Monday, November 1, 2010

Rix Pix 2010: Cold Bath


For the most part I keep this blog free of my politics, except as my broad political philosophy shapes my opinion on the topics discussed here - which is quite a bit.

But I have made a long term tradition of putting out my US election forecasts and commentary, originally as an email. Now that I have a blog I hijack it. The nearly half of you who come from elsewhere can skip this without perceptible loss; in fact so can my fellow 'Murricans. But I actually invite you to stick around; some global perspective would be interesting in comments.


I am a yellow dog Democrat, and we're gonna take a shellackin' tomorrow night.

This is the least of surprises. The country has a nasty economic hangover, and who is the electorate going to take it out on but the party in power? (I could say a word or two about the Bundesbank, for whom every year is 1924, but they aren't on the US ballot.) I think the argument that Obama's policies helped keep us from going over a cliff is valid, but it is not a vote getter.

House of Representatives - net Dem loss 56 seats, GOP takeover

House Democrats will bear the brunt of it. My call is thoroughly middle of the road, and leaves the next House with 235 Republicans and 200 Democrats, an 18 point GOP margin. Some of those Republicans are convincing evidence of interstellar travel, but they will be shuffled off to the remoter reaches of C-Span and YouTube, and the GOP House will focus on keeping the legislative branch tied up in knots, which is both easy and effective for them.


Senate - net Dem loss 6 seats, Dems retain majority

Senate Democrats will also take a drubbing, but will probably keep the majority, not that narrow Senate majorities are good for a whole lot, especially when the other party has the House.

Sorry, Harry Reid. He may be remembered as a very effective Majority Leader, but Nevada is a stranded space colony, and the colonists will send the Imperial governor out the airlock. I won't be so sorry about Feingold; a bit self righteous and a bit of a showhorse were a bit too much.


President Obama

He is not on the ballot, but will take a media beating in the short run. This is irrelevant to his political fate. Barring the unforeseen, meaning mainly a crisis abroad, that will depend on what happens to the US economy over the next two years. Adam Smith's animal spirits did not come across for him and the Dems this year, but I would not bet against them two years from now.

I know the economic conventional wisdom is that a sluggish economy will persist for years, but the ECW usually just mirrors the recent past. In some alternate world we will turn away from consumption and austerity will become a way of life. This is the same alternate world where 9/11 made Americans serious and thoughful about foreign policy.

In the real world we are 'Murricans. We like to buy stuff. We have had to put it off because some of us lost jobs and more found out their homes weren't piggy banks after all (or found they were broken ones). We will start buying stuff again. So the economy will probably pick up enough for Obama to claim credit in 2012, whether he deserves it or not. In the meanwhile he will discover the world, because that is what presidents do when they can't get anything through Congress.


California

The Golden State is apparently on a different planet in this election from the rest of the US, and politically a much more habitable one. This in spite of the fact that the Great Recession hit harder here than in most places, and a dozen lost colonies' worth of abandoned housing developments.

Perhaps that is because the face of the GOP in California is Arnold Schwarzeneggar, who as it turned out was not only no Terminator, but also no Ronald Reagan. As it looks now, Barbara Boxer will be re-elected Senator, but at least to me the big story will be the second coming of Jerry Brown, who I voted for in the 1970s and have already voted for again.

And on the footnotes of politics front I will go out on a bud, as it were, and venture that Proposition 19 will pass, making personal possession of marijuana legal under state law.



The image of the Acropolis comes from a collection of travel photos.

37 comments:

M. D. Van Norman said...

As a contrarian libertarian communist, I have to comment.

First, the President’s party almost always suffers in the midterm elections. The Democrats have also burned an unusually large amount of political capital this time around. We’ll soon know how badly that has hurt them.

However, my yellow-dog friends need not fret too much. While I disagree with a lot of the casual socialism espoused by the modern Democratic Party, the brochures are very pretty. The Republicans are inept propagandists by comparison and are just as likely to squander any significant electoral victory.

That said, a Republican Congress could help the Democrats with a couple thorny issues. With these out of the way, voters who cleave to the Republican Party over social issues may begin to transfer their loyalty for economic reasons. After all, who doesn’t want to soak the rich?

Second, California is a mess, and which party has been in power for 20+ years? Despite that, I will also be voting E. G. Brown for governor. He turned out to be an excellent attorney general, and he’s honest about being a Democrat, unlike his primary opponent.

If redistricting reforms actually go into effect next year, we may finally see some changes. Of course, the Democrats may very well clinch power. In that case, California will either hit rock bottom, or competition within the Democratic Party will start to restore some rationality therein.

Rodney said...

As a left-leaning Democrat in an extremely conservative area, I haven’t felt that I’ve had much say in elections in the last few years (Obama was the first candidate that I voted for in any election that won since I came of voting age in ’98). Are elections supposed to cause depression and feelings of helplessness?

In any case, I think you’re probably right about the Congressional elections. Whether that actually has an effect on anything in the next two years is debatable. If anything, it will probably keep something from happening. You’re also probably right about next year being the start of the Obama World Tour. That said, Clinton had to deal with a Republican led Congress for most of his presidency, and he did quite a bit. That was another time, though. I things have gotten a little too partisan for Obama to get anything on his agenda done.

The next two years are going to be interesting, as in, “may you live in interesting times.”

P.S. So, in California, the big Prop will allow for personal possession of pot. In Florida, the big amendments involved districting and comprehensive land use? I’m in the wrong state!

Tony said...

Nation:

The 800 lb gorilla in the room that nobody seems to want to talk about is that it's turning out people don't really want what they voted for in 2008.

Healthcare Reform sounded good in the abstract, but when people saw the implementation and the bill attached to it, they said to themselves, "I didn't sign up for that."

I'm personally agnostic about the bank and auto industry bailouts. Maybe it was right, maybe it was wrong, maybe it didn't make a difference. But the idea that it was done and didn't have positive results is what people are voting on, not whether it kept worse from happening -- not that anyone can actually prove that it did.

Obama made good on his promise to make Afghanistan our war of choice, instead of Iraq. (And let's not kid ourselves -- past the point of the inital punitive campaign against Taliban and al Qaeda on 2001-2, it Afghanistan been a war of choice.) Problem is, we're spinning in cirlces there.

When Obama came in, a lot of people were afraid of the cult of personality. Better for the country, but worse for the Democrats, it has turned out that Obama is pretty much the Chicago machine politician his background suggested he was. His kind of politics may work in Chicagoland, but all it's done on the national stage is convert the cult of personality into a cult of buffoonery. It's so bad that where Dick Cheney was seen as the court Svengali of the Bush Administration, Biden is seen as the court jester of this one -- and that's a step up from where he started out.

I really don't GAS what your politics are, or where they place in comparison to mine. The reason today is going to be, well, Today, is because Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress have governed impractically and ineffectively. And that should be inexcusable, no matter who you are.

California:

I was born there. I lived there for about 34 of the susequent 37 years. (And was only away for those three years on my Uncle Sam's business.) But I left, like many people have left, because it had become a nightmare to keep on living there. And, because bad money drives out good, it will keep getting worse.

Anonymous said...

I hate politics, but they are a nessicary evil for a representitive republic. That having been said, I do feel that the major problem with American politics today is that the two major national parties have become too ideologically-driven. To illustrate my point, just look at how Congressmen are identified: their title, name, and their party affiliation; you are left guessing what state they are from, or it is mentioned as an after thought. Our politicians are more loyal to their political party than the people who voted them into office. This seems like a plot from a bad work of fiction, but it does seem like reality. As I get older, the more I feel that Jefferson had it right when he said that he didn't think that political parties were a good idea. Oh, a piece of good news (good to me, anyway), I just heard on the news that if the Republican candidate for governor does't get at least 10% of the vote, then the Republican party will be officially declared an "minor party". One down, one to go...

Yes, I do sound jaded and cynical; are any of you surprised? Oh, and as far as California's Prop 19, it seems like the first big assault on modern day Prohibition...(and we all know how well that went).

The Democrats and Republicans seem like two people fighting about what color to paint the walls, while ignoring the fact that the building is falling down arount their ears...

Rant over

Ferrell

Ferrard Carson said...

It really appears to be a lose-lose situation to me, but that might just be because of a string of really crappy weeks involving much unexpected drama.

If the Dems retain control of a part of Congress, then we're stuck with the same old deadlock that's defined American politics for two years at the very least, 16 years if you count the start being Newt Gingrich's rise in 1994.

If the Reps gain control of a part of Congress, then they immediately start repealing everything they can get their grubby paws on before realizing that they really have no idea who the hell they just let into Congress. All these Tea Party candidates will shed their populist coats and there'll be a three-way in Congress, and by that I refer to a fight, not the other thing.

Either way, not a lick of good governing will get done, and America's going to end up worse off in 2012 for whichever unlucky (fatherless-son) gets stuck with the presidency then.

I dunno. I've had a bad month.

~ Ferrard

Tony said...

God, I just luv political fear and loathing.

Look, young Jedis, the people didn't get what they voted for in 2008. So they're going to shake things up and see what falls out. If they get what they want, they'll confirm it in 2012. If they don't, they'll shake things up some more.

That's all that's going on. Don't confirm your ignorance to others eyes by demonizing one party or the other, or the process overall.

Thucydides said...

Many longer term trends are coming home to roost, including the increasing disconnect between the elected and the electors, and the effects of disintermediation and structural changes in the economy and culture, meaning many of the traditional "client" groups of each party have far different amounts of influence than they used to have (mostly less), while others are now trying to grab the spoils government power seems to offer.

Not to worry, the same wave is rising in Canada as well. The City of Toronto has elected a populist mayor who would not be out of place at a TEA party rally, while many other local politicians have been turfed in this round of municipal elections as voters long for change, but haven't quite settled on a vision of what that change should actually be.

Many of the arguments floated on the City-State thread are reflections of that sort of thinking, clearly things are no longer working the way they have in the past, but what mechanisms will be both workable and acceptable in the future? (Note these are not always the same, the Fascist Corporate State could boast that the "trains run on time" but few today would be in favour of that solution).

Rick said...

"Thank you, Sir; may I have another!"

Well, that felt about as good as predicted, which wasn't very. Final House numbers are still hazy, but it looks like the GOP picked up a few more seats than I predicted, 60 plus. Dems fared better in the Senate, retaining control. Feingold went down, but Reid didn't go out the Vegas airlock after all.

In California both Boxer and Jerry Brown went down. No legal buds, alas, but a far more consequential ballot measure did pass, Prop 25, allowing a simple majority in the Legislature to pass the state budget - breaking the GOP budget stranglehold.


Thanks to everyone who commented! The point about burning, or at any rate spending, political capital is an interesting one. Obama spent his, and I think was well served to do so - if he had played defensive ball the last two years, Dems would still have taken a beating, but with far less to show for it and far less to run on in 2012.

I am an unabashed partisan, but will waste no time on fear & loathing. Nor do I think the 'Murrican political system is going to hell in a handbasket.

In spite of the cult of the independent voter, political parties have gotten stronger, and this is a point where I think the Framers had it wrong. But bear in mind that when the Federalist talks about 'party' it does not mean political parties in our sense. They meant personalist factions of the sort familiar in ancient and medieval city states.

Modern political parties (not just in the US but around the democratic world) are much more like the 'disunion of the Senate and people' that Nick Machiavelli identified as a foundation of Roman liberty. The left/right distinction is crude and frequently inconsistent, but broadly reflects the basic interest division between those with plenty of access to resources and those with less.

Tony said...

Rick:

"The left/right distinction is crude and frequently inconsistent, but broadly reflects the basic interest division between those with plenty of access to resources and those with less."

I think that depends critically on how you define "have" and "have not". In a lot of ways, it's much more philosophical than situational. I have access to far less resources than the stereotypical Republican. But I'll never vote Democrat, because IMO their governing philosophy is informed by radical levelling and loom breaking impulses, which I have deep philosophical convictions against.

Anonymous said...

So the party of George Soros, John (Heinz) Kerry, Steve Jobs, and Warren Buffett is the party of those with less "access to resources"?

Pull the other one.

Tony said...

Let's not be mean. Rick is our host. And I understand what he's getting at. If I shared his values, I'd think the same thing, for the same reasons, ultra-rich outliers notwithstanding.

And it's hardly the time for the Republicans, or conservatives in general, to crow. What was said last night by many Republican electees is 100% true: the people have given them a second shot at something most folks don't get a first shot at. They need to listen to what the people want, not what their ideology tells them to do.

Rick said...

Oops, mistake in my last reply, I mean both Boxer and Jerry Brown won.

I see that it did not take long for a political post to draw an anonymous, drive-by flame. But I'll address the substance. There is nothing new about individual nobili becoming leaders of the populus; it is as old as Pericles and the Gracchi, or 'traitor to his class' FDR.

In a future post I may discuss the basis of my political philosophy, since it is relevant to a lot of what we discuss here. But in a nutshell there is a natural and necessary alliance of king and commons against the barons. It is dysfunctional in the rare if spectacular cases where it wipes out the baronial class, but in normal conditions it just keeps them restrained.

Thucydides said...

Politics is fascinating for so many reasons, but also a source of inflamed passions.

I have a sense that the notion of "Politics is a means of distributing scarce resources" (the organizational theory definition) is going to be heavily redefined in the future as the notion of scarce resources changes. If there is limited access to information, then getting in with Tammany Hall or the Chicago Machine makes perfect sense, you now are plugged into information and can use that to access resources.

If you can access information directly, then you have more options and the ability to organize to gain access to resources and achieve your own goals. The growth of the home schooling movement is an example (since it is a DYI movement, it cuts out the entire education bureaucracy and the political apparatus that drives funding towards education).

Since we are in an evolutionary period, the narratives of political parties, "Left" and "Right" are still in use, but have less and less relationship to the real world we are observing. The partisanship of political supporters becomes less and less connected to the "severely normal" people who are not partisan, while parties of all stripes (and in all nations) seem to be striving harder to remain relevant

Anonymous said...

I wasn't drive-by trolling, I'm serious. The party that raised more money for this year's campaign season is somehow the party of people with less resources?

I know the Democrats love to posture as the "party of the poor" but is that actually true? It looks like the party of billionaires to me.

Ferrard Carson said...

All parties are parties of billionaires. What's your point? And more importantly, what's your name?

Anyways, lots of good points. I will grant that this change in America's political landscape is likely nowhere near as bad as three-quarters of the media is saying, and nowhere near as good as the last quarter insists.

I don't feel as though either party has a good metric on the sentiment of the country, although that may just be the cable cabals ramming their own take on it down our throats.

Random thought: What role would media conglomerates play in interplanetary / interstellar politics? I mean, a great deal of it would depend on the level of communications technology, but still... Something to think about in class.

~ Ferrard

Tony said...

Re:

"I wasn't drive-by trolling, I'm serious. The party that raised more money for this year's campaign season is somehow the party of people with less resources?

I know the Democrats love to posture as the "party of the poor" but is that actually true? It looks like the party of billionaires to me."


Parties exist to win elections, not promote ideologies. (Well, in single-party autocracies there is a party theorist, but his job is to make excuses that look good in the preferred jargon, not actually think deeply and philosophically.) They'll always be backed by rich, powerful men.

Now, whether those men have an ideology themsleves, or are up to something else, that's a very interesting question. Are they buying protection, promoting what they believe should be, or simply seeking power through innfluence? And that question could be asked equally of the wealthy backers of both the Left and Right.

Rick said...

There is a lot of low budget Machiavellianism out there that would benefit from actually reading Old Nick, and the Discourses as well as everyone's favorite political porn, The Prince.

I think a lot of people have a genuine belief that they can be world savers. Meg Whitman could have found a lot more fun things to do with $100 million of her own money than spend it losing the California governor's race to Jerry Brown.

How they plan to save the world is determined background, outlook, interest, and the rest of the usual human things. Naked cynicism is difficult; willful self delusion is extremely easy and common.

Tony said...

Rick:

"Naked cynicism is difficult; willful self delusion is extremely easy and common."

Wow, in context, the perfect recursive sentence...

Anonymous said...

Tony said:"God, I just luv political fear and loathing.

Look, young Jedis, the people didn't get what they voted for in 2008. So they're going to shake things up and see what falls out. If they get what they want, they'll confirm it in 2012. If they don't, they'll shake things up some more.

That's all that's going on. Don't confirm your ignorance to others eyes by demonizing one party or the other, or the process overall."

Oh, I believe in the system; it's the people IN the system that I have a problem with. If every state had a "None of the above" on the ballot, like Utah does, I'd be much happier. I started voting in 1979 and I often times find that the cadidates are equally reprihensible...I don't know if it's because getting older and grumpier has made me view politicians in a less-than-favorable way, or if politicians really are getting grubbier...I susspect that they have always been grubby, but I'm just noticing it more and more... Whatever.
Washington really needs to make some unpopular (i.e. needs, not wants) decisions. We, as a country, need to stop spending more than we take in; that is basic to everyone who can balance a checkbook, but somehow is beyond the abilities of Congress. That alone should indicate a major problem with the people who seek public office. Again, the system isn't broken, but the people WE send there seem to be...

Ferrell

Thucydides said...

Mostly a matter of incentives.

"We the People" (from anyplace) want to transfer our costs to someone else. "They the Politicians" will happily promise to do so for their client base, and stick you with the tab (so long as you are not in the client base). Once they ran out of people to stick it to, they resorted to accounting fictions and discovered that the one demographic which can't protest being presented the bill is the next generation or two, who haven't even been born yet to contest the issue.

So long as "We the People" are happy to have our bills being taken care of by others (The "rich", the flyover states (or Alberta if you are from Canada), the "Untermensch" or whatever), then we have lots of incentive to elect weasels to office and they have lots of incentives to act like weasels.

Rick said...

In a democracy, or any accountable political system, making unpopular decisions is ... difficult. Especially when there is strong disagreement about WHICH unpopular decision should be made.

I don't think the analogy of public finance to the family checkbook holds up, but I can't add much to a debate that has been going at least since Keynes and the 30s.

Tony said...

Ferrell:

"If every state had a 'None of the above' on the ballot, like Utah does, I'd be much happier."

I vote in Utah. There is no such choice on our ballots. Except for format differences made necessary by differences in vote recording technology, they're organized the same way as the ones I used to vote in California.

An a "none of the above" choice isn't necessary. It doesn't invalidate the ballot to skip making a choice in one or more of the elections. The right to vote includes the right to abstain.

If you're talking about a binding NOTA, that fails to elect anyone if it captures the majority, count me out. We don't need more chaos than we already have in our electoral system.

"Again, the system isn't broken, but the people WE send there seem to be..."

The people we send are the people we vote for. If you object to the choice of candidates, look no further than your friends and neighbors who won't vote for any other kind.

Anonymous said...

Tony said:"An a "none of the above" choice isn't necessary. It doesn't invalidate the ballot to skip making a choice in one or more of the elections. The right to vote includes the right to abstain.

If you're talking about a binding NOTA, that fails to elect anyone if it captures the majority, count me out. We don't need more chaos than we already have in our electoral system."

If there is a binding NOTA that recieves the majority, then the state legislature and/or governor appoints a temporary senator or rep. until a special election can be held. The only stipulation is that none of the people on the ballot can be appointed. The whole point is to vote AGAINST the candidates presented. I may have gotten the state wrong that has NOTA on the ballot, but you knew what I meant, obviously.

Ferrell

Tony said...

Ferrell:

"If there is a binding NOTA that recieves the majority, then the state legislature and/or governor appoints a temporary senator or rep. until a special election can be held. The only stipulation is that none of the people on the ballot can be appointed. The whole point is to vote AGAINST the candidates presented. I may have gotten the state wrong that has NOTA on the ballot, but you knew what I meant, obviously."

It's a particularly un-brilliant idea, whoever might do it. The objective of an election is to decide something, not postpone the decision. Dithering is dithering, whether it's an individual failing or an institutional one.

Thucydides said...

Interesting perspective from the UK:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/janetdaley/8114728/The-West-is-turning-against-big-government-but-what-comes-next.html

Tony said...

Thucydides...

I'm an American-style conservative (though not a partisan or activist one), and even I can see that an op-ed in the Torygraph is usually full of ridiculous ideas. The piece you offered is no different. The liquidation of the social welfar state, is not a moral issue. It's a practical one, to the degree that it happens at all. Likewise ridiculous is the veiled reference to the Laffer Curve, which describes an interesting phenomenon, but isn't exactly an economic law that can be invoked as the author does.

Anonymous said...

Tony said:"It's a particularly un-brilliant idea, whoever might do it. The objective of an election is to decide something, not postpone the decision. Dithering is dithering, whether it's an individual failing or an institutional one."
So, you avocate one of three choices:
1)Vote for someone you don't trust
2)Vote for someone you feel is incompitant
or 3)not voting and leaving your fate in the hands of others who share the traits of 1) and/or 2) above. That strikes me as un-brilliant...

Ferrell

Thucydides said...

Tony, I found the article interesting from several perspectives:

1. England is the source of lots of socialist theory and ideas (everything from Fabianism to H.G. Well's idea of a "Liberal Fascism"), so to see it coming under fire from there is rather interesting in of itself.

2. The creation of the social welfare state was cast as a moral imperative by the political left, and here in Canada, its defenders (such as the New Democratic Party) still use the language of morality and moral imperatives to describe it. Reducing or dismembering the Social Welfare State may well be only a practical solution, but if the defenders speak in these sort of terms, I doubt any political call to action on pragmatic grounds will succeed. Indeed, Canada almost underwent an insolvency crisis back in the 1990's, but action only took place when we were almost at the edge, not a decade earlier when alarms were being sounded.

3. I hadn't really thought about the Laffer curve in that article, but since I think economics is a "descriptive" science rather than a predictive one, the Laffer curve is a useful tool for looking at economic behaviour under different tax regimes.

Rick said...

You are correct that supporters of a social welfare state, including me, regard it as in part a moral responsibility, though there are also pragmatic aspects.

The same is true, so far as I can tell, of arguments for dismantling the social welfare state - they are only in part pragmatic; in part they are moral. So purely pragmatic arguments over the effectiveness of something may miss the real point on both sides.

But I should note here something I'm swiping from blogger Matt Yglesias. 'Big government liberals' like me are not fans of government programs for their own sake, only of things they can accomplish that the private sector can't or won't.

Tony said...

The perceived need for moral imperatives is perhaps the biggest misunderstanding there is about social welfare. In fact, I would say that many liberals' moral fascination with the "little guy" is the functional equivalent of many conservatives' love affair with "natural" rights. By that I mean that they don't want welfare and rights, respectively, to be about pragmatic considerations, because if they are then they lose their ultimate argument, that it's supposed to be that way. (And, for the moment, let's not get into the etymology of "supposed", the nature of moral suppositions, or Hume's Gillotine, though they all apply.)

I'm about to say things that are going to upset a lot of people. I do not apologize in advance.

Social welfare is not a moral question, at least not in the way its supporters think it is, and want everybody else to think it is. Social welfare is about surplus in a wealthy economy. That's all. The moral issue, if there is one, is that moral suassions may be used -- though they may not necessarily be valid -- to suggest the expenditure of that surplus on welfare rather than other things, like industrial expansion or rocking the Rocketpunk future ot industrial expansion towards a Rocketpunk future.

Once the decision is made to spend on social welfare, there is no morality involved. It's a simple question of collecting the resources from those that have and redistributing to those that don't have. Maybe some decisions need to be made about who is deserving and who isn't, but even then morality is obfuscatory. Think for a moment about Shaw's Pygmalion here, and Alfred Doolittle's perspective on middle class morality, when it comes to charity.)

Also, when we get moral we talk about rights and entitlements. Nothing could be worse for social welfare than rights and entitlements. That kind of thinking leads to a "soak the rich" mentality. This only kills the goose that lays the golden eggs, because it is in the surplus of wealthy people and enterprises that you find the resources for your social welfare. In a truly self-aware social welfare state, the rich would be tapped of some of their surplus, but not all of it, and encouragexd to make more, for the betterment of society. They would be respected as the engines of growth and wealth, not reviled and demonized as the enemy of the people. But Mamon is evil and poverty is saintly, so we'll have none of that in a real-world social welfare state.

Well, at least such "morality" will be it's own undoing. Like all false moralities, it tries to make water run uphill, and will only wind up drowning in its own illogic.

Rick said...

I don't think many social welfare liberals out there actually want to soak the rich to the point of outright expropriation! There have been marginal tax rates up to 90 percent or so, but those were pretty nominal.

All the talk about freedom or statist slavery on one side, or poverty and social injustice on the other, comes down to whether the marginal rate on high incomes is 20 percent, 40 percent, or somewhere in between.

I will acknowledge that the rhetoric of the left is full of holdovers from the agrarian age, when 'the rich' were overwhelmingly a rentier class. I recently read a column that ranted a bit about 'aristocrats.'

That said, I will spare only a nano sized hankie to cry for the oppressed, demonized rich. Not in 'Murrican society. I know that in Britain and elsewhere there is still a real, old style Left, but if New Labour is anything to go by they have been pretty thoroughly marginalized there as well.

And, entirely apart from welfare considerations, there is a strong public interest in constraining concentrations of private wealth if these grows to the point of having disproportionate political influence. Because at that point it is no longer just a private matter, but an oligarchic political force.

I say that as a theoretical principle - I am not much concerned about issues like campaign finance reform. It is troubling in principle that Meg Whitman could try to buy her way into the CA governor's office, but in practice all she did was transfer a lot of wealth from herself to campaign consultants and local TV stations.

Tony said...

Where I think I disagree with you, Rick, is no so much on the specifics of policy you identify, but on the notion that we've come through the looking glass and capital is safe, as long as it is in the harness. There are way too many idealists in the world waiting for the next demagogue to take them on the next crusade.

I do have a philosophical bone to pick with you, however. Whatever Meg or anybody else wants to do with their after tax money has to be their own decision. If they're spending it on goods and services, somebody -- a lot of somebody's -- are getting work out of it. That's not a bad thing, even when the concentration of power and influence is factored in.

Heck, everybody that wins an election "buys" it. I'm not sure what the real difference, even in principle, is between one who does it with gifts or one that does it with their own money. both methods concentrate power and influence of money in the person of the candidate. The candidate who self finances may be behoden unto himslef only, but why is that necessarily worse than the candidate that is beholden to his backers? Plenty of candidates have been abolutely corrupted, and their offices compromised by what they ahd to do to get elected.

Rick said...

Slippery slope arguments can themselves be a bit of a slippery slope. The choices aren't laissez-faire or Joe Stalin.

Philosophically, property rights are not absolute, since they are a social institution in the first place. If experience showed a genuine hazard of oligarchy from self financed campaigns I'd have no problem restricting them, but experience shows otherwise.

I'll (tentatively!) make this my closing remark. This blog implicitly deals a lot with political questions, and lets me explore them in a far more nuanced way than any overtly political discussion.

(Trans: I really don't want to spend any more mental energy on Meg Whitman, even indirectly!)

Tony said...

Rick:

"Slippery slope arguments can themselves be a bit of a slippery slope. The choices aren't laissez-faire or Joe Stalin."

Just so. Let's just say I'm sufficiently skeptical of humans in large groups that I don't trust them to avoid radical manias. Maybe it has to do with being a child of the mid 20th Century. In any case, the nearer the top (for certain values of "top") we can remain, the further from the bottom we'll end up when this or that mania expresses itself.

"Philosophically, property rights are not absolute, since they are a social institution in the first place."

In that case, all rights are a social institution. And I do mean all. If nobody has an absolute right to property (which, you may recall, for those who believe in absolute property rights, includes a person's own life), then nobody has an absolute right to anything. No basic human rights, no civil rights, no womens' rights, no LGBT rights, etc.

I'm not trying to be a conservative cro-magnong jerk here. I'm pointing out the logical absurdity of certain people denying the absolutness of others' rights, but claiming some other set of rights to be (often categorically imperative) moral absolutes. You want to make property rights relative to time place and popular whim? Fine, I'll go along perfectly happily, just so long as all rights receive the same treatment, including ocassional public audit. If rights are socially constructed, after all, then they had ought to be subject to review and recall, in case social constructs change over time.

But somehow I don't think anybody with any sense wants that. Rights may not be absolute in any philosophical sense, but they had better be as close to absolute as they can be made in a functional one, or we have chaos.

And don't think this is aimed at any political side or the other (or a third or a fourth). I have just as many philosophical and practical problems with the conservative natural rights crowd as I do with the liberal social rights bunch. Quite frankly, a pox on both their houses. If you want to talk about rights, understand that they may not come from God or Nature, but equally understand that they're not up for constant debate either. They exist, where they do, as a sure footing that benefits evrybody by making life more predictable and less capricious.

Rick said...

In the context of this discussion, I would say that ALL rights are indeed a social construct, simply because they only exist. Does Robinson Crusoe own the island he lives on? I would call it undefined until Friday, or someone, shows up to agree, disagree, negotiate, or fight over it.

But I think we are stumbling over differing senses of 'non-absolute.' My meaning is in the sense of saying that my right to swing my fist ends short of your face. Most interesting legal questions arise out of the collision of acknowledged rights.

You are (I believe) taking a different sense of 'non-absolute,' the sense of provisional and, in the end case, precarious. On that point I would agree with you. Orderly rules are in some way even more fundamental than justice - I do tend to think that 'no justice, no peace' is trumped by 'no peace, no justice.'

Now I'm gonna go argue about space travel.

Tony said...

We can leave it here. (Fully recognizing that you're the host and you'll leave it where you want to, which is your right.}

I would only add that I can't agree that peace preceeds justice. IMO you can't establish peace without first establishing what a large majority of the people involved recognize as justice. The second a unilaterally declared -- or even imposed -- peace is perceived as unjust by more than a small minority, you get non-peace. AFAICT, "peace", in practical terms, is a consensus about the state of justice in the world.

Rick said...

Fair point!