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April 01, 2005

Burn!

Chait to Goldberg:

Jonah then uses his misunderstanding of welfare to perform a victory dance in my ideological end zone. "It's not that liberals have maturely adapted to new data, it's that they've been proven wrong so often — either empirically or at the polls — that they've had to change," he writes. Ah. So it's just a matter of time before liberals accept that the income tax, child labor laws, environmental regulations, the minimum wage, federal food inspectors, and so on will cripple American business. And that's why Ronald Reagan's prediction that if Medicare was enacted, "you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was like in America when men were free" is conventional wisdom today.

Stick a fork in him, he's done.

Update: The more of this debate I read, the more puzzled I get. Here's Jonah:

I would add that many liberals would have the same reaction, depending on the economic policy in question. Surely, at some point, some liberals would object to the mass seizure of private property — even if it "worked" to help the poor — on principled grounds having to do with liberty and the rule of law. If not, then Jonathan's distinction between socialists and liberals is meaningless. Speaking broadly, socialists believe the redistribution of private property is a good in and of itself. If liberals are persuadable of the same, but just need a bit more data to be convinced, then liberalism isn't a distinct philosophy, it's merely a doughy socialism in need of a few more minutes in the oven.

What Jonah's saying here is that if God came down and explained that the best way to run society is via socialism, we should tell Him to screw off. If we don't, even hypothetically, we're just socialists in waiting.

Huh?

I'm not a socialist because
I don't think socialism works. That makes me not a socialist. Further, I'm not a Christian because I don't think Christianity is true. But if God came down tomorrow, explained the whole thing to me, and offered some irrefutable evidence validating the Bible, I'd be a Christian so fast it'd make your head spin. Does that mean I'm a "doughy" Christian now? What about a "doughy" Muslim? And Buddhist*? And every other religion? Jonah, here, proves Chait's point: conservatives aren't looking for empiricism and don't believe others should be either.

Anyway, go read the
Duel. As Chris Rasmussen e-mailed to me, Chait's response to Jonah's post is really a knock-out punch. And it's really quite funny to watch Jonah dance, and take umbrage, and muddle ideas, and simply get pummeled throughout the exchange. I almost feel bad for the guy. Almost.


* Actually, I kinda am a Buddhist.

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Comments

Personally, I found it heartening that Jonah came up with the idea (on his own!) that Bush really isn't a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. Check this out:

By that way of argumentation your point that George W. Bush expanded Medicare is meaningless because by your own definition of conservatism, conservatives don't want to expand things like Medicare, therefore Bush isn't a conservative.

It's interesting, because the rest of that paragraph shows Jonah desperately trying to save the ultimate conservative argument: comparing all liberals to the radical left (e.g. socalists). What would happen to conservative pundits if they had to debate the left without the commie boogyman attack?

Posted by: verplanck colvin | Apr 1, 2005 2:57:03 PM

But if God came down tomorrow, explained the whole thing to me, and offered some irrefutable evidence validating the Bible, I'd be a Christian so fast it'd make your head spin.

What a wuss. You would really just buy into whatever God told you, just because it could prove it was god?

If the Supreme Being revealed itself to me in a way that left no doubt in my mind that it was in fact the Supreme Being, and if it told me (for example) that homosexuality is an abomination, or that women should be subservient, or that only people who worship this particular Supreme Being can be saved, I would tell it to fuck off. A doctrine that is inherently monstrous isn't any less monstrous if it's endorsed by God.

Posted by: Tom Hilton | Apr 1, 2005 3:15:07 PM

This reminds me of an exchange between Krugman and Bill O'Reilly on a Tim Russert show.

O'Reilly called Krugman a socialist, and Krugman rightly protested. Then O'Reilly rephrased, called Krugman a "quasi-socialist." Krugman first expressed bafflement at what that meant, then suggested that O'Reilly was a "quasi-murderer."

Goldberg really is showing how paper-thin his cortex is in this debate with Chait. Plus, he's a quasi-murderer.

riffle

Posted by: rifffle | Apr 1, 2005 3:17:35 PM

Save your dance, guys. Jonah was hurting bad until today. His response is actually as close as conservatives can ever come to being right, and reflects on several mistakes that Chait made earlier and Jonah previously ignored.

1. Jonah correctly points out that Chait's assertion that liberals are interested in ideology, just outcomes, is ludicrous. Evaluating outcomes is an exercise in ideology, and when conservatives pointed this out in the late 1960s, it was their knockout blow to Roosevelt-Truman liberalism. Now, I am enamoured of that liberalism as is Chait, but Chait erroneously believes that because conservatives aren't talking about the centrality of ideology anymore, the critique is no longer operative. Incidentally, in Economics this insight is summarized in the "Lukas critique," and that bit of theory is virtually the only remaining convincing vestige of 1970s-era monetarism.

2. In fleeing as fast as possible from socialism, Chait allowed Jonah to define that term to Chait's disadvantage. Chait should have consigned socialism to the realm of Marxist materialist-dialectic history, the dustbin where it belongs. Because the way it's shaken out, Chait is unable to return to the knockout punch that LIBERALISM retains in treating conservative arguments: that freedom (defined as they define it) does not actually make people more free in the way we (and society) commonly understand the term. Freedom must have something to do with actual material welfare--the freest person in the world lives in a Hobbesian state of nature. Chait should re-read his Rousseau.

I should say that Chait's phobia of socialism is demonstrative of the New Republic's institutional phobia of real liberals, of the actual Left. They maintain that they're trying to return liberalism to its roots, but it would behoove them to examine what the Loony Left actually says now and again instead of panicking the moment the word 'socialism' is mentioned.

3. Finally, Chait really, really needs to point out that Jonah's lying to himself and us when he says that conservatives believe in limited government because broadly speaking they think that's what works best. Now both Jonah and I are tripping over point number (1) above, but it's demonstrably untrue that the state of the world called 'limited government' is better than the state of the world called 'limited government plus Food and Drug Administration' or 'limited government plus Securities and Exchange Commission'. I say it's demonstrably untrue because we used to have a world without those plusses, and by popular demand, the world now includes them. In order to return to 'limited government,' conservatives resort to public dishonesty on social security and everything else, suggesting that their set of ideological outcome-evaluators are not the mainstream ones. Thus, if we all agree on outcomes as the criterion of policy but are allowed to define outcomes according to ideological criteria, liberalism will win.

Posted by: Marshall | Apr 1, 2005 3:36:22 PM

This whole debate thing is pretty ridiculous. Chait is basically making an arguement that conseratives believe that freedom is "an end in itself" based on the fact that conservatives tend to couch their rhetoric in those terms. This is ridiculous because that rhetoric is simply a result of the fact that it will always be easier to explain how taking stuff away from rich people makes a voter better off then explaining why giving rich people more will make a voter better off.

(Giving rich people more creates incentives to become rich. Ideally becoming rich involves creating human inputs like effort and entrepreneurship, which would create a larger pool of inputs for society.)

Posted by: TheJew | Apr 1, 2005 3:48:57 PM

Since there is no supreme diety in Buddhism, which urges you to accept nothing on faith, you're safe on the last one. And you probably are kinda Buddhist.

Posted by: Slayton I. Mustgo | Apr 1, 2005 4:29:36 PM

Horseshit. Chiat needs to remind Goldberg that it was the government that created the middle class not the capitalists. Hell, this country would look rather bad to the majority if the US government hadn't done a whole string of things. The truth is that each of America's successive middle classes has been artificially created by government-sponsored social engineering. From 1800 to 1848 the U.S. government acquired more than two million square miles of territory, much of it arable, by purchase or negotiation (the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803; Florida from Spain in 1819; Oregon from Britain in 1846), by annexation (Texas, 1845), or by conquest (the Mexican Cession in 1848). Populists sought to ensure that this land went to small farmers rather than large landowners or speculators. The danger of European-style feudalism in the United States was neutralized by the land ordinance of 1785, which guaranteed that the federal domain would be broken up into "fee simple" properties, with no complex web of multiple ownership. And the Homestead Act of 1862 provided 160 acres of free public land to settlers who would live on it and improve it for at least five years. Meanwhile, the federal government subsidized continent-crossing railroads, and the Army Corps of Engineers built much of the country's rural infrastructure. This was social engineering on a colossal scale.

The story was similar for the second American middle class, made up of prosperous urban industrial workers. From Abraham Lincoln to Herbert Hoover, American politics was dominated by a bargain between capitalists and workers; high tariffs on imports served the interests of both, by protecting goods from foreign competition. In addition, the dominant industrial labor force successfully lobbied the government to protect it from competition with other groups. In the late nineteenth century Congress cut off "Oriental" immigration, and after World War I—with the support of organized labor—it cut large-scale European immigration. Before World War I informal discrimination prevented southern black Americans from moving to the Northeast and the Midwest to compete for industrial jobs. Finally, child-labor laws removed children from the work force, and "family wage" or "breadwinner" systems—which paid married fathers more than unmarried, childless men—encouraged married women to become homemakers. Today nostalgic conservatives attribute the prosperity of the 1920s to free enterprise. In reality the market was rigged.

A product of the early industrial era, the second American middle class was largely limited to the industrial states of the Northeast and the Midwest. Unlike the factory workers in those states, the rural majority in the South and the West did not share in the income gains from industrialization; tariffs were, in effect, a tax imposed on them to subsidize urban workers and capitalists. The protectionist system also hurt the professional elite, because it raised prices on high-end consumer goods. Economics goes a long way toward explaining why elite progressives from the North teamed up with southern and western populists in the New Deal coalition that lasted from 1932 until the 1960s. The New Dealers created the third American middle class.

Whereas the second American middle class was founded on high wages for workers in the industrial sector, the third American middle class was founded on the supplementation of wage income by government benefits that collectively constituted a "social wage." The social wage included not only private-sector benefits encouraged by the tax code, such as employer-provided health insurance, but also subsidies such as the home-mortgage-interest deduction and government entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare (which freed many middle-class families from the bankrupting burden of caring for elderly parents), the GI Bill for higher education, and student loans. As the Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker has pointed out, when the hidden welfare state is counted along with the visible welfare state, the United States has a system of social provision as generous as those in Western Europe—though in this country much of that system extends only to the middle class and the professional elite.

The social-wage system had many flaws—for example, it failed to provide health insurance for tens of millions of Americans. Nevertheless, the third American middle class, the product of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, Harry Truman's Fair Deal, and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, was larger and more inclusive than the earlier two. From the 1930s to the 1970s income inequality in America shrank dramatically, producing what the economic historians Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo have called the Great Compression.


The above is one of the big reasons globalization is so flawed. The World Bank, and the current crop of capitalists don't let the developing countries actually develop. They rig the system so they can cash in quick and get out before the countries have had a chance to develop. If you look at the early US land grab and it's distribution it's almost communist like.

I've read plenty about how Grover Norquist and the boys want a government so small and weak they can drown it in the bathtub. Someone needs to remind these guys that a strong government is what helped this country be what it is today. As much as the free market fundies want to believe that their way is the best way the facts just don't back them up.

Ezra, if I was you I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss socialism, we have had a watered down version of socialism for years and it has worked quite well. Sweden has had socialism and capitalism sitting side by side in their country since 1918, and they have a 5.7% unemployment rate and universal healthcare, and their budget isn't running record deficets like ours is. Right now the crony capitalists rule the country, and it's about time for the people to push back and demand some wealth redistribution. Historical reality requires the periodic redistribution of wealth, as described by Will Durant in his "Lesons of History":

The experience of the past leaves little doubt that every economic system must sooner or later rely upon some form of the profit motive to stir individuals and groups to productivity. Substitutes like slavery, police supervision, or ideological enthusiasm prove too unproductive, too expensive, or too transient. ... Since practical ability differs from person to person, the majority of such abilities, in nearly all societies, is gathered in the minority of men. The concentration of wealth is a natural result of this concentration of ability, and regularly recurs in history. The rate of concentration varies (other factors being equal) with the economic freedom permitted by morals and the laws. ... In progressive societies the concentration may reach a point where the strength of numbers of the many poor rivals the strength of ability in the few rich; then the unstable equilibrium creates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution redistributing poverty.... The French Revolution attempted a violent redistribution of wealth by Jacqueries in the countryside and massacre in the cities, but the chief result was the transfer of property and privilege from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie. The government of the United States, in 1933-52 and 1960-65, followed peaceful methods and accomplished a moderate and pacifying redistribution; perhaps someone had studied history. The upper classes in America cursed, complied and resumed the concentration of wealth.

Posted by: jbou | Apr 1, 2005 5:04:35 PM

Actually Jbou, I agree with you (great comment, btw). You have to mix socialism and capitalism to create an effective economy. The question is where to draw the line. In any case, command-and-control communism certainly doesn't work, but my point is that, if it did, I wouldn't be adverse to it. I want policy to work and create the best of all possible worlds, if I was shown oncontrovertible evidence that full-socialism was the way to do it, I'd probably head down that path.

Posted by: Ezra | Apr 1, 2005 6:02:28 PM

The World Bank, and the current crop of capitalists don't let the developing countries actually develop.

Things are getting better -- or they were, until Wolfowitz came on board.

Posted by: Kimmitt | Apr 1, 2005 7:07:35 PM

Someone buy Jonah a real dictionary:

You cannot merely say that liberals don't want to use government to solve every problem because the definition of a liberal says they don't.

Shorter Jonah: "Your nuanced position is too complicated to argue against, so I'll assume you didn't make it"

Posted by: Fledermaus | Apr 1, 2005 7:13:48 PM

It gets more complicated of course. Now it isn't enough to balance market forces (which have mushroomed out of control) against wealth distributing mechanisms (have to have consumers, they have to have income), finite resources, international competition, refuse disposal and environment sustainment all add to the fun mix of concerns. The miracle is that anything works at all.

Posted by: opit | Apr 2, 2005 12:32:56 AM


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Posted by: peter.w | Sep 15, 2007 9:15:24 AM

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