Benevolent Dictation

The separation of powers, which ensures that no single part of the government can ever achieve unified control of the policymaking process, has been a blessing and a curse. It prevents tyranny but creates veto points for politicians who, for whatever reason, wish to stop federal solutions to long-term challenges.
Julian E. Zelizer "Why the U.S. Can’t Solve Big Problems"

Everyone loves "democracy." Until they can't wrangle the votes to prevail. Mr. Zelizer strikes me as yet another in a long line of people who are complaining about the fact that representative government was not designed to make the world safe for partisan (in this case Progressive) ideals of enlightenment; but to allow various stakeholder groups to have some say in the decisions that are going to determine the course of their lives.

I am of the understanding that Mr. Zelizer's "politicians who, for whatever reason, wish to stop federal solutions to long-term challenges" are a figment of the imagination. Instead what we have are politicians who have been duly elected (even if the electoral system is less than perfectly representative) to speak for the interests of people who have a different understanding of the long-term challenges that need solutions. People can, and will, argue over whether those different understandings are good-faith or fraudulent. That argument, however, often creates problems of its own, as people decide that their positions are so self-evidently correct that principled opposition to them is a contradiction in terms.

Regardless of someone's confidence in "the right answer," no matter how much of a consensus there is among particular groups, that answer does not have a right to either be or influence policy. The purpose of representative government is not to align policy with scientific or philosophical truth. It's to align policy with what people understand is good for them. In this sense, the anti-intellectualism that Mr. Zelizer complains about is also a feature, not a bug, as an expert class that imposes on the public what they feel is best for everyone involved is functionally little different from well-meaning royals and aristocrats doing them same.

And in this "grassroots activism" is not a solution to some sort of particular problem with the United States government. Rather it's way things were intended to work. Citizens should be talking to each other and making the point, "This is why this is good for you; and I will see to it that it is," rather than simply demanding asymmetrical sacrifice or indulging in revanchism. For all that people complain that Liberal disdain was the reason why Donald Trump was elected, I stand by the understanding that during the Obama Administration, Democrats, convinced that what's right need not explain itself, failed to say to their more Conservative friends and neighbors: "Look, I know that you're concerned about this, but I will take it upon myself to ensure that Washington makes this work for you." And Republican voters now, convinced that Truth is finally prevailing are ignoring the concerns of their more Liberal acquaintances in the same way. If "grassroots activism" is allowed to simply become a description of getting the choir to go to the polls, it's going to exacerbate the problem rather than mitigate it. Instead, the grass roots need to be speaking to people who are not always like them, and looking to ensure that the policies they are pursuing help those people in a way that those people understand they need help. This isn't always going to be simply doing as they are told, but in finding solutions to the underlying problems.

To take one of Mr. Zelizer's examples, slavery, I'm uncertain that the South was simply so enamored of slavekeeping that it had become an end in itself. Rather, it was a means, and while historical counterfactuals are never anything more than speculation, one can imagine that a solution that both freed the slaves and maintained the South's economic standing would have allowed the United States to have the cake of abolition and eat it in peace.

Of course, such a deal would have required a level of trust, and that's usually the missing link. I speak fairly often with a Conservative high-school classmate of mine, and he is convinced that American Liberalism has, as an end, stealing from the rich to allow the poor to get high and play video games. Our discussions are often slogs, not because of acrimony, but because he suspects that any position to the left of his own of bad faith, and I spend a lot of my time carefully laying out the logic that underpins my positions to counter the talking points he falls back on. This is not to say that he's a bad person, or "brainwashed," but that he expects dishonesty to go hand-in-hand with disagreement, and it's only the fact that we've known each other since we were in the fifth grade, and I show genuine concern for him, that he gives me the time of day. And genuine trust across party lines takes that level of connection, and that level of work. Pat accusations of bad faith undermine that.

Another Slice, Please

Oren Cass penned a column for The Atlantic, titled Economic Piety Is a Crisis for Workers. It's an interesting piece although it quickly becomes predictable; the title seems geared at obscuring the point long enough for people to begin to read. Change "Economic Piety" to "The Welfare State," and you'll have a pretty good idea of where the article goes.

There are at least three possible outcomes when a society has a number of people who are unemployed due to a level of productivity that renders their labor redundant. They are not mutually exclusive, and so any or all of them can exist at once over a large enough group of people.

One is Privation. In effect, those people who are unemployed or severely underemployed simply suffer the effects of being unable to earn enough income to meet their physical needs, whether that homelessness, malnutrition, poor health due to lack of treatment and/or whatever else may be visited upon them. Another is Transfers. This can be government transfers, in the form of welfare, but it may also be private charity or dependence of friends or family who have the resources to support them; with or without requesting or requiring some form of work to support the household in return. The other outcome that occurs to me is Inefficiency. In this case, the society comes up with a way of doing less with more, or at least producing less, per capita, than they otherwise could, but still paying people sufficient wages to support themselves.

Inefficiency strikes me as the least visible of these outcomes. People may not realize that there is, in effect, a bunch of busy work going on. Mr. Cass' "productive pluralism" is effectively a form of inefficiency. It asks that society structure itself such that excess labor is limited, if not eliminated.

An emphasis on labor-market health also changes the analysis of trade and immigration policy. In consumer-welfare terms, unconstrained trade and immigration appear to be unmitigated goods. Not so from the worker’s perspective. How society draws borders around its labor market matters a great deal, and imbalances take a serious toll. A high level of trade can be beneficial, but a large trade deficit is a problem: It represents a dramatic expansion of labor supply with no accompanying expansion of demand. A high level of unskilled immigration, likewise, is unwise amidst concern about the limited opportunities available to the existing unskilled workforce.

This seemed to be the primary point of the article; a call to limit trade (imports mainly) and immigration in the service of forcing American society to need people to do work who are, at current levels of productivity and trade, surplus. It's redistribution, in the same way that government taxation to find transfer payments is redistribution. The difference is in this case, the public is made to pay higher prices for good and services so that domestic workers will have enough demand to make employing them profitable. There's also call for economic autarky (self-sufficiency) in the sense that the United States should not specialize in some things, while allowing other nations to specialize in others. Instead, the nation should have productive capacity in everything, and seek to maintain competitiveness in all sectors.

It's an interesting perspective. And it's not unique. My impression of Japan is that there is a lot of inefficiency in the system. There were a number of people I encountered whose jobs seemed to be little more than providing them something to do. I like to tell the story of "The Wall Of Shoelaces," from my experience in a Japanese department store. When a broken shoelace means that four people spring into action, you really see what a culture devoted to top-notch service is all about. But it seemed pretty clear to me that a number of jobs were there as a means of keeping people "off the streets," as we put it in the United States.

But the reason that we don't have this sort of society here isn't that we have the wrong government policies for it. It's that the people who own businesses understand that having someone assist me with finding the right shoelaces for my shoes costs more than making me do the heavy lifting myself. And since business owners and shareholders are generally unwilling to accept less in dividends and the public is unwilling to accept paying higher prices, there is a push to cut costs. And having four people on hand to help me find the right color, style and length of shoelaces for my shoes (not to mention changing out the laces for me) costs significantly more than having me figure it out and change my own shoelaces.

And this, for me, is where the analysis wanders back into standard faith-based economic territory. Part of the problem might be that Mr. Cass is basically promoting his new book, The Once and Future Worker. Explaining how one deals with the incentives to reduce the workforce to the lowest level that can produce goods and services for paying customers and allowing someone else to pick up the costs for the unemployed isn't covered in the column. And while I understand that perhaps the hope is that people will read the book to find out, I'm not interested in reading the entire volume just to see if he gets around to it.

I also wonder what is supposed to happen to all of the people, especially the unskilled workers, who currently make their livings doing the work that Mr. Cass would see onshored again, and that migrants would be blocked from accessing. It's one thing to argue that we made an error in importing poverty in order to raise the standards of living of those who remained employed. It's quite another to propose exporting that poverty back to the nations from which it came. Given the protectionist tactics that it will take to revive things like the textile industry, it's hard to understand why other nations would want to trade with us. Not to mention that in order to compete with China, working conditions and wages would likely have to look something like China's. We might be able to force Americans to buy products made in the United States at wage and benefit levels that remove the need for subsidization of the workers with government transfers, but it's less clear why people in other countries wouldn't decide to pay less for the made-in-China model.

And I guess in the end, this is the thing that I'm suspicious of. I understand as well as anyone else that our current model of funding consumption through transfer payments and onshoring poverty is unsustainable in the long (or even perhaps medium) run. But changing the incentives for the system we have is going to require more than simply looking for ways to force domestic capital to give higher returns to domestic labor. Mr. Cass presents "Economic piety" as the habit of funding a destructive idleness among people who need to be laboring in order to be happy and healthy. But the focus on the economic pie (See what he has done there?) is perhaps more accurately viewed as being about funding corporate profitability, with the idea that if corporations do well, that they will hire more people to do work.

Changing that conception of society is going to be difficult in a world that's set up to see efficiency as the end-all and be-all. Changing economic policy is unlikely to be up to the task.

Digging Deep

There have been any number of claims that the Trump Administration attempted to "bury" a report on climate change by releasing it on Black Friday. As if this would somehow stop government watchers, on the lookout for just such a thing from finding it and shouting about it from the rooftops.

While I understand that the Trump Administration would want to avoid drawing attention to the report, attempting to somehow sneak it out seems like a pointless endeavor because the Trump Administration has no intention of making policy changes based on a) the report itself or b) critics talking about the report. And this is because President Trump draws quite a bit of his support from people who would find their livelihoods severely damaged by a wholesale shift to alternative energy sources. And while one could make the case that this refers to legacy energy company investors and executives, it's mainly coal miners and oil workers who one is likely to find at the President's rallies. And they are the people who depend most keenly on the health of the industry.

Given this, it's almost surprising that the report wasn't released with more fanfare; as this would have allowed the President to make a bigger deal of ignoring it and its conclusions.

Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

Alexandra Petri, columnist and blogger at The Washington Post: Well, I feel like there's always this undefinable thingness that any particular woman who happens to be in power is always lacking. And so people will say, well, in general, it's sort of like the generic candidate versus the actual president candidate, where you say, man, any generic Democrat would do gangbusters' business. But, then, the second you have a specific person, suddenly, they're fraught with problems.

But, with women, it's especially - the kind of line that you're asked to walk is incredibly difficult. It's something out of a fairy tale, almost. It's like you must be walking down the road, not walking but not riding and not naked but not clothed and, like, not in the road and not out of it. And, at a certain point, you have to say, huh, am I really as eager to welcome a women to lead as I've been saying I was all this time?
Barbershop: Some Democrats Oppose Pelosi's House Speaker Bid

This comment stood out for me, because it reminded me of a conversation that had taken place at work, where one of the resident Conservatives had taken issue with the commitment of Liberals to women candidates; because they hadn't bothered to stipulate a preference for Liberal women candidates, as opposed to simply any woman candidate.

But while it might seem obvious to someone that partisans might consider a commitment to their ideals and policy priorities more important than simple gender diversity in a situation where it's clearly and either/or situation, it's worth keeping in mind that the logic can also apply to a situation like the one that House Minority Leader Pelosi finds herself in today. After all, the Democratic Party is not completely defined by a narrow Progressive agenda that everyone follows. While conservative Democrats have been pretty much purged from the party's ranks, there is a still a centrist/left divide at work, and it's understandable that any given Democrat would find a certain level of agreement with them on which side of the party should be in charge to be of more immediate importance than any given woman leader.

And this is where Ms. Petri's comment puts people into an uncomfortable box, with the implication there is no valid reason, other than gender, to oppose Minority Leader Pelosi becoming Speaker of the House again. If the only choices are Speaker Pelosi or misogyny, that's something of a problem. And it's a problem that plagues a number of organizations, even while it's an advantage for people who find themselves in Representative Pelosi's situation. They're the only "acceptable" choice. If there were more women running for the speakership, that would give room for people to pursue both their policy and diversity priorities. It would also deny the Minority Leader the ability to blame opposition on sexism. Now, of course, this isn't to say that there isn't a certain amount of discomfort with the idea of women leaders to outright misogyny in play here. But with a polarizing figure like Minority Leader Pelosi as the subject, it's hard to separate the two.

Cup Overflowing