Political Philosophy

Quote of the Day

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From a comment by “Whiskey” in a thread at Belmont Club:

But clearly, the elites must be purged from all institutions and life. The attitudes of Obama or Goldman Sachs (screw the customer, because you are powerful) even when shown to be long-term bad, continue in the attitudes described by Michael Lewis in Liar’s Poker.
 
How can the elites be purged?
 
Fear and terror. Not by anything violent and illegal, not only is that course counter productive but middle class people are neither violent nor criminal — it is why they are middle class in the first place.
 
The elites have a great weakness. A hideous one. They and particularly the media cover for each other so much that all their dirty secrets are not even hidden. They are out in the open for anyone to see. John Edwards, Eliot Spitzer, Blago, Mayor Tony Villaraigosa, Gavin Newsome, John Ensign, Dennis Hastert, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, and the rest all had their scandals widely known. EVERYONE in the elite knew about them, and never uttered them publicly. The people involved did not try to hide it.
 
What we need is an army of Luke Fords. Bloggers, who have some traffic, no ambition for politics, who don’t mind personal attacks, publishing the ugly, sordid, nasty, and often illegal details of the lives of political, cultural, economic, and bureaucratic elite. Plus their friends, families, and supporters. Simply being around, soaking up the open secrets, and publishing their ugly details, would be enough to push a purging frenzy. Particularly if one could jigger the job as being motivated by insider enemies. For example, unflattering and true details about Rahm Emmanuel being ascribed to people around Bill Clinton. To use a hypothetical. Elite infighting is another weakness.
 
The strength of the people is that they don’t make good Alinsky targets. Joe the Plumber is just a guy. So too, Luke Ford, or Mickey Kaus, or anyone else. It is the logical culmination of asymmetric political warfare.

Read the whole thing.

Quote of the Day

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From a comment on a post at Belmont Club:

…There is also the problem of the elite’s lack of humility. I’m a pretty smart guy, and I think I could do a decent job of re-ordering the world if given absolute power.
 
But … It wouldn’t be right. It is not up to me to tell my fellow humans how to live. I think bowling, for instance, is stupid, though many people enjoy it. What/who gives me the right to tell bowlers that they should be going to the symphony instead?
 
But nobody is forcing me to go bowling and nobody is using my tax dollars to subsidize bowling, so I don’t care. Not my business, and not a problem. This is the essence of liberty.
 
For a thought experiment, substitute guns, french fries, or abortion for bowling above and see how you feel. The realization that you do not have the Moral Authority to try to construct a perfect world that eliminates what you dislike is the essence of humility. Many very bright people lack humility.

Paul Revere’s Ride, April 18, 1775

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paul revere

… For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

God bless America.

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Paying Higher Taxes Can Be Very Profitable (rerun)

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(I originally posted this on Jan 2….given that today is April 14, it seems like an appropriate time to run it again)

Chevy Chase, MD, is an affluent suburb of Washington DC. Median household income is over $200K, and a significant percentage of households have incomes that are much, much higher. Stores located in Chevy Chase include Tiffany & Co, Ralph Lauren, Christian Dior, Versace, Jimmy Choo, Nieman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Saks-Jandel.

PowerLine observes that during the election season, yards in Chevy Chase were thick with Obama signs–and wonders how these people are now feeling about the prospect of sharp tax increases for people in their income brackets.

The PowerLine guys are very astute, but I think they’re missing a key point on this one. There are substantial groups of people who stand to benefit financially from the policies of the Obama/Pelosi/Reid triumvirate, and these benefits can greatly outweigh the costs of any additional taxes that these policies require them to pay. Many of the residents of Chevy Chase–a very high percentage of whom get their income directly or indirectly from government activities–fall into this category.

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Volitional causation versus systemic analysis

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Neither in his theory of economics nor in his theory of history did Marx make end results simply the carrying out of individual volition, even the volition of elites. As his collaborator Friedrich Engels put it, “what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.” Economics is about the pattern that emerges. Historian Charles A. Beard could seek to explain the Constitution of the United States by the economic interests of those who wrote it but that volitional approach was not the approach used by Marx and Engels, despite how often Beard’s theory of history has been confused with the Marxian theory of history. Marx dismissed a similar theory in his own day as “facile anecdote-mongering and the attribution of all great events to petty and mean causes.”
 
The question here is not whether most intellectuals agree with systemic analysis, either in economics or elsewhere. Many have never even considered, much less confronted, that kind of analysis. Those who reason in terms of volitional causation see chaos from conflicting individual decisions as the alternative to central control of economic processes. John Dewey said, “comprehensive plans” are required “if the problem of social organization is to be met.” Otherwise, there will be “a continuation of a regime of accident, waste and distress.” To Dewey, “dependence upon intelligence” is an alternative to “drift and casual improvisation” – that is, chaos – and those who are “hostile to intentional social planning” are in favor of “atomistic individualism.”

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society