I'm sure we all can relate to the enjoyment associated with the sharing of good news . . . the following is some good news I received this morning via email:
Hi,
We recently published "Hidden Gems: The 100 .edu sites every Entrepreneur Should Read " I am happy to let you know that your site has been included in the list.
I figured I'd bring it to your attention in case you think your readers would find it useful.
Cheers,
Rich McIver
Transitional wry observation: how ironic that an insurance company, a business which we pay to assume risk on our behalf, should call itself Progressive...
Most Halloween costumes are not scary precisely because they are obviously that: costumes. This is so not because the costumes are poorly executed, but because they disguise us as things which, for the most part, we cannot be. They scare children because children (and postmoderns) still exist in the magical marches between imagination and reality, where imagined things become real simply in the imagining.
Progressives are frightening because they actually exist. Not only exist, but like Canadians, they walk among us undetected. Or maybe I should say that we walk among them.
Because in the last several elections, the one constant in the winning party was how Progressive a platform it had. Back in the old days, Democrats (modern liberals) favored using government to spend your money for you, but not for telling you how to live your life. Republicans (conservatives—to prefix “modern” would create an oxymoron, wouldn’t it?) wanted to use government to tell you how to live your life, but not spend your money. Progressives were elitist populists—they wanted to use government to do both, because they were smarter than you (populists were just more numerous).
Bill Clinton won because he promised to be a tough-minded liberal—not just spend money, but spend it wisely. Similarly, George W. Bush won by promising to be a compassionate conservative—not just cut spending, but spend it wisely. And by wisely both meant “for moral purposes.” Both used rhetoric about government caring, it being government’s job to make us more moral, defined as caring about our fellow humans. Government is the tool, they are the artist, we are the medium.
Now, the median voter theorem tells us that in a plurality system, there will tend to be two parties (though Duverger also tells us that), and those two parties will look one very much like the other. Because the candidate with the most votes wins (whether the office or the electoral votes), voters will concentrate their votes on two parties, and those two parties will position themselves to maximize their share of the vote—close to but equidistant from the median voter.
This seems to explain our last four elections rather well. In fact, the only substantive difference between George Bush and John Kerry in their first debate was who should get to be the one to do what they proposed. But if candidates have won by appealing to the median voter, and they have won based on Progressive rhetoric…that means the median voter in the U.S. is…Progressive. Bob Dole and George H.W. Bush lost to Clinton because they ran as conservatives, and Clinton ran as a “postmodern liberal.” Gore lost to Bush because Gore ran as a traditional, modern liberal—for the working man!—while Bush ran as a “modern conservative.” (So Bush is at least an oxymoron.)
Note Gore’s refashioning of himself as a true Progressive since the election. He’s all about the environment, because he knows more about it than you do, so you have to give him power to make you a better person. Nothing could be more Progressive than the Precautionary Principle—“we can’t let the lack of evidence stop us from acting to correct a problem” because we don’t like risk or uncertainty; we want government to make them go away.
Or, more cynically, we don’t like independent thought, and want government to make that go away. Don’t believe me? Question your garden-variety environmentalist. You won’t get evidence—you’ll get moral outrage and indignation. Which finally explains why Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize. The world is never so peaceful as when other people do your thinking for you, when government takes all of your cares away.
So I’m watching this election with interest, and a fair amount of trepidation. Not because the winner might do horrible things to us, because we can use our institutions to shield us from that. But if the contest is between Fred Thompson (a Goldwater conservative) and Hillary Clinton (the poster-being for neo-Progressivism), the identity of the winner will tell us something about the electorate. Then again, if the contest is between Hillary and Rudy Giuliani, I fear that too will tell us something about the electorate. And that something may be that we won’t use those institutions to protect ourselves, but to better ourselves. (For the Tolkein fan who might be reading: oh, the folly of Saruman repeated!)
Hi, I’m Ben. I’m a junior political science and philosophy double major and I love freedom, and figured this blog would be just one more way to express that love, so I’ll be posting on here every so often. I hope you will not only read, but comment. I’d love to take the issues I raise on here further.
So, what do I mean by saying I love freedom? I’m guessing my saying that probably either intrigues you or scares you. Why do I want freedom so bad? I’m probably sick and tired of the stupid government getting all up in my face and violating my rights, right? WRONG.
My call for freedom stems not from a demand for my rights as one who is governed, but from an acknowledgement of the limits of my rights as one who governs.
Or, for another way of looking at it:
I’m not your daddy. God is.
I am not one of those angry libertarians who wants freedom because he’s tired of “big government,” or “the man,” or whoever, pushing him around. I want freedom because I recognize that I don’t have the authority to make anyone do anything except keep his hands off someone else. And if I don’t have that authority and if you don’t either, then getting together with a whole bunch of people and making a majority won’t magically give us that authority. I don’t have the right to be your boss, whether on my own, or with a bunch of people. I can protect others from you, but it’s not my job to tell you how to live. That’s your job. And when I say that’s your job, I mean it. It’s not so much that you have a right to be your own boss, but that you have a responsibility to be your own boss. It’s your JOB. It’s not my place to do it for you, even if I really do know how to do it better, because you are morally accountable for your actions, not me. The only thing I can do to you is make sure you don’t interfere with anyone else’s job. And since that’s the only thing I’m able to do to you, that’s the only thing the government, which is just a bunch of everyday people like me, can do to you. THAT is why I demand freedom.
I’ll leave you this bit from “Equality” by C.S. Lewis:
A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind was so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true… I find that they’re not true without looking further than myself. I don’t deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation… The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.
I’ve decided what I’m going to be for Halloween: a Progressive! I’ll scare…well, I probably won’t scare anyone. In fact, it would probably help me blend in a great deal more than I usually do. For Halloween purposes, I’d do better going as myself, at least if your average college student will be there. Oh, no! It’s a professor who expects me to think for myself! To earn grades! RUN!
I’ll have to save the ruminations on these kids today, and on how inflation does the same thing for self-esteem and grades that it does for currency (and the difference between inflation and appreciation) for another day. Makes me feel like I ought to be wearing my pants up around my armpits, and I just don’t feel up to the concomitant wedgie right now.
The point is, Progressives ought to scare us a great deal more than they do.
For those too young (or too sleepy in history class) to remember, the Progressive movement was big around the turn of the last century. Whereas our founders believed that government, like fire, was a dangerous servant and a fearful master (something George Washington is supposed to have said—historians suppose he didn’t), the Progressives believed that government was a tool for the improvement of mankind. Not only could it allow us to live peacefully together, it could make us better people: more caring, more compassionate, more temperate.
At least, it could if it were run by the right people. Smart people who knew what was right could use government to make the rest of us stand up straight (it’s better for your spine), eat healthy and nutritious foods (it’s good for your digestion), and quit drinking and smoking (you’ll be more productive at work, and that nasty cough!). Take, for example, one of Progressivism’s biggest successes: Prohibition. Smart people knew that alcohol was bad for you, so they had the right—no, the duty—to help the human race achieve its highest potential by keeping the nasty stuff from people who weren’t smart enough to see how it harmed them.
Now, I’m a life-long teetotaler, as was my father before me. But alcohol doesn’t kill people—people kill people by misusing alcohol. There are two possible reactions to that fact: hold people accountable for their bad decisions, or assume that they’re too dumb or weak to learn, and that you must therefore keep it away from them. Notice the first approach is how we (used to) treat adults; the second is how we treat children.
And that is how Progressives saw the rest of us, as children: loveable, but misguided, not yet possessed of the intellectual maturity to make important decisions for ourselves, nor able to bear the consequences of them. None of us like bearing the consequences of our actions. Being human, we make mistakes, and those have unpleasant consequences. Wouldn’t it be much better if someone else could shield us from those consequences?
Those of you who have read Tocqueville or Dostoevskii will begin to recognize this as exactly the tyranny which democracy has to fear. We begin by feeling clever for having dodged the reckoning for our mistakes. We are relieved, but resolved to learn from our mistakes. Government is a good servant, saving us the trouble of dealing with unpleasantness. But soon the next mistake comes along, and then the next, and soon we have conditioned ourselves to dependence on our fearful master.
Children do not simply become adults, at least not in any sense other than the trivial. We all require education, from our parents, our teachers, our friends, even the heartless and ruthless invisible hand before we learn to exercise appropriate caution in our decisions, to weigh and accept risks. The trouble with Progressives is that they want to keep us as children, to deny us the education that life brings with its consequences. Obviously, Progressives speak in terms of educating us about what is good for us, but they mean instead that we must come to recognize their right to tell us what to think. Like infant industries, we will never grow old.
But as any number of literary examples attests, beginning with Peter Pan, too many of us do not wish to grow old. Perhaps the scariest thing about Progressives is that they may be making a correct assumption about us, or at the very least, an assumption we want desperately to be true. Can we blame them for offering us what we want, or should we blame ourselves for wanting it?
Alas, the answer must wait ‘til next week, when we will consider in more depth why exactly the most frightening costume this fall is Progressive!
We’ve all heard about “the market” doing this to people, doing that to people, getting pulled over for DUI…oh, wait, that was Paris Hilton. But I labor under the impression that most folk don’t have a good conception of the fact that “the market” is shorthand for a much more complicated idea. For example, most people think the market rewards those with money. In fact, the market defines what a good decision is, and then rewards those who make good decisions.
Let’s look at baseball for an example. The eight cities whose teams are in the playoffs this year, five are ranked in the top six in population: New York (1), Los Angeles (2), Chicago (3), Philadelphia (5), and Phoenix (6). The other three, however are much lower in the rankings (close to or even below our beloved Nashville at 28): Boston (24), Denver (25), and Cleveland (39).
Granted, population of the home city is not the perfect measure here—the term “market share,” and thus small or large market status, refers to more than just the city population. So let’s use Forbes’ valuations of baseball teams (out of 30 teams): Yankees (1), Red Sox (2), Cubs (5), Phillies (9), Angels (13), Cleveland (17), Diamondbacks (19), and Rockies (20). What you should notice is that it’s not the top eight teams in terms of revenue or valuation that make the playoffs. The teams third and fourth in both valuation and revenues (Mets and Dodgers) failed to make the playoffs.
Back to my point: the market rewards those who make good decisions. The Rockies, Diamondbacks, Indians, and Angels did not make the playoffs by buying high-priced free agents. For that matter, neither did the Phillies. (The Yankees seem to have made it in spite of theirs.) Instead, those teams made better decisions when drafting, when deciding to keep players (Jim Thome for two of those teams), when deciding which free agents to pursue.
And the baseball “market” is set up to reward those who know how to evaluate talent and how to manage baseball games. The Braves punch above their market size because the talent they put on the field attracted fans from more than just their home market. Wanna bet sales of Rockies merchandise go up after the country gets a look at that scrappy bunch of underdogs? That more people are wearing Brewers’ jerseys?
Now, the market rewards people who make good decisions with money. And money allows those decision-makers more margin of error. If the Yankees draft a bust in the first round, it hurts them—but they have the money to absorb that cost. If the Athletics make too many poor choices in a draft, then they feel the pain a lot faster. Likewise, Bill Gates can afford to make a poor investment, whereas I can barely afford to make a good investment.
Back to my original point: I have used “the market” as if it were a single organism, with a consciousness and motive power all its own. But the best way to understand the market (and why attempts to centrally control or direct it are misguided) is the concept of distributed processing. Think of a swarm of bees or a flock of birds. They move as if the group had a single mind controlling them, but they don’t. (For a great introduction to this via popular fiction, see Michael Crichton’s Prey.)
Instead, each member of the group receives just the amount of information necessary to allow them to make their decision. The aggregation of those responses produces something that looks like it has a mind of its own—but doesn’t. And that’s what the market is—swarm behavior. Markets deliver to us only the information we need to make our individual decisions (we call that information a price). We do not consciously coordinate our actions with each other, nor does another consciousness do it for us. But it seems as if one does, and that illusion leads us to believe that, if we can control that consciousness, we can control the swarm.
What we can do is alter the market institutions so that they send different signals. Where we have done so without regard to the nature of the market, however, we have ended up sending signals that lead pathological behavior to emerge in the swarm: subsidies cause massive overproduction, price restrictions cause scarcity and famine, and people get hurt.
In other words, we have to be careful in selecting our definition of "good decision." It requires a set of values—and if you don’t define your values, someone else will do it for you. Perhaps that term “moral philosopher” does make more sense than “economist.”