Political Philosophy

Stimulus Bungle

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Government as a real-world institution makes very poor decisions overall. Many people buy into the myth that individuals in government who are driven by a greed for power make better decisions than do people outside of government who act from other motives. A Fox News analysis [h/t Instapundit] provides profound evidence this is not the case.

Comparisons between foundering California and prospering Texas are all the rage now because the differences are quite stark. Now matter what area you examine, California is hurting badly. The state was Ground Zero for the housing bust. Unemployment is exploding and people are leaving the state in droves. Texas, by contrast, escaped the housing bust, has a balanced budget, a growing manufacturing sector and low unemployment compared to most places.

Clearly, California needs more help than Texas. (What form that help should take is another discussion.)

Look at this Wall Street Journal table (scroll down) that breaks down the per capita stimulus spending for each state. Compare California and Texas. Texas get more money per capita from the stimulus in virtually every single category, sometimes by quite a lot. When California does get more per capita it’s not by much.  When you factor in Texas’s significantly lower cost of living, the comparison looks even worse.

How did the political system crank out such a perverse result? It can’t be political pull. The Texas federal delegation is overwhelmingly Republican and therefore locked out of the stimulus distribution. Texas has even less pull with the Obama White House. As previously noted, Obama routed money preferentially to areas that supported him, which in the main Texas did not.

In a time of perceived national emergency and one-party rule, fans of government decisionmaking would predict that government would make even better decisions than usual, but,  unsurprisingly to the rest of us, in the bizarre sausage-making nightmare of the federal political system, Texas came out with more money per capita than California. If the political system worked as well as it does in the fantasies of leftists, all of the money that went to Texas would have gone to California instead. Even those of us who believe the stimulus foolish nevertheless believe that we should at least spend the money on the people hurting.

The guy with the surfboard needs the help not the guy with the Waverider. Why couldn’t the real-world federal political process figure that out?

texasvscalifornia

Leszek Kołakowski (October 23, 1927 – July 17, 2009)

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A bit of a Chicago Boy, as it turns out. Thanks to Pejman for the tip. Requiescat in pace.

Sheeple

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sheeple

From xkcd

We all seem possessed by the fear we are not special. We cannot emotionally tolerate that each of us apprehends only a tiny piece of  reality. We create a fantasy in which whatever special piece of knowledge we believe we possess grants us a superior understanding as compared to all others. This fantasy lets us view ourselves as deserving a higher status in society than all others.  

Some people build political ideologies around this fantasy.  

Another Day, Another Speech, Another History Trashed

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Claudia Rossett’s “The Bear Scare” analyzes Obama’s rather weak grasp of history on display in Moscow as it was in Cairo. But it is not just the confused focus, the generalizations at odds with history. It is also an attitude. She speaks of the real blood and treasure with which we have defended freedom; more importantly, “Americans kept brilliantly alive a philosophy of democratic government and free markets, which offered a beacon to oppressed people of the world, and exported both ideas and inventions that have vastly enriched mankind.” Were Russians surprised a U.S. President interpreted their history as he did?

In Obama’s version of history, Soviet communism (which he referred to not by name but as “old political and economic restrictions”) came to an end through some sort of brotherly mass movement: “The change did not come from any one nation,” he told an audience of Russian students. “The Cold War reached a conclusion because of the actions of many nations over many years, and because the people of Russia and Eastern Europe stood up and decided that its end would be peaceful.”

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New Frontiers in Irresponsibility

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A week ago today, the House of Representatives passed the very long and complex Waxman-Markey energy bill. This bill included 300 pages of amendments which were added by the Democratic leadership at 3:00 AM Friday morning. It is impossible that any of those voting on the bill could have read and understood this complete bill as amended. (Many of the amendments were apparently of the “subparagraph (c) of paragraph XXII is amended to replace AAAA by BBBB” type, which require careful and undisturbed thought to comprehend.)

This bill, should it become law, will have enormous impact on the lives of all Americans and on future generations. There was no particular reason why it had to be voted on last Friday, except possibly for Nancy Pelosi’s vacation plans. It says much about the character of the majority of members of this House that they passed it without reading and understanding it.

What would we think of a financial manager/advisor who invested all of a family’s money into a particular investment without doing serious due diligence–who, for example, put all the money into purchasing a fast-food franchise without bothering to read either the prospectus or the franchise agreement? How about “violation of fiduciary responsibility?” What this House has done is similar in principle, though obviously much further-reaching in its implications.

Dear liberal and “progressive” friends: When you talk about drastically expanding the role of government in American society, remember that “government” is not some abstract and benign entity. Are you really comfortable having every detail of your life planned for you by people who take their responsibilities with as little seriousness as that demonstrated by the House last week?

If government by the people is “democracy,” and government by an elite is “aristocracy”…I wonder what the proper Greek would be for “government by clowns”?