Look Like Flies

Yglesias has a post about the rhetoric of The Social Security Trust Fund, in response to a Planet Money podcast on the subject. The puzzle of the podcast is: how can there even be an argument about whether a giant Trust Fund exists or not? Shouldn’t that be sort of obvious? Yglesias is in the ‘it exists’ camp. And I think that’s right.

Here’s the way to think about the Trust Fund, to make it seem it doesn’t exist. The Social Security Trust Fund takes in money that it socks away, for an elderly day, in the form of government bonds. But, since it’s all just the government, that’s your right hand loaning your left hand money. If I am poor, I can’t get rich selling myself a lot of ‘Holbo bonds’. I can’t have my cake and eat it, too, earning money with the left hand, then loaning that money to the right hand, to spend on a piece of cake to be eaten now, while also writing on a piece of paper, ‘the right hand owes the left hand a piece of cake’. That seems like double-counting in the worst way.

Here’s the way to think about it, so it seems like the Trust Fund exists. The parents (government) agree that the child (Social Security) should have an allowance. The child wants to save the money. So the parents keep a running account. Every week, the parents write the child an IOU, which the child dutifully puts in a little box. Over time the box comes to contain a lot of IOU’s from the parents. Meanwhile, the parents are not separately putting funds that would correspond to those IOU’s into yet another box. They are just running the household. But the IOU’s exist, and are backed by the parents. [click to continue…]

Somehow I ended up reading about Tolkien’s anarcho-monarchism in this First Things piece, by David B. Hart. (Yes, yes.)

There should be a rhetorical term for the sort of stock, boilerplate, conservative antinomian complex irony with which the piece concludes. (‘Antinomian’ from an + tinom, proto-Germanic for ‘on tin’. The earliest occurrence is in Wodehouse: “The drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G. K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin.” By metaphoric extension, ‘antinomianism’ was retroactively picked up by the likes of Martin Luther – who would have found Chesterton a trying personality – and applied, generally, to anyone who, like Chesterton, considers that, for some obscure reason, the law doesn’t apply to him. Antinomians can mint paradoxes, while indignantly fulminating against paradox. They can speak up for plain, English commonsense in terms that would make a Frenchman blush at the extravagance of the gesture. That sort of business.)

I suppose we could do worse than just calling it a Chestertonian antinomy. Hart’s goes like this:

We all have to make our way as best we can across the burning desert floor of history, and those who do so with the aid of “political philosophies” come in two varieties.

There are those whose political visions hover tantalizingly near on the horizon, like inviting mirages, and who are as likely as not to get the whole caravan killed by trying to lead it off to one or another of those nonexistent oases. And then there are those whose political dreams are only cooling clouds, easing the journey with the meager shade of a gently ironic critique, but always hanging high up in the air, forever out of reach.

I like to think my own political philosophy—derived entirely from my exactingly close readings of The Compleat Angler and The Wind in the Willows—is of the latter kind. Certainly Tolkien’s was. Whatever the case, the only purpose of such a philosophy is to avert disappointment and prevent idolatry.

Now how does Hart hope to evade the awkward consideration that trying to cross a desert with only a dog-eared copy of The Wind in the Willows as your guide is as likely to get the whole caravan killed as any other method that might be tried? Well, obviously he doesn’t mean it. But that’s the trick. Because this is the point in the discussion at which Hart is most obliged to mean something by something. Because this is the point at which the circular peg of anarcho-monarchism fits into the round hole of solid English conservatism – of plain common sense, disdaining all conceptual extravagance and idle concept-mongery! Well, how does it?

Imagine a world in which progressives penned pieces that ended like so: ‘I like to think there are two sorts of political philosophies. Utopian dreams, and down-to-earth, pragmatic proposals for things that just might work. My own ideas about politics – derived wholly from a bongwater-stained edition of the 1970 Whole Earth Catalogue and a close reading of the liner notes to Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma – are decidedly of the latter sort.’ Rhetorical life – if not mental life – would be greatly eased if this sort of gesture – superficially silly – seemed to promise a sort of slow, serious, mature attunement to First Things. Ah, that would be The Life.

In other news, my copy of Barry Deutsch’s Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword [amazon] just arrived. Oh, joy! I think I’ll read it. You can read just the first 15 pages here.

Matthew Yglesias often writes about the conservative penchant for anti-anti-racist stances. Today, for example:

What we’re seeing is episode one million in the American conservative movement’s passionate attachment to the cause of anti-anti-racism. Relatively few conservatives are interested in expressing racist views, but virtually all conservatives are united in the conviction that anti-racism run amok is ruining the country and almost no conservatives are interested in combating racism.

I think a better way to put it is this: contemporary conservatives are determined to rewrite history as to who was/is on the side of the angels in major civil rights struggles. Conservatives accept that equality for blacks and women is a good thing and that real social and legal progress has been made on these fronts. Conservatives freely admit those on the losing side of these civil rights struggles were in the wrong. What they resist is the admission that theirs was the losing side. Glenn Beck, wrapped in the mantle of the civil rights. Sarah Palin, feminist icon. Conservatives are fine with civil right victories, on the condition that these are victories for conservatism, and reproaches to liberalism and progressivism. Feminism is great, so long as it puts the feminists in their place. (Seriously, conservatives now like what feminists were saying all that time, pretty much. It only bugs them who the messenger was.) [click to continue…]

Greg Mankiw’s recent, much derided NY Times column reminded me of a passage from Simon Schama’s Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution [amazon]: [click to continue…]

If she is going to be complaining about lack of erudition under headlines like this:

On Basic Religion Test, Many Doth Not Pass

Hat tip: Belle (she was just standing right next to me, so I can’t link to it). “Did they learn about religion from a bunch of old Thor comics?” Belle wants to know.

Speaking of which, our daughters actually use ‘doth‘ in this wrong way quite a bit, because I bought them Mini Marvels [amazon], which is pretty good.

I cut off the final joke: namely, Loki actually is wearing baggy pants. But I think it’s funnier if the joke is just about systematic abuse of language.

UPDATE: Yon Gray Lady Hath Fixethed It.

Jonah Goldberg points out that there is something sinister, even progressive, about the German phrase, ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ – quite apart from the association with Auschwitz. “The Orwellian undertones to the phrase are real, and the associations with the Holocaust are horrific, but Arbeit Macht Frei was a popular “progressive” slogan on the road to serfdom.” Do you know where the phrase came from?

The Arbeit Macht Frei sign [at Auschwitz] was erected by prisoners with metalwork skills on Nazi orders in June 1940, and was a cynical take on the title of an 1873 work by the lexicographer, linguist and novelist Lorenz Diefenbach in which gamblers and fraudsters discover the path to virtue through hard work.

I appreciate that Republicans are hard-pressed to come up with a positive platform in 2010, but this seems an unpromising trial balloon: we must restore a culture of healthy recklessness and corruption, lest, by treading the perilous path of work and responsibility, we be beguiled into serfdom.

It’s like ‘the Fascist octopus has sung its swan song,’ but with Poor Richard’s Almanack as the libretto.

Andrew McCarthy’s book is apparently selling well! We’ll get to that.

But first: a couple weeks ago Jonah Goldberg did one of those diavlog thingies with David Frum. The occasion was Frum making accusations of ‘epistemic closure’ and Goldberg protesting that it’s all nonsense. The Jim Manzi/Mark Levin thing. The section we will be concerned with is this one. Only 9 minutes long, so you can watch it yourself. I’ve transcribed some highlights. (If anyone listens and notices I’ve mistranscribed or misleadingly paraphrased, please say so in comments.) [click to continue…]

This post is theme-and-variations on my previous one. The issue: Barry Goldwater is lionized as an icon of conservative high principle and true philosophy. But his signature domestic issue was opposition to integration and civil rights legislation. If – like Rand Paul a week ago – you think his opposition was philosophically and Constitutionally correct and admirable, then bully for you. But if – like Rand Paul today, like most conservatives – you think Goldwater was wrong to oppose integration and civil rights legislation, then you need to explain how Goldwater’s conservative conscience failed him so utterly and comprehensively. One possibility: he was personally just a racist or opportunist, and that overrode his principles. But no, this answer is not accepted (by conservatives). Well then: either 1) he espoused wrong principles, or 2) he mis/over-applied them in some way. [click to continue…]

The Rand Paul vs. Civil Rights Act business has been fascinating.

I have particularly enjoyed attempts by Paul defenders to brush off the significance of his initial comments as ‘merely philosophical’ – as college bull-session irrelevancy, for which he is being unfairly held accountable. When, of course, the whole Tea Party point of Rand Paul’s candidacy is his libertarian-conservative philosophy, and his promise to stay true to the implications of it, as a legislator. (So the whole thing has been like this American Elf strip, but substitute ‘philosophy’ for ‘costume’.)

In walking this stuff back – in saying he would have voted for the Civil Rights Act, after all – Paul is walking back his longstanding, core philosophical commitments. So now we know: he is willing to vote for things things that, by his own lights, go against the Constitution and reduce individual liberty, in the most essential sense (freedom = unencumbered enjoyment of private property rights). This retreat really ought to be worse than out-and-out liberalism, again by Paul’s own lights, because liberals at least have the decency to be confused about what the Constitution says, having hallucinated commerce clause penumbrae that make it all ok. And liberals don’t value freedom all that highly, supposedly, so it’s not surprising that they are perfectly willing to chuck liberty into the fiery maw of the Moloch of ‘social justice’. At least there’s a failed god of socialism that they are doing it for. What’s Paul’s philosophical excuse? Why aren’t conservative-libertarians up in arms, complaining about this cowardly betrayal of Paul’s whole philosophy, after he got the nomination on the strength of his philosophy? Is no one willing to shout from the rooftops that Jim Crow – privately and informally enforced! – is the price we should be willing to pay for freedom? What’s the point of equating liberty with private property rights if you aren’t going to equate liberty with private property rights? Why are Paul’s defenders scrambling to make out how, plausibly, libertarianism should eliminate informal/social Jim Crow, once you clear away all legal, institutional, governmental forms of it? The essential point should be: even if it doesn’t, that’s not so important, because it’s not unjust. (Why would you be a propertarian sort of libertarian if you didn’t think so?)

Indeed, isn’t all this what Jonah Goldberg derides as ‘sherpa conservatism‘ – that is, the canard that conservatism is only acceptable as a more sure-footed means to liberal ends? So libertarian-conservatism is only acceptable if it conduces to a ‘nice’, racially-harmonious, integrated, multi-culti, ‘socially just’ society? When will libertarian-conservatives finally be willing to stand up for what their principles imply? Healthy civil society is based on bedrock respect for individual property rights. Period. [UPDATE: And formally equal political rights, true. But that doesn’t really change the equation.] It’s invidious to insinuate that a ‘nice’, integrated, racially harmonious, multi-culti, ‘socially just’ society must be our sole model of healthy civil society. (Yes, all that’s fine. But it’s not required, in principle, so you shouldn’t sacrifice principle for the sake of it. Sheesh. Barry Goldwater is spinning in his grave.)

Let’s consider David Bernstein’s latest post. [click to continue…]

Via “Gideon Rachman”:http://blogs.ft.com/rachmanblog/2010/03/mice-on-the-loose-in-parliament/, the House of Lords debates the mouse problem in Westminister Palace. It’s both wonderful and surreal.

bq. As for getting a cat, I answered a Question from the noble Lord, Lord Elton, last week on this matter. I was not aware that such a thing as a hypoallergenic cat existed-I do not know whether our cat at home is one of those. There are a number of reasons why it is not a good idea to have cats. First, they would ingest mouse poison when eating poisoned mice, which would not be very nice for them, and there would be nothing to keep them where they are needed or stop them walking around the House on desks in offices or on tables in restaurants and bars-and maybe even in the Chamber itself. Therefore, we have ruled out at this stage the possibility of acquiring a cat, or cats.

… The Chairman of Committees: My Lords, I am well aware that there are still mice around. I saw one in the Bishops’ Bar only yesterday evening. I do not know whether it was the same one that I saw the day before or a different one; it is always difficult to tell the difference between the various mice that one sees. We believe that the problem is getting better. Cleaning is one of the measures we are taking, as I outlined in my original Answer. As I speak here this afternoon, the Bishops’ Bar and the Guest Room are being hoovered, so we can get rid of the food scraps from lunch. If you were a mouse, you would rather eat the crumbs of a smoked salmon sandwich than the bait. Therefore, we want to remove the crumbs as quickly as possible.

Lord Pilkington of Oxenford: Why should I and noble Lords trust the Executive to deal with mice when they cannot deal with the economy?

The Chairman of Committees: My Lords, I do not actually deal with the economy. I am glad to say that that would be above my pay grade, whereas trying to deal with the mice is probably just about right for me.

Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean: My Lords, I was in total ignorance that there was anything of the nature of a mouse helpline until this Question Time. Can the Chairman of Committees tell us what helplines there are for Members of the House on other issues that we do not know about?

I’m trying to imagine a similar conversation taking place, say, in the U.S. Senate, and failing completely.

Ramesh Ponnuru:

Understandably, Cornyn doesn’t want to touch the most popular element of Obamacare, the ban on discrimination based on pre-existing conditions. But unless it’s modified substantially, the individual mandate has to stay too — and therefore so do the subsidies and the minimum-benefits regs. Without perhaps realizing it, Cornyn has come out for tinkering at the edges of Obamacare.

This is the problem the Dems faced (well, one of them), just in reverse: namely, what you want is uncontroversial and small-seeming. But in order to ask for that one thing, you have to ask for all this other heavy-duty stuff. Now, in reverse, the Reps can’t object to the heavy-duty stuff without getting pinned to the charge that they want to do really gratuitously, pettily awful stuff.

I predict that Cornyn is ahead of the curve. Soon it will have been the common wisdom all along. Basically for the reasons Ponnuru outlines. There will never be a moment when any large number of Republicans announce they’ve changed their minds, of course. (In 1994 and even until 2006 the individual mandate was moderate – then in 2009 and especially in early 2010 it was radical from the get-go – then in late 2010 it continued on, moderate as ever.)

I hereby lay my bet as to when the flip will take place: immediately after 2010 primary season. During the primaries, Republicans will be strongly and vocally in favor of total repeal, a unified front against being primaried from the right. Then, after the primaries, all that will fade, like a dream upon waking. Blogs and the conservative commentariat will be slightly slower but will catch up before the 2010 general. By 2012 the apocalyptic rhetoric will have faded so far from memory that Mitt Romney will be able to run as a Republican, without having to run from himself. Of course someone will point this out, but it won’t matter that much. Heat of the moment stuff. Ancient history.

Of course I could be wrong. What do you think?

Ponnuru and Lowry have responded to critics of their American Exceptionalism piece, I see. I’ll just quote a bit from the end:

Victor Davis Hanson notes that one reason for American exceptionalism may be that we did not inherit from England “a large underclass of only quasi-free people attached to barons as serfs.” Sadly, a worse institution took root here, but never became part of the national psyche.

Thank goodness it never became a serious problem. It might have left scars.

You’ve probably heard about this. Surely we can get a thread’s worth of comments, eh? I’m awaiting the inevitable backwash of an actual edition of Dante’s poem with imagery from the game on the cover. But someone came up with that joke already. What next? Obviously video game adaptation is most natural when you have ‘levels’ or ‘generations’, and episodic picaresqueness is a plus. Vanity Fair? (You play Becky Sharp, climbing the social ladder, winning over various representative males in the Boss Fights.) Buddenbrooks?

OK, then, what about this: it’s obvious that the way to do this right would have been as an installment in the Mario series: Mario’s Comedy. With Peach as Beatrice, Bowser as Satan, Luigi as Virgil, providing ‘super guide’ assistance’. Or maybe Virgil should be a Toad. I’m flexible. And the rest of the cast. Mushrooms and King Boo and Koopas and Yoshis and big biting metal balls on chains, disporting in appropriate spiritual attitudes. Lava and ice and howling wind. Various souls trapped in blocks you free by jumping on them, then carrying them to the end of the level, maybe.

Italian guy loves princess, Italian guy loses princess, Italian guy has to struggle through level after level, eventually fighting the Big Boss, to get Princess back again. Writes itself. Nine Levels. Plus climbing the Mountain of Purgatory. Then Paradiso could be the video you watch after you’re done. Boring stuff, but running on kinda long. Like the original. (YouTube mashup artists, take it away!)

Since this isn’t the way we’ve gone, apparently, I think our second best option would be to adapt, say, Super Mario Brothers, as a terza rima epic. So that’s your assigned task in comments. Something about ‘midway along the path’, ‘running always to the right’, ‘jumping on people’s heads’. That sort of thing. If you choose to accept your mission.

To judge from this interview with Zizek in The Times of India, they were right the first time.

How can you dismiss Buddhism so easily? It’s the fastest growing religion in the world.

In the West, Buddhism is the new predominant ideology. Things are so unstable and confusing that with one speculation you can lose billions of dollars in a minute. The only thing that can explain this is Buddhism which says that everything is an appearance. That’s why the Dalai Lama is so popular in Hollywood.

You have also been critical of Gandhi. You have called him violent. Why?

It’s crucial to see violence which is done repeatedly to keep the things the way they are. In that sense, Gandhi was more violent than Hitler.

UPDATE: Apparently Zizek was misquoted. At any rate, one person who claims to have been present for the interview says so, and it seems plausible enough.