State of the Rose: Wildrose vs libertarians redux

A lot happened in Alberta politics during 2011 and had I not been in China for most of the year I would have felt compelled to comment on several occasions. To start by picking just one incident, I'll take note of former federal Libertarian Party leader Dennis Young's disqualification as a Wildrose candidate.

When Daveberta blogged about this on October 19 I could only shake my head. Think of the time and grief you could have saved yourself, Dennis, had you read my blogpost from October 2010 about libertarians' place in the party consequent to the expansion of the caucus in January 2010! At that time I noted that "the fact that Cosh, Johnston, Brock et al have all gone off about this [caucus statement re Ontario prostitution ruling] suggests that these critics are voicing a view that is generally held." Evidently Dennis didn't share this general view or he would have been more circumspect about whether party HQ would support his bid to run in Calgary Hays.

Now it's true that no one in the Wildrose caucus has been as straightforward as US Presidential candidate Rick Santorum (photo at right). In June 2011 Santorum stated that he would "fight very strongly against libertarian influence within the Republican party and the conservative movement." I highly doubt that MLAs Rob Anderson, Heather Forsyth, Paul Hinman, or Wildrose éminence grise Link Byfield would ever say such a thing, not least because of Byfield's view that fiscal and social conservatives need to cooperate in order to win elections. But that doesn't mean that advancing a libertarian agenda within Wildrose wouldn't be a Sisyphean task.

After the 2010 AGM I welcomed Chris Jones' becoming Edmonton director for the party, noting that Chris would be a good advocate for Edmonton on the provincial executive. Apparently, he was too good an advocate for views the party poohbahs aren't inclined to indulge since I've recently learned (not from Chris) that party HQ has stalled on Chris' application to run in Edmonton Millcreek. Evidently headquarters is too busy invoicing the constituency associations for money to be sent to party central. I have to shake my head at the complaint about Chris I heard in 2010 from someone drawing a full time salary from the party that the Edmonton volunteer was too controlling. Who is controlling who here?

Does Wildrose offer the fiscal conservatism libertarians would be interested in? When the party is promising more education spending etc it's doubtful whether the commitment is more than rhetorical. In today's Throne Speech, it seemed that Premier Redford might actually put some effort into honouring her leadership campaign pledge to only route the first $6 billion of natural resource revenue into current spending and have the remainder go into savings. Given that more than $8 billion of non-renewable resource revenue is being spent annually, this leaves a real gap that will have to be closed by either spending cuts or tax increases. Either route is going to be unpopular, and if Redford doesn't try to wriggle out of this one she deserves credit for following through on a deficit fighting promise.

The elephant in the room with regard to spending remains, as I've long argued, the public sector unions. A recent U of Calgary study noted that "since 2000, the province’s public sector wage bill has shot up by 119 percent — almost double the rate of growth in the rest of Canada." Futhermore,

In 2000-01 total provincial revenues were $25.5 billion. In 2010-11 revenues grew to $34.0 billion, an $8.5 billion dollar increase. [meanwhile...] we see an increase in wages of $8.1 billion. In other words, 95 percent of the increase in provincial revenues over the last decade has gone directly into the pockets of public sector employees. The total wage bill rose to nearly 45 percent of total expenditure in 2010 from just over a quarter in 2000.

This is what happens when the public sector unions have the whip hand. I continue to have little faith that the Wildrose party's current leadership has the stomach to take them on. The breaking point for me was when Wildrose Finance critic Rob Anderson claimed that he supported the right to a secret ballot for union certifications despite the fact that at the 2010 AGM, the "caucus" (read Anderson and Forsyth) wanted to delete the party plank calling for a secret ballot. No libertarian should tolerate this interference with the economic freedom of the individual. While Alberta politicians continue to universally avoid any direct criticism of either unions or the salaries and benefits going to front-line public servants, Iowa Governor Scott Walker has put his job on the line with respect to the issue.

State of the Rose: Wildrose vs libertarians

In mid-October 2009, the membership of Alberta's Wildrose Alliance Party elected Danielle Smith as its new leader. Since then the party, which was polling 7% in April 2009, has never polled below 25% across the province, while the official opposition Alberta Liberals have never polled above. Wildrose has so sidelined the Liberals as primary opposition to the governing PC party that a newspaper editorialist has contended that Wildrose is fighting a proxy war against the governing PC party in the upcoming municipal election in Edmonton. Ms Simons' opinion piece has to be taken with a grain of salt: her previous columns suggest that she would like nothing more than to see Wildrose humiliated in the capital city, and a possible route to that end would be to render as a verdict on the party the October 17 municipal vote, which should see the incumbent mayor Stephen Mandel win at a canter. The proxy war narrative also fits it rather too conveniently into Mandel's ranting about provincial politicians interfering in Edmonton's affairs. But whether the thesis that Wildrose has what military strategists call force projection capability to contest the most Wildrose-unfriendly territory in the province on a proxy basis is well-founded or not, there is no denying that Danielle Smith has a significantly higher profile both provincially and nationally than Official Opposition leader David Swann.

Writing about my view of the state of the party this weekend is going to be lengthy chronicle of woe, sad to say. As such, I'm dividing it into three parts: 1) the regrettable and unnecessary falling out between the party and libertarian pundits at the Western Standard and Macleans 2) Wildrose's education policies, which on at least one unsettling point are more teacher union friendly the PC government's policies, and 3) a broader view of the fundamental policy problem that North America in general faces and how the "conservative" parties are failing to address it.

Ms Smith' convincing victory in the race to become Wildrose leader was seen by many "libertarians" who supported her as the membership's endorsement of a libertarian positioning for the party. Danielle told the Edmonton Journal's Capital Notebook that she was "libertarian and pro-choice." Matthew Johnston, owner of the Western Standard, says that at his e-magazine "we aim to be fiercely and openly loyal to libertarian ideas" and in April 2009 Johnston described Danielle as close to the "perfect candidate". Johnston co-hosted a reception for Danielle with federal Libertarian Party leader Dennis Young in Calgary in June 2009, shortly after Danielle declared her candidacy for the party's leadership. The blogger "CalgaryLibertarian" volunteered to help the party win the Glenmore by-election later that summer. While organizing for Wildrose in Edmonton's south-west late last year, I tried to get a 20-year old Edmonton libertarian on to a constituency board in order to ensure that the voice of young people was heard and although this student had to decline because of school commitments, he said he was very interested in getting Danielle to speak to his local libertarian meet-up group.

I'm not a libertarian, I'm a paleo-con, but I nonetheless feel that, in general, libertarians are a valuable part of any conservative movement not least because their enthusiasm for what is largely an abstraction makes them less susceptible to partisanship on any particular issue. Earlier this summer Western Standard writer JJ McCullough noted an "important" fact that is "largely forgotten or unfashionable to recall in the present day," namely, that "[t]he 1993-2003 Liberal government of Jean Chretien embarked on a remarkable agenda of fiscal conservatism." Another Western Standard contributor, Mike Brock, uploaded to Youtube a video of Andrew Coyne blasting the Harper Conservatives.

By being frequently found outside established brokerage parties, Libertarian pundits serve as a conscience check of sorts, and so it was that I thought that Matt Johnston's view should have been given some consideration when early this year he warned against floor-crosser Heather Forsyth being "given prominence in the party that could put her in a position to shape policy." I, myself, was more concerned about Rob Anderson, writing to a Wildrose executive member on January 4 to warn that Anderson is "a communications risk for going off message on social issues." The idea of "prominence" that Johnston refers to is an important one: floor-crossings are not all created equal. If crossers are going to justify not running in a byelection with the argument that they were elected as individuals instead of as representatives of a party, if post-crossing those individuals are presented more as individuals than as party representatives, the hypocrisy is minimal. More than a year ago I had written to the same Wildrose executive member to express my concerns about floor-crossers in light of the then rumours, noting that accepting the crossers into the party is one issue and "[w]hether we want them to step into what would amount to commanding positions in the Wildrose Alliance is another issue."

So when, just a month after I blogged here that "the less we hear from caucus... the better," caucus puts out a "Wildrose statement" that provokes Matt Johnston to write, "I feel sick about this. I really thought Danielle would be different," I don't know whether to laugh or cry. It is, of course, not just Johnston that is upset. Mike Brock has waved the "I told you so," finger as well, saying "[a]s I predicted, the libertarians must compromise." My former high school classmate Colby Cosh, writing for Macleans, deemed the press release evidence of an anti-evidence-based social policy and perceived Forsyth's idiosyncratic policy concerns in the text. In my view, whether or not a politician makes "extreme" remarks is unrelated to how accountable that politician is. An elected politician who makes idiosyncratic policy announcements, however, is necessarily insensitive to accountability considerations to at least a degree because an accountable politician keeps in mind the fact that the people who volunteered their time and money to elect him or her did not do so in order to advance a particular person's ambitions and personal agenda, but to advance a general agenda. De-particularizing one's platform is correlated with removing one's particular self such that getting elected becomes a team effort. The fact that Cosh, Johnston, Brock et al have all gone off about this incident suggests that these critics are voicing a view that is generally held. What's especially headshaking here is the fact that Forsyth and Anderson have used the soapbox given to them by Wildrose and funded by the Alberta taxpayer (through the MLA office allowances) to go off about a court decision in Ontario, calling on the federal government to wade into a provincial issue.

As a non-libertarian, I am not as disturbed by the substance of the policy issue here, prostitution, as the Western Standard writers. The legalization of prostitution was one of the weekly Economist debate forum topics in September and I think the "con" speaker helpfully raises some of the fallen nature arguments that libertarians, who have have little time for depth psychology, all too often give short shrift to. I also think that that if Johnston, Brock, and Cosh were true libertarians as opposed to anti-social conservatives, they would have reserved their greatest indignation for when "the caucus" (read: Anderson and Forsyth, since I can't believe it was Hinman's idea) took their very nearly successful run at the policy planks that said Wildrose "will allow individual workers to voluntarily determine their membership in labour organizations" and "will extend to workers the democratic right to a secret ballot vote" at the party's AGM in June. I would think that the right to freely buy and sell labour in general is more fundamental that the right to freely buy and sell the human body. But the fact that more than three quarters of Economist readers should think prostitution should be legalized shouldn't surprise anyone and this sentiment was not confined to the upscale readers of the Economist either, if the comment threads on the CBC and Globe and Mail websites are any guide.

Libertarians are something of a fringe group and evidence for this is the fact that the caucus press release at issue here was uncontroversial in the eyes the mainstream media. But as a fiscal conservative I have to wonder how fiscal conservatives would fare under a Wildrose government. Mike Brock writes:

It's time, as I've been saying for a while, for libertarians across the country to withdraw our support for conservative parties across this country.

Even though we are a small minority in the movement, we played a big roll in the media, within the party establishment and on the ground shilling for conservatives over the past decade. What have we gotten for this?

Insults by the prime minister, who used to identify with classical liberalism. A complete abandonment of fiscal responsibility. More regulation. Bigger government. More military spending. Intensification of the drug war.

Oh, and some token tax cuts. At the expense of the biggest deficit in history, mind you.

No. I call on libertarians from all over to withdraw their support and do their damnedest to sabotage the conservative movement by playing to it's hypocrisies on economic issues, in particular.

I have to agree completely that self-styled conservatives need to be exposed for their "hypocrisies on economic issues", with the prime minister being offender-in-chief. Boondoggles like the Atlantic Opportunties Agency are getting as much taxpayer money as ever. It seems to me that what Brock and I have a common problem with is PARTY conservatives. Principled conservatives need to stop drinking the kool-aid, especially the kind labelled "citizen's initiatives", which the worst of the demagogues, like Bill "indicted-by-the-Conflict-of-Interest-Commisssioner" Vander Zalm, exploit for their own purposes. Consider the chain of the events that led to this latest incident. It was ultimately set into motion by a decision that was made, not by ordinary voters who elected Anderson and Forsyth to represent Wildrose, or by a grassroots membership vote to take a positioning that would alienate libertarians, but by an extremely small group of insiders at the top of the party under conditions of negligible transparency. That the financial interests of the floor crossers was reportedly taken into consideration as well (note the potentially "without an income for six months [if the crossers resigned to run in byelections]" quote in that link) just underlines how the fateful decision was made in the best traditions of back room politics.

Brock in fact has it wrong when he contends that the libertarian supporters of the party ended up with a "compromise" outcome they find unsatisfactory. Were that the case, as someone who doesn't hail from that wing I would have no objection. The real problem is that how libertarians would perceive the caucus press release on the Ontario court decision was simply never even considered.

"Output" democracy and paternalistic libertarianism

The "Ideas" section of Wednesday's Edmonton Journal featured a piece by Dr Bob Ascah titled "Smoothing Out the Boom and Bust." Ascah is currently director of the Institute for Public Economics at the University of Alberta. He notes that in 1982 "resource revenue was nearly four times the take from personal income taxes." Furthermore, "[r]esource revenue represented 2½ times the cost of health care and twice education expenditures." According to Ascah, in 1982 Premier Lougheed diverted resource revenue that would have gone into the Heritage Fund into general spending, and

Had the investment income been retained by the fund, the size of the Heritage Fund today would be $80 billion, compared with its current value of $13.8 billion

Ascah then moves forward in time to the turn of the millennium and rapidly increasing resource revenue to consider the "staggering" opportunity cost of this decade's spending spree. Behind these observations is Ascah's thesis that the government's fiscal policy has been aggravating the cycle instead of dampening it. He notes that "As private investment peaks, public investment is also peaking causing a "crowding out" effect resulting in higher construction costs in both the private and public sector." This is another excellent point that I had hoped to raise in the context of the affordable housing issue during last year's election.

In a note to another Wildroser this week I raised the possibility of the party adopting as part of its platform a major tax reform that would tax privilege savings and investment over consumption. "It wouldn't pass a referendum," was a response.

Coughing up policy for referendum is certainly one approach. There is another approach, however, the first step of which involves throwing a policy plank out before the media. The media then takes it before some "expert", who gives it the thumbs up or thumbs down. The media subsequently reports this verdict, and if it was thumbs up, the public concludes that the party is not just a mob. Note that under this approach, the party actually has a need for policy wonks as opposed to just pollsters and focus group organizers. The wonks' job would be to develop policy that can carry a narrative and win arguments come campaign time. This is policy that is typically NOT initially popular.

Dirk Kurbjuweit, writing for Der Spiegel, notes that

The scoundrels in Brussels have sold the European people a lot of things: a single market, the euro, the lifting of many border controls and, most recently, a binding global climate policy. These have all been good things, and they have helped make Europe an eminently livable continent. Despite the many dull moments and emotions that have been negative at best, the end result has been laudable.

Most of these improvements would have been held up, if not outright prevented, by referendums.

Yesterday, the frontpage of the Edmonton Journal was "Wildrose Support Blooms." The story described how a survey by U of Lethbridge political scientist Faron Ellis found Wildrose Alliance support in the province to be comparable to or even higher than that of the Alberta Liberals. Had this come out prior to the Glenmore by-election, I would have thought it a bombshell, but post-Glenmore, I didn't think there was much news here apart from what was in the cross-tabs.

Some of the crosstabs surprised and concerned me, since they seemed to support Ellis' contention that "One of the problems this party’s going to have is, they’re going to go down the populist road."

After the Irish rejected the Lisbon Treaty last year, one member of the European Parliament described the "No" movement as "a toxic cocktail of anti-globalisers, neocons, the clergy and Trotskyists."

A toxic cocktail of another flavour is what the Wildrose Alliance will become if the party continues down this "road."

It doesn't have to be this way. As a number of European observers have noted, the classical model of democratic legitimization from the bottom up (from the citizen to the state) is an obstacle to modernization not an engine of it. Wolfgang Hoffmann-Riem's notion of "no longer securing legitimization solely through institutions and processes, but also through results" is an example of

the theory of so-called "output" democracy, in which more weight is placed on the persuasive power of results than legitimization through "input" from democratic opinion-shaping processes within the population.

Wildrose support bloomed in the late summer of 2009 in large part because a result of consuming our natural resource revenues instead of saving them was the fueling of a pro-cyclical fiscal policy that aggravated the province's recession. We are not going to unwind this dynamic by submitting the painful components of the necessary adjustment to the public in referenda. California has already attempted this with "epic fail" results. Am I opposed to the self-determination of individual citizens? To an extent, yes: I've long believed that libertarianism is an incomplete and possibly naive philosophy. As David Brooks has noted, we have a crisis of economic morality, and the solution will ultimately involve making men moral. At the root of our problems is collective self-indulgence on a mass scale at the expense of future generations (of not only humans but animals and plants).

Harvard Law professor and Obama advisor Cass Sunstein partnered with economist Richard Thaler to write Nudge, a book whose wisdom about the value of building a "choice architecture" will be lost if all everyone can see (and object to) is the paternalistic element in Sunstein and Thaler's notion of "paternalistic libertarianism."

open letter to Alberta evangelicals

Perhaps you frequent one of Beulah Alliance's 3 weekend services in Edmonton's west end. Perhaps you travel even further west on Sunday mornings and are a member of West Meadows Baptist on 199 st. Maybe you head to 167 ave to worship with your Pentecostal brethren at North Pointe, Edmonton's newest suburban megachurch. Do you attend First Alliance in Calgary's southeast? Perhaps you are a Briercrest graduate like I am, or an alumnus of Ambrose in Calgary or one of its predecessors (Canadian Nazarene College or the C&MA affiliated Canadian Bible College). You might alternatively have a connection to Prairie in Three Hills, Canada's oldest bible institute, or Taylor in Edmonton.

You might be an evangelical! Some will say you might be a redneck as well, but if these critics attended a service at Beulah they would see the bright, welcoming faces of contemporary suburban Albertans.

Whatever your denomination background, evangelicals share something in common, and that's a belief in the power and necessity of personal regeneration. Why is regeneration necessary? Because we are born in the flesh, and the flesh isn't interested in what is noble, inspiring, and righteous. The flesh is interested in selfish indulgence. A lot of secular people reject this contention, maintaining that we are born tabula rasa. Society, according these secularists, need only educate the young in how to reason and they will flower into caring, responsible, industrious citizens. The experience of innumerable generations suggests otherwise. Remove the influence of the church, parents, and tradition from the raising of the next generation and one does not create some enduring vacuum which liberates the young to self-determine. The vacuum is instead filled with other influences, namely, peer pressure and pop culture. Social liberals like to think that every time they have undermined or destabilized a norm, some emancipatory effect follows, when in reality we become enslaved to our own baser instincts. This is why the "culture wars" matter. "Live and let live" isn't a call for a truce but a call to surrender to "entitlementia" and, ultimately, the social breakdown concomitant with anomie.

In fact, I've oversimplified with "live and let live": one not only can but should "live and let live" when it comes to matters of economy and administration. This, the legal world, is the arena in which the final authority of human reason is recognized by all parties. Where one cannot "live and let live" is in the "life world" - here, no one "lives and let lives" since every life has to be lived on the basis of some fundamental metaphysical assumptions. In this arena rational argument is of limited utility: Alvin Plantinga's notion of "foundational knowledge" is an argument of sorts, but in many respects it is an argument against argument. I could develop this approach further by borrowing from the postmodern critique of modernism but to express the point simply would be to note that in practice, most people come to a weltanschauung which appreciates concepts like sanctity through a transformation that is deeper than the mind: it goes to the soul (personal regeneration!). Trying to argue someone into faith on the micro level is unlikely to be productive, as is trying to use the political process to lobby people into adopting a Christian perspective. It is more effective to use the political process to create the public space that allows one to transform lives on the particular, private level. This is where living one's faith becomes the most effective tool for evangelism. Get political in order to be able to get unpolitical.

This idea of two worlds, one instrumental and governed by commonly recognized principles of rational efficiency, the other personal and subjective, is not original. Lest I misconstrue the sociologist Daniel Bell, I will defer to Jürgen Habermas' summary of Bell's views:

In his book, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Bell argues that the crises of the developed societies of the West are to be traced back to a split between culture and society. Modernist culture has come to penetrate the values of everyday life; the life-world is infected by modernism. Because of the forces of modernism, the principle of unlimited self-realization, the demand for authentic self-experience and the subjectivism of a hyperstimulated sensity have come to be dominant. This temperament unleashes hedonistic motives irreconcilable with the discipline of professional life in society, Bell says. Moreover, modernist culture is altogether incompatible with the moral basis of a purposive rational conduct of life. In this manner, Bell places the burden of responsibility for the dissolution of the Protestant ethic (a phenomenon which has already disturbed Max Weber), on the "adversary culture." Culture, in its modern form, stirs up hatred against the conventions and virtues of an everyday life, which has become rationalized under the pressures of economic and administrative imperatives.

Lifestyle evangelism works. Political evangelism, however, often doesn't and when it does make a difference it can be for the worse.

James Dobson's Focus on the Family group has been a great service for both Canadian and American evangelicals. But Dr Dobson's Family Research Council, which is more explicitly designed to be a vehicle for political activism, has been a lightning rod for controversy. When President Bush nominated Harriet Miers for the United States Supreme Court, Dobson gave his stamp of approval (according to some reports, after Karl Rove gave him private assurances about Miers). What Dobson was missing, however, was allies. One could argue that he applied a litmus test without appreciating the fact that a candidate for high office requires much more. The libertarian intelligentsia within the conservative movement rebelled because of Miers' limited abilities in the realm of reasoned argument, and her nomination was withdrawn. To go back to the Habermas quote, what one might call "economic and administrative imperatives", or perhaps just the sound administration of justice and good government, demanded that Miers not stand for nomination. The fact that there was no necessary conflict between social conservatives and libertarians was demonstrated when the subsequent nomination of John Roberts got the process right.

Contrast this episode with Rick Warren's sure footedness on the national stage. Pastor Warren needs no introduction to evangelicals; The Purpose Driven Life is one of the best selling non-fiction books of all time, even if (too) much of unchurched community has never even heard of it. During last year's Presidential campaign Warren hosted John McCain and Barack Obama in a forum at the Saddleback Church he pastors. Warren didn't tell these men what he thought they should do, he rather asked them questions. After the event, a secular liberal pundit said

The one sure winner was Rick Warren, who overnight changed the face of evangelicals in this country from the cartoon caricature of rigid, right-wing fundamentalists to one of open-minded, intelligent, concerned citizens.

In Alberta, recent political events have created the opportunity to either reinforce that "cartoon caricature" or dispel it. The government of Ed Stelmach has made a show out of addressing the concerns of social conservatives, but has in fact aggravated the "adversary culture." Section 9 of Bill 44 does not push the state out of the church's sphere. It rather expands the state, and then makes a show out of leasing the state's new territory to the church. The powers of the human rights tribunals are broadened by this bill. If it is families 1, teachers 0 this game, it could easily be families 0 next game in a series the teachers didn't ask for. Most of the more prominent members of the Wildrose Alliance Party have not been caught up in the red herring of section 9 because they have focused on section 3 which authorizes the state to adjudicate the dialogue of the church (amongst others). If some speech should offend secular humanist sensibilities by, say, defending social norms and thereby implying that some identifiable group is deviant, the Stelmach government reserves the right to see the speaker investigated and censured.

As a party that understands the importance of separation between the church and the state, the Wildrose Alliance will create opportunities for evangelicals to get a fair hearing and accordingly be recognized as the "open-minded, intelligent, concerned citizens" evangelicals are. The party, which sent a shock wave through the provincial political establishment when it won a byelection on September 14, already has more members than any other opposition party. A leadership race is underway and there is a candidate in the race who can speak authoritatively to "economic and administrative" issues. She not only does not clash with "Modernist culture", she is fully in tune with it; but has firm convictions about the limits of its ambit. She would be no help to social conservatives encroaching on a minimal state, but would be an invaluable ally in defending against an encroaching state. If two roads, one involving the retreat of the state and the other involving the advance of the church, would both keep us moving in the direction of our destination, shouldn't we take the way that is passable? However much the metaphysics of secular humanism may inform Danielle Smith's personal "life world", she is not on a mission to bring Voltaire's godless Enlightenment to the "life world" of others, she's rather on a mission to bring enlightened government to government.

If you haven't yet become a member of the Wildrose Alliance, I would urge you to do so by visiting daniellesmith.ca either today (October 1) or tomorrow, signing up, and then casting your vote for the same candidate that astute social conservatives like Link Byfield support:

Brooks, Habermas and conservatism

Lately I had been second guessing my verdict of earlier this year that New York Times writer and PBS Newshour talking head David Brooks is "my favourite pundit." He's just been too wimpy. Although he may be a conservative, his whole style screams liberal. His being molested by a US Senator wouldn't be such a headshaker if it didn't fit his personality so well. Man up, Brooksie! Some guy is violating your personal space? Tell him to lay off and if he won't then start shoving! As David Warren of the Ottawa Citizen has noted, Brooks once retracted the views he presented in a column after the White House called him and told him to get back in line. Do you think they could muscle Krauthammer like that? I think not!

But Brooks has earned his keep with his Sept 28 opinion piece about the need for "economic morality":

Over the past few years... there clearly has been an erosion in the country's financial values. This erosion has happened at a time when the country's cultural monitors were busy with other things. They were off fighting a culture war about prayer in schools, "Piss Christ" and the theory of evolution...

In 1960, Americans' personal debt amounted to about 55 percent of national income. By 2007, Americans' personal debt had surged to 133 percent of national income....

If there is to be a correction, it will require a moral and cultural movement.

Our current cultural politics are organized by the obsolete culture war, which has put secular liberals on one side and religious conservatives on the other....

It will have to take on what you might call the lobbyist ethos... It will have to take on the self-indulgent popular demand for low taxes and high spending.

A crusade for economic self-restraint would have to rearrange the current alliances and embrace policies like energy taxes and spending cuts that are now deemed politically impossible. But this sort of moral revival is what the country actually needs.

What I find compelling about Brooks' analysis is that he criticizes what the "cultural monitors" have been obsessing over but does so from a conservative as opposed to a liberal or libertarian perspective. I am not a libertarian. Never have been. When I was a young adult and at the stage where I might have become libertarian I was exposed to Postmodern thinkers and subsequently decided to reject libertarianism as a Modern and therefore philosophically untenable ideology. But that doesn't mean that the rationalism that drives libertarianism at its purest isn't of tremendous practical value within a circumscribed sphere. I've championed communally conscious or responsible libertarianism which rejects the usual "culture war" as obsolete because with luck my fellow conservatives will be convinced that if we follow the Glenn Becks of the world down the road they are on we will just be barking louder up the wrong tree. I say "communally conscious" libertarianism because the retail politics that have been labelled libertarian in the United States have routinely been infected with the "lobbyist ethos" Brooks rightly indicts. Regular readers of this blog would note that Brooks' call for "energy taxes and spending cuts" is a prescription I've been writing out for anyone interested in which medicine I think we need to swallow.

My one reservation with Brooks' opinion piece is that he seems to suggest that "religious conservatives" should give up one battle in favour of taking up another one without really explaining what is different about the second battle aside from the implied suggestion that the second battle is currently being lost via neglect. There are, in fact, sound reasons for why the first battle is misguided beyond just questions of tactics. For this, one may turn to Jürgen Habermas' essay "Modernity versus Postmodernity" where Habermas describes conservatives who

welcome the development of modern science, as long as this only goes beyond its sphere to carry forward technical progress, capitalist growth and rational administration. Moreover, they recommend a politics of defusing the explosive content of cultural modernity.

According to one thesis, science, when properly understood, has become irrevocably meaningless for the orientation of the life-world. A further thesis is that politics must be kept as far aloof as possible from the demands of moral-practical justification.

Note that politics "must be kept as far aloof as possible" from what I would call the hot button social issues. Why? Because it's the exact opposite of "defusing": it's inflaming. It creates a take-no-prisoners show down with Modernity when Modernity ought to be encouraged to flower within its circumscribed sphere. I, for one, champion the Economist on a regular basis but that's because it addresses "technical progress, capitalist growth and rational administration." When it infects the "life world," that is when to pick a fight. I am not saying religious conservatives should not be fighting the battles that have been fought per se. I am saying that these should be battles for souls and need to be de-politicized. De-politicized means reserved for the "life world" and separate from the world of "administration." Rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's means preventing abortions through private counselling not public lobbying.

But doesn't Brooks venture into the public arena when he calls for an "economic morality"? Yes, he does. But the difference here is that "the enemy" does not have to change his or her fundamental metaphysical presumptions to come around. Athiests can appreciate the need for an "economic morality" by considering the social science evidence and reasoned appeals to shared self-interests. They can't appreciate the need to ban abortion if their metaphysics doesn't recognize a notion of sanctity. They have to be won over on that issue by personal regeneration, not political lobbying. In the economic, or more precisely the instrumental, sphere, however, conservatives can go on the offensive and win with libertarian allies. Outside this sphere, one should battle privately not publicly because publicly it will be a continual defensive action (the currency of the public or political battle is language and reason and conservatives believe the efficacy of these tools is limited because our worldview was ultimately arrived at via irrational, nonverbal experience). Not only is the prospect of winning the political battle over, say, abortion more unlikely with every decade that Modernism advances, making a political fight out of it raises the stakes, putting everything at risk, because it suggests that co-existence is impossible. If we indicate that we cannot live in a world in which they do not adopt our metaphysics, they are going to resolve to eliminate the threat by eliminating us. In fact, co-existence is entirely possible if Modernism/Rationalism/Instrumentalism is contained within its appropriate field: separate "life worlds", common political worlds. Libertarians will be our allies in a circumscribed political world and will even help protect our separated "life worlds" but first we have to recognize that arguments with theistic assumptions are not going to work in the political sphere. That concession in no way implies that they do not carry the day in the private sphere of concrete personal experience.

"libertarians" biggest winner in today's German election?

The Free Democratic Party (FDP) made a strong showing in Germany's federal election today (and in an election in the northernmost state of Schleswig-Holstein as well), increasing its national vote share from just under 10% in 2005 to more than 14%. According to Deutsche Welle, "[t]he FDP champions sharply lower taxes, less regulation and friendliness to private enterprise." The gain allows Chancellor Angela Merkel to continue to govern despite small losses for her own Christian Democratic Union (CDU) by dropping her awkward "grand coalition" with the social democrats in favour of a coalition with the pro-reform FDP. The new coalition is known as the "black yellow" or "wasp" coalition as the FDP's party colour is yellow and Merkel's Christian Democrats are associated with the colour black (the CDU's pre-war predecessor, the Centre Party, "was represented in parliament by many black-robed Catholic priests"). Franz-Walter Steinmeier's Social Democratic Party (SPD) suffered heavy losses, "Steini girl" apparently not being able to replicate "Obama girl"'s success at delivering the Youtube vote, and the SPD's "financial sharks would vote for the FDP" advertising campaign not having much bite either.

The shift right continues a Europe-wide trend, with Norway as the notable exception, the Norwegians having kept left in elections earlier this month as a mountain of petrodollars petrokronors has kept the world's richest country-sized country blissfully floating above the economic pain being visited upon most of the rest of the western world.

Although Canada's Globe and Mail describes the FDP as "libertarian", it is rare to see the party described as such in either European or American media. For continentals, "liberal" suffices (the FDP calls themselves "Die Liberalen") and European liberals are understood to be opposed to the political left. In the USA, when the "libertarian" label has been associated with a politician it has all too frequently been with some sort of populist fringe character. The Libertarian Party's candidate for President last year was Bob Barr, who was one of the loudest defenders of the war on drugs and a southerner who has been described by his local media as 'the idol of the gun-toting, abortion-fighting, IRS-hating hard right wing of American politics." These types share with the political left a belief in conspiracies, the difference being that the menace takes the form of public institutions like the Federal Reserve or the government Department of Black Helicopters as opposed to private institutions like Big Business.

For global audiences, the most common adjective for the Economist endorsed FDP is thus "pro-business." An explicitly "pro-business" party would likely be a hard sell in America, because whereas Europeans may take a communal perspective and accept the FDP's platform of sound economic management at face value, Americans generally take an individual perspective that insists on reducing a party's platform into the question of whether it will increase government services for oneself or impact one's personal liberty (which would include one's personal tax liability).

According to the left leaning German daily Die Tageszeitung,

[FDP leader Guido] Westerwelle has restricted his political movement of his own free will. With this one sided outlook on free market policies he is steering the party toward the outer right edge of the political spectrum, in terms of social and economic policies. Today his party is the mirror opposite of the Left Party [die Linke] while the Greens have taken up a position in the traditional middle.

This view of Westerwelle (pictured here with Chancellor Merkel) may perhaps be supported by Westerwelle's "socialists and communists must not be allowed to rule Germany" campaign refusal to entertain a governing coalition with the SPD (a coalition the FDP was a part of several times in the former West Germany), and his comments about unions in 2003:

Trade unions are a plague on our country and [union bosses] are the pall-bearers of the welfare state and of the prosperity in our country.

That said, Westerwelle happens to have called for cuts in defence spending and the removal of US nuclear weapons from German soil, in addition to having complained of the "dramatic dismantling of civil rights" in Germany since the 9-11 terror attacks. The FDP leader - and likely soon to be newly minted vice chancellor and foreign minister - is also openly gay. None of this seems to have precluded the Christian Democratic Union, which "is still very much a Catholic Party" according to some, from deeming the Free Democrats their "preferred partner" in government prior to the election.

Serious beer drinkers are also serious voters--and they want tax cuts as much as anyone else.
- FDP party spokesman re Westerwelle's campaigning at Munich's Oktoberfest

crisis for capitalism = renaissance for left?

I have not written much on the financial crisis since I have been on the road and still am (currently in Chile). But I have a few moments today...

I do suspect there will be a serious revisiting of the idea of freedom of contract. But I do not think that it will be the leftist critique that cuts much ice. The left has often opposed freedom of contract on the grounds that contracting power is not equal. Unions, for example, may operate just like cartels in that they try to act as a monopoly supplier for their good or service (in this case, labour), but anti-competitive behaviour is OK if the victim is a corporate producer instead of an individual consumer (I could note the fact that, at the end of the day, it is still individual consumers who pay for the dead weight loss but that's another column). But at the root of the current crisis is credit being extended to poor individuals on terms that no one can say was too favourable to the corporate creditor. In fact, the terms were not favourable enough to those corporate creditors. Government policy that encouraged this flow of credit (including, but not limited to, mortgage deductibility) for no other discernible reason than creating more home owners (something that has no necessary relation with raising living standards) exacerbated the problem.

People can, and are, wagging the finger at the bankers. But the leftist critique has a hard time explaining how the bankers are to blame when it is the banks that are taking the hit and the borrowers who are washing their hands of unpaid debts. Sure, some banking executives made out like bandits, perversely, but in all of these cases it is not the borrower that was left holding the big but other capitalists, like the high rollers who put money into exposed hedge funds. The borrower is really only suffering because of the grief of the capitalists has "trickled down".

One can speak of "regulation", which is popularly conceived of as opposed to freedom of contract and therefore something on the "left" agenda, but in fact regulation is not necessarily left but anti-libertarian. Conservativism, as distinct from libertarianism, has always been suspicious of free wheeling capitalism. What conservatives approve of is competitiveness, something the left generally opposes (see my observations about labour supply cartels). A competitive character is a strong character. It is something in the blood. Freedom of contract, on the other hand, is an abstraction. And make no mistake, excessive abstraction is the root cause of the current crisis, when viewing from the most philosophical level.

A lot of regulations serve the leftist agenda of protecting favoured groups from competition. We do not need any more of that. But we could use more regulation that protects people from themselves. People have an inordinate capacity to create layers of abstraction that while theoretically designed to raise one's perspective from the concrete and immediate, often end up looping back to themselves in obscure ways such that one's perception is clouded by a false confidence. I have often preferred literature to formal philosophy because the former is more rooted (as an aside, I do not think the fact the Anglosphere is fertile ground to both analytical philosophy and exotic financial derivatives a coincidence). As novelist Joseph Conrad, very much a cultural conservative in temperament, wrote

Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!

But it took two to tango here. Whereas the financiers blinded themselves via too much modeling and too little sense, the borrowers freely contracted with the bankers in order to satisfy their own consumption interests.

If I am getting too metaphysical here, it is because the continual search for an economic (or "abstract") explanation and/or solution is itself not going to be very satisfying if abstract models are themselves part of the problem. Economics does have a model for freedom of contract problems, namely, externalities (and externalities call for anti-libertarian policies). But this was not really a problem like a consumer and a producer freely contracting to dump the pollution associated with production on a third party. The categories are not so rigid. To a large degree, the third party here was the financiers themselves. It was the layers of abstraction that facilitated the inability (or unwillingness) to see that the music could stop and that it was themselves who could be left without a chair.

the Singapore "experiment"

I'm currently in Malaysia, but will be returning to Alberta at the end of the month for at least a few days.

I spent close to 2 weeks in Singapore last month, and continued to be impressed by the quality of life there. Meanwhile, I note that stories of crime in Vancouver and Toronto have been getting more press. As a general rule, when it comes to drawing inferences about society, one should stick to statistics because the media generally sensationalizes crime. But a comment on Vancouver's gang wars struck me as nonetheless compelling: "The Vancouver "experiment" in tolerance has proven the coexistence of degradation and lawlessness."
It is compelling because, according to the Economist, "the idea that graffti-spraying and other forms of low-level delinquency promote further bad behaviour has now been tested experimentally". In other words, the social illiberalism of a place like Singapore has an empirical rationale for its policies. Order has its own positive feedback, leading to a upward spiral in terms of security and qualify of life.

This is another element which libertarianism is weak on: the idea of "low-level delinquency". For libertarianism, the world is much more cut and dried, with autonomous, rational individuals. For better or worse, in the real world is quite irrational and individual decision making far from autonomous.

why I'm not an unqualified libertarian, part II

David Brooks' latest NYT column would be mandatory background reading should I have another post on this subject, and am linking to it now for ready reference.

the aggressor in the Kulturkampf

Mostly because of my interest in economic policy, and the fact law makers actually spend very little of their time developing legislation that deals with social issues like abortion, I consider myself a economic or business conservative, which overlaps, or ought to, with libertarianism.

But libertarianism is broader. While libertarians are economic conservatives (supporting, for example, free markets), they are social liberals. As my previous post may illustrate, I am frequently frustrated by the anti-intellectual demogoguery emanating from self-styled so-cons, to the point whereby I am often tempted to just state clearly that I, likely my former high school friend Colby Cosh, am a libertarian, full stop.

But while I would then have less of a need to elaborate on why I support a scientific, evidence-based, "intellectual" approach to resolving policy issues in general, fact is I am postmodern enough to NOT see Reason as the final touchstone in all realms. I see a need to circumscribe it to the instrumental realm, a project that's been described in more detail by German philosopher Jürgen Habermas.

It's the fact that in practice we could use more reason, not less, in our public debates that tempts me to endorse full-on libertarianism without qualification. But philosophically sophisticated arguments for social conservatism such as those described by Daniel Bell are compelling, or at least deserving of more attention.

Norms have value. People who believe some emancipatory effect will follow from the elimination of sexual norms are putting too much stock into theory (Reason, if you will) and not enough into the reality of human nature. The idea that youth, for example, will be more self-determined if traditional influences are removed is largely a fiction. What would replace it are other cultural influences. Undermine the norms generally endorsed by parents, for example, and you'll empower unreflective peer pressure, not individuals in idealized, abstracted isolation, and that peer pressure would generally serve the baser elements of social darwinism. What people are being emancipated to, in other words, is the prehistoric savannah where the contributions of potential Newtons, Einsteins, Vivaldis etc were undeveloped and unsupported. The point here can, and is, frequently taken too far. But there is a point, just as Nietzsche makes something of a counterpoint. What's missing is an intellectual curiousity about why norms like not running around in the nude arose in the first place.

The content of the norms is generally not so important as the fact they simply exist, in my view. Is one superior by virtue of being, say, white, male, and Protestant? No. But is it reasonable to consider that important? Yes. Whether it should be important may be debated, but where the social left goes most awry is on the issue of whether it is important. A religious revival might well do more to solve otherwise intractable social problems and improve human satisifcation than a new bureaucratic government spending program.

Which brings me to the uproar over Obama's invitation to Rick Warren. Rich Lowry identifies the "cultural left" as the "aggressor" in this latest flare-up in the culture war. I agree, and am futhermore reminded of why I'm not a libertarian. A libertarian might well be compelled to agree that Warren should be disinvited, which would be an extremely dogmatic stance that furthered a distorted view of the particular facts. Pastor Rick is not a hatemonger, and the efforts to paint him as such strike me as less loving, more "hateful" if you will, than what Rick Warren has been preaching and writing about his whole career. The activists here are looking to provoke a political showdown that Warren is not looking for.

I've argued elsewhere that gay marriage is not a libertarian issue anyway. I won't repeat the reasons here in detail, other than to say that the issue is unlike the decriminalization of homosexuality by going to positive "rights", namely the right to compel government action, as opposed to negative rights. Gay marriage is about normalizing deviancy, not about the right to deviate. Some readers may jump at my use of the word deviant here, saying its highly pejorative, but for what it's worth I am using the term as an entirely descriptive, sociological term.

UPDATE:
This San Francisco pundit supported same sex marriage in the past but has since turned cold on the idea because of the intolerance exhibited... by SSM supporters.

UPDATE 2:

Continuing with this theme, what I think bothers a lot of moderates is the, shall we say, lack of magnanimity shown by the left:

The Left has won the culture war, and, at least in the near-term, its victory is irreversible. In social relations, the right to choose trumps all other considerations: to fornicate, marry, breed, abort, divorce, and abandon. That a single mother with six kids should opt for another eight because she feels like it captures the distilled essence of the cultural moment that we have entered. 

Andrew J. Bacevich, Feb 9