Civil Society

Lauding Paul Ryan

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There is a great piece in the American Spectator about Paul Ryan and his “Road Map.” Ryan lacks Gingrich’s Machiavellian talents, and therefore isn’t in the running for taking over the party. Of course, Ryan doesn’t seem to have any of Newt’s devastating character flaws either.

The fact is that Ryan is a talent that is being wasted in the slow-witted and slow moving Republican Party. He’s a policy guy trying to save the nation while the party is run by idiots running the stupid “Pelosi Fright Wig” strategy. We all understand the trade off in winning elections. The GOP is once again choosing the wrong path, using the supposedly easier path of winning power by vacuity over running on ideas and then actually having a mandate to govern.

In this cycle, we could actually win an honest mandate for change by following Ryan. Instead, we are wasting the opportunity to put in a gaggle of intellectually flaccid graymeat who will do what Boehner tells them to do. This is a strategy for disaster.

Paul Ryan’s Friends

The amount of flack being directed at Ryan and his “Roadmap” has been rapidly increasing. Former White House budget director Peter Orszag, who should know better, trashed the Ryan plan in his farewell lecture at Brookings. This from the man who, as noted by the Wall Street Journal, “presided over record deficits of $1.4 trillion in 2009-or 9.9% of GDP-and an expected $1.5 trillion in 2010.” Cheeky fellow.

Jon Ward of the Daily Caller observed that this high-profile critique of Ryan “shows the seriousness with which Obama and his top advisers take Ryan’s alternative vision for the country’s future, as well as the vehemence with which they disagree.” Ward mentioned that the Orszag attack was the same day the Democratic National Committee attacked the “Roadmap.”

Note that the left takes Ryan more seriously than the leaders in his own party.

You can live with enemies in politics, but you can’t survive without friends. Ryan needs more than intellectual or moral support from conservative intellectuals, commentators, and even honest liberals, as important as they are. He and his “Roadmap” need the heartfelt support of his party, its leaders and its candidates across the country who must take the argument to the people in this watershed election year.

The stakes are too high for the Republicans to simply stand by, quietly, hoping the Democrats will self-immolate. The GOP needs to embrace a big, visionary idea, something like Ryan’s “Roadmap,” which addresses the most important political challenge of the age: the runaway costs of entitlements which were irresponsibly put on autopilot under both Democratic and Republican governments.

As many readers here might know, I put forth a much bigger, better, and more visionary idea here a few days ago. While I laud Ryan as true thinker, leader, and one of the few hopes for a brain dead party, my idea is a better roadmap.

VAT Tax Redux, New Proposal, and Barone’s piece in SF Examiner

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This lonnnnng post was prompted by an email linking Michael Barone’s latest SF Examiner piece, which asks Republicans “Now what?” after assuming some strong gains in November.  I have a few ideas on the “now what?” question, and I can’t think of a better place to post them than on this excellent blog.

First, I can’t thank you all enough for the excellent commentary and critiques on my recent “Swapping a VAT for failing income tax is Good Policy” post a week or so ago.  I’ve commented on many of your ideas, and I think you’ve changed my mind on a thing or two, which you will notice below.

I wanted to follow up that post with another proposal that fixes the primary problem with going to consumption taxes, which is their impact on the working poor and middle class. One benefit of a consumption-based tax regime is that it captures money from every transaction, making every one a part of the solution to our fiscal mess.  It is also far more stable than a highly skewed progressive system that only taxes the rich. (Social Security notwithstanding)

The most difficult political and policy problem preventing the adoption of a consumption based tax system is that it places a “burden” on the working poor and middle class. (burden being interpreted both in policy and political terms)

Simply put, in a consumption tax system, the lower end of the earning spectrum pays a much greater share of their income in taxes than the rich.  Many will argue that this is “unfair.”  Leaving that argument aside, it is fair to say that this problem MUST be resolved before any politician is going to risk moving the entire system away from income taxes.

I propose such a solution in this post, beginning with my answer to Barone’s “Now What?”

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“Mama, mama, you got some money for me?”

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This part of Chicagoland tells a story and it’s a pretty familiar urban tale: the rise and fall of a neighborhood. Rickety houses in complete disrepair mingle with neatly kept bungalows – the stalwarts, I like to call them – whose trimmed lawns and white painted bars over windows and doors tell a different story. Someone here has a job.

The stories people tell me and the stories I’ve run across.

During the mid nineties, I rotated through the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office for a few months during one of my medical resident rotations. One of the autopsies I witnessed involved a suicide in jail. The pathologist had gone to the jail, as I recall, and brought back some personal artifacts in order to put the case together properly. One of the artifacts was a suicide note and I was allowed to look through it. I remember something like this: “noone ever loved me my mom wanted to abort me noone wanted me noone wanted me.” The words aren’t exact, but I remember the white notebook paper the words were written on and the round loopy “running together” handwriting as clear as day. I always say none of this stuff gets to me but I remember a few details with such clarity that I wonder if it is really true.

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An Uncomfortable Intimacy

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Following up on Lex’s point…

For most  of the course of human events, mankind lived in tribes.  Behavior was regulated by intimate and persistent relationships, many with blood relations. The prolonged development required by human children assumed prolonged immersion in a cultural torrent fed by close physical proximity to fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and the occasional stray outsider. Through this immersion, acceptable behavior was impressed on a child’s mind through a mix of deliberate and accidental lessons cumulatively applied over decades. When personal survival depended entirely on face to face relationships with others, the incentive to conform to what the tribe found acceptable was strong.

As Peter Turchin discussed in War and Peace and War, every human group, including tribes, is made up of three kinds of people:

  • knave: puts individual  interests before group interests
  • saint: puts group interests before individual interests
  • moralist: conditionally puts individual interests before group interests

If moralists can punish knaves for not pursuing group interests, they will willingly put group interests ahead of their individual interests. If moralists can’t punish knaves, they opt out of pursuing group interests and only pursue their individual interests.

Since any human group is roughly ¼  knave, ¼  saint, and ½  moralist, this potentially pits ¾  of the group against the knaves. Within a tribe, knaves face an additional problem: the size of a tribe is usually smaller than Dunbar’s number. Dunbar’s number is the “number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained” within the limits of the human mind. If group size is less than Dunbar’s number (around 150 people), moralists can know who’s a knave and who isn’t, allowing them to monitor and punish known knaves.

Consistent face to face intimacy with saints or moralists makes knavery difficult.

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An Interesting “Collapse” Hypothetical

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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, the famous Reagan administration economist and now an embittered and cranky paleoconservative social critic, penned a short but intriguing American “collapse” scenario set in the near future. Some of what Roberts writes fits neatly with the thesis in Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies:

The Year America Dissolved

….As society broke down, the police became warlords. The state police broke apart, and the officers were subsumed into the local forces of their communities. The newly formed tribes expanded to encompass the relatives and friends of the police.
 
The dollar had collapsed as world reserve currency in 2012 when the worsening economic depression made it clear to Washington’s creditors that the federal budget deficit was too large to be financed except by the printing of money. With the dollar’s demise, import prices skyrocketed. As Americans were unable to afford foreign-made goods, the transnational corporations that were producing offshore for US markets were bankrupted, further eroding the government’s revenue base.
 

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