Political Philosophy

Big Wheel Cease from Turnin’

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deltaqueen1

The steamboat Delta Queen is a well-known and much-loved vessel. Built in 1926, she is 285 feet long, with a steel hull, powered by two steam engines of 2000HP each. She was originally used for passenger service between San Francisco and Sacramento. After being refurbished in 1945, she began service on the Mississippi River and its tributaries, and has operated in that role ever since. Thousands of Americans have enjoyed river cruising on the Delta Queen.

Not any more, though. Delta Queen made her last passenger voyage in 2008, and is now tied up as a hotel in Chattanooga. The end of passenger service is not due to any structural or mechanical problems with the vessel, nor is it due to the difficult economy. Rather, the demise of the Delta Queen says a great deal–not much of it very encouraging–about the political and cultural environment now existing in this country.

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Be Afraid

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Many Unhappy Returns, by Charles Rossotti, is the story of Rossotti’s experiences as IRS Commissioner, which position he held from 1997-2002–having previously spent his career in the private sector and been cofounder & chairman of American Management Systems Inc. I picked the book up for a dollar at a library book sale, thinking it might offer an interesting case study on the challenges of managing and improving a very large bureaucratic organization.

And I’m sure it does. On the very first pages of the book, though, are some stories which are very relevant to our current political situation.

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Unions Are Grounded in Violence

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This story about French union members threatening to blow up their factory if their demands are not met [h/t Instapundit] lays bare the ugly truth about unions.  The French union members are simply reminding the French people of where their union’s true power springs from.  The power of unions does not come from warm and fuzzy class solidarity and negotiation but rather from the willingness of union members to destroy and kill in order to further their own economic self-interest.

Back in the 1930s the government took over the role of forcing union demands on everyone else, so we have forgotten the ugly, violent, racist roots of union power. We’ve allowed the unions to sell us a mythology about unions being little people fighting the big and powerful.

In reality, unions function by hurting everyone outside the union, especially the poor and powerless.

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“…their total inability to admit the possibility of a social order which is not made by political design”

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In Britain and among the English-speaking peoples … Locke’s ideas were simply combined with the old English tradition of limited government. Rather than a project for a new society and a new morality, the English revolution of 1688 and, to a lesser extent, the American revolution of 1776 were basically, though not only, a reassertion of the rights of free Englishman to live their lives as they used to live them before—under the common protection of the laws of the land. In other words, what we now call liberal democracy has emerged in the Anglosphere as a natural outgrowth of existing, law-abiding and moral-abiding ways of life. For this reason, liberal democracy among the English speaking peoples has been naturally associated with an ethos of duty—which, as Burke pointed out, is not and should not be deduced from will. For this reason, too, liberal democracy in the Anglosphere has been tremendously stable. And the English-speaking peoples have always been the first to rise in defence of their cherished liberties—their way of life.
 
In continental Europe, by contrast, the idea of liberty has tended to be understood as an adversarial project: adversarial to all existing ways of life simply because, in a sense, they were already there; because they had not been designed by ‘Reason’. This has generated a lasting instability in European politics. This adversarial attitude, combined with a widespread disregard for limited government, has led European politics to be recurrently dominated by two absolutist poles: revolutionary liberals and later revolutionary socialists, on the one hand, and counter-revolutionary conservatives, on the other. They both have aimed at using government without limits to push forward their particular, and usually sectarian, agendas. Their clash—the clash between the so-called liberal project and traditional ways of life—has been at the root of the historical weakness of European liberal democracy, when compared with liberal democracy among the English speaking peoples. This weakness also explains why, differently from the English-speaking peoples, continental Europeans are not usually the first to rise in defence of our liberties when our liberties become at risk.

João Carlos Espada, Edmund Burke and the Anglo-American Tradition of Liberty (2006)

These Job Makers are Going, Boys, and They Ain’t Coming Back

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Now main streets whitewashed windows and vacant stores

Seems like there aint nobody wants to come down here no more

They’re closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks

Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain’t coming back to

Your hometown, your hometown, your hometown, your hometown

— Bruce Springsteen and E-Street Band, Your Hometown

Obama in Michigan

“The hard truth is that some of the jobs that have been lost in the auto industry and elsewhere won’t be coming back,” he said in a speech at Macomb Community College in Warren, Mich. “They are the casualties of a changing economy. And that only underscores the importance of generating new businesses and industries to replace the ones we’ve lost, and of preparing our workers to fill jobs they create.
 
He added, “For even before this recession hit, we were faced with an economy that was simply not creating or sustaining enough new, well-paying jobs.”
 
But some economists believe Obama is training people for failure.

Well, perhaps training people for his failure. The real problem is that neither Obama nor The Bruce understands what jobs really are.

We talk about jobs as if they are physical objects. We find jobs. We lose them. We trade them. We save them. We export them by shipping them overseas. Occasionally, we believe they are stolen. Metaphors are common in language and usually harmless, but sometimes we seem to forget that they are metaphors. This in turn causes us to misunderstand the phenomenom under discussion.

In the case of jobs, the metaphor stops us from asking what physical event actually occurs when jobs “go away” and “don’t come back.” Examining this metaphor tells us something that is very important and ignored in most political discussions.

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