Transparency

So one of the outcomes of the unfortunate series of events from my last post has been a discovery of Stephen Schneier's excellent blog, Schneier on Security, and a subsequent gaffe on my part. In one of his posts, he linked to an article written by Naomi Klein for Rolling Stone in which she warns of the panopticon currently being built in China with technology being developed by defense contractors in the US. My gaffe was to react to the author's identity and to scan the article for the earmarks of a Naomi Klein piece: half-truths and wild assertions. I found my quarry: first, in that she refers to China, a police state if there ever was one, as an example of a free market, and second, that the alarmist article is riddled with examples of ongoing criminal activities in this totalitarian world, a paradox or irony which she fails to note. Besides those two drawbacks, I find that her alarmism may not be without foundation.

Which is one of the reasons why I find comments like Bernard Yomtov's comment in this thread so meaningless. Yes, there are probably libertarians (Kevin Carson's "vulgar" libertarians) who are more interested in lower taxes and repeal of motorcycle helmet laws than they are in issues like indefinite incarceration on the basis of secret evidence. But the libertarian community with which I am most familiar (a) does not suffer from that affliction, and (b) is more likely to see civil rights as a continuum in which the differences are of degree as well as of kind [1]. Tune in to Radley Balko's blog for a few weeks, see kids arrested and choked for skateboarding, see no-knock drug-war raids turn into murder of innocents, see kids taken from their parents on the slightest pretexts (see below).

In related articles, I see that Kevin has a similar reaction to Naomi in this essay reviewing her The Shock Doctrine [2], and I also see where Schneier makes a good point regarding transparency in this article in which he reviewed David Brin's The Transparent Society, revived on its 10th anniversary. He says,

If I disclose information to you, your power with respect to me increases. One way to address this power imbalance is for you to similarly disclose information to me. We both have less privacy, but the balance of power is maintained. But this mechanism fails utterly if you and I have different power levels to begin with.

An example will make this clearer. You're stopped by a police officer, who demands to see identification. Divulging your identity will give the officer enormous power over you: He or she can search police databases using the information on your ID; he or she can create a police record attached to your name; he or she can put you on this or that secret terrorist watch list. Asking to see the officer's ID in return gives you no comparable power over him or her. The power imbalance is too great, and mutual disclosure does not make it OK.

Which brings me to one of the points of interest I have had with respect not only to corporate security policy, but to large organizations in general: one of the basic problems is the establishment and maintenance of transparency. How are decisions arrived at? Who has the decision authority? What is the basis of a decision? How may the decision be appealed?

This is the genius of Open Source: you don't like it, ultimately, you could change it yourself. But more importantly, Open Source embraces Eric Raymond's reformulation of Claude Shannon's reformulation of Kerckhoffs' principle: a system that is based on the assumption that the enemy -- who could be MegaSoft or the state -- has the code (but not the key) because the code is freely accessible (and therefore subject to close scrutiny) is more secure than a system whose operation is a closely held secret. This same principle would seem to apply to anything that someone would want to do, whether a company or a state, whether developing code or a new chemical or passing a farm bill or budget.

Another aspect of transparency: authority and responsibility must lie at the same locus. Remove one and leave the other and you end up with an irresponsible despot and/or powerless bureaucrat. Most large organizations are filled with both, sometimes the same person acting at different times in different capacities. That is what lies at the bottom of one of the threads undertaken in this post: a mistake by a parent leads to the detention of the child even though everyone at every stage acknowledges it is the wrong thing to do (original story here). In that case, the system is transparent to neither the victims nor to the perpetrators, the latter who don't even know how to appeal a decision they would like to appeal but nevertheless feel compelled to enforce.

Transparency seems more easily achievable in smaller organizations and in less hierarchical organizations. It isn't a slam dunk: presenting a grievance to a single individual with authority may get you further at less cost than attempting to convince the majority of a democratic body. This was the subject of Madison's Federalist X essay: the tension between the need to thwart the "violence of faction" while maintaining some semblance of democracy. It is also the basis of the Public Choice theory in The Calculus of Consent. Given the arguments I made in Local, Action: Issues of Scale, I am claiming a close correlation between transparency and communication and the difficulties of achieving either in large social structures.

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[1] As to the difference in kind: some civil rights are undermined in reaction to criminals who harm others, while others are undermined in reaction to citizens who might harm themselves. But it seems to me that each side of the spectrum likes to take their favorite pet peeve of the latter type and turn it into one of the former. Thus, for Bill O'Reilly, drugs should be illegal for adults because they eventually end up abusing their children because of the drugs. For the anti-smoking crowd, Second-Hand Tobacco Smoke was a godsend. And now, global warming is the trump card.

It makes sense that if we do not want the police state that we have, then the first laws we should get rid of are those that purport to defend us from ourselves. If we can't even take these off the books, how can anyone believe that we will be able to take laws off the books (or practices off the table) that supposedly protect us from supposedly bad men? Both repeals would require an admission that the state cannot protect us from all risks. After all, they will point out, 19 men with box cutters very nearly managed to kill tens of thousands of people rather than "just" 3000, and going back to that state of affairs invites another such disaster.

Note that that argument is not my argument, but rather the argument you're going to get from the "protect the kids" crowd. It isn't easy to dismiss since it appeals to our sense of personal security; its most recent manifestation was not a Bush speech, but Hillary's "3 AM call" campaign ads. I would argue that we are no better off under the new state of affairs, under which the FBI and TSA are effectively committing a low level type of terrorism. Yes, they may be catching some bad guys and preventing some bad things in the near-term, but they are creating more terrorists abroad. As they keep pointing out to us, preventing acts of terror is a matter of dismal statistics; the bad guys only have to get lucky once, while the "good" guys have to get lucky every time. Creating more future terrorists who only have to get lucky once seems like more rather than less risk, but the alternative is to have an adult conversation with the public about terror.

The Left punted on that. They chose instead to accuse the Bush Admin of "failing to connect the dots" and being "asleep at the switch". Those accusations contributed to the overwrought response and subsequent invasion of Iraq. They should have asserted that this was an unfortunate event requiring in-depth analysis rather than bold action. But the problem is that winning debate points is far more important to the Left than preventing the growth of the police state, which they rather enjoy when they control it.

[2] I cannot follow Kevin down the pro-Chavista path. Not only has Chavez shown autocratic tendencies (extending his own power, shutting down dissenting media), but if the FARC cache is authentic, he has shown a willingness to support violence to undermine neighboring democracies. Yes, Colombia's democracy is tenuous and questionable, but no less than Chavez' own. When Kevin says,

Quite frankly, if my only choices are corporate liberalism and social democracy, and a banana republic on the neoliberal model, I'll take the former any day. If I get to choose between the paternalism of Brave New World and the jackboot in my face of 1984, it won't take me long to decide. I'm not ashamed to say that if my only choices are the welfare statist and neoliberal versions of statism, I'll take the kind of statism whose yoke weighs less heavily on my own back.

he is, by his own tacit admission ("if my choices are ..."), offering a false choice. Let us hope we have at least a third choice.

Mental Health

This news story reminded me about a post I started a few weeks ago.

I have long believed that the existence and treatment of mental illness poses a tough political problem for libertarians generally (including the Civil Libertarians in the ACLU). I once attended a lecture given by Thomas Szasz; I could not accept his claim that mental illness is not really a disease. He claimed that it could not be legitimately called a disease since there was no cell pathology, e.g. no germ had been found to cause schizophrenia. Neither sickle cell anemia nor scurvy is caused by a foreign organism, so that doesn't seem to be the best argument to take. Furthermore, he seems to have fallen into Taleb's round trip error: "no germ found to cause disease" has become "no germs exist to cause the disease" [1]. However, he made a good case that the state has historically been given powers too broad for locking people up on the basis of insanity, for reasons that once included a wife's disobedience.

The problem as I see it with mental illness is that it is tough to construct a mechanism for treating the patient when the patient does not necessarily agree with either the prescription or the diagnosis. It seems easy to say that we should treat patients against their will when they are a danger to others, but what about when they are only a danger to themselves? Who gets to decide that? And on what basis? Is not a mortally obese person a danger to themselves? What about an extreme sport enthusiast? What about bicycle messengers? Abused, this could become a thin veneer for a state that wants to lock up the merely idiosynchratic. These people might include Howard Hughes, most physical science researchers (physicists), and Andy Kaufman. I'm afraid of its abuse by a government that already wants to assert broad powers for locking people up and holding them for indeterminate periods of time without a trial on the basis of secret evidence. [2]

The involuntary treatment solution is also known as Assisted Outpatient Treatment or AOT. The State of New York, among other places, has passed a form of this in Kendra's Law. Kendra's Law failed the gentlemen described in "Free to Die in Iowa" (Michael Judge, WSJ, 22 Dec 2007) (hattip: fashion-incubator) because the doctors apparently didn't know that they could have treated the man involuntarily. Kendra's Law is so-named for a girl killed by a man in the NYC subway. The man apparently had some limited access to treatment (199 treatments in two years and $95k in one year is hardly a lack of access), but he refused treatment on many occasions.

The primary advocate of Kendra's Law is a researcher by the name of Edward Fuller Torrey. Torrey is a former adviser to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), an education and advocacy group. NAMI was founded in 1979 in the wake of the deinstitutionalization movement of the 1970s. NAMI advocates community treatment, a comprehensive approach involving the "consumer", their family and friends, civil authorities, medical professionals, and other orgranizations.

The deinstitutionalization movement started in the 1950s and 1960s, and achieved success in the 1970s. The Community Mental Health Act (CMHA) of 1963 is said to be a significant milestone in the history of the movement, though it isn't clear whether the measure was taken to address concerns for the rights of patients or for fiscal reasons (probably both). Another significant event in the history of the movement was the success of the book and subsequent movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The movement has elements of Post Modernist Michel Foucault's thoughts on the cultural and social meaning of "sanity" as well as ACLU opposition to involuntary incarceration and the anti-psychiatry movement. The anti-psychiatry movement itself is fueled in part by Scientology and in part by legitimate recognition of some of its shortcomings, such as the fact that homosexuality was listed as a mental illness by the American Psychiatry Association as recently as 1974. More recently, the finding of increasing numbers of children to have ADHD in order to control their behavior with Ritalin seems to have some merit as legitimate criticism. Additionally, it is noted that many clinicians are also stakeholders in pharmaceutical interests.

I think that much of the thinking that goes into this subject is too simplistic. In part, this may be because the entire debate is locked up on the left end of the political spectrum between those who have never met a federal program they didn't like and those who don't believe the state should ever have a police function. There is broad overlap with the former group and socialists, and between the latter group and libertarians. I'm skeptical of both. [3] At the other end of the spectrum, we frequently find people like Michael Medved ranting about the injustice of failing to lock up everyone who poses a danger to anyone without any apparent consideration of whether jail is the appropriate environment for people whose main problem is bad genetic luck.

What are the meta problems?
- Who will watch the watchers?
- How do you take politics out of defining what "risk to oneself" means?
- Where do you draw the line on risk to oneself? 1%? 10%? Imminent danger? Isn't the latter the most obvious category, and one that is mainly detected too late no matter how much we spend on the problem?
- Can we recognize that we are talking about locking people up, but we simply aren't calling it jail? We can call it a hospital, but that doesn't mean it is any less oppressive than jail. The patients are still at the mercy of the staff and to a large extent other patients.

I have very little problem with funding mental health initiatives. As usual, I would rather see it done at the private, then the local, then the state level, but not at the federal level at all.

To some extent, this is exactly what is happening. NAMI is private. The local chapter of NAMI has obtained some sponsorship of temporary communal living quarters. That has been augmented with City and State funding. I think it is underfunded, but that should only drive the creativity of the advocates that much harder (isn't this what they say when they advocate unfunded mandates on various industries?)

We also know that action in the private sphere is moving faster than in the public sphere, due in part to consumers who are demanding more of their employer-sponsored health packages. "During the past three decades, per enrollee spending for a common benefit package has grown at a slightly slower average annual rate for Medicare than for private health insurance," according to this. To be sure, this doesn't help people who are unemployed, but it does help those teenagers whose parents are employed and insured to get early treatment, keeping them off the public programs.

The money is spent on doctors, nurses, support staff, facilities, and medication. Not as much money is required if stabilization can be achieved quickly. That means having a very effective, broad program that directs people into the system quickly.

I doubt social medicine works any better on this score. Homelessness and schizophrenia are significant problems in both Europe and Canada. Recall the recent riots in the Netherlands as homeless people were evicted from squatting in abandoned buildings? Or the recent problems with moving the homeless in Paris?

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[1] E. Fuller Torrey has been looking at the possibility that a parasite found in cat feces may have something to do with schizophrenia.

[2] And if you think secret evidence and holding people without trials started with George W., I have a bridge to sell you. The Clinton Administration also locked up foreign suspects without trial on the basis of secret evidence (see, for example, this article). I doubt this problem started in the 1990s, either. In fact, Wilson's Palmer Raids come to mind.

[3] I am reminded of the claims that Ronald Reagan is primarily responsible and the Republican party partially responsible for the lack of mental health care in the United States. This claim is due to the fact that Reagan happened to sign an 1981 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act that repealed another law, National Mental Health Systems Act of 1980, that had never gone into effect. In fact, that 1980 Law would have reduced federal expenditures on mental health care. In addition, the 1981 Omnibus bill kept the cuts, but "converted them to block grants disbursed with few strings attached. New York State, which used block-grant monies to fund community-based programs, and other states [had] to cut mental health programs." The issue then was not that the Reagan Administration was cutting funding for these programs, but more specifically, they were cutting some funding and then cutting the strings attached to that funding. The local authorities were given broad powers to use the money, and apparently failed to direct it to mental health. The blame for that failure should fall on the entire spectrum, from left to right, but it doesn't.

I think any reasonable person could conclude that Reagan's involvement was incidental since the deinstitutionalization movement preceded him, guided Congressional action on the 1963, 1980, and 1981 Acts, and led to the founding of NAMI, and that furthermore nobody has come along since and proposed replacement legislation at either the state or the federal level despite the fact that Democrats occupied the White House for 8 years and controlled Congress for 15. It seems apparent to me that there is broad recognition of the problems laid out at the beginning of this piece: that involuntary treatment of adults is a difficult problem with no easy solutions.

Defining fascism

When trying to define something like fascism, it is important to keep several distinctions in mind. First, "fascism" was specifically coined by Mussolini in reference to his own views. There are differences between other regimes who either used it to refer to themselves, or to whom it has been applied with general approval. Nazi Germany and (apparently) Falangist Spain would fall in the former class, while arguably Japan in the same era and Chile under Pinochet might fall into the second.

Second, the one-dimensional, number-line model of political parties (below) is not helpful for understanding this controversy. For one thing, you have the libertarians over on the right when they have very left-leaning views on many issues (drug war, immigration, abortion, gay marriage, etc.).

Yoram Bauman notes the libertarian problem in coming up with his political spectrum:

Libertarians-Leftists-Rightists-Libertarians

For another, given that their actual policies and policy applications resulted in nearly identical outcomes, anything that pits Hitler and Stalin as polar opposites is nearly useless.

Communism-Socialism-Progressivism-Center-Conservatism-Libertarianism-Fascism

The Nolan Chart (below) is a better but not perfect model for understanding this issue. For those unfamiliar with it, it is based on the observations of Stuart Lillie and William Maddox that people tend to separate their economic views from their social/cultural views. An example of a quiz based on this was recently posted at Crooked Timber.













Rotating it 45 degrees, we find that the traditional, one-dimensional view lines up from the left to right corners. Other axes might be chosen, such as elitism vs. populism, foreign vs. domestic focus, and so on.












Using this chart, we can illustrate the "traditional" or high school civics version of fascism, which says that fascism is an extreme right wing movement (black).













We can also illustrate the non-traditional view in which statism or collectivism is located along the bottom edge (blue).












In this form, it is contrasted with anti-statists (classical liberalism, libertarianism, and anarchism) at the top. Note that in this view, Hitler and Stalin may be located near each other towards the bottom, having arrived at that point from their positions on the right and left. To me, this is an imperfect but much more satisfactory outcome than the one-dimensional model.

To be sure, many people attempt -- through deliberate attempts to obscure, or through innocent error -- to place fascism on the left (red).












This is one of the strawman versions of Jonah Goldberg's thesis in Liberal Fascism; the other is that he is painting the entire black, red, and blue space as fascism in order to reduce the epithet to meaninglessness. I haven't read the book, so I can't be sure he isn't, but from the interview, that doesn't seem likely (20%). Instead, I think Goldberg is attempting to point out that the blue version of the origins and location of fascism has a left as well as a right side to it. If so, I would agree with him, but I would emphasize that it has two sides to it and they both tend to collaborate or at least feed off of one another. In other words, I would not have given the book the title it has.

Note that everyone wants to define fascism in a self-serving way, i.e. the left wants to paint them as right-wing, libertarians want to paint them as pro-state, and the right (of which Goldberg appears to be a member) wants to paint them as left-wing. The libertarian version of this makes the most sense to me, as it explains much of what has happened and why the other two groups seem to be blissfully unaware of the problems caused by their respective allies.

Having offered this graphical guide as background, I think I can proceed to actually working out a definition, but not before noting those who have come before. First, Mussolini himself. However, George Orwell tells us that fascism as a word had become meaningless by 1944. On the other hand, Eco has worked out a theory which makes them easy to spot -- or has he? Wikipedia offers a list of traits.

I think the best way to work through this is to realize that fascism, if it can be applied to states which have not embraced the term themselves, must account for regimes whose outcomes look like those who have embraced the term regardless of their rhetorical claims. In other words, it is not enough to take someone at face value when he claims to be an enemy of fascism. There seem to be characteristics in fact which are common to states we might term "fascist", but they may be present in different degrees from state to state. By way of illustration, I offer modernism, socialism, and anti-semitism.

Hitler was anti-modern in a number of ways. The pan-Germanism movement was stuck in place at the moment when Germany was trying to come together from a group of loosely attached states in the early 19^th century. They were dominated by their admiration for Prussia, by their Romanticism, and the influence of Rousseau and his Noble Savage. Through the influence of Spengler and others, Hitler subscribed to the Blood and Soil ideals of the Romantics, and with it the yearning for heroes to lead innocent men through the travails of modernism. Accordingly, Hitler idolized the work of Wagner and rejected the modern artists. Mussolini, on the other hand, recognized that if Marx' material dialectic theory of history was to be correct, Italy must be dragged through the capitalist phase of development in order to get to the socialist phase. There were broad overlaps between the Italian futurists and fascism, including the embrace of violence and focus on the future (see this, this, and this [1] for example). That is not consistent with Eco's claim that fascist movements are exclusively backward looking (is mine a fair reading of Eco?).

It is worth pointing out too that the meaning of "left wing" or "liberalism" has changed much throughout the past 200 years. The original denotation of left-right came from the seating in the French Assembly, with the Jacobins, sans-culottes, and their allies on the left and the reactionaries and other pro-monarchy and pro-aristocracy members on the right. The left was in favor of change and justice. Today, at least in the US, both left and right seem to want to return to some idealized past; for the left, it is a past in which The New Deal is still fresh, unions represent a majority of workers, trust-busting is still high on the agenda, the marginal tax rate on high earners is 90+%[2], and a program can be introduced for whatever ails you. For the right, the past is a place where taxes were low so a family of 4 could get by comfortably on a single salary, leaving mom free to raise the kids, the government consisted mostly of a Defense Department to protect us from the forces of evil, and we exported the best goods to the rest of the world because Americans were simply better at stuff and the government wasn't interfering. Neither of those places existed, and we couldn't go back if they did. Today, of the two, the left is largely the more conservative in the sense of being for maintaining the status quo if not returning to some perceived past, while the right is torn between creating a new idyllism and returning to the perceived old one. To some extent, the left is still the one in favor of achieving some measure of justice for both our own poor and for those abroad (though many of their favored policies would either do one at the expense of the other, or achieve neither), while the right wants to achieve justice by being left alone to enjoy their H3 Hummer, ATV, and the house whose 125% mortgage pays for it all.

With regard to socialism, Hitler was an enthusiast, but not a well-informed one. Mussolini, on the other hand, was a dyed-in-the-wool socialist who grew up on it and rose to the heights of the Italian socialist party. It is necessary to distinguish between Marxist "scientific socialism" and other varieties of socialism; so great was the man's influence on subsequent thinking that we forget today that socialism had been around for at least two generations before Karl, and that Karl was a successful polemicist who cowed or outlived his contemporary detractors (in part because Karl was frequently really Engels' interpretation). Germany was the first state with an in-depth experience with socialism thanks to Marx' contemporaries Ferdinand Lasalle and Otto von Bismarck, the former the wildly popular socialist leader in the Bundesrat who died before his time at the hands of a romantic rival, and the latter the classically conservative (pro-aristocracy) empire builder. Hitler grew up in the wake of Bismarckian or State Socialism (though in Austria, not Germany); in Mein Kampf, he consistently and eloquently expresses socialist sentiments while denouncing the Marxist variety (which he identifies by various names such as Communism, Bolshevism, and -- in reference to the specific party -- Democratic Socialism). Mussolini, on the other hand, was steeped in Marxist thought thanks to a father who was a member of the International. Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was named after Mexican revolutionary Benito Juarez and Italian revolutionaries Amilcare Cipriani and Andrea Costa. He was the editor of the Socialist party paper, Avanti!. Benito and the Soviet leaders were mutual admirers: Joshua Muravchik notes among other events (in Heaven on Earth) that

British journalist George Slocombe, who interviewed Mussolini at the 1922 Cannes Conference, reported that "Lenin was the only contemporary for whom he would express respect." Meanwhile, Comintern chief Nikolai Bukharin commented that in their methods of combat, the Fascists "more than any other party, have adopted and applied ... the experiences of the Russian Revolution." Later, Mussolini perceived that the Soviet system under Stalin had become a kind of "Slav fascism" or "crypto-fascism."

Mussolini, like the French Vichy government, was forced into deporting Jews to Germany. Franco apparently aided some fleeing Jews. It is perhaps more instructive to look beyond anti-semitism to the larger picture and say that fascists have to divide the world into us and them. I wanted to provide these three areas of contrast regarding their futurism/pastism, relationship with socialism, and anti-semitism to show that even universally acknowledged fascists have differences between them on these key issues.

So here is the list of traits from Wiki offered with a few comments:

Trait	Germany	Fascist Italy	Falangist Spain	Arrow Cross
Nationalism	10	10	10	10
Anti-communism	10	8 (early admiration for Lenin and Stalin, tepid and opportunistic anti-communism)	10 (worth pointing out that the communists helped bring Franco to power by fighting against the anarchists)	10
Anti-liberal	10	10	10?	10?
Racism/anti-semitism/some other form of bigotry	10	7	8?	8?
Militarism	10	10	10?	10?
Totalitarianism	8, though Buccheim and Scherner have pointed out that there was still competition in the letting of contracts and in the methods by which they were fulfilled	10, Mussolini coined the term.	8?	8?
Anti-democratic	8 (came to power by democratic means)	10	10	10
Strong leader	10	10	10?	8?
Total	74	75	76	74?

Totalitarianism does not mean "particularly mean" or "vicious". It means that the state is involved in or wants to control every aspect of a citizen's life for the purpose of coordinating their activities for the benefit of the group.

And of the other states, what can we say about them?

Trait	Tojoist Japan	Stalinist USSR	Pinochetist Chile	Modern USA
Nationalism	10	9	10?	8
Anti-communism	10?	4 (but they were making up what communism was, e.g. not Trotskyite, and not very Marxist)	10	8
Anti-liberal	10	10	5 (the Chicago Boys)	8
Racism/anti-semitism/some other form of bigotry	10	9, against Kulaks and later against other ethnic groups including Jews in the Doctor's Plot	3?	3
Militarism	10	9	10	3
Totalitarianism	8?	10	7	4, but moving that direction
Anti-democratic	10	10	9, until they allowed elections	3
Strong leader	10	10	8 - Junta rather than single strongman	3, both parties believe in the imperial president
Total	78	71	62	40

And more to Goldberg's point?

Trait	Wilson Progressives	FDR	Modern Progressives	Neocons
Nationalism	8 (WWI)	8 (WWII)	4	8
Anti-communism	8 (Palmer raids)	6	6	8
Anti-liberal	7 (many laws passed)	8	9	8
Racism/anti-semitism/some other form of bigotry	8 (support for Jim Crow)	8 (Japanese internment camps)	3 (soft racism, bombing brown people was fine as long as Clinton was doing it)	6 (xenophobia)
Militarism	4	7 Yes, the CCC was a quasi-military	2 (generally supported Clinton's imperialism)	7 (though they failed to support Clinton's imperialism)
Totalitarianism	9 (Efficiency, Technocracy)	8 (controlled the press, controlled prices during the war, supported legislation that controlled wide swathes of economic activity)	9 (Heading that way on efficiency grounds)	9 (Heading that way on moral grounds)
Anti-democratic	3	7 (4 terms? Using social programs to buy votes, machine politics)	6 (judicial activism, anti-change in social programs, gerrymandering, antifederalist)	6 (gerrymandering, judicial activism, antifederalist)
Strong leader	3	8? Corporatism?	8 (belief in Executive Power)	8 (Ditto)
Total	50	60	47	60

And just for fun:

Trait	Cuba	Ba'athist Iraq	Israel	Jihadists
Nationalism	10	10	8	10 for their belief in the caliphate
Anti-communism	2	8	7	10 - look what happened in Afghanistan
Anti-liberal	8	8	7	10
Racism/anti-semitism/some other form of bigotry	5	7	5	10
Militarism	10	10	8	10
Totalitarianism	10	10	3	10
Anti-democratic	10	10	3	10
Strong leader	10	10	2	10
Total	65	73	43	80!

Wow, of all of the groups scored, the jihadists are the only ones to achieve a perfect 80. The United States as a whole is less fascist than Israel which is less fascist than either the neoprogressives or the Wilson Administration, and they in turn are less fascist than the neocons or the US under FDR administration.

Country	Score
Jihadists	80
Tojoist Japan	78
Falangist Spain	76
Fascist Italy	75
Nazi Germany	74
Ba'athist Iraq	73
Stalinist Russia	72
Cuba	65
Pinochetist Chile	62
FDR	60
Neoconservatives	60
Wilson	50
Neoprogressives	47
Israel	43
Modern US	40
Arrow Cross	74?

Obviously, this isn't terribly scientific. My scoring is likely to be skewed by availability bias and my own personal knowledge. I'd love to know how other people would change these scores. I have read quite a bit on the history of Germany's descent into Nazism, a little on the Progressive and New Deal eras, Italy, USSR, Spain, and Cuba, but not so much on the rest.

I think it would also be instructive to try to score the US through its history. I suspect that the racism would score high in the early Republic, but everything else would be quite low. That would change abruptly as we pass through the Civil War era in which the strong leader score would rise. The militarism would also gradually rise; it basically never went down very far after the Spanish-American War. Anti-liberalism, while never quite 0, has been on the rise since the 1887 Interstate Commerce Act. Totalitarianism was near 0 before the Civil War, but has been at least a 5 since the original Progressive Era and rising since then. Nationalism has aways been high; anti-democratic tendencies have been on the wain since the colonial period but have accelerated in step with the totalitarianism. Politicians don't want to be seen as responsible for the rising intrusion into our lives; better leave those decisions to armies of faceless technical experts known as civil servants.

I think the main point here is that fascism is a combination of elements and a group or regime is fascist to the extent that they embrace those elements. It is not a fair deconstruction to look at the elements taken one at a time and out of context with the whole. People taking that approach (which so far has dominated the anti-Goldberg legions) are like the blind men investigating the elephant. By concentrating only on the parts, they conclude that an elephant is like a snake, a wall, a spear, a fan, a rope, or a tree. They will never realize that the elephant has all of those characteristics, but is never entirely like just one of those elements. Few would conclude that an immature elephant is not an elephant because it lacks tusks. Similarly, if a regime is strong in all but one category, I don't see how you can fail to conclude that it is fascistic if not fascist. After all, can we really claim that Hitler was not fascist because he obtained office by democratic means? Or that Pinochet's Junta was not fascist simply because he allowed elections to be held and the democratically elected government to succeed him?

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[1] Mussolini makes the statements, "Activism: that is to say nationalism, futurism, fascism." and "The State is not only the present; it is also the past and above all the future."

[2] see Rosser's comments here in which he concentrates on the posted marginal rates rather than the actual average rates which were considerably lower due to the complexity of the tax code and the various holes in it.

More Goldberg

After listening to the interview with Glenn and Helen Reynolds, I'd have to say that the Sadly, No gang's fisking is not illuminating (the Crooked Timber takes are even less useful, since they are literally judging the book by its cover). Take this exchange, keeping in mind that one of Goldberg's themes is that the proto-fascist socialists were pro-military:

JG: There is confusion over Nazi attitudes about homosexuality.
S,N: No there isn't. They wanted to kill them.
JG: Some Nazis were gay.
S,N: Duh, of course; good help is hard to find. [EH: What happened to wanting to kill them?]
JG: They killed Rohm not because he was gay but rather because he was more radical, desiring a second revolution.
S,N: Aha! By radical, you mean more socialist! [EH: Perhaps homosexuality is not the only reason the Nazis killed?]

Sadly, No then goes on to provide a link which yielded the following quote:

The SA, led by Ernst Rohm, included control of the Reichswehr (the army) in the program of the second revolution.

The more radical/socialist members of the NSDAP wanted to control the military? It's hard to see how this doesn't support Goldberg's thesis. Instead, we get lots of side track comments from the Sadly, No author that are self-contradictory.

This next tidbit is a common problem in any analysis of the Nazi relationship to socialism, broadly understood. The standard reaction to any mention of Hitler's obsession with health is that Goldberg -- or anyone else pointing this out -- is using this syllogism:

Hitler was a vegetarian.
Vegetarians are leftists.
Therefore, Hitler was a leftist.

Since they have dropped almost all of the context, it's hard to say where Goldberg was going with his discussion, but it seems much more likely that he's developing a line of argument that has to do with connecting certain lifestyles with morality, and morality with the state, and thus the idea that the state can and should strictly regulate diet, exercise, and other habits (smoking). As Russell Wardlow and others point out on Steve Sailer's site (excellent comments), some people are unable to refrain from going to that simple strawman syllogism and therefore overlook the bigger point. The bigger point is that the Nazis wanted to regulate health habits because they thought it was every citizen's duty to provide the state with fit workers. [1]

Then we have this line from another post:

Starting wars simply to demonstrate national strength is about a billion times more fascist than some namby-pamby bureaucrat telling you not to super-size your fries.

By comparing nanny-state bureaucracy to something that arguably more fascist [2] and declaring that it pales in comparison, the author concludes that it can't be fascist. I'm sure that's a named fallacy. But even if I can't be bothered to look up the name of that fallacy, I recognize the attitude: it's the Banality of Evil.

Speaking of Hannah Arendt, the same post contains a floating quotation (no context again) about the relationship of Wilson and FDR to the French Revolution, which Goldberg identifies as fascist. The commenters are mystified, but they wouldn't be had they ever pulled themselves through a copy of Arendt's On Revolution. It's actually quite funny, since the commenters point out that the Jacobins were radicals, i.e. proto-progressives. Indeed they were. And the result? The Committee on Public Safety, under the leadership of Robespierre, commenced the Reign of Terror. I'd like to know in what way they find that significantly different from fascism.

In another post, they attempt this argument, which the uncritical commenters accept:

In fact, we must stare in awe as Jonah accuses Margaret Sanger of "nasty racism" for her era-appropriate belief in eugenics

I asked, in response,

I wonder if you'd also characterize the antisemitism of He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named as "era-appropriate"? Surely, if such ideas are bad, they are bad in any era, regardless of the identity of the person who thinks those thoughts?

Nobody has answered. If those ideas were so era-appropriate, how does one explain people like G. K. Chesterton who were opposed to eugenics? Could it be that the era-appropriateness hinged on the acceptance of the idea among H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Woodrow Wilson, and other progressives?

It is surely funny that the Sadly, No writer lampoons some of Goldberg's sources but then relies on The History Channel's National Socialism archives. Still, I wonder if he would consider it fair game if portions of that worked against him?

The roots of National Socialism, however, were peculiarly German, grounded, for example, in the Prussian tradition of military authoritarianism and expansion; in the German romantic tradition of hostility to rationalism, liberalism, and democracy; in various racist doctrines according to which the Nordic peoples, as so-called pure Aryans, were not only physically superior to other races, but were the carriers of a superior morality and culture; and in certain philosophical traditions that idealized the state or exalted the superior individual and exempted such a person from conventional restraints.

The Prussian thing, the Romantic thing, and the Aryan thing are tied together in Fichte, Herder, and several others who also influenced Hegel and through him, Marx. Stir in some Plenge, Spengler, and Chamberlain, add a dash of George Bernard Shaw's Nietzche's Superman, and you have the National Socialist German Worker's Party philosophical stew made almost exclusively from the same philosophers who influenced the era's leading progressives, Fabians, and socialists.

Consider what Richard Pipes has to say:

Was the Fascist Party a "right-wing" party?
Mussolini's party was a right-wing party but only to some extent, just as the Nazi party. These were not conservative parties. They were radical, radical nationalist parties, which in the programs very much maintained the socialist ideals [emphasis added]. For example, Mussolini's corporate state workers participated in the decision making in the business enterprises. They had as much say in some respects, as did the owners of factories.

Mussolini did shift to the right gradually because I think he was afraid of the power of the communist and the socialists, and since he was a dictator and wanted dictatorial power he felt that one has to suppress these parties and they were suppressed.

...

Are Communism and Fascism totally different things, completely opposed to one another?
Well, the notion that Communism and fascism are diametrically opposed is something that was fostered by the Communist party, by the Communist International. In the 1920s, basically the International defined fascism as any anti-communist movement. If you were anti-communist, it doesn't matter what platform, you were automatically fascist. So that even the western democracies were called fascist. This is a meaningless term. I use the term Fascism concretely, to apply only to the Italian fascist party and the Nazi to the Nazi party.

The idea that fascism as a far-right ideology was a creation of the Comintern is something Goldberg makes reference to in the interview linked above. And if you doubt the extent to which the Comintern would go to paint their fellow-traveller rivals as reactionary, I'd recommend that you pick up a copy of Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.

In the interview, Goldberg says something to the effect of, "I bet that if you were to remove the war and antisemitism from the Nazi program, most of these modern progressives would endorse their policies." That does seem to occur among the commenters in the form of "if free education was all that nazism did, I would be in favor of it," as if you could separate things so easily -- what part of "totalitarian" don't they understand? Via Matt Zeitlin, I did come across something that approached a thoughtful critique at Spencer Ackerman's TooHotforTNR (worth reading), in which he asserts that "a government that makes a lot of poor and invidious policy choices, many of dubious constitutionality, but still leaves power following a democratic election isn't fascist." Does that mean that the NSDAP was not fascist until the Reichstag fire? Or that they wouldn't have been fascist had Hitler counterfactually stepped down in elections in 1940? Does it mean that Lenin and Stalin were fascist?

This debate hinges on the definition of fascism. Most common definitions start from the standpoint informed by the post-WWII propaganda effort that painted Nazis, Italian fascists, and other groups into the right by way of contrasting them to the Communists, socialists, and Democrats. [3] As usual, I'm no fan of the overly simple, one-dimensional, left-right model of politics. Anything that pretends to pit Hitler and Stalin as polar opposites is nearly useless. If I find the time, perhaps I may make an attempt at developing a definition of fascism.

Most critics of Goldberg's book seem to think that he is making the definition so broad that it would encompass every country and political movement in history. Possibly: I don't have the book and the Amazon version isn't searchable, so I don't have Goldberg's definition. It seems likely, based on the little I have seen, that they are being intentionally obtuse. They are preferring to argue on the differences in degree in the components and refusing to see the difference in kind in the system taken as a whole. Take Ackerman's response to one passage in the book:

JG: Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve that common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the "problem" and therefore defined as the enemy.

SA: Fascist regimes do not impose their wills by force "or" through regulation and social pressure. They systematize violence.

Is this a deliberate misrepresentation of both Goldberg's claim and of fascism? He skips past the "religion of the state" part and the definition of totalitarian, going right for a minor point about regulation and social pressure. And on that point, he is wrong. Fascist states famously used social pressure as leverage to get people to report their neighbors. It is so well known that it has entered our language in the form of phrases like "little Eichmans" and "Good Germans"; it has been famously studied in the Milgram, Stanford prison, and Asch conformity experiments.


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[1] Today, the primary argument for state intervention in these matters has not been our own health or the state's right to our labor, but rather the cost which unhealthy citizens are placing on state healthcare programs. Which is absurd when you think about it - the state creates a program to shield people from risk and then is shocked to find people using it? The rejoinder to this from the left is most likely to be a moral argument, i.e., individuals should sacrifice their personal pleasure (smoke, consumption of transfats) for the common good. Sounds like ... ?

[2] First, Nazi Germany did not start a war to demonstrate their national power, they started it because they felt they had an obligation to look after the welfare of "ethnic Germans". Thus, they reclaimed the Rhineland, pulled the Austrian and Sudetenland Germans back into the fold, and then started expanding east (Poland) in order to start realizing his goals of autarky, a closed economic system which could provide its own food , manufactured goods, and markets for both. They did this because they perceived the lesson of WWI was that imperialism did not work. Hitler went to war with France and England as a pre-emptive measure, and against Russia because he felt he also needed some of the land which the Soviets had grabbed for farm production.

Another reason for qualifying war as only "arguably" more fascist is that England, France, and Kaiser-era Germany were all basically fighting over their imperialist aspirations in WWI, and the Soviet Union and China also started a few wars. Were they fascist? Using this aspect of the Sadly, No author's definition of fascism, it might be difficult to find a country which would not qualify. Can anyone state the significance of the United States, Mexico, and 1848 in this context? Anyone? Bueller?

[3] These are over-represented in the Wiki articles thanks to the efforts of Chip Berlet and a few self-identified Marxist editors. I found that if I attempted to mitigate some of their more eggregious errors, my edits were promptly removed without explanation. When I started a wholly new section, they moved it to someplace completely unrelated and then watered it down. They view their sources as unassailable while claiming that the Austrian school of economics is too marginalized to be taken seriously. Wikipedia is like politics: a small special interest group or a majority can introduce and enforce errors.

Liberal Fascism? Never heard of it, can't be true

Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism has drawn the ire of both the Crooked Timber and the Sadly, No gangs, as well as many other left-leaning reviewers. Their refutations consist mainly of calling Goldberg a stupid fascist; the general approach is to assume he's obviously wrong, beneath answer, and therefore only to be mocked. I have yet to find one who takes on Goldberg's actual arguments, much less his strongest arguments.

No matter the quality of Jonah's book, the bottom line is that there is no meaningful separation between fascism, broadly understood, and historical progressivism, broadly understood [1]. Both are rooted in the desire to use the state as the primary if not sole institution for improving the common good. How many assumptions are rolled into that worldview? A common understanding of and agreement to "the common good"; the agreement that "rugged individualists" (classical or neoclassical liberalism) are the enemy; that it is both possible and desirable to standardize production, employment, organization, goals, means, thought, and culture (a return to the security and surety of the Middle Ages, when the Church provided the centralization); a belief that the state, no matter how intrusive, is either benign or decidedly beneficial, but only when it is in the proper hands (and those are easily identified by party affiliation); that progress only comes as a result of intentional design, forcefully implemented (e.g. you don't use incentives to reduce pollution to acceptable levels, you simply ban it and introduce very harsh sentences for transgressors). There are also the non-assumptions: the means by which the state achieves these goals are non-controversial, never to be mentioned, "police state" is a term reserved for the means only when the opposition is in control.

I haven't read Goldberg's book, but I still find it remarkable that the Progressives can not reflect on their own views of how governments -- such as the present Bush Administration -- try to frame their policies and consider how the early to mid 20th century was no different. Yes, Iraq was our ally while we were fighting a proxy war against the Iranians, and likewise the Talibani and al Qaeda troops in a proxy war against the Soviet Union. When the focus of those efforts shifted, so did the rhetoric of the executive branch.

Likewise, Germany was the most socialist state in all of Europe when the Nazis started winning elections [1]. They didn't run on a "Repeal Socialism" platform because it never would have gotten off the starting line. They ran on a "Get the foreigners off our backs" platform, but retained every bit of the socialist central planning tendency that by that time was ingrained in every German. One need only look at the 1920 platform, which includes elements of land redistribution, social welfare, abolition of rent and usury, nationalization of trusts, pension expansion, and free education along with all of the anti-semitic and racist nonsense. Hitler liked to think of his theory as a third way, charting a course between English liberalism (which he called "international finance" or "Manchesterism") and bolshevik communism; he considered both to be of Jewish origin.

Prior to Hitler's ascension, Lenin, Stalin, and Mussolini had come to power. The dominant view in the US at that time was not that these were evil regimes, but that they were experimenting with new forms. The real watershed moment in the 20th century came not in the Depression or WWII, but during World War I. The socialists approved war funding in Germany, causing Lenin and Mussolini to declare the International to be dead. The US started experimenting with industrial planning boards, Mussolini (one of if not the leading socialist in Italy) began to question whether the internationalist plank in the socialist platform was worth keeping, and Lenin took advantage of the chaos in Russia to assume power. A few years later, Mussolini took advantage of chaos in Italy (much of which he created) to seize power and build his variant of socialism; he and Lenin were mutual admirers. Fascism is named for the fascio, a symbol of both power and unity; in this case, unity of Italian workers, who Mussolini would lead through the necessary capitalist stage that was required to precede the socialist stage. Soon thereafter, in the wake of the post-war, reparation-fueled inflation and in the midst of the world-wide depression, Hitler came to power with promises of restoring pay and prestige to artisans and small farmers. Both of these models - Italian corporatives and German autarky - were the new way forward, along with the experience with industrial planning, which Roosevelt drew on to create the National Recovery Administration. Free markets -- "Manchesterism" -- were out, and state cartelization was in.

The exchange between the Europeans and Americans was not one way, nor was it limited to the corporative. The dominant theme in American politics at that time was Progressivism, underpinned by Taylor's Scientific Management. This was a direct offshoot of both large, finance capitalist enterprises, and the scientism of Comte. It came to infect America at large when Louis Brandeis brought Harrington Emerson to the stand in the 1910 Eastern Rate Cases. They argued that rate increases were not necessary, that more scientific planning could improve the efficiency and therefore profitability of the railroads. It touched off the Efficiency and Technocracy movements. The intellectual leaders of these movements -- Taylor, Emerson, Gilbreth, Brandeis, Croly -- became cultural as well as political icons. Gilbreth's biography even led to a popular movie, Cheaper By The Dozen. Lenin, thrashing around for an organizing principle, adopted Scientific Management as the basis for Soviet planning and control. Yes Virginia, the organizing principle behind GM was the same as the organizing principle behind the Soviet Union.

It was only in the dynamics of World War II that Italy and Germany became the enemy -- and then only after they broke the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact! It is only in the undynamic, one-dimensional model of left-right politics that they an be viewed as anti-progressivist. Yes, Hitler was against liberalism, but he was against liberalism in its classical meaning. Yes, Mussolini's Black Shirts fought against the socialists, but only because he wanted to accelerate the revolution and take their power, not to deny their ideas. It is naive to reason that since Americans were fighting against Hitler, his ideas were opposite Roosevelt's; that since Hitler was fighting Stalin, then their theories were polar opposites; that since Mussolini joined Hitler, their theories were identical and diametrically opposed to socialism. Even the Progressives today draw parallels between Bush and Husseini policies, yet they fail to recognize that political opponents in the present might not have been ideological opponents in the past [3]. The world is much more complex than that: it is said that special hatred is reserved for the heretic, not the pagan, and this is no less true for the political alignments and propaganda campaigns of World War II than it was in pre-Renaissance Europe.

But no, it's easier to say "Hitler started a war and killed Jews and is generally regarded as evil, and Hitler fought against the communists, and communists are leftists, therefore Hitler was a right-winger, and laissez faire capitalists also are against communists, therefore the more capitalist you are, the more right-wing you are, and therefore the more like Hitler you are." It's a neat syllogism that simultaneously affirms your morality and confirms the immorality of anyone who doesn't embrace your assumptions of state benevolence and planner omniscience. And it threatens the use of this syllogism to call into question its premises.

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[1] By "broadly understood", I mean that it doesn't enlighten anyone to define fascism as, "an ideology opposed to progressivism," and vice-versa. The conclusions are assumed by such a definition.

[2] I doubt anyone wants to argue that the Soviet Union was more socialist, but I will concede that point if made and would include the qualifier, "democratic", to "state".

[3] Incidentally, Saddam is popularly considered to be right wing and fascist. However, Saddam was a member of the Baathist party. Baathists are socialists who are against foreign intervention. It stems from pan-Arabism. What party had its roots in pan-Germanism, stood against foreign intervention, broadly adopted socialist principles, but fought against Marxist-bolshevist socialists?

Running on glue and tar

My wife and I have been discussing where the world is going to go in the post-Peak Oil era. I for one am optimistic, but concerned about the transitional period. I think that we (humanity) will develop a variety of responses to the problem(s), and that we will be better off in the end, but I am concerned about the rate at which the transition will occur. There may be upheaval and pain in the interim, regardless of who is in the White House or what policies we follow to get there.

In the comments on Matthew Yglesias recent post on gouging, we see a response to higher fuel prices that I think is indicative of lazy, uncreative thinking. Simply keep piling on one supposed remedy after another. This is creative thinking in much the same way that fixing your mistakes after rushing through a job is productive work. (for my previous thoughts on gouging, see here, here, and here).

Some things seem to escape the attention of people who think like this. For example, the crimes committed by a gas station owner can be determined by looking at his prices compared to his competitors' as follows:

• higher: gouging
• lower: predatory intent
• equal: collusion

In this environment, it might be worthwhile to keep a lawyer on staff, nicht war? And since the laws are subject to change, a lobbyist might be useful. If everyone has to have lawyers and lobbyists, that creates a competitive advantage for larger businesses. I think I can assume that people who are against gouging are also against large businesses, so why don't they understand or acknowledge these problems?

---------------------------------

Then, I was reading about heterodoxy, Cowen, and Veblen, looked up Veblen, got side-tracked by Giffen Goods, and finally came across an essay in The Nation by Sasha Abramsky entitled, "Running on Fumes". He raises the idea that gasoline is a Giffen Good, one that poorer people will come to spend more on even as its price rises because they are locked into it.

Sasha says,

Indeed, the very fact that some commentators, such as the Cato Institute's Jerry Taylor, so glibly assume (or, at least, assumed pre-Katrina) that an oil price shock can be painlessly absorbed shows just how invisible the country's poor have become to much of its pundit class.

Since Taylor's offending comments are neither quoted nor referenced, I can only guess that Taylor said something like, "let the price mechanism work" in response to calls for price controls. The month prior to Abramsky's piece, Taylor wrote about fuel prices in NRO. I would recommend reading both before proceeding with the rest of this post.

Back?

It is of course debatable whether the price mechanism will work well with regards to energy. In the comments on James Hamilton's Peak Oil in America post, Stuart Staniford claims that recent empirical research indicates a short-term price elasticity of -0.05. An older survey indicates that the long term price elasticity is around -0.8 and the short term is around -0.2. In any case, this is for a general population, not the poor, so it is only indirectly relevant to the point. If these two articles can be taken as accurate, the indicated decrease in elasticity (magnitude) indicates that it will be harder to curtail gasoline use as price goes up than it was in 1979-1983; I would assume that it would be harder for the driving poor, but perhaps not so much for the urban poor who have access to other options. (I graph oil use vs. oil price here, but have not updated it since October 2005. Note how much reduction was achieved 1979-1983.)

Near his conclusion, Mr. Abramsky claims that the decline of the rural area about which he is writing is preventable, but

prevention involves the sort of innovation the Bush Administration, besotted as it is with laissez-faire triumphalism (not to mention oil-industry campaign cash), has been reluctant to embrace.

Did you just experience a self-administered lacto-nasal enema upon reading -- in a single sentence -- that the Bush Administration favors laissez-faire policies and that laissez-faire and oil-industry campaign cash are not mutually exclusive?

Indeed, this seems to be common in discussions of gouging, Peak Oil, current pricing, and related issues. Are Mr. Abramsky and the commenters on Matthew Yglesias' blog really claiming that the oil industry enjoys laissez-faire trade policy? That seems so absurd on its face that I cannot believe it needs rebuttal.

The oil industry came of age in the Progressive Era. Oil production had steadily increased and prices decreased for the entire history of the industry through the antitrust prosecution of Standard Oil. As the automobile caught on and demand heated up, Progressives were excited to be able to subsidize a competitor to railroads. Then, as the US got involved in World War I, businessmen eager to be freed from antitrust regulation jumped at the invitation to participate in the Commodities Section of the Petroleum War Services Committee and the Oil Division of the United States Fuel Administration. Dominick Armentano points out in Antitrust and Monopoly, that A. C. Bedford, president of Standard Oil of New Jersey, was appointed as chairman of the War Services Committee. Their experience of cooperation and "supervised competition", and the concurrent worldwide embrace of central planning (think about what was happening in Russia, Germany, Italy, and even England in the period between wars), paved the way to the corporative-creating National Industrial Recovery Act. When that was struck down, the Connally Hot Oil Act of 1935 was passed without hearings to maintain stability in the oil industry. It allocated state production quotas and provided a means to enforce restrictions on interstate transshipment in excess of those quotas.

The military has been tied in to oil production or at least the Middle East arguably since Eisenhower placed troops in Lebanon in 1958 and Kennedy defended Saudi interests in 1963. More recently, in 1980 Jimmy Carter announced the Carter Doctrine, stating that the US would defend its oil interests there. You have the obvious Bush wars since then, with Clinton lobbing a few bombs and establishing bases in Saudi Arabia in between.

In addition to regulatory and military support, we also have regulatory intervention and distortion. As James Hamilton has pointed out, one reason for the increase in gas prices during the tight markets in 2005 was the fact that the national market is segmented by EPA requirements and refineries cannot easily switch between the various boutique fuels favored by - you guessed it - Mr. Abramsky's fellow travelers. Finally, we have people who insist that we need to increase gas taxes so that we, like Eurotopia, will have gasoline prices near $10 per gallon.

Any guesses as to whether The Nation favors those higher fuel prices? I searched for "carbon tax" on their site and got 78 hits; the first one says, "A carbon tax would be simple --" The author goes on to add that

And as Charles Komanoff of the Carbon Tax Center argues, at least part of the proceeds of the tax could be rebated to poor and middle-income households through the income tax system, neutralizing any inequities. The unrebated balance could be used to subsidize alternative energy research and production. Given the historical successes of government funding of basic research in computing and medicine, there's every reason to believe the products of this work would be very promising.

Another two-fer: not only do we learn that the simple tax now has lots of other little simple ancillaries, like using the simple income tax system to rebate for gas, but we also discover that the government's funding of basic research has a proven track record. They don't explain exactly how we figure out the difference in rebates between subway-riding New Yorkers and rural Californians, so perhaps it is not as simple as they first insist. Nor do they actually compare the government's track record in conducting research to anything else, like privately funded applied research. Now, I think it's possible that government gives the private sector a good run in basic research, but recall that the human genome was first decoded by a private company in 1/10 the time and budget as that proposed by a government agency. But the private sector is much better at applied research, which is what was meant by "subsidize alternative energy research and production." So they call for applied research based on the government's track record in basic research? Nice sleight of hand.

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A greater protest must be registered over Mr. Abramsky's nearly complete silence on the century of other Progressive policies that have pushed the poor out of town and into the oil-based lifestyle. Once again, we can refer to Gabriel Kolko's Railroads and Regulation and The Triumph of Conservatism for an understanding of the politics underlying regulation in the Progressive Era. The tongue-in-cheek, short version is that competition was largely working for everyone except the capitalists themselves. Competition was forcing costs down so far that they were all headed for bankruptcy, so they tried cooperative arrangements. When those failed, they turned to the federal government to act as the cartelizing agent. Though Kolko doesn't specifically address it, it is easy to see that the electric power industry faced the same logic of high capital costs, low marginal production costs, and the resulting expansion, competition, system building, bankruptcy, and "need" for regulatory intervention. This eliminated the "destructive competition" in rails & utilities by constraining competition and innovation. The whole point of regulatory oversight was not consumer protection, as the unsophisticated, narcissistic state-worshipper would have you think, but rather stabilization for the industries so they could go back to peace, quiet, and regular dividends. That is why deregulation and people like Craig McCaw and Michael Milken were so upsetting to AT&T in the 1970s and 1980s, and why electric utilities are so resistant to deregulation today.

The same public who first wanted to give land grants and rights of way to railroads and canals in order to get rid of private turnpikes, and then wanted to constrain railroads because the average voter didn't understand the logic of the capital-intensive industry they had spawned, and now didn't like the fact that their regulations created a de jure cartel, wanted roads. They joined the Good Roads movement and fought for public subsidies for bicycles and then cars. When Louis Brandeis brought Harrington Emerson to the stand in the 1910 Eastern Freight Rate Cases to argue that every industry could be rationalized with and every consumer benefited by Taylor's Scientific Management, the public caught the bug for the Efficiency Movement and Technocracy Movement. They wanted to centrally manage everything. The goal was, as Herbert Croly put it, to produce "Jeffersonian ends with Hamiltonian means".

As outlined above, the Progressives in WWI and FDR's cabinet in the Depression and WWII supported a state-industrial oil policy to further rationalize oil production and distribution. In conjunction with the Good Roads and subsidization of the automobile (which gave rise to the Golden Age of manufacture and its corresponding anomie and unionism which many Progressives yearn for), the stage was set for moving out of high density urban areas and to the suburbs.

The push to suburbia has also been helped over the years with some uniquely Progressive policies. Rent control in New York City, for example (I once read that poverty-stricken Walter Cronkite lives in a rent-controlled building). The aforementioned utility subsidization, including the TVA and REA, which replaced farmer-owned windmills with investor-owner utilities. More recently, to "preserve their character" (a euphemism for "preserve their property values"), many cities (bastions of Right Wingerdom, like San Francisco) have banned urban development, forcing people out of town to find affordable housing. To pay for a wide variety of programs, some of which used to be privately provided by the working classes for themselves, cities have raised property and sales taxes (Santa Fe, for example: there's a reason you need to make $10/hour to live there, and it mostly has to do with California millionaires moving into the City Different; most of them are not exactly Goldwater Republicans). While the upper and middle classes were leaving the city to live in clean, quiet neighborhoods, these policies were all pushing the poor even further out of town.

In the specific case Mr. Abramsky addresses in his essay, the size of those towns probably needs to be smaller. They were dependent on mineral extraction and timber, both repeatedly attacked by people like Mr. Abramsky, but probably not by Jerry Taylor. Indeed, it's probably a safe bet that when people like Jerry Taylor raised the issue about the impact of stopping resource extraction on the workers, people like Mr. Abramsky glibly dismissed it, saying that the economy could easily absorb the jobs lost. But I will go further than either of them and point out something both should agree to (if they want to be logically consistent with their probable core values): continuing to live in a non-agricultural rural area is inherently energy intensive, and we should not continue to subsidize it if we really think Peak Oil is a concern.

I recently came across a site (probably something on Gristmill dealing with global warming) that claimed all of the skeptics of (Kyoto?) never provide any suggested solutions of their own. Does Mr. Abramsky offer a suggested solution for the poor people he exploits for his article? He offers a vague mention of mass transit, a system that works well in high density areas like Europe and the Northeast Corridor, but probably not in Northern California. He seems to imply that George Bush is personally responsible for the lack of mass transit despite the fact that ridership is higher than it was under Clinton.

Abramsky makes a quick offer to help them pay for oil, thus furthering the addiction that has them in this situation in the first place, and contributing to a 150 year legacy of trapping people in a state-underwritten prison. The latest insult in that legacy has been the ethanol subsidy, a Carter-era program with bipartisan support for all the wrong reasons: it reduces imports, it supports "family farmers", and it is "renewable". First used to replace lead (Pb) and reduce pollution, it actually increases certain types of pollution. The subsidies for "family" corn farmers mostly end up in the pockets of ADM. And the renewability, touted by Progressives, is having growing implications for poor people. As I noted in my review of Joshua Tickell's From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank, "Some bio-cheerleaders ... claim that a large scale shift to biofuels won't affect food prices, but that is almost certainly wrong. The amount of land required to make a dent into our petro-fuel usage would easily require both the fallow fields and some land currently used for food production. Demand up, price up, QED." Given recent headlines, I'm going to claim prescience, but I think every clear-headed person could figure this out on their own. Even Noam Chomsky figured it out in hindsight.

Finally, Abramsky also mentions the possibility of subsidizing efficient vehicles, something that has been going on for several years with mixed results*. In other words, we get some paeans to Progressive programs and a demonstration of how much good Mr. Abramsky can do with other people's money to prove that he cares. Some of his explanations are wrong, some suggested solutions are demonstrable failures, and one at least will probably make things worse (subsidizing oil? Really?!). At no time does Abramsky recognize or even seem to be aware of the contribution of his intellectual predecessors to the creation of the problems of today's poor. Instead, he turns the tables, claiming that those problems were caused by people like Jerry Taylor and policies like laissez faire and implying that anyone who doesn't accept his vaguely defined solutions is responsible for the misery and possibly death of the poor. "Laissez faire means you don't care."

Now, Mr. Abramsky is correct to question the effect on the poor, but he has come to exactly the wrong conclusion. His essay is nothing but rhetorical sleight of hand intended to impugn Jerry Taylor and anyone who dares suggest that the price mechanism is a better mechanism than any other so far identified to coordinate oil supply with oil demand. Mr. Abramsky is like George Washington's doctors who kept letting his blood, and upon remarking how sick he appeared -- probably the result of too much blood letting -- tried more blood letting.

Note that I did not say the price mechanism is the best means. Again, thinking negatively (what is that? perhaps not what you think), there may be a solution of which I have not heard yet, but until then the price mechanism is the least worst solution. Price controls are predicted by theory to create shortages, and the theory is confirmed by empirical data. A shorthand way of explaining this is the gas lines in the 70s and in Baghdad today. Surely, if the poor need gasoline, then some at high prices is better than none at any price? Ridiculing the least worst answer, or insulting the person who acknowledges it, is like accusing your doctor of murder for informing you that you will inevitably die.

Furthermore, Mr. Abramsky never seriously looks at the total effect of the price mechanism. It not only curtails demand, but it stimulates supply. Note the implications of this chart in The Economist, from the article "Venture Capitals". Furthermore, note an idea from this episode of Nova: "If you look at companies, like SunEdison, who are helping retailers put up solar panels on their roofs, you're suddenly seeing a linkage of the capital markets -- which have traditionally been very reluctant to get into solar energy -- with the retail sector. That's how you do things in America. You link the technology to the capital, and that's where the rubber hits the road." In America, the capital markets respond to a problem, while in other countries, the politicians respond. The former have to spend their own or their clients' money and are held accountable, the latter not so much.

"So what", you might say, "I don't care who produces the solution, so long as there is one. And so long as it benefits the least well off."

Well, here's so what. I'm vaguely familiar with the theory of functionalism. It says that institutions exist because a society needs them; institutions serve a purpose, a function. When I first heard of it, I immediately thought that it seems circular and lacks a mechanism to describe change; this appears to be an ongoing criticism of the theory. In any case, proponents of this theory use it to justify the existence of government agencies: obviously we must need them if they exist. If you evil bastard libertarians abolish some of those agencies, people will suffer.

That is true as far as it goes. It doesn't go far enough, though. There are two problems with it.

First, I have always believed that there are two problems faced by people who desire change: one is describing a desirable and reasonably realistic future. That is what I like about Kirkpatrick Sale. The second is to describe the path, how to get from here to there. The problem with simply saying "abolish such-and-such program" is that it doesn't describe what we reasonably expect to replace the functionality of that program or how the private institution that replaces the program will spontaneously evolve. For one thing, we don't know what it will look like or how it will evolve: if we did, we'd be in favor of planning. For another, "spontaneous" does not mean "instantaneous", and "evolve" does not mean "appear out of thin air".** So they are right to think that people would suffer if all we were saying is "abolish such-and-such", but we aren't: we are saying, "abolish such-and-such and allow some time for a better solution to evolve." Clearly, though, we need to do a better job of understanding and then explaining how institutions evolve.

The second problem with the functionalist-statist analysis is that it is usually based on an ignorance of history. Remember, if the existence of an institution implies a need for it, what answered that need before the government agency? This is a problem with the change mechanism in functionalism - if the agency sprung from nothingness, either the need must not have existed before, or the agency didn't spring from nothingness. So how does functionalism account for how or why would such a change occur? No answer seems to be forthcoming (but I admittedly have only a kindergartener's view of functionalism). In many cases, though, the solution to the riddle is that a private institution answered the need until it was co-opted by the government. As David Beito has documented, that was the case with much social insurance. The victor (the government) also gets to write the history and teach it in the schools it owns, so few people know about institutional arrangements that probably haven't existed for generations.

Let me bring this full circle.

Sasha Abramsky and others are claiming that laissez faire is not the answer to the problems posed by high gasoline prices for poor people, they are claiming it is the problem. I'm going to consider this patently false until someone can successfully convince me that oil policy is and has been laissez faire. Even stipulating to that claim, though, their recommended solutions of subsidizing the addiction would only prolong the problem and -- given that agencies rarely die once created -- would make the problem worse if oil prices should fall. They are refusing to face the possible fact that this area of California, like the Corps of Engineers' New Orleans, should not be as heavily populated as they were in the cheap-energy past. However, had laissez faire actually been practiced instead of the heady policy brew we have endured for the past 100+ years - regulating railroads and utilities, protecting them against innovators, encouraging suburban expansion, promoting efficiency in energy production at the expense of efficiency in distribution, reliability, and end use, then perhaps the poor people described in Mr. Abramsky's story wouldn't be locked into the lifestyle they are. People like Mr. Abramsky spent taxpayer money on the system that got them into this mess, now he has 100 ideas on how to spend more to keep them in the manner they have come to expect: poor, dependent, and hopeless. Ecologists refer to this approach of endlessly proposing the same solutions to the unintended consequences caused by an earlier round of similar interventions as "parachuting cats."

Given the power to enact their vision, they would systematically destroy every last vestige of spontaneous, private order in an effort to build community values. But such governments have a tendency to collapse of their own weight. When they do, the survivors look around and note that the community was kept together only by the fear of the increasingly necessary police state. There is no community spirit in such a place. Look at what the inhabitants of Russia have been enduring after the collapse of their system. Listen to this article on NPR about the lack of community values in Albania. No, really, listen to it. Generations of socialist theory have wiped out everything they knew about civil society. In America, de Tocqueville marveled at the Association phenomena; in Russia, people wished for their neighbors' barns to burn down.

That is why I prefer private to public institutions. I don't believe in market "magic"; too often have I been a disappointed consumer. Private solutions may not be perfect, but neither are state institutions. Too often have I also stood in DMV lines.

Cooperatives and associations are more democratic than an agency run by career bureaucrats. Furthermore, even Hirschman now acknowledges that Voice works only when Exit is a viable option. As a result, on average, private institutions are flexible and responsive and will evolve; public agencies are rigid and arrogant and will stagnate.***

Nobody resents an association they neither belong to nor pay for, even when that institution stands for something they loathe, but everyone hates paying for those parts of the government they oppose (agriculture? military?). Those who oppose democracy distrust private organizations and vote to suppress them (think Red Scare, Alien and Sedition, Palmer Raids, Radio Caracas Television). Those who genuflect to democracy cannot understand why people would vote for what they would call "undemocratic" programs and politicians. To comfort themselves, they develop theories of conspiracy, brainwashing & propaganda, or false class consciousness. They then begin to support politicians who promise to thwart those poor demented creatures, the opposition; in the end, the democrats line up to vote for the fascists, who proceed to replace private institutions with state institutions. The democrats are surprised when the anti-democrats take control of the machine and use it in surprising ways, perhaps even contrary to its original intent.

A public policy and agency require no imagination or creativity; simply - and I mean simply - propose a blunt mechanism for addressing whatever problem vexes you, then either declare victory or ask for more money and authority. The clever politician does both at once. Opponents can always be demonized as unpatriotic, asocial, and dangerous. A private institution requires work, creativity, conviction, persuasion, and innovation. It promotes civic values. Think Wikipedia, an institution created by libertarians (yes, Virginia, Jimbo Wales is one of those people). That is why I think that government is the intellectually lazy man's solution, and why it endangers the poor man whom he seeks to save.



* Yes, the Prius is great, but I get 46+ mpg with my non-hybrid. Somehow, the powers that be decided that hybrid was better than diesel, even though diesel fuel can be made easily from waste oil and renewable oil. I would argue that this is rather short-sighted, but not atypical. Also, several years ago I remember reading about the skyrocketing price of Suburbans in Arizona due to a shortage of them; apparently, the state was subsidizing a version with an alternative fuel modification (LNG or propane), but you could still run it on gasoline, so people were driving in from out of state and taking ownership of a friggin' Suburban at taxpayer expense for the purpose of saving gas. Personally, I think that if there is a role for the government here, it is to fund an E-prize as Lovins et al describe in The Oil Endgame. Remember, however, that the E-prize is named after the Ansari X-prize, a privately funded prize that has been moderately successful.

** In case you think I'm exaggerating about the strawmen used by anti-libertarians, look at what this says about libertarianism: "Libertarians believe (like Marxists believed back when there actually were Marxists) that if the government just shriveled away, a paradise would naturally spring into existence." Spring? It took hundreds of years to kill some institutions that themselves had to evolve over hundreds of years; only a fool would think they could be replaced overnight. Similarly, only a fool would think that "stroke of the pen, law of the land" equates to "problem solved". They are generally surprised to find out about "unintended consequences". Other than that, Midas' claim that things claimed by libertarians have never existed exposes the breathtaking ignorance of actual history usually found in people who read only popular history books. He could try starting with Homage to Catalonia or The Machinery of Freedom and work his way up from there.

*** Size is also important: I will take a small, decentralized public institution to a large corporation. Centralization and the distance between the top of the hierarchy and the end users or customers are also factors.