Limits on government power

Jul 142008
 

Debra Saunders is just one of many conservatives saying stuff like this:

And the average voter certainly isn’t going to lose sleep if the price of that security is that the ACLU does not have carte blanche to sue AT&T for cooperating with the government.

It boggles the mind that conservatives think it good to have private companies cooperating with the government. They ought to be at each others’ throats, not ganging up on us.

Jun 102008
 

I’ve long detested the term “policymaker” as used in this sentence that I found by googling for the term:

The User Liaison Program disseminates health services research findings for State and local health policymakers in easily understandable and usable formats through interactive onsite workshops, teleconferences, distance learning programs, and research syntheses.

Bleah.

I understand the need for legislators, judges, and executives in our system of government.   I am not particularly fond of government bureaucrats, but I accept the fact that we need them.   But how did these beings called “policymakers” ever weasel their way into our society?    Why can’t we just eliminate those positions, and let the practitioners be rehabilitated?  Then we wouldn’t need “usable formats” and “interactive onsite workshops.”   Life would be much more pleasant.

I’ve been tilting against that windmill for some time, but now I see I am not alone!   I was about to throw out the April 21 issue of the The Weekly Standard, when I found an article abut Michael Oakeshott that I hadn’t finished reading.  I had heard of the guy before — some conservatives seem to talk about him a lot — but hadn’t read anything of his, and still haven’t.  The following has got me interested, though:

The lectures are worth reading in their own right, but Oakeshott’s admirers will appreciate them primarily for the elaboration they afford to some of the points he made in his anti-Rationalist essays. In two of those, he distinguished between the word “ruler,” the medieval term for a sovereign or head of state, and the word “leader,” which we now use to describe political officials of whose strength or charisma we approve.

The former, says Oakeshott, carries the idea of adjudicating disputes and otherwise maintaining order; the latter suggests the teleological impositions of the modern state. “Rulers” want enough money to fight wars and as few internal disputes as possible; “leaders” want to take the state in a certain direction and must persuade majorities to let them. The transformation began, says Oakeshott, when, in the early modern era, the medieval distinction between adjudication and policymaking began to fall away.

For medieval rulers, policymaking had been confined almost exclusively to foreign policy: the making of treaties, declarations of war, and so on–powers, by their nature, unlimited. But in time, governments began to pursue policy with respect to their own population.

A modern state is a ‘policy’ state; and this, in its extreme, is a ‘police’ state. For what constitutes a ‘police’ state is not the ‘knock at the door’ (that is a minor detail), but the pursuit of policy by a government in relation to its own subjects.

Unfortunately, that’s as much as the article has to say about it.

Jun 082008
 

Shawn Macomber reviews Gene Healy’s book, The Cult of the Presidency.

I came of political age in the ’90s, with the conservative critique of Waco, and during a time when conservatives often opposed foreign adventurism. Though I identified myself as a libertarian, I always associated conservatism with a realistic view of human nature and, accordingly, skepticism toward unchecked power. And the conservatives I knew best had spent the ’90s trying to convince the country that the executive branch had been seized by an utterly corrupt bunch of people who could not be trusted with power. Yet here they were in the new century, endorsing every one of the Bush administration’s extravagant constitutional claims. This seemed especially odd when all the while the odds-on favorite to win the office was another candidate named Clinton.

Well, I came of political age in the early 1960s, not the 90s, and it’s just as much a mystery to me why conservatives did that. It’s just as disheartening to me as the discovery, in the very late 60s, that so many conservative Republicans didn’t really oppose civil rights laws on constitutional grounds after all. They were just racists.

It was so depressing that by 1972 I had become an anti-Nixonite McGovernite. I had partially recovered by 1976, and fully recovered soon after Ronald Reagan’s administration began in 1981.

I’m not sure what I’ll do about it this time.

Mar 082008
 

Here’s how to get Leviathan to finance the defeat of Leviathan. (I’m reminded by the Couch Potato Entitlement editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal.) When you convert your analog TVs to digital, don’t turn down your $40 coupon(s) on the principle that the government has no business subsidizing private entertainment. You’ll never beat the welfare-police state that way.

No, you should use those coupons. But money is fungible. Immediately send an equivalent $40 (or $80) to defeat the members of Congress who voted for this program.

You could give the money to the Cato Institute, or to the Club for Growth. Or you could send it as a direct contribution to some member of Congress who voted against this subsidity — to your own Congressperson, if you’re that lucky. (I’ll try to find a list.)

One more thing is important. Be sure to let it be known what you’ve done with the money. Tell your Congresspeople. Tell about it on your blogs. Write a letter to the editor. And tell the recipient.

I should warn you that hell hath no fury like that of a welfare pimp towards a recipient who is not properly grateful for government subsidies. Look at how they’ve treated Clarence Thomas. But that’s how you know that this is one of the most effective means of opposing them.

Feb 092008
 

Wired magazine tells about a $30 million project to piece together a billion pieces of paper records that were torn up by the East German Stasi, but which they hadn’t gotten around to destroying. And the destroyed records amount to only about five percent of its files:

the agency had generated perhaps more paper than any other bureaucracy in history — possibly a billion pages of surveillance records, informant accounting, reports on espionage, analyses of foreign press, personnel records, and useless minutiae. There’s a record for every time anyone drove across the border.

The main reason we need lower taxes is not for economic growth, though that is an important reason. The main reason is so the government cannot afford to do things remotely like this.

And it’s interesting that even in a government like that of East Germany, it almost seemed laughable at the time to think it would be harassing dissenters by letting the air out of their tires. But the records show that that is indeed what was happening to Ulrike Poppe. Is it really so far-fetched to think that Kathleen Willey was experiencing the same sort of treatment from the Clintons?

She even tracked down the Stasi officer who managed her case, and after she set up a sort of ambush for him at a bar — he thought he was there for a job interview — they continued to get together. Over the course of half a dozen meetings, they talked about what she found in her files, why the Stasi was watching her, what they thought she was doing. For months, it turned out, an agent was assigned to steal her baby stroller and covertly let the air out of her bicycle tires when she went grocery shopping with her two toddlers. “If I had told anyone at the time that the Stasi was giving me flat tires, they would have laughed at me,” she says. “It was a way to discredit people, make them seem crazy. I doubted my own sanity sometimes.” Eventually, the officer broke off contact, but continued to telephone Poppe — often drunk, often late at night, sometimes complaining about his failing marriage. He eventually committed suicide.

Feb 062008
 

The WSJ editorializes on the “stimulus”.

President Bush and Congress are marching arm in arm to pass their economic “stimulus,” but it’s clear that at least one group of observers isn’t impressed: investors. They blew right through all the Beltway happy talk yesterday, selling off the major stock indexes by some 3% or so on an ugly day.

I suppose an alternative possibility is that investors are spooked by the prospect of a Clinton, Obama, or McCain becoming president and are bailing out while they can still cut their losses.

But more likely they’re spooked by the results of bipartisanship.

I’m guessing the reason the Congress and President are acting so quickly on this package is that they need to do it quickly before people learn that it won’t do any good.  The important point for them is to expand the size and scope of government  while they have a chance.

Yes, the rebates are mostly temporary, but the expansion of government will be permanent.  The new spending will have to be paid for, which will create pressure for higher taxes, which will create pressure for more spending.

Feb 032008
 

I suppose I should have had something to say about Jonah Goldberg’s book by now, given that “leftwing fascism” is a blog category here and I and have been using that term for a decade or two. But I haven’t yet read Liberal Fascism. I’ve heard of it, but haven’t read it.

I haven’t used that category much, either. I suppose it’s because there are times when I’d rather make fun of leftwingism than slap a label on it, though I have nothing against either.

However, I do have a comment about Richard Bernstein’s review at the International Herald Tribune titled, Are American liberals “nice fascists”? It’s actually a pretty good review, but it ends like this:

And it might even be the case, as Goldberg contends, that Clinton, in her willingness to “insert the state deep into family life” in order to assure the well-being of children is “in perfect accord with similar efforts by totalitarians of the past.” But that doesn’t make Hillary a fascist or a totalitarian, or, for that matter, wrong.

I’m afraid Bernstein is wrong here. Such a willingness on the part of Hillary very much suggests a totalitarian fascist tendency. If “deep into family life” is not getting the state involved in pretty close to total control, I’m not sure what is.

And who has ever heard Hillary express any concern about keeping government’s control within prescribed limits?

In the end, Goldberg’s point that the fascist label has been used by some liberals to defame almost anything they don’t like is a valid one. So is his contention that American conservatism has no connection or similarity to European fascism – even if some American conservatives were not especially alarmed by Hitlerian racism or, for that matter, American Jim Crow.

But he should have stopped there.

To go on to label American liberals “nice fascists” isn’t exactly a smear, but it’s not exactly helpful to public discourse either. Then again, if Goldberg had stopped short of doing that, the chances are a book called “Liberal Fascism” wouldn’t have made it onto the best-seller list.

On the contrary, that label IS helpful to public discourse, and Bernstein’s review proved it. It gets us talking again about the idea of there being proper limits to government power.

Feb 012008
 

I’d mock it, too, if I heard Hillary say such a thing. If she really wants to do away with the horrendous paperwork of applying for college student-aid, she needs to get the government out of the business of subsidizing education loans. She can let the markets handle it and keep the paperwork simple, or she can have the government involved and the paperwork complicated. There really is no other method.

If you let the markets take care of it, lenders don’t need all the information that the government does. Yes, they do need to know some things about your finances, in order for you to convince them that they’ll get their money back. But they don’t need to know all the details that the government needs to know to keep cheaters from getting government money. In order for government to be fair and equitable in handing out money, it needs to know all sorts of things about us that are really none of its business.

From New York magazine:

Hillary believes, to the core of her political being, that what changes people’s lives are government programs. Her command of detail about these is prodigious, at times jaw-slackeningly so. And this often leads journalists to underestimate the effectiveness of her laundry-listy rhetorical métier. At her final speech in New Hampshire, I watched a well-known national columnist walk up to Doug Hattaway, one of her strategists, and mock a portion of her speech in which she promised that she’d do away with the horrendous paperwork involved in applying for college student aid. Hattaway simply shrugged and said, “She probably wouldn’t keep saying it if it didn’t get huge applause everywhere she goes.”

Jan 142008
 

(Also posted to my Spokesrider blog).

I’ve been reading a remarkable little book: “The Whiskey Rebellion” by William Hogeland (2006).

The reading is in preparation for a bicycle tour this summer to some of the sites of the Whiskey Rebellion in southwestern Pennsylvania.

What got me into this topic was the Hezekiah Wells family. Wells Hall on the campus of Michigan State University is named for him. Hezekiah Wells was important in MSU’s early history, in part for keeping MSU from being merely an adjunct of the University of Michigan. He was also a big supporter of Abraham Lincoln’s candidacy for the presidency and of the big Unity faction that won out in the early 1860s.

His father, Bezaleel Wells, was a big player in early Ohio history, and happened to intersect with the Black Hawk history I’m doing by making a trip to Michigan in 1832 to visit his sons. He was in the company of Bishop Philander Chase, founder of Kenyon College in Ohio, who had just left that institution under angry circumstances.

bronson-prairieriver-1338

This photo is from an October 2005 bike ride. It’s on US-12 a few miles west of Bronson, Michigan (on Black Hawk’s old road). There’s nothing there now but what you see in the photo, but in 1832 there was a little settlement and mill. One of the writers of the county history remembered that Chase and Wells had come through. Chase made inquiries about land to buy. (He then started a seminary in Goshen Gilead Township, which later burned and was abandoned.) Wells continued on to Kalamazoo to visit his sons.

Bezaleel’s father had been a whiskey distiller in western Pennsylvania at the time of the Whiskey Rebellion. I’m not sure how active a participant he was in all the activities–maybe only a reluctant participant–but in any case it’s an interesting transition in three generations from an anti-unity rebellion to war for unity and centralization.

I happened to pick Hogeland’s book (along with a few others) because it was one easily available to me. The guy writes well and gives some points of view I had not considered before. I’m maybe 1/3 of the way into the book. While it has been fun to read, I have been wary, not sure whether he’s a leftwing populist (perhaps a crackpot populist) or a rightwing one. He certainly brings out a lot of points that cannot be comforting to either side.

One thing to learn, btw, is that those people who think a sales tax is a fair tax are the REAL crackpots. And those who think a sales tax (excise tax) is easy to collect need to learn a little history.

I finally decided I couldn’t wait. I’m not nearly finished with the book yet, but I needed to learn more about what others have said about the book. I did find a few things — the Amazon reviews, for example — but I found something even better: the author’s own explanation of his work.

It’s no wonder I wasn’t sure what he was. Here is a quote:

The Whiskey Rebellion does not offer perfect support for anyone’s current agenda; it shakes up much of what is widely assumed across the political spectrum about the founding period. When the dust settles, it offers new clarity. Though libertarians and socialists have long been virtually the only keepers of the Whiskey Rebellion flame, I now believe that living through the Rebellion will challenge not only consensus mainstream historians but also both left and libertarian students of American history.

Here’s where I found his statement: http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/hogeland1.html

federal-aid-bridge-1339

And here is a closeup photo of that bridge on US-12. It gives a clue as to how the story of federal power and tax authority turned out. (You can click for a larger version of it.)

Jan 092008
 

From the WSJ:

Why Donating Millions Is Hard To Keep Secret
Anonymous Gifts Are Growing, But Groups Are Under Pressure To Reveal Benefactors’ Names
By SALLY BEATTY

…publicity-shy donors say they want to give back to their communities but avoid the headaches of a high public profile, including pushy fund-raisers, jealous relatives and even risks to their personal safety.

…Proponents of greater disclosure by charities, including some lawmakers and consumer groups, argue that keeping givers’ identities secret can mask efforts by wealthy individuals and corporations to use philanthropy as a tool of undue influence.

To say nothing of philanthropists getting tax breaks to fund programs that support the governing class in having its way with less wealthy taxpayers.

…And political rivals of presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton have pressed her husband, former president Bill Clinton, to reveal names of anonymous donors to his foundation.

Sounds like a great way for the Clintons to subvert campaign finance regulation.

…Wealthy donors have different reasons for wanting to stay out of the limelight. Most major religions, including Christianity, Judaism and Islam, regard anonymous gifts as a more sincere or even higher form of giving compared with gifts for which the donor takes credit publicly…

OK, how’s about this? So long as the benefactor and benefactee do not get any tax breaks, e.g. so long as the benefactor does not take a tax deduction, and so long as the benefactee pays income tax on income derived from the gift, it should be just fine for the donor to remain anonymous. After all, can anybody’s religion really consider it a more sincere form of giving if there are tax benefits for it?