Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has written a book advocating a series of constitutional amendments that aim to, well, increase the power of the supreme court. According to USA Today the retired federal judge advocates abridging the right to bear arms, abolishing the death penalty, restricting campaign spending, reducing the independence of states, and changing congressional rules.
The US Supreme Court is a failed, backward-looking institution, and a former supreme court justice's giving advice about government is akin to a former General Motors executive's giving advice about free enterprise or a former Enron executive's giving advice about morals. Actually, a former Enron executive, including the ones in jail, is better equipped to give ethics advice than is a retired supreme court justice, for the moral turpitude of the supreme court is worse than Enron's.
Instead of Stevens's stale ideas, why not a constitutional amendment to abolish the Supreme Court, which has been a cancer on the American economy since 1803, the year of Marbury v. Madison? The worst thing Jefferson did wasn't the Louisiana Purchase--it was the failure to overturn Marshall's illegitimate claim that the supreme court has the right to interpret the constitution. Instead of a Supreme Court, the state courts could set up an arbitration system to adjudicate disputes among states, and Congress could set up an arbitration system to adjudicate disputes with foreign powers. The rest of the things that the US Supreme Court does, all of which it has mangled, could be done by state courts. That would encourage diversity, one of the supposed aims of the totalitarian federal state.
Since centralization and excessive federal power has resulted in a stagnant standard of living for most Americans--but not Stevens, who has spent a lifetime living off federal taxes and centralizing policies that have benefited him at the public's expense--it is difficult for me to understand why Americans could possibly care what Stevens has to say.
Friday, April 25, 2014
Saturday, April 19, 2014
C Wright Mills, America's Elite, and the Wisdom of Third Parties
I finished reading C. Wright Mills's Power Elite over the past couple of weeks. Published in 1956, the book offers more insight into current events than most contemporary commentary. Mills says that there are three levels of power--lower, middle, and upper--and that the pluralism upon which most political science focuses is characteristic of the local (lower) and Congressional (middle) levels. Although interest groups function on the lower and middle levels, there is little diversity at the upper level. The upper elite does, of course, contain advocates of different social orientations and degrees of socialism, but the underlying viewpoint is stable. The upper elite that runs America is comprised of presidential appointees selected from the broader power elite, which Mills depicts as coming from multiple sources: the Metropolitan 400 or social register types, the corporate rich, and the senior officers in the military.
When Mills wrote the book, the military and the military budget were more important than now. Mills was unaware of the Fed's role (hence the centrality of banking interests) in the subsidization of the power elite and the US governmental system. As a result, he understates the importance of banking interests, which Murray Rothbard and Ronald Radosh tease out in their New History of Leviathan and that James Perloff illustrates in his Shadows of Power.
Mills briefly describes the central role of the white-shoe law firms and investment banks, but these were more central in the 1950s than Mills describes them; they have become more so since Nixon's ending of the gold standard in 1971.
According to Mills, the president and his advisers select the highest-level elite from the various groups within the power elite. During the Kennedy years social and intellectual elites, represented by the Bundys, Dean Rusk, and Robert McNamara (recommended by fellow Skull-and-Bonesman and partner of Prescott Bush at Brown Brothers Harriman, Robert Lovett ) were dominant. More recently, much as in the days of George Washington, bankers like Henry Paulson (who parallels but is not the intellectual equivalent of Hamilton) have been dominant.
The upper elite interacts within itself, and typically there are one or two degrees of separation between any two members. Mills does not claim that there is any sort of conspiracy, for that would be foolish. Rather, each takes cues from the other. Conformity derived from educational-and-university experiences obviates the need for overt conspiracy.
The last few chapters move from analysis to broadside as Mills criticizes what he calls the crackpot realism of America's narrow-minded upper elite.
Mills's depiction of America as having moved from a public liberal to a mass society is on point. His emphasis on the mass media as transforming Americans from a free, imaginative people to a nation of cowed serfs (my word, not his) is also on point. Mills is not that far from writers like James Perloff, who writes about the Council on Foreign Relations. No president since Hoover has been independent of the CFR. That does not imply conspiracy any more than the leadership of a modern corporation's interacting with each other is a conspiracy. The elite interacts and forms opinions. Its mindset, like that of leading university professors, is conformist, lockstep, cowardly, and lacking in vision.
Mills offers little hope for those who care about America or hope to see a change from the current trend. It occurred to me that his book was the inspiration for Eisenhower's 1961 speech about the military-industrial complex. If Mills is right, then a useful long-term strategy in politics is to support third parties. Another is simply to jump ship and move to a smaller country in which a mass culture and an elite bred to narrow-minded arrogance and the subjugation of a foolish mass of TV-news-viewing idiots won't exist because of the smaller scale.
In the Federalist 10 Madison argued that America's large scale was an impediment to the formation of faction. As transportation and communication modernized, universities began to serve as the proving ground for elite conformity and groupthink. The power of America's elite is made possible by large scale combined with modern communication methods. The Internet and other postmodern developments, such as community activism, pose a challenge to America's mass culture. Nevertheless, as long as Americans continue to support the two mass parties and as long as at least a plurality of Americans derive their news from mass-market newspapers and television, the trends that Mills observed will continue to escalate.
When Mills wrote the book, the military and the military budget were more important than now. Mills was unaware of the Fed's role (hence the centrality of banking interests) in the subsidization of the power elite and the US governmental system. As a result, he understates the importance of banking interests, which Murray Rothbard and Ronald Radosh tease out in their New History of Leviathan and that James Perloff illustrates in his Shadows of Power.
Mills briefly describes the central role of the white-shoe law firms and investment banks, but these were more central in the 1950s than Mills describes them; they have become more so since Nixon's ending of the gold standard in 1971.
According to Mills, the president and his advisers select the highest-level elite from the various groups within the power elite. During the Kennedy years social and intellectual elites, represented by the Bundys, Dean Rusk, and Robert McNamara (recommended by fellow Skull-and-Bonesman and partner of Prescott Bush at Brown Brothers Harriman, Robert Lovett ) were dominant. More recently, much as in the days of George Washington, bankers like Henry Paulson (who parallels but is not the intellectual equivalent of Hamilton) have been dominant.
The upper elite interacts within itself, and typically there are one or two degrees of separation between any two members. Mills does not claim that there is any sort of conspiracy, for that would be foolish. Rather, each takes cues from the other. Conformity derived from educational-and-university experiences obviates the need for overt conspiracy.
The last few chapters move from analysis to broadside as Mills criticizes what he calls the crackpot realism of America's narrow-minded upper elite.
Mills's depiction of America as having moved from a public liberal to a mass society is on point. His emphasis on the mass media as transforming Americans from a free, imaginative people to a nation of cowed serfs (my word, not his) is also on point. Mills is not that far from writers like James Perloff, who writes about the Council on Foreign Relations. No president since Hoover has been independent of the CFR. That does not imply conspiracy any more than the leadership of a modern corporation's interacting with each other is a conspiracy. The elite interacts and forms opinions. Its mindset, like that of leading university professors, is conformist, lockstep, cowardly, and lacking in vision.
Mills offers little hope for those who care about America or hope to see a change from the current trend. It occurred to me that his book was the inspiration for Eisenhower's 1961 speech about the military-industrial complex. If Mills is right, then a useful long-term strategy in politics is to support third parties. Another is simply to jump ship and move to a smaller country in which a mass culture and an elite bred to narrow-minded arrogance and the subjugation of a foolish mass of TV-news-viewing idiots won't exist because of the smaller scale.
In the Federalist 10 Madison argued that America's large scale was an impediment to the formation of faction. As transportation and communication modernized, universities began to serve as the proving ground for elite conformity and groupthink. The power of America's elite is made possible by large scale combined with modern communication methods. The Internet and other postmodern developments, such as community activism, pose a challenge to America's mass culture. Nevertheless, as long as Americans continue to support the two mass parties and as long as at least a plurality of Americans derive their news from mass-market newspapers and television, the trends that Mills observed will continue to escalate.
Wednesday, April 9, 2014
An Inconvenient Truth: Bill Maher Resembles a Rat
I've not watched the comedian Bill Maher for more than a few minutes, but HBO has been running advertisements about his show. The advertisements make me want to cancel HBO. The material on Netflix, such as Zoey Barnes's murder on House of Cards, is at least as good as the HBO programming. Who needs HBO?
Why have television and the entertainment industry, which have always emphasized attractive appearance over substance, elevated an announcer as ugly as Maher? After looking at his ad a few times, I thought of a deeper philosophical question: Why does a television network sponsor an announcer who looks like a rat?
Maher's predictable, politically correct views are the obvious answer. Other commentators who have the patience and stomach to watch his show have described his tasteless humor and his bigoted remarks about others' religious beliefs. Putting an announcer on HBO who makes distasteful remarks about Blacks or Jews is unthinkable, and rightfully so. Putting an anti-Catholic bigot like Maher on television is acceptable to the ignorant left-wingers at HBO.
HBO's programs aren't good enough to compensate for Maher, and in addition to the outlandish cost of Comcast's services, Maher offers an excellent reason to terminate cable television service. Many of the left-wing and pro-Fed blogs consider Maher to be "brilliant." In the same way the coarse, realist art under communism and the cliched neoclassical art under Hitler were held up as "brilliant" in those totalitarian lands. When media is state controlled, the coarse, ugly and mediocre are elevated, especially when they serve the state.
Scott Harrington Interviews Langbert and Marnell
Lincoln Eagle publisher Mike Marnell and I appeared on Scott Harrington's Speak Out show on WKNY in Kingston, NY. It aired on March 29, 2014. The discussion concerned education and politics. Scott's a great guy, and we had a ball.
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