group categories normally enjoy special powers not available to individualas. The Catholic Church has a right to set doctrine for Catholics everywhere; an individual Catholic does not, no matter how strongly he may feel that the Vatican got it wrong.
This example doesn't appear to me to have any bearing as to what is a personal question.
Are you, Grim, Willing to do that which is wrong in a group which you believe to be wrong for you to do as an individual.
Yes or no. If yes, please give me an example.
I would extend the Invitation to you, Nortius, as well.
Again, keep the answer personal, since the question is.
TOC:
I am willing, as matters stand in the US today, as part of a jury, to sentence a man to death after a fair trial, if I think he is guilty of a crime for which that sentence is appropriate. I am pretty damned sure that there have been worse jurors than I'd be. I'm also not unwilling to engage in jury nullification, based on my moral determination. I'm not sure it's fair, right, or proper, given my old Spoonerish "freedom-from" leanings and my sympathy to the reply Manuel (another Heinlein character) gives: that it's never right for a group to do something an individual shouldn't; but I'm willing to serve on a jury and render a verdict, because I also have sympathy for the notion that what we've got works well enough to preserve.
But I am not willing, as matters stand in the US today, to be a vigilante passing sentence and meting out death to wrongdoers on my own.
So the answer to your reframing of de la Paz's question, strictly constructed, is yes.
I try to ask myself de la Paz's question frequently enough that I hope I'll show some resistance at some point to a sufficiently egregious totalitarian state.
On the other hand, I can't prove that the current state of affairs here in the US doesn't make it already an egregiously totalitarian state. To say nothing of what it might be like 4 years from now. As I have said previously, the way to bet seems to be an increase in centralization of power, no matter who gets elected, and that bugs me.
Note that when I speak of vigilantes, I mean Batman stuff, not defense of my life.
#97:
Absolutely -- and far too many Federal laws altogether. And too many State laws. And far, far too many regulations that have punitive force.
The famous legal saying is, "Ignorance of the law is no excuse." That can be true, though, only under something like common law: where the law is well known and changes rarely. When the law is created as arcanely as we do now, so that even the lawyers don't really know how many new laws were made last year, how can anyone hope to be anything other than ignorant of the law? It's not like there's anyone to advise us, unless we employ a lawyer to do it -- and how many Americans have the money to retain a lawyer to review all these new laws, and explain how they likely affect our daily business?
#98:
Let's say I would never shoot at a house without knowing for certain what was inside of it, if I were alone; but if I were a corporal in a rifle squad, and was ordered to conduct a recon by fire on such a house, I would certainly do so.
That's correct. I have no problem with saying that he has lost all hope of freedom for the rest of his natural life, given the heinousness of his crime. In many ways, that's more of a punishment than a somewhat dramatic death after a decade or two of appeals.
They guy also has his own choice to make, once there. He can (and more than likely will) transform his cell into his own personal hell, and live there for the rest of his life. Or possibly, he can find some sort of personal transforming salvation, which will allow him to make his cell into something other than hell, while he spends the rest of his life there. His choice.
The guy has done something hideously awful. He should and will be punished for it. Should we then kill him, to underline the sincerity of our claim that killing another human being is wrong?
I agree, and would take it even farther. In some cases, I am guessing, it is literally impossible to obey the mass of laws binding a life that is more than austerely simple. That is, the set of applicable laws (plus the necessities of making a living) are an "over-determined" set of constraints, which have no solution at all!
Once, we were proud to be "A Nation of Laws, not of Men", meaning that you were punished if you broke a law, regardless of who you are, and not according to the whim of someone in power.
If everyone beyond serfdom is necessarily violating some law in the tangle, then all someone in power needs to do is to spend the resources to determine which law you are breaking, and then prosecute you for it. That law, considered in isolation, may sound (and be) perfectly reasonable. But if everyone breaks some laws, then the decision by those in power to prosecute eliminates the "Nation of Laws".
Not to be abrupt, Beard, but I'd like to let it be Grim's call if we go that far afield -- debating capital punishment. I'm feeling guilty for having bloviated so while AL was out on Catalina touching up his tan. :) I'd like to discuss it, sometime. Was settling for describing, happy I got it right. I am not deprecating your position, though practically we do not agree. I am conscious of the antinomy in my own position.
My thanks to all thread participants and readers for their forbearance and comity.
#103: Yeah. And that's a big part of the sort of catastrophe or catastrophe-analog I see as so likely as an optimist -- that is, as a movie where the theme song that plays out at the end at least has some happy strains in it:
Everyone guilty of something, a surveillance society and selective enforcement of the David Brin - Ernest Mann - Cory Doctorow dystopian sort, and then comes a pushback or a Black Swan (I think of that as a "P/BS" for short).
If the P/BS is traumatic enough, the survivors are too damned busy just putting things back together to F*CK with each other quite so much. And if the cards fall just the right way, some pockets of cooperative orneriness instead of feudal water empires and the like.
Still pretty much sucks, though.
Boy, you are an optimist, aren't you?
The reason I am far less enthusiastic about the traumatic solution is that I believe that history suggests that the cooperative orneriness of the libertarian paradise is a rare and unstable solution to the social problem, compared with roving bands of bandits and feudal power accumulation.
Democratic societies, for all their ills and evils, are a shining light compared with that. I worry about all the problems we have been discussing, but I'd rather muddle on forward, hoping for a breakthrough, than ask for Noah's flood (or "fire next time") and roll the dice for a whole new chance.
You misread me. As I review what I wrote, I was rushed and didn't unpack my thoughts well. I'm a thwarted optimist. I want to be "up-wing", not left or right. But the at least some of the "up-wingers" who are thoughtful recognize how bad the odds are of threading the needle to "up" without a big mess.
I simply consider the likelihood of a major nontraumatic correction to be much closer to zero than all the others. I'm not cheering correction at any cost on, if I did I'd be some sort of Year Zero cheerleader, Trotskyist or "The Future Soon" technocrat. Believe me, I am none of those.
Let's look at the "fuzzy bunny" case. The outcome of a major improvement (by idealist lights) created by a post-scarcity economy -- the ideal of purist socialists -- the best "final" outcome foreseeable with the sweetest "roll end credits" music -- were it to occur through something like a technological singularity, would still very likely for some period cause all manner of unpleasantness. People jumping out of upper story windows as they did in 1929. Chaos caused by game-changing that might not threaten them in the long run that nonetheless throws too many poor hominids for a loop.
And that's the best outcome for the next 50 years I see as even barely likely. There'll be a pony, but there will be major trouble, too.
Another possibility is a long slow grind down into oppression over all, as resources get scarcer and people get scareder, without a major correction. Maybe.
What makes me an optimist on my good days is that I hope I'm wrong; that improvements for all on balance will not cause dislocations that harm on the way. But that hope has very little audacity to it.
And I'll stop here. I need to go find some flowers to look at, and maybe I should take up tutoring or something. Something positive.
I've run my mouth here 'way too much. Ciao.
[Edited]
Ciao, NM.
Meanwhile, go find an old SF story called "Business as Usual, During Alterations". It's from the 1950s or very early 1960s, and deals with the sudden, unexpected transition to a post-scarcity economy. It's hilarious. And optimistic, which is what to expect from SF of that vintage.
OK, Destry has to strap on his six-guns one more time on this thread.
Yes, I know the story. Possibly better than you do. 1958, Ralph Williams. Spoiler warning... Plot follows.
Hostile "benevolent" aliens conveniently provide an anything box that can duplicate itself and anything else nonliving (hmm... why? (*)) with indiscriminate/no feedstock (making it femtotechnology with an unknown apparently limitless power source, by the way, so the story is fantasy, not SF). The aliens expect to conquer the Earth without firing a shot, due to the ensuing chaos as economies are destroyed, the way they've done to countless other planets. An economy of novelty develops instead, in a rather Cory-Doctorow-ish "wuffie" way. Everyone adapts OK. Whew. Good thing we humans are so special! I was worried there for a week or so. The End.
But in the story, no one drives off a bridge, or through a crowd, in depression because his status has been destroyed. No one kills someone for their anything box because that's faster than waiting for a copy. Nobody, to please their god, multiples the necrotizing fasciitis bacterium or nuclear waste (femtotech, not nano; any nucleus as output is fine) and spills them in subways using the devices. No one creates a ton of dynamite from a single stick to settle an old feud.
And here's a line right from the story:
Superempowerment. Yay.
Business as usual, with light to moderate megadeaths in the late afternoon, followed by sun.
That sounds about right to me. Sad to say.
[Edited]
PS: The Foresight Institute is holding a "Vision Weekend" this November. I hope to go. Those help my mood some, even more than flowers. Which I did find and admire today. :)
Ah, well, so much for the piping sunshine business. When you've got your glooms on, it's no good me trying to be Little Mary Sunshine.
Just remember, that sense of clarity and complete understanding that accompanies the glooms? It is the product of the same chemicals that produce the depression, and is very likely just as much an illusion.
Not that deciding to be chipper about the whole thing isn't an illusion, too, but since you've really only got your choice of illusions, I'd rather pick one that's comfortable. (Not that I don't prepare for the alternatives.)
All the best.