David J. Garrow's Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama

I haven't read David J. Garrow's Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, but a friend forwarded Paul Street's review in Counter Punch.  Street's review is from a left perspective--one which would have been called New Left a few decades ago.  Thus, while Street's (and presumably Garrow's) analysis is accurate, we part ways with respect to Street's criticisms of Garrow as well as Street's conclusions and recommendations.

Street's rendition of Garrow makes some similar points to those I made in this blog in 2008 and 2009. Street puts more weight than I did--how could I have known?--on Obama's lack of substance and his pragmatism.  It was evident from the contribution numbers readily available in 2008 that Obama would be deferential to Wall Street, which he was, according to the review.  

The left has never understood that socialism begets elitism, so a more socialistic economy would beget a slightly different but essentially similar set of figures to Robert Rubin and Lloyd Blankfein.  The elites in communist and softer socialist states don't differ much from the current American elite. Cliches like "neoliberalism," "progressive" and "democratic"  confuse leftists like Street, who remain wedded to the false premise that Hoover's Progressivism was laissez faire.

While it is true that Hoover was more laissez faire than Franklin Roosevelt, the basic statist infrastructure--the Fed, the permanent war machine, the draft,  the income tax,  the process for providing regulatory subsidization to special interests--was already in place under Hoover, and he supported it.  The Republicans elected during the 1920s--Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover--had no interest in repealing the big-government institutions that Theodore Roosevelt (R), Taft (R) and  Wilson (D) had put into place.   While Taft was conservative compared to Roosevelt, he was in the Progressive tradition, favoring use of litigation over regulation of trusts to enforce federal regulation. Roosevelt had favored a more regulated approach, so he ran against Taft in 1912, enabling election of Wilson, who signed both the income tax and the Federal Reserve Act into law.

The American imperial state has been evolving since Lincoln and before, and socialism is not the solution. It is the problem. Obama was in the imperial tradition of Leviathan, and Street's review is worth reading.

America's Living Constitution

America has a living Constitution.  The Constitution is living because it reflects the ability of the American people to amend it.  When Americans’ values change or when scientific advance changes politics, the American people can change the Constitution in two ways. 

First, the Constitution says that two-thirds of the House and Senate and three-fourths of the states can vote to amend the Constitution.  Second, two-thirds of the state legislatures can call a Constitutional Convention that can amend the Constitution.  These democratic processes provide for shifts in public opinion. 

The Constitution does not delegate the authority to decide Constitutionality to the federal courts, nor does it give the Supreme Court the authority to legislate, nor does it give the Supreme Court the authority to amend the Constitution.  The Supreme Court claimed that it has the power to amend the Constitution in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut, in which it claimed that it and only it  could identify new  penumbras of the Constitution.  This arrogation of power has given it the authority to invent law, an authority that Hitler claimed for himself through his doctrine of Fuehrerprinzip. 

In contrast, George Washington believed that the president determined Constitutionality, and Andrew Jackson felt no qualms about ignoring the Supreme Court’s claims about Constitutionality.

The Constitution does not delegate authority to amend it to the Supreme Court.  There is no provision for the Supreme Court to update, revise, or change the Constitution based on their claims of penumbras or social evolution, which Supreme Court justices, who are just legal experts, have no authority, knowledge, or competence to determine.  

The claim that the Supreme Court has such authority and that the Constitution is living in the sense that its meaning can be adjusted to reflect the caprices of the Supreme Court justices is another way to express Hitler's principle of Fuehrerprinzip—the theory that his personal whim was law. The phrase living Constitution  means the nine-fuehrer principle: Neunfuehrerprinzip.

The Trump Score Card

Four-and-a-half months into his presidency, Donald Trump has been better than I thought he would be. He  has appointed Betsy De Vos to head the education department, and I believe that Gail Heriot still has a crack at the Office of Civil Rights post.  He has repudiated a climate change treaty that deserves rethinking on Constitutional grounds, as Seth Lipsky points out in his blog in yesterday’s New York Sun.  Moreover, the president still seems serious about regulatory reform.    However, as I point out on Mr. Lipsky’s blog, he has made his best contribution in the way he has rankled the press, baiting them into one absurd impeachment cry after another. 

I rarely watch TV news, but I work out in the Route 28 Gym in Woodstock, NY, and the local lefties inevitably have the TV tuned to MSNBC and Chris Matthews’s mug.  The stridency of his and the other announcers’ carping, caviling, and cussing about President Trump has turned what once could have been fairly called a biased press into one that is shrill and hyperbolic.  The silly Russian story is less serious than the racketeering in which Hillary Clinton engaged, but the MSNBC announcers harp on it and assume that their calls for impeachment will make a difference.   They are discrediting themselves and eliminating any hope for resuscitation of their profession.

Perhaps Trump has encouraged this by design—as someone on Facebook put it, he may have succeeded in goading the media to confusedly charge, much like a bullfighter waving the muleta or red flag at the bull.  If that's not so, the end result will still turn out well.

The press now behaves much like the parties to any social dementia, such as the Salem witch trials, the Negro Plot of 1741, the Red Scare during World War I, or the public reaction to Orson Welles's War of The Worlds.

MSNBC’s Matthews is like the farmer who waved his pitchfork at Welles’s flying saucer.  What we may be seeing is the discrediting of television news and the end of the mid-to-late 20th century's centralized, broadcast news system. If so, Mr. Trump will have done more than a little good on that score alone.

Right to Work Laws Increase Wages

 The academic field of industrial relations is, as I pointed out last year, biased in favor of monopolistic unionism and regulation so that much industrial relations research amounts to partisan advocacy, and the claim that real disposable income is higher in forced unionism states is a case in point.

Advocates of forced unionism claim that nominal per capita income is lower in right to work states than in forced unionism states.  They then make a leap of false logic: They claim that right to work laws reduce real wages.

One frequent and major omission from labor research is an adjustment for state or local differences in cost of living.  The cost of living in a forced unionism state like California is 53.4% higher than in a right to work state like Indiana.  On average, the cost of living in the 24 forced unionism states^[1] is 21.9% higher than in the 26 right to work states.  (The data cited here and below are not weighted for differences in state population size.)

While nominal per capita disposable personal income is significantly higher in forced unionism than in right to work states ($45,595 versus $39,914), when I apply an index of the cost of living in each state, the cost-of-living-adjusted disposable personal income is higher in right to work states ($42,450) than in forced unionism states ($40,140). The 2016 interstate cost of living index is published by the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center.

In order to assess why real after-tax purchasing power per capita is roughly 6% higher in right to work states than in forced unionism states, it is necessary to consider several important demographic differences between the two groups of states.

Although the mean populations of the forced unionism and right to work states are not terribly far apart (6.9 versus 6.0 million), the forced unionism states tend to be more urban.  The average size of the largest city in the right to work states is 527,800, but it is 1,038,500 in the forced unionism states.  Several large forced unionism states such as California, New York, and Illinois skew the mean.

Today, large cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston and New York have highly educated workforces, but their college-educated populations have grown relatively slowly in recent years. The demographic evidence indicates the primary reason cities like the Big Apple are now much more educated than the U.S. average is massive out-migration of people who do not hold at least a bachelor’s degree.

One reason why forced unionism states are relatively attractive to the highly educated is that high-status service firms such as law, advertising, high-tech, and investment banking firms are found mostly in large cities.  (There is evidence indicating such high-status service industries are now, as other economic sectors like manufacturing have already done, shifting to right to work states, but the shift for high-status services remains today only at an early stage.)  The centralized urban settings that are, at present, more commonly located in forced unionism states reduce interest groups’ costs of organizing; that is, large-city settings facilitate successful lobbying by special interests. For instance, centralized urban settings reduce the cost of travel to group meetings and to political officials’ offices.  The concentration of highly educated workforces residing in forced unionism states and a heavier labor regulation load in forced unionism states may skew real wage levels, distorting comparisons of right to work and forced unionism states over and above the cost of living adjustment.

Specifically, the percent of the 25-to-44-year-old population with a BA or greater is 34.0% in the forced unionism states and 28.0% in the right to work states. Moreover, the right to work states have less labor market regulation (excluding forced unionism) as measured by an index of labor market freedom published by William P. Ruger and Jason Sorens of the Cato Institute.  Education levels are higher and labor market regulation is more burdensome in forced unionism states, and these factors may affect disposable income, including wages.

To examine how those factors affect disposable income, I used a technique called multiple regression analysis that enables one to control for the effects of competing explanatory variables.  I included state-level measures for exports of manufactured goods per capita, overall state population, the population of the largest city, the percentage of 25-to-44 year olds with BAs or higher, labor market freedom not counting right to work laws (as measured by the Cato Institute), and the presence of a right to work law.  I also included controls for the states of New York, California, and Virginia.  I included Virginia because it is a right to work state with a large segment that works in the District of Columbia, which is not a right to work venue.

Of these variables, two rose to the level of statistical significance: the presence of a right to work law and the percentage of 25-to-44 year olds with BAs. Right to work laws raise cost of living-adjusted wages by $4,290, controlling for other kinds of deregulation, workforce education, and the other factors.  Other kinds of labor deregulation are not as important as right to work laws in improving per capita disposable personal income.  The only factor that has a greater effect is the education level.

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[1] Since 2016 income and cost-of-living data are being cited, Kentucky and Missouri, which adopted their Right to Work laws only this year, are counted as forced unionism states here.