"Once it is admitted that Power may forswear its true reason and end, and as it were, detach itself from society to form far above it a separate body for its oppression, then the whole theory of Power's identity with society breaks down before this simple fact.
"At this point nearly all who have written on the subject look the other way. A Power which is both illegitimate and unjust is off their intellectual beat. This feeling of repugnance, while it is understandable, has to be overcome. For the phenomenon is of too frequent occurrence to give any chance to a theory which does not take account of it.
"It is clear enough how the mistake arose: it was from basing a Science of Power on observations made, as it is history's business to make them, of Powers whose relations with society were of one kind only; what are in fact only its acquired characteristics were thus mistaken for Power's essence. And so the knowledge acquired, while adequate to explain one state of things, was quite useless in dealing with the times of the great divorces between Power and society.
"It is not true that Power vanishes when it forswears its rightful begetter and acts in breach of the office which has been assigned to it. It continues as before to command and to be obeyed: without that, there is no Power--with it, no other attribute is needed."
----Bertrand de Jouvenal, On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth, p. 108
In the 1950s Stanley Milgram showed that conformity to authority comes naturally to a large segment, and likely a majority, of the population. All that is required to confer legitimacy on a Sovereign is an appropriate title or costume. Under laboratory conditions between 30 and 60 percent of the population will be willing to kill another person upon a scientist's command.
De Jouvenal points out that two restraints on European kings limited their exercise of power to a greater degree than modern democracy is limited. These were custom and the Church. Legal doctrines received from the Barbarian Codes and from the Romans left European kings with strictly delineated authority. Moreover, the power of the nobility, the dux, countered the power of the rex. Viewed historically, power seemed limited to historians of the 19th century because the kings never knew unlimited power until the Protestant Reformation, which overthrew custom and created the conditions for the argument of the divine right of kings. At the same time, the argument of popular sovereignty derived unlimited power from the popular will. Thus, the two doctrines of the divine right of kings and popular sovereignty evolved at the same time and considerably extended the possibility of power.
Historians could not anticipate the tragic consequences that would emanate from the unrestrained popular will of Rousseau, Hobbes, Hegel and Marx. Even the arch-capitalist Herbert Spencer was taken by surprise. He had argued that the organic evolution of the state in light of popular sovereignty would be in the direction of reductions in state power rather than more.
America was spared the Rousseauean tragedy because Locke did not claim that the people bestow all liberties on the general will, or that there is a general will at all. Unlike Rousseau and Hobbes, Locke saw only a limited granting of rights to the state. This limitation on state power creates a considerable distance between American and European democracy. Jefferson did not see this difference between the French and American Revolutions. That is one point on which Hamilton and Washington, the Federalists, were right and the Democratic Republicans were wrong. In America, Thomas Paine was exalted. In France, he was imprisoned.
Progressivism is a reassertion of Rousseauean values. The extent of the damage that Progressivism has done has yet to be seen.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Monday, June 1, 2009
Michael Mooron Aims to Build Mass Transit For Suburbanites
General Motors went bankrupt in 1919, 90 years ago, and the current bankruptcy has antecedents that are instructive. GM also was reorganized in the 1920s, when the DuPonts, the firm's chief stockholders, removed its founder, William Durant, for manipulating the firm's stock price. Pierre DuPont ran the firm briefly and hired Alfred Sloan, a managerial genius after whom are named MIT's Sloan School of Management (Sloan was an MIT alum) and the Sloan-Kettering Memorial Cancer Center in Manhattan. (Kettering was Sloan's R&D vice president and inventor of the self starting engine and many other automotive breakthroughs.)
The management policies that Sloan implemented transformed GM from a poor second to Ford to the world's largest manufacturing firm. Part of Sloan's insight involved decentralizing or divisionalizing the firm; creating price-based target markets for the automotive divisions; using return on investment to evaluate performance; and targeting higher-priced cars in order that used GMs would compete with the lowest price car--the Ford Model T. Sloan envisioned the used car market, and indeed, by the 1920s used GMs and other brands began to compete with the cheap Model Ts, but not the higher-end GM cars.
The reason Sloan was able to turn around GM was his managerial ability. In particular, Sloan understood markets; he established a market research system; he understood customers; he enhanced and utilized relationships with dealers; he developed cost efficient organizational structures; and he provided incentives for competent management and innovation. Sloan's sharp management skills contrast with the examples of public mismanagement that Michael Moore presents in his film Roger and Me. In the film, the Flint municipal government squanders millions on nonsensical investments like a theme park called "Auto World"; a useless hotel; and an effort to draw tourists to visit Flint.
But the mechanistic management style that Sloan represented had several flaws. Sloan was bad at labor relations and politics. As a result, he became a sacrificial lamb to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. The unionization of GM could have been implemented in a way to enhance GM's strategic advantage, but instead Sloan created an atmosphere of adversarial labor relations from which the firm never recovered. He was attacked not only by sit down strikers but also by Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins and, if I recall, Roosevelt himself.
Likewise, Sloan failed to develop a succession plan. The executives who followed him at GM were not his equals. Managerial breakthroughs were being made in Japan by the 1950s, yet the GM management was not able to imitate the ideas that Toyota pioneered.
The failure of GM was well documented in the 1972 On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors by De Lorean and Wright. As well, Peter Drucker had written a rather positive account of the firm in the late 1940s entitled Concept of the Corporation, to which the management reacted with considerable hostility. Sloan responded with his 1962 classic My Years with General Motors which is one of the best management books ever written. GM's paranoia about criticism ran deep, and its culture of conformity and groupthink undoubtedly contributed to its demise.
There is a long litany of critics of General Motors and the automobile industry, one of whom is Ralph Nader and another is Michael Moore. Moore's Roger and Me is a darn good film. Unfortunately, Moore's political ideas are downright Mooronic.
Jim Crum just sent me this drivel that Moore wrote about socializing the firm and turning it into a mass transit manufacturer. Moore's strategy is similar to the woman's in his film who conceptualized Flint as a tourist Mecca--and who upon failure made her destination to be tourism czar of Tel Aviv just as the Palestinian Intafada was about to start.
If GM is to be turned around it needs to clean house; eliminate management at the departmental head level and above; and institute nuts-and-bolts, quality-oriented managers who can institute lean manufacturing and a culture of innovation and cooperation. Imposition of the rancid, socialistic tripe that Moore has on offer will create another New York City subway system in the form of General Motors.
One of the problems with America today is that America's wealthy, including Moore, are economically illiterate and persistently self serving. Moore is one of the few who can afford an expensive apartment in Manhattan. He lived on 83rd off Broadway when I lived on Riverside Drive and 87th. I was there because my in-laws lived there. He was there because plunking down $1 or $2 million for an apartment is chicken feed for a Hollywood guy.
Thus, Moore makes the assumption that all Americans live in Manhattan and can afford the $1 million for a one bedroom apartment, just like he can. As a result, all Americans will benefit from more mass transit.
But if anything is worse managed than GM, it is New York City's subways. Moore probably doesn't take the subway. Rather, he is likely chauffeured around, possibly in a specially built hybrid Humvee to accommodate his frame. I doubt he could fit into one of those mini-van style taxis that are environmentally friendly and coming to dominate the New York taxi scene. As well, I suspect his flatulence is a bigger problem than the bovine flatulence and porcine waste about which environmentalists like to complain.
The New York City subway is a nightmare institution. Rats scurry hither and yon. When I travel to Brooklyn, there are 20 people in the subways and thousands above ground in Humvees and Cadillacs. Maybe most of the cars aren't GMs, but building more subway cars isn't going to change that because the subway system is so incompetently managed by the Metropolitan Transit Authority that it would have gone bankrupt 40 years ago if it were a private firm. Of course, before the city took it over in the 1930s, the subways were clean and attractive and the subway firms viable. Now, Moore is looking to turn GM into another incompetently managed subway system. To him, the way to turn around GM is to turn a third rate private firm into a twentieth rate public sector one.
Moore is right to criticize GM's management, but he is one of the few people who feel themselves qualified to comment on management issues whose ideas are more blundering and stupider than Wall Street's or GM's. Socializing GM is guaranteed to establish a management even stupider than Roger Smith. And Moore, a robotized advocate of socialism who has never seen a public institution he was willing to criticize, no matter how putrid, won't be around to tell the tale.
Moore writes:
1. Just as President Roosevelt did after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the President must tell the nation that we are at war and we must immediately convert our auto factories to factories that build mass transit vehicles and alternative energy devices. Within months in Flint in 1942, GM halted all car production and immediately used the assembly lines to build planes, tanks and machine guns. The conversion took no time at all. Everyone pitched in. The fascists were defeated.
The management policies that Sloan implemented transformed GM from a poor second to Ford to the world's largest manufacturing firm. Part of Sloan's insight involved decentralizing or divisionalizing the firm; creating price-based target markets for the automotive divisions; using return on investment to evaluate performance; and targeting higher-priced cars in order that used GMs would compete with the lowest price car--the Ford Model T. Sloan envisioned the used car market, and indeed, by the 1920s used GMs and other brands began to compete with the cheap Model Ts, but not the higher-end GM cars.
The reason Sloan was able to turn around GM was his managerial ability. In particular, Sloan understood markets; he established a market research system; he understood customers; he enhanced and utilized relationships with dealers; he developed cost efficient organizational structures; and he provided incentives for competent management and innovation. Sloan's sharp management skills contrast with the examples of public mismanagement that Michael Moore presents in his film Roger and Me. In the film, the Flint municipal government squanders millions on nonsensical investments like a theme park called "Auto World"; a useless hotel; and an effort to draw tourists to visit Flint.
But the mechanistic management style that Sloan represented had several flaws. Sloan was bad at labor relations and politics. As a result, he became a sacrificial lamb to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. The unionization of GM could have been implemented in a way to enhance GM's strategic advantage, but instead Sloan created an atmosphere of adversarial labor relations from which the firm never recovered. He was attacked not only by sit down strikers but also by Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins and, if I recall, Roosevelt himself.
Likewise, Sloan failed to develop a succession plan. The executives who followed him at GM were not his equals. Managerial breakthroughs were being made in Japan by the 1950s, yet the GM management was not able to imitate the ideas that Toyota pioneered.
The failure of GM was well documented in the 1972 On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors by De Lorean and Wright. As well, Peter Drucker had written a rather positive account of the firm in the late 1940s entitled Concept of the Corporation, to which the management reacted with considerable hostility. Sloan responded with his 1962 classic My Years with General Motors which is one of the best management books ever written. GM's paranoia about criticism ran deep, and its culture of conformity and groupthink undoubtedly contributed to its demise.
There is a long litany of critics of General Motors and the automobile industry, one of whom is Ralph Nader and another is Michael Moore. Moore's Roger and Me is a darn good film. Unfortunately, Moore's political ideas are downright Mooronic.
Jim Crum just sent me this drivel that Moore wrote about socializing the firm and turning it into a mass transit manufacturer. Moore's strategy is similar to the woman's in his film who conceptualized Flint as a tourist Mecca--and who upon failure made her destination to be tourism czar of Tel Aviv just as the Palestinian Intafada was about to start.
If GM is to be turned around it needs to clean house; eliminate management at the departmental head level and above; and institute nuts-and-bolts, quality-oriented managers who can institute lean manufacturing and a culture of innovation and cooperation. Imposition of the rancid, socialistic tripe that Moore has on offer will create another New York City subway system in the form of General Motors.
One of the problems with America today is that America's wealthy, including Moore, are economically illiterate and persistently self serving. Moore is one of the few who can afford an expensive apartment in Manhattan. He lived on 83rd off Broadway when I lived on Riverside Drive and 87th. I was there because my in-laws lived there. He was there because plunking down $1 or $2 million for an apartment is chicken feed for a Hollywood guy.
Thus, Moore makes the assumption that all Americans live in Manhattan and can afford the $1 million for a one bedroom apartment, just like he can. As a result, all Americans will benefit from more mass transit.
But if anything is worse managed than GM, it is New York City's subways. Moore probably doesn't take the subway. Rather, he is likely chauffeured around, possibly in a specially built hybrid Humvee to accommodate his frame. I doubt he could fit into one of those mini-van style taxis that are environmentally friendly and coming to dominate the New York taxi scene. As well, I suspect his flatulence is a bigger problem than the bovine flatulence and porcine waste about which environmentalists like to complain.
The New York City subway is a nightmare institution. Rats scurry hither and yon. When I travel to Brooklyn, there are 20 people in the subways and thousands above ground in Humvees and Cadillacs. Maybe most of the cars aren't GMs, but building more subway cars isn't going to change that because the subway system is so incompetently managed by the Metropolitan Transit Authority that it would have gone bankrupt 40 years ago if it were a private firm. Of course, before the city took it over in the 1930s, the subways were clean and attractive and the subway firms viable. Now, Moore is looking to turn GM into another incompetently managed subway system. To him, the way to turn around GM is to turn a third rate private firm into a twentieth rate public sector one.
Moore is right to criticize GM's management, but he is one of the few people who feel themselves qualified to comment on management issues whose ideas are more blundering and stupider than Wall Street's or GM's. Socializing GM is guaranteed to establish a management even stupider than Roger Smith. And Moore, a robotized advocate of socialism who has never seen a public institution he was willing to criticize, no matter how putrid, won't be around to tell the tale.
Moore writes:
1. Just as President Roosevelt did after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the President must tell the nation that we are at war and we must immediately convert our auto factories to factories that build mass transit vehicles and alternative energy devices. Within months in Flint in 1942, GM halted all car production and immediately used the assembly lines to build planes, tanks and machine guns. The conversion took no time at all. Everyone pitched in. The fascists were defeated.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
The Coming Crisis of Legitimacy in American Government
Legitimacy refers to a concurrence of belief. In American government and politics, political legitimacy has been associated with the Constitution. The traditional American value system, Lockean liberalism, requires a limited state, and the Constitution reflects that value. There has always been debate among Americans as to how limited the state ought to be. Traditionally, special interests, to include the wealthy, manufacturing and banking interests, favored government intervention to further their goals. The working class, while poor, favored greater limits on government intervention to permit their acquisition of wealth. In the early twentieth century to the 1930s the model was modified. A strong element of social democracy was introduced. American social democracy was reconciled to Lockean liberalism in an uneasy balance. A social minimum or floor was established, as reflected in Social Security and Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Standards of professionalism were established in a wide range of fields. For example, with respect to the workplace, laws concerning health and safety, retirement plans, discrimination, and overtime were established. Although the late nineteenth century doctrines of free contract were overturned, a wide latitude for contracting remained. The social democratic laws did not interfere with a wide range of economic activity. Taxes were kept moderately low, at least in comparison with Europe. Where taxes were high, as with respect to inheritance, numerous loopholes were created.
This system is unstable because there is no dividing line between the principles of Lockean liberalism on which the system is based and the system of social democracy that was superimposed on it. To achieve balance Americans needed to constantly reformulate the principles of Lockean liberalism and social democracy. But to reformulate the balance, Americans must understand Lockean liberalism and social democracy. Yet, many Americans never bought into the social democratic system, and many never bought into Lockean liberalism. From the beginning some Federalists rejected principles of limited government. Europeans who immigrated here by the 20th century were unfamiliar with Lockean liberalism. The education system kept their descendants in the dark. On the one hand, Locke is not part of the education of American students today. He is ignored in the curriculum, and the education schools shun him. Therefore, there is no avenue by which many Americans can learn the foundation of one half of the equation.
On the other hand, the scale is heavily weighted toward social democracy. But the American system of business, innovation and progress depends on Lockean liberalism. Socialism and social democracy are incapable of generating progress, and there has been no progress of substance made in socialist or state-dominated countries. Sweden, for instance, grants prizes in innovation to others but itself has been responsible for little in the past century. In Japan, the most famous principles of business, lean manufacturing and total quality management, were created by Toyota's Taiichi Ohno and by the American consultant Edward I. Deming. The government policies in Japan, subsidies to banks, infrastructure, bailouts, and centralized planning have failed.
The educational system has been particularly aggressive in its rejection of Lockean liberalism. But no system of rights is based on logical necessity. The German university, the prototype of the American educational system, claimed to derive the necessity of social democracy from historical forces. Yet in America historical forces tended toward laissez-faire. But the adherents of the German historical school, such as John R. Commons, claimed to derive the necessity of social democracy from historical forces anyway.
Likewise, conservatives claimed to derive the precariously balanced system of Progressivism from tradition. Yet, there was no Progressive tradition. Indeed, there is no American political tradition. American government was created from scratch by colonists in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Declaration of Independence was a logical assertion of Lockean liberalism, and the Constitution imposed a Federalist superstructure. None of these institutions were derived from ancient tradition as in tribal and Roman Europe, the Middle East or Asia.
American conservatism can have meaning only to those who believe that social democracy is the future. To counterpoise "conservatism" to social democracy is to start by stating that you aim to lose the argument. Thus, the American conservative movement failed.
There is no logical coherence to social democracy. Social democracy depends on the mystical assumption that one must obey the state. Yet there is no moral necessity of obedience to social democracy any more than there is a moral necessity of unlimited laissez-faire. As de Jouvenal points out, democracy is attended with increasing levels of state compulsion to enforce the increasingly aggressive dictates of the democratic state. De Tocqueville called this the tyranny of the majority. Social democracy depends on mystical assertions of a "general will" which directly parallels the monarchical "divine will" of Filmer. Social democracy claims a moral foundation based on the logical necessity of risk aversion or minimizing the maximum possible loss, but there is no such logical necessity. Lockeans believe that progress depends on risk, and history has substantiated this opinion. Minimizing maximum loss is the philosophy of tribal cave men, not of free republicans. Yet the cave man theory of government is the one to which social democrats adhere. If many Americans have adopted the minimizing-maximum-loss value system it is because they have never been given a chance to learn what the American philosophy is.
Thus, American higher education has replaced the moral superstructure of Lockean liberalism with the moral superstructure of social democracy. Neither has foundation in logic, but the effects of both can be tested. Germany first adopted social democracy in the 1880s. The century following the adoption of social democracy in Europe and Progressivism in America was the ugliest and bloodiest in Germany's and the world's history. America's adoption of Progressivism in the 1890s led to its foray into imperialism. The adoption of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913 was followed by the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The progress that liberalism, England and the United States had generated in the 19th century continued to unfold fifty or sixty years into the twentieth century so that the 19th century innovations of television and radio waves provided for continued innovation. But the rapid, universal innovation levels of the 19th century ended. By the 1970s real wages were declining, a result uncharacteristic of any prior period of American history, and firms had decided that the way to profit was by moving plants into low labor cost regions rather than through innovation. Although the personal computer and Internet were notable exceptions, in broad swathes of American industry innovation stalled. Today, once-proud American firms like GM beg for public money. Yet, in the historical context it would seem that innovation should be ever increasing in pace because new ideas generate yet additional ideas. Creativity experts have long observed that innovation begets innovation. That is the process of brainstorming. Thus, the failure of innovation in America suggests not the failure of capitalism, but the failure of social democracy.
The educational system has thus generated a belief system that is empirically unfounded and is likely to disrupt and disappoint most Americans' expectations. The increasing level of taxation since 1950; the transfer of wealth to established businesses and the wealthy via the Federal Reserve Bank and the recent bailouts; the increasing levels of regulation; and the unquenchable expansion of state power to reflect every moral or ethical fantasy of America's elite (so long as the fantasies do not disrupt the investment holdings of the Ochs Sulzbergers, Warren Buffett or George Soros) will all disappoint Americans, who have been told to expect improvement in living standards even though they have not been told how to achieve such improvement or what the system of government and economy is that creates such improvement.
The belief system that the educational system inculcates is mystical in nature. It claims a universal morality of state action; and it holds that the changing and often whimsical beliefs of university professors and newspaper editors morally require blind adherence. It sets up silly "saviors" such as Franklin Roosevelt and Barack Obama, whose divine right to exercise power; deprive Americans of traditionally defined rights and property; and to be believed is rigidly proclaimed as moral. Just as late medieval Europeans believed in a divine right of kings, American social democrats believe in a divine right of state power and the cult of the presidential savior.
An essential part of social democrat mysticism is the replacement of God by the state. Thus, just as a religious Catholic might have a picture of a Saint in their home, social democrats have a picture of their Divine Savior-President Barack Obama in their homes. Just as blasphemous language is contemned by the religious, so is language disrespectful of Savior-Divine President Barack Obama contemned by social democrats.
Thus, the inculcation of blind moral obedience to the state by the Progresssive-Republicans and social democrat-Democrats leads to an inherent instability in the legitimacy of American government. This is seen most clearly in the US Supreme Court. Through a series of judicial decisions the Supreme Court has arrogated the power to legislate. This is not provided by the Constitution. With respect to Dred Scott, in the 1850s, the Supreme Court held that it had the power to regulate contracts. This incursion into state power increased through the 19th century. While cases like Brown v. Board of Education may have had morally laudable results, the arrogation of power by the Supreme Court lacks legitimacy. It is not provided in the Constitution. Many Americans do not believe that the Supreme Court ought to function like a moral dictator. And many Americans do not share the Supreme Court's value system. The Supreme Court cannot function as an overseer of the nation's morals because a sizable percentage of Americans do not share the Supreme Court's values.
The reason again speaks to the failure of America's educational system to educate Americans as to Lockean liberalism. As a result, although I do not question the intelligence and sophistication of the members of the Court, the Court's value system reflects in large part the social democratic training that the Justices received in American schools and universities. Their values are elitist and do not reflect justice as most Americans define it. The court has become increasingly illegitimate. The same is true of other American institutions. Congress's approval ratings are very low, but no one seems to be able to say why. The bailout was opposed by the majority of Americans, and there was no real reason for it save crackpot Keynesian arguments in elitist, pissant newspapers and television stations, but Congress went with the elitist newspapers and television stations.
The end result of the increasing tyranny of social democracy and tyranny of elitist opinion over American values and rights is de-legitimacy of the US government. We live in a period of instability because Americans have refused to confront the failure of social democracy and Progressivism. They continue to accept that conservative insistence on Progressivism and elitist social democracy are the only two options. Yet, the economic policies that the nation has adopted will deprive Americans of the standard of living to which they have become accustomed. This failure will mark the end of the American state as we know it. If the nation were doing as well as it could, reflecting Lockean values to a large degree and striving to balance reason, tradition and innovation in public affairs, minor modifications would be possible. But the two Progressive/social democratic parties have followed an avenue that has led them to the side of a cliff. And the public is going to have to back up and push the two parties over the side.
This system is unstable because there is no dividing line between the principles of Lockean liberalism on which the system is based and the system of social democracy that was superimposed on it. To achieve balance Americans needed to constantly reformulate the principles of Lockean liberalism and social democracy. But to reformulate the balance, Americans must understand Lockean liberalism and social democracy. Yet, many Americans never bought into the social democratic system, and many never bought into Lockean liberalism. From the beginning some Federalists rejected principles of limited government. Europeans who immigrated here by the 20th century were unfamiliar with Lockean liberalism. The education system kept their descendants in the dark. On the one hand, Locke is not part of the education of American students today. He is ignored in the curriculum, and the education schools shun him. Therefore, there is no avenue by which many Americans can learn the foundation of one half of the equation.
On the other hand, the scale is heavily weighted toward social democracy. But the American system of business, innovation and progress depends on Lockean liberalism. Socialism and social democracy are incapable of generating progress, and there has been no progress of substance made in socialist or state-dominated countries. Sweden, for instance, grants prizes in innovation to others but itself has been responsible for little in the past century. In Japan, the most famous principles of business, lean manufacturing and total quality management, were created by Toyota's Taiichi Ohno and by the American consultant Edward I. Deming. The government policies in Japan, subsidies to banks, infrastructure, bailouts, and centralized planning have failed.
The educational system has been particularly aggressive in its rejection of Lockean liberalism. But no system of rights is based on logical necessity. The German university, the prototype of the American educational system, claimed to derive the necessity of social democracy from historical forces. Yet in America historical forces tended toward laissez-faire. But the adherents of the German historical school, such as John R. Commons, claimed to derive the necessity of social democracy from historical forces anyway.
Likewise, conservatives claimed to derive the precariously balanced system of Progressivism from tradition. Yet, there was no Progressive tradition. Indeed, there is no American political tradition. American government was created from scratch by colonists in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Declaration of Independence was a logical assertion of Lockean liberalism, and the Constitution imposed a Federalist superstructure. None of these institutions were derived from ancient tradition as in tribal and Roman Europe, the Middle East or Asia.
American conservatism can have meaning only to those who believe that social democracy is the future. To counterpoise "conservatism" to social democracy is to start by stating that you aim to lose the argument. Thus, the American conservative movement failed.
There is no logical coherence to social democracy. Social democracy depends on the mystical assumption that one must obey the state. Yet there is no moral necessity of obedience to social democracy any more than there is a moral necessity of unlimited laissez-faire. As de Jouvenal points out, democracy is attended with increasing levels of state compulsion to enforce the increasingly aggressive dictates of the democratic state. De Tocqueville called this the tyranny of the majority. Social democracy depends on mystical assertions of a "general will" which directly parallels the monarchical "divine will" of Filmer. Social democracy claims a moral foundation based on the logical necessity of risk aversion or minimizing the maximum possible loss, but there is no such logical necessity. Lockeans believe that progress depends on risk, and history has substantiated this opinion. Minimizing maximum loss is the philosophy of tribal cave men, not of free republicans. Yet the cave man theory of government is the one to which social democrats adhere. If many Americans have adopted the minimizing-maximum-loss value system it is because they have never been given a chance to learn what the American philosophy is.
Thus, American higher education has replaced the moral superstructure of Lockean liberalism with the moral superstructure of social democracy. Neither has foundation in logic, but the effects of both can be tested. Germany first adopted social democracy in the 1880s. The century following the adoption of social democracy in Europe and Progressivism in America was the ugliest and bloodiest in Germany's and the world's history. America's adoption of Progressivism in the 1890s led to its foray into imperialism. The adoption of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913 was followed by the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The progress that liberalism, England and the United States had generated in the 19th century continued to unfold fifty or sixty years into the twentieth century so that the 19th century innovations of television and radio waves provided for continued innovation. But the rapid, universal innovation levels of the 19th century ended. By the 1970s real wages were declining, a result uncharacteristic of any prior period of American history, and firms had decided that the way to profit was by moving plants into low labor cost regions rather than through innovation. Although the personal computer and Internet were notable exceptions, in broad swathes of American industry innovation stalled. Today, once-proud American firms like GM beg for public money. Yet, in the historical context it would seem that innovation should be ever increasing in pace because new ideas generate yet additional ideas. Creativity experts have long observed that innovation begets innovation. That is the process of brainstorming. Thus, the failure of innovation in America suggests not the failure of capitalism, but the failure of social democracy.
The educational system has thus generated a belief system that is empirically unfounded and is likely to disrupt and disappoint most Americans' expectations. The increasing level of taxation since 1950; the transfer of wealth to established businesses and the wealthy via the Federal Reserve Bank and the recent bailouts; the increasing levels of regulation; and the unquenchable expansion of state power to reflect every moral or ethical fantasy of America's elite (so long as the fantasies do not disrupt the investment holdings of the Ochs Sulzbergers, Warren Buffett or George Soros) will all disappoint Americans, who have been told to expect improvement in living standards even though they have not been told how to achieve such improvement or what the system of government and economy is that creates such improvement.
The belief system that the educational system inculcates is mystical in nature. It claims a universal morality of state action; and it holds that the changing and often whimsical beliefs of university professors and newspaper editors morally require blind adherence. It sets up silly "saviors" such as Franklin Roosevelt and Barack Obama, whose divine right to exercise power; deprive Americans of traditionally defined rights and property; and to be believed is rigidly proclaimed as moral. Just as late medieval Europeans believed in a divine right of kings, American social democrats believe in a divine right of state power and the cult of the presidential savior.
An essential part of social democrat mysticism is the replacement of God by the state. Thus, just as a religious Catholic might have a picture of a Saint in their home, social democrats have a picture of their Divine Savior-President Barack Obama in their homes. Just as blasphemous language is contemned by the religious, so is language disrespectful of Savior-Divine President Barack Obama contemned by social democrats.
Thus, the inculcation of blind moral obedience to the state by the Progresssive-Republicans and social democrat-Democrats leads to an inherent instability in the legitimacy of American government. This is seen most clearly in the US Supreme Court. Through a series of judicial decisions the Supreme Court has arrogated the power to legislate. This is not provided by the Constitution. With respect to Dred Scott, in the 1850s, the Supreme Court held that it had the power to regulate contracts. This incursion into state power increased through the 19th century. While cases like Brown v. Board of Education may have had morally laudable results, the arrogation of power by the Supreme Court lacks legitimacy. It is not provided in the Constitution. Many Americans do not believe that the Supreme Court ought to function like a moral dictator. And many Americans do not share the Supreme Court's value system. The Supreme Court cannot function as an overseer of the nation's morals because a sizable percentage of Americans do not share the Supreme Court's values.
The reason again speaks to the failure of America's educational system to educate Americans as to Lockean liberalism. As a result, although I do not question the intelligence and sophistication of the members of the Court, the Court's value system reflects in large part the social democratic training that the Justices received in American schools and universities. Their values are elitist and do not reflect justice as most Americans define it. The court has become increasingly illegitimate. The same is true of other American institutions. Congress's approval ratings are very low, but no one seems to be able to say why. The bailout was opposed by the majority of Americans, and there was no real reason for it save crackpot Keynesian arguments in elitist, pissant newspapers and television stations, but Congress went with the elitist newspapers and television stations.
The end result of the increasing tyranny of social democracy and tyranny of elitist opinion over American values and rights is de-legitimacy of the US government. We live in a period of instability because Americans have refused to confront the failure of social democracy and Progressivism. They continue to accept that conservative insistence on Progressivism and elitist social democracy are the only two options. Yet, the economic policies that the nation has adopted will deprive Americans of the standard of living to which they have become accustomed. This failure will mark the end of the American state as we know it. If the nation were doing as well as it could, reflecting Lockean values to a large degree and striving to balance reason, tradition and innovation in public affairs, minor modifications would be possible. But the two Progressive/social democratic parties have followed an avenue that has led them to the side of a cliff. And the public is going to have to back up and push the two parties over the side.
Democracies are More Coercive Than Monarchies
"It may be argued that there are really two Powers which are different in kind; that one is the Power of a small number of men over the mass, as in a monarchy or aristocracy, and that Power of this kind maintains itself by force alone; and that the other is the Power of the mass over itself, and that Power of this kind maintains itself by partnership alone.
"If that were so, we should expect to find that in monarchical and aristocratic regimes the apparatus of coercion was at its zenith, because there was no other driving power, and that in modern democracies it was at its nadir, because the demands made by them on their citizens are all the decisions of the citizens themselves. Whereas what we in fact find is the very opposite, and that there goes with the movement away from monarchy to democracy an amazing development of the apparatus of coercion. No absolute monarch ever had at his disposal a police force comparable to those of modern democracies. It is, therefore, a gross mistake to speak of two Powers differing in kind, each of which receives obedience through the play of one feeling only. Logical analyses of this kind misconceive the complexity of the problem."
---Bertrand de Jouvenal
On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth, p. 23
"If that were so, we should expect to find that in monarchical and aristocratic regimes the apparatus of coercion was at its zenith, because there was no other driving power, and that in modern democracies it was at its nadir, because the demands made by them on their citizens are all the decisions of the citizens themselves. Whereas what we in fact find is the very opposite, and that there goes with the movement away from monarchy to democracy an amazing development of the apparatus of coercion. No absolute monarch ever had at his disposal a police force comparable to those of modern democracies. It is, therefore, a gross mistake to speak of two Powers differing in kind, each of which receives obedience through the play of one feeling only. Logical analyses of this kind misconceive the complexity of the problem."
---Bertrand de Jouvenal
On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth, p. 23
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
