Pursuit of Truthiness

Here are some ideas I’ve come up with.  I look forward to hearing some others from you.

1) Tea Party (the drinking kind)- Throw a tea party.  But instead of tea, serve coffee with a dash of Kentucky bourbon.  And instead of crumpets, use deep-fried apple pies.  Then watch an appropriate movie like 1776, the Patriot, or Red Dawn.

2) Tea Party (the ship-attacking kind)- What is the modern equivalent of highly taxed tea in British ships?  I would say supertankers filled with oil from OPEC countries.  We don’t need their oil!  Take over a ship and dump its oil in the harbor! (ok, perhaps we should find a more water-soluble product to feel oppressed by)

3) Down with the Brits!- Take over your nearest British consulate or embassy, then present the British government with a document detailing their “long train of  abuses” and a list of your demands.  If you’re feeling really ambitious, kidnap the royal family instead.

4) Fight for our Freedom- on a more serious note, the real restrictions on our freedoms nowadays don’t come from the British or from foreign enemies; they come from ourselves and our government.  The 4th is a great day to work to protect existing liberties and regain new ones.  Donate your time or money to a liberty-enhancing think tank, legal foundation, political action committee, or other NGO (say, Wikileaks).  If this constructive approach to enhancing liberty sounds too boring or difficult, you can simply celebrate in classic style by breaking some oppressive laws- like those against fireworks and marijuana!

Happy 4th to all however you celebrate.  I spend much of the year thinking about how the country could be better but its nice to think every once in a while about how good things already are.

After the American Revolution, democracy was the new thing that all the cool Americans were doing.

In the 1960′s and 70′s, a large youth cohort and a constitutional amendment lowering the voting age brought down the age of the median political participant.  Political policies and styles became more in tune with the youngest generation which is the eternal font of cool.

Now the youth cohort is small but technology is multiplying their influence.

Two recent examples deal with symbolic bills rather than policy but demonstrate this so perfectly.

First, the Oklahoma State Legislature decided to choose the Official Rock Song of Oklahoma using an internet poll.  In an upset over many classics and many songs that had more to do with the state, the winner was the Flaming Lips’ “Do You Realize” (which can be found on the video page of the band’s website).

Second, the creators of the gaming webcomic Penny Arcade just got commended by the Washington State Legislature.

This officially ushers in the age of hip techno-democracy!

Election night reminded me once more what a crazy, wonderful country I live in.  Barack Obama gave an incredible, uplifting victory speech to match his great accomplishment.  John McCain’s concession speech was literally jaw-dropping.   His eloquence, graciousness, and humility were inspiring; a few more performances that good and he may not have had to concede!  For him, on the very night of the election, to refer to his opponent as “my president”, after an ugly campaign this year and such divisive elections in 2000 and 2004, blew my mind.

It made me think of just how unusual our political system is.  Our presidents and presidential candidates have, again and again, given up the most powerful office in the world without coups, civil wars, violence.  This is not how human beings naturally work.  That we do so is an awesome achievement of our constitutional system, culture, and continued vigilance.  John McCain did one better, giving up not only without violence, but without hard feelings.

In a democratic society, though, we cannot depend only on having great leaders; they will not emerge except from a great people.  Ordinary Americans, using the latest greatest American technology, give the best showing of supporting democracy and being kind-hearted.

I give you 52 to 48/48 to 52, with love!

From Chris Blattman:

This is the best estimate of real income per capita in the United States since 1820.

Over these years we had violent financial crashes of various types, bank panics, piles of recessions and a huge depression, many foreign wars and one enormous domestic war, had a central bank and didn’t, were on the gold standard and weren’t, had governments topple in scandal and multiple leaders assassinated, and what did it all amount to in the medium to long run? In per-capita income terms: Nothing. The overall trend does not bend or shift. Every bad year was followed by a good year that returned us to trend.

The US average growth rate of real per capita incomes over the last 190 years has been 1.8% a year, and the same rate over the last 10 years has been…. 1.8% a year.

Stare at that graph: The Great Depression was traumatic in countless ways, but astonishingly, it’s not clear that we are any worse off today than we would be if the whole thing never occurred. Anyone who made such a claim in the 1930s would have been scoffed at, but that’s what happened.

As cynical Americans, we hardly expect our politicians to do in office what they promised to do on the campaign trail.  But many presidents end up doing just the opposite of what they promised, speeding away from their original platform like an Olympian diving off the 10 meter- though rarely with such purpose or grace.

Woodrow Wilson was reelected in 1916 on the slogan, “He kept us out of war.”  Within five months, he was asking Congress to declare war against Germany.

Franklin Roosevelt called President Hoover a profligate spender and promised to balance the budget and reign in spending.  But once in office he quickly surpassed Hoover, increasing government spending and defecits to peacetime records.

On the campaign trail in 2000, then-Governor Bush criticized Clinton and Gore for their attempts at “nation-building”, and said he would never do such a thing.  Less than a year after he was elected, President Bush had decided to give nation-building a try in Afghanistan, soon followed by a larger and less necessary attempt in Iraq.

Were these men simply lying to get elected?  I don’t think its so simple; I suspect all of them, especially Bush, intended to follow through on their rhetoric.  They changed their minds in response to changing circumstances- like unrestricted German submarine warfare, a persistent depression, or the Sept 11th attacks.  There is a least a modicum of honesty and legitimacy in these actions.

But the fact remains that these men were given power by an electorate because of what they promised to do.  Some of those who voted for Bush in 2000 in hopes of a less activist foreign policy were deeply dissapointed with his change of heart; some Floridians especially must have been driven to despair knowing what their hand had helped to wreak.

But what can we do as voters?  How can we know what a presidential candidate would really do, when they may not even know themselves?  Given the history just cited, it almost seems as if the best bet is to vote for the candidate with the beliefs most nearly opposite one’s own.  But really, it is probably best to roll the dice given the information we have.  Looking at the records and speeches of Obama and McCain, we can gain a little information.  It may not cover everything; it may be contradictory already; it will almost certainly be contradicted later.  But voters too must take the plunge, and hope the pool we are aiming for turns out to be where we think it is.

The Strange Death of American Liberalism by H.W. Brands purports to explain why LBJ-style liberalism no longer has any real influence on American governace.

He is right to note that its influence has faded away.  No matter how many times Bill Clinton is labelled a tax-and-spend liberal, the facts remain that he balanced the budget, reformed welfare, and introduced no major government programs.  The comparison to LBJ and even Nixon could hardly be more stark.

Brands’ main thesis is that liberalism is a political philosophy that puts enormous trust in the government, and that Americans are only willing to give that much trust to a government which is successfully prosecuting a war.

Most basically, Americans only tolerate the expansion of government power during wartime.  Brands tells the story of government expansion during and after each American war.  Each time the government takes on extraordinary powers; at the end of each conflict, the size and power of the government ebb- but never all the way back to prewar levels.

The Cold War allowed America to remain in a war mentality for decades, building a huge military and national security bureaucracy at the same time as it expanded domestic spending and policing abilities.

Vietnam and Watergate brought a loss of trust in the government, while detente meant a partial end to the Cold War.  By the time Nixon resigned, the liberal era was over.

Brands thesis is fine as far as it goes.  I get the sense that the heart of this book is about the wartime expansion of government power, in ways liberal or not; the title was probably chosen to sell more copies rather than to describe the contents.  His writting is clear and occassionally compelling.  He makes one prediction which is obvious in the abstract, but bracing given he timing: in a book published in early 2001, he states that the next major expansion of government would come only after a “national emergency.”  The emergency, and the expansion, of course followed swiftly.

This made me wonder how far the government’s size and power will ebb when Americans perceive the “War on Terror” to be over.  How many of us will outlive the Department of Homeland Security?  Or Federal security and shoe removal at airports?

Mostly I wonder what a President Obama would do.  His stated position of ending the war in Iraq, restoring many civil liberties, and also introducing major new government programs such as national health care, is impossible according to Brands.  Major new domestic powers can only come in wartime.  So will Obama continue the war in order to have a freer hand domestically?  Will he end the war along with his plans for major new initiatives like health care?  Or will he prove Brands wrong?

Just read Albert Einstein’s The World As I See It. The book, published in German in 1933 and in English a year later, was Einstein’s first publication directed at a general audience. The first half is devoted to science, both to an explanation of Einstein’s work and a record of his thoughts on the work of others and on the scientific method.

Next follow a series of letters about what it means to be Jewish and about the Zionist cause. Einstein thought highly of the value placed by Jews on learning and on justice. He hoped they would be able to integrate into Western, Christian societies without losing their own traditions and identity, and he saw the Zionist project as a way to bring all Jews together, whether or not they actually went to Palestine. His views are striking today do to the form of Zionism he advocated. He did not envision Israel as a political entity, a national state; he thought it enough that Jews were once again living together in their ancient home. It was not a problem to be living under British or Arab rule. Significantly, Einstein repeatedly states that the Jews and Arabs must be reconciled, so that when someday when the British would leave, then they could still live together in peace and friendship. I imagine that this very sound advice in 1933 was deemed too much of a risk after the experience of the Holocaust; after an experience like that any people must be reluctant to leave their security in the hands of others.

Einstein proceeds to turn his great mind to the problems of peace, war, economics, religion and philosophy. Einstein was an ardent pacifist, and a believer in the human potential for goodness. He earnestly hoped to see disarmament and the end of war in his own lifetime. He went about pursuing this goal every way he knew how, from attending peace conferences to fostering international ties among scientists to giving public speeches to writing prominent political figures.  But he was not a naive idealist.  He realized the collective action problem presented by disarmament, where each nation has an incentive to cheat; so he hoped for simultaneous universal disarmament.  Second-best would be attempts to punish those who start wars, regardless of the short-term interests of the other nations- so at best, every country would fight against an aggressor; or barring that, every country wold forgo potential war profits and put sanctions on the aggressor.  These last options border on the realistic.  Einstein’s foremost peace crusade was to fight against what he saw as the most evil part of war, but at the same time one of the easiest to eliminate: conscription.  He hoped, through changed laws and widespread conscientious objection, to eliminate the draft, and usher in a world where no man was forced to fight against his will.  In this, at least, he has been largely vindicated.

Einstein praises Americans for many reasons- our technology, our generosity, our freedom.  Much of this praise is still deserved today, to a greater or lesser degree than it formerly was.  But it is sad to see that in his time he placed the highest hope on Americans as the most peaceful large nation and the one most likely to bring about the end of war.  But seventy-five years later, it is the Europeans who have bucked their long history of warmaking, while America still engages in aggressive wars of choice.  I as much as anyone can give many reasons why our continued use of war is a good, or perhaps on balance even a peace-promoting strategy.  But it is sad to realize that a modern-day Einstein’s praise would flow the other way, and that America has given up a part of the moral high ground we long held relative to Europe.

If Einstein’s thoughts on peace do not now seem silly or naive, I thought perhaps he might slip as he waded into economics.  But his thoughts there too seem both wise and intelligent, especially in the desperate era of the Great Depression which left most economists baffled.  He advocated the regulation of monopolies and cartels, a maximum work-week, and a minimum wage.  Most importantly, especially as a German, he recommended the stabilization of the price level, to be achieved by controlling the money supply- Milton Friedman, twenty years early.  He hoped that the economy could be improved through regulation and organization, but recognized the severe inherent limitations of state enterprise:

“It is no accident that capitalism has brought with it progress not merely in production but also in knowledge.  Egoism and competition are, alas, stronger forces than public spirit and sense of duty.  In Russia, they say, it is impossible to get a decent piece of bread…. bureaucracy is the death of all sound work.  I have seen and experienced too many dreadful warnings, even in comparatively model Switzerland…. the state can only be of real use to industry as a limiting and regulating force.”

He saw Soviet communism as a grand experiment; he wondered whether it could work there, or work in a Western nation that would not tolerate such “terror” to enforce it.  But he expresses much skepticism in the project.  All in all, his views pass economic muster today, and are stunningly prescient for 1933.

Finally, Einstein puts forward some views on fundamental questions.  He sees a search for the meaning of life as an absolute necessity.  “The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness and Beauty.  Without the sense of fellowship with men of like mind, of preoccupation with the objective, life would have seemed to me empty.”  Yet despite this need for fellowship, he feels “an obstinate sense of detachment” and a “need for solitude”, and is “sharply conscious, without too much regret, of the limits of mutual understanding and sympathy between one’s fellow creatures.”

Einstein sees science as a sort of religion.  He abhors religions based on fear, whether of God or death, and eschews anthropomorphic conceptions of God.  But he believes “a knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which our minds seem to reach only in their most elementary forms; it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man.”

Einstein really opened his mind and his heart to the world in this book.  He demonstrates that his intelligence is wide-ranging, and in his letters shows himself to be wise, kind, and generous; a truly great man.

To end on a lighter note, and again recall a similarity to Milton Friedman, I quote Einstein’s views on prohibition:

“The prestige of the government has undoubtedly been lowered by the prohibition law.  For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced.  It is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is closely connected with this.”

Clearly a wise man!

Superbowl Sunday is the new July 4th.

I am officially acculturated and assimilated, purged of French idées and cultures.

Playing basketball was a good start; watching the Superbowl with friends patriotic; but the burgers, mozzarella sticks, and hundreds of wings are the real secret.  This food is enough to make a man’s heart burn with revolutionary fervor.