It has become cliché to make comparisons of the modern world to Orwell’s 1984. Government collection of metadata means we are always being watched. Homeland Security illustrates the penetration of doublespeak in our lives. That we are engaged in a never-ending war against terrorism is analogous to having “always been at war with Eastasia.”
However, despite many important parallels, I find the primary theme of 1984 to be an inaccurate portrayal of modern life. 1984 imagines the evil of unified power. It is personified through Big Brother. The primary theme, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever,” is simply not apt.
Most people do not feel the boot on their face. Obama, despite the fact he occasionally drones children, is not Big Brother. Homeland Security is not the Ministry of Love, it is the DMV with police powers. Rather than the horrors of totalitarian dictatorship, we have the horrors of rampant, dysfunctional bureaucracy.
“Brazil,” directed by Terry Gilliam and loved by those who have seen it, captures these themes expertly. It follows Sam Lowry, a low-level bureaucrat with fantasies about saving a woman from his dreams.
A clerical error leads to the imprisonment, looking very much like a modern SWAT raid, of a Mr. Archibald Buttle, instead of terrorist Archibald Tuttle. This is reminiscent of putting Rahinah Ibrahim on the no-fly list because of a clerical error. It took 8 years for the government to admit its error.
Later, Archibald Tuttle, an air conditioning repairman gone rogue because of his dislike of paperwork, helps Sam fix his air conditioning. I can’t help but think of licensing laws and how they keep people impoverished.
Overall, the picture is painted is not one of evil, but incompetence. The bureaucracy is impossible to navigate, but no one is responsible. It is the result of human action but not human design. Our world today is the same.
This is the thesis offered by Noah Smith. He argues that the rise of data and new theories has led to economists to move away from free market theories. Adverse selection, moral hazard, and game theory have shown how rational agents can lead to suboptimal results, while behavioral economics has cast doubt on the assumptions about human rationality.
It seems to me that he conflates two things. The first is how the public perceives economists. The second is the political preferences of economists themselves. The distinction is important because even if economists have become more liberal, they still might appear to be free market dogmatists if the public continues to not understand economic theory. Bryan Caplan has demonstrated there continue to exist biases in the public understanding of economics. While adverse selection is important, I think most economists agree comparative advantage is even more so. Paul Krugman at least used to agree.
Noah also falls prey to the nirvana fallacy. He compares supposed market failures with idealized solutions. These idealized solutions rarely happen, the reason being public choice, an innovation he failed to mention. Government actors are the same fallible humans as market actors.
Take behavioral economics for example. While it is often applied to market actors, the same logic also applies to the government actors making and enforcing the rules. Therefore, on net, it isn’t clear whether behavioral economics justifies government intervention. Applying behavioral economics to government might imply restricting state intervention.
However, Noah’s more central point is about the change in attitudes of the economic profession. David Henderson already responded about macroeconomics. My research has been on development economics and that field has become substantially more likely to favor open markets.
It is worth noting that the traditional dichotomy between liberal and conservative is misplaced. While I favor lower marginal tax rates and less government intervention, far more important is government recognition of property rights. The question is not, is Sweden a better model than the US, it is, why is Africa poor? The (relatively new) consensus among economists is that Africa is poor because of bad institutions.
This wasn’t always the case. Peter Bauer was for years a loner voice against state led planning. Though Douglass North won the Nobel Prize in 1993 for his work on institutions, the turning point didn’t occur until Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson published “Colonial Origins” in 2001. They were the first to causally show through econometrics that institutions caused economic performance and not vice versa.
While institutional economics cannot be described as entirely libertarian in its implications, it is substantially more so than previous development theories. Two recent books, Why Nations Fail and Violence and Social Ordersoffer similar frameworks. They differentiate between two types of governments; I will call them an open state and a predatory state. Predatory states are defined by elite expropriation of wealth and monopoly privileges. Open states allow any person to enter the marketplace and encourage competition. These distinctions are comparable to indices of economic freedom.
Part of the reason Noah might have the impression he does is because economists used to assume the existence of strong stable property rights. The discussion was over government intervention given those property rights. Perhaps given that assumption he is correct, but the importance of institutional economics is abandoning that assumption.
As I tell my students, the reason there are poor countries is because their governments steal too much from the people and don’t respect their property rights. I do not think most economists would have agreed in the 1960’s or 1970’s, but I do think they would today.
From Office of Hawaiian Affairs Kamana’opono Crabbe’s remarks at a press conference on Monday:
A second reason for my questions to Secretary Kerry stems from our Hawaiian community. My staff and I have held some 30 community meetings in the past two months regarding our proposed process to rebuild our nation. In that same period we also held two governance summits with key community leaders. At these gatherings, and in other virtual contexts, we heard repeatedly concerns about engaging in a process of rebuilding a nation when-following the research of many legal, historical, and political experts-our nation continues to exist in the context of international law.
Such concerns have led our community to request more time in the nation rebuilding process to have questions– such as I raised with Secretary Kerry– fully explored and shared with our people so that they can make well-informed decisions throughout the process.
The Hawaiian community needed to know that I was inquiring about the very matters they sought to bring forward. And this is the reason I felt it was imperative not only that I ask the questions but that the community be aware of the inquiry.
However, recognizing the gravity of the questions posed, I met with Chair Machado before making the letter public. I explained that my questions were a matter of due diligence and risk management to avoid OHA missteps in its nation rebuilding facilitation. I believed I had her consent to proceed with sharing publicly my letter to Secretary Kerry. Unfortunately, it is now apparent that we walked away from that meeting with a misunderstanding and misinformation.
Despite disagreements that will need to be worked out between myself and OHA’s trustees, I am certain that the Board and I stand firmly together in our commitment to do all that we appropriately can to reestablish a Hawaiian nation. I look forward to engaging with the trustees in the ho’oponopono, which Chair Machado graciously suggested, so that we can work collectively to Ho’oulu Uihui Aloha, to Rebuild a Beloved Nation.
We must succeed in our efforts for the good of our lahui, our community, and our families for generations to come.
Chairwoman Machado disputes that he consulted with her before sending the letter. The OHA trustees had a very interesting meetingon Thursday, with a big crowd supporting Crabbe. Related: The militarized Pacific.
From one of the translated letters of Tibetan prisoner Goshul Lobsang, written in prison, September 2012. He died on March 19:
I have no regrets, although all of a sudden, I may be compelled to separate from the path of life that [I have been treading along] with my beloved mother, siblings, wife and children. I may have to depart with [feelings] of cold, heavy sadness, but I have no sense of guilt in my heart.
My clear conscience is my only asset in this world. I don’t possess anything other than this, and I don’t need anything other than this.
[But] my only regret that weighs heavily on my heart is the lack of profound sense of solidarity among our people, because of which we are unable to achieve a strong unified stand.
*****
In the Salt Lake Tribune yesterday, a letter to the editor written by a Republican name-checks Lincoln and asks:
The right-wing fanatics who would have the federal government hand over all public lands in Utah, Nevada, etc., remind me of the pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine. When would they like to hold the referendum on secession from the United States?
Chris Roth says the Cliven Bundy standoff is the harbinger of a new “silly season.” State legislators from a number of states are getting involved, including Matt Shea:
Four more county committees forming for the Jefferson statehood effort, one is working with Tea Party Patriots.
*****
Nationalia looks at Yorkshire autonomy, the Bavarian Party’s attempt to get a representative in the European Parliament, and the Occitan Nation Party’s pro-stateless peoples (and pro-EU) message.
Timothy Snyder and Leon Wieseltier are in Kiev this weekend.
Scottish Tory MEP says in an address supporting a Spanish unionist MEP that Scottish independence “would trigger a wave of secessionist movements across the EU.”
Israel clears up a rumor that they were going to transfer sovereignty of the tomb of David and the Cenacle to the Vatican.
Our moral sphere should not be stretched beyond the scale appropriate for an individual human life. That does not mean that we are indifferent to suffering outside that scale, nor that there’s something wrong with giving to charity or volunteering. Telescopic as an adjective is meant more pejoratively than categorically; to reject telescopic morality is not to say that our concern for far matters should be reduced to zero, just as rejecting gluttony does not mean that we should stop eating entirely.
Nevertheless, I am very pessimistic about our ability to have a non-negligible impact on large scale and distant matters.
While generations of Québécois had felt estranged from a spiritually apostate France after the 1789 Revolution, this antirevolutionary ethos vanished during the 1960s. The French Revolution had begun when Louis XVI had convoked the Estates General. Shortly thereafter, the Third Estate, consisting of commoners, rose up and abolished the first two estates, representing the clergy and nobility, declaring itself l’Assemblée nationale, that is, the National Assembly.
In 1968, in an eerie echo of the events of nearly two centuries earlier, Québec similarly abolished the upper chamber of its provincial legislature, le Conseil legislatif, while the lower chamber, l’Assemblée legislative, changed its name to – you guessed it – l’Assemblée nationale! The French Revolution had finally caught up with La Belle Province. That same year saw the formation of the Parti québécois, which sought a wholly French-speaking nation separate from Canada.
Political philosophers and historians have given lots of attention to Calvinism as an engine of modern liberal (read constitutional) politics. Whether it’s resistance theory, the Dutch rebellion, or the so-called Presbyterian revolution of the British colonies in North America, students of Calvinism believe they have a firm read on Reformed Protestant politics as an inherently rebellious outlook, one that won’t let any human authority encroach on the Lordship of Christ. (Why we didn’t celebrate 1861 along with 1776, 1689, and 1567 prior to getting right with race is a bit of an inconsistency.)
That sounds good in theory, and it certainly turns out Calvinist (New, Neo, or Denominational) in large numbers for Fox News. But it doesn’t make sense of history where context matters.
The NSA’s “new collection posture,” as shown in the NSA documents reproduced in Greenwald’s book, is: “Sniff it all, know it all, collect it all, process it all, exploit it all, partner it all.” In short, they aim to abolish the concept of privacy – and if they are now targeting political “radicalizers,” as one of their documents puts it – not Al Qaeda, but American political dissidents – then our old republic is no more. The Constitution means nothing: the Bill of Rights is abolished, and we are living under a de facto “democratic” dictatorship. …
As it stands … anyone in America who has ever expressed a “radical” idea is now a potential target.
Nothing short of a revolution is going to reverse this monstrous reality. Whether it comes in a peaceful form – perhaps some combination of electoral and legislative action – in which the warlords of Washington are thrown out on their ears, or some other way is not for me to say. No one can know the future. What I do know, however, is this: one way or another, the monster must be slain.
… a partisan prosecutor launched “secret John Doe” investigations to terrify the entire conservative community and to remove them from the political conversation. Even though these Wisconsinites have been charged with nothing, they’ve been subjected to pre-dawn raids, warrants, subpoenas, and other harassment.
Video is now online of the Committee for the Republic’s tribute to American Conservative publisher Jon Utley back in March, for his 80th birthday, which I had the great pleasure of attending.
If there’s ever been a meeting of the good guys in a Washington salon, this was it, featuring (quoting from the YouTube description): “John Henry, Chairman of the Committee, fundraising giant Richard Viguerie, Lee Edwards of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, Dan McCarthy, editor of The American Conservative, Allan Brownfeld of the American Council for Judaism, Alex Chafuen, President of the Atlas Economic Research foundation, Norman Birnbaum, Georgetown University Professor emeritus, British writer Francis Beckett, author of Stalin’s British Victims, and Fran Griffin, President of Griffin Communications, who also read a message from Pat Buchanan.”
I forget which one it was that comments that the thing that distinguished Utley from the other anti-communists is that he never held his own government to a double standard.
Jon has been in the forefront of the antiwar movement since 1990, when he spearheaded a group to oppose George H.W. Bush’s war against Iraq. He has been a rare voice of reason and grace in conservative circles, patiently pointing out how foreign warring was destroying American freedom – as well as wreaking pointless havoc abroad. He has also been a generous supporter of groups ranging from the Future of Freedom Foundation to Antiwar.com, where his columns continue to trounce bloodthirsty politicians of all stripes.
Jon has always been kind in his comments and encouragement on my writing. Some years ago, I saw that he was heading to an ACLU awards dinner that featured some fashionable left-wing keynoter who didn’t seem truly concerned with freedom. I asked why he was going to the ACLU event.
Jon replied, “So that somebody will care when government agents take us away.”
Hearing that line from someone whose father vanished in the Gulag makes it impossible to forget.
Happy birthday, Jon, and thanks for all you’ve done for freedom for 60+ years!
Check out the documentary, “Return To the Gulag,” about Jon’s search for his father here.
Just a thought: the editor of the New York Times is a Southerner for the first time since Howell Raines, and the editor of the New York Times Magazine, while not technically from the South, was educated in Virginia and has spent most of his career in Texas. In any case, Silverstein’s hiring has been characterized as bold and slightly exotic; a line like this is typical, “an eyebrow-raising choice that brings a bit of Southwestern swagger to a position traditionally held by New York media insiders.”
Richard Fossey also hopes the elevation of Baquet, who is from New Orleans and went to Catholic school, means they’ll lighten up on the Catholic-baiting.
Anyone who has bothered to read Ludwig von Mises immediately knows that the answer is no. However, because of a few out of context quotations from his book, Liberalism, every few years he is attacked as one. The most recent offender is Michael Lind, making such ridiculous arguments I wonder if Poe’s law applies to Salon.
He quotes Mises:
It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aimed at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has for the moment saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history.
Now this quotation looks bad. Mises literally writes that fascism has saved European civilization. However, it is important to consider the context within which Mises was writing. The Soviet Union was about a decade old and had already starved 3-10 million people under war communism. The output of heavy industry had fallen to 20 percent of 1913. Communist parties were all over Europe and close to power.
Mises, out of all people, stood to be most horrified by this. He wrote the most penetrating critique of communism, warning of the impossibility of rationally allocating resources without prices. Prices were only meaningful with private property and market transactions. Fascism, on the other hand, was a new phenomenon. Hitler hadn’t taken power in Europe. Fascists had not started any wars. They had not yet committed genocide.
Hindsight is 20-20. Perhaps it is too much to expect Mises to be knowledgeable about the future evils of fascism — wait, no it isn’t. Mises was a genius. Let’s quote the entire passage rather than the two sentences Michael Lind does.
So much for the domestic policy of Fascism. That its foreign policy, based as it is on the avowed principle of force in international relations, cannot fail to give rise to an endless series of wars that must destroy all of modern civilization requires no further discussion. To maintain and further raise our present level of economic development, peace among nations must be assured. But they cannot live together in peace if the basic tenet of the ideology by which they are governed is the belief that one’s own nation can secure its place in the community of nations by force alone.
It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continued success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error.
So, not only does Mises dislike fascism in 1927, he also fully realizes the threat to European peace that it is. He takes the likelihood of what fascism will lead to as so obvious it “requires no further discussion.” Viewing fascism as anything more than an “emergency makeshift” would be a “fatal error.”
Reading the full passage it is clear that Mises had a nuanced and amazingly prescient understanding of fascism. Forced to choose between two of the greatest evils of the 20th century, he chose the fascists, fully recognizing where they would lead if they retained power and warning against it.
Now, unlike Michael Lind I try to be reasonable. I read passages in full, and do not selectively quote to obscure meaning. That being said, based on my reading of Liberalism I am forced to conclude Mises was a time traveler. It is the only possible explanation of such brilliance.
As a bonus, if you’re interested in what Mises wrote about the domestic policy of fascism:
Many people approve of the methods of Fascism, even though its economic program is altogether antiliberal and its policy completely interventionist, because it is far from practicing the senseless and unrestrained destructionism that has stamped the Communists as the archenemies of civilization. Still others, in full knowledge of the evil that Fascist economic policy brings with it, view Fascism, in comparison with Bolshevism and Sovietism, as at least the lesser evil.
