Lie of the Year? "$1.5 trillion spending cuts already passed"

For my undergraduate degree I majored in philosophy, and one of the ideas I picked up then that has stuck with me is that the "coherence" theory of truth has a lot to recommend it.  It answers many of the various objections that epistemological skeptics make and that subjectivists make to objectivists while retaining the primacy of logic and rejecting the metaphysical premises behind moral relativism.  To oversimplify, you might not agree with someone else's world view, but you still have to keep your own world view coherent, and once it is established that both you and another person both believe in certain basic principles, if you disagree on some derivative matter one of the two of you is more wrong than the other.

The moral status of abortion may be an example of an issue whereby the level at which disagreement begins is too fundamental for either side to prove the either side to be definitively wrong.  There just aren't many commonly held premises, even when drilling down to the metaphysical level.  One ends up appealing to a "correspondent" theory of truth, i.e. arguing that the other side's beliefs do not correspond to reality.  If one person's view of reality happens to be entirely materialist (that nothing, not even consciousness, exists apart from matter and energy) while the other is metaphysical dualist, the disagreement will be pretty fundamental.

But most debates between "subjectivists" and "objectivists" are over matters of degree within a coherence construct.  If the coherence test is applied to such an extent that the "edge" of its applicability circumscribes all of human consciousness, and that metaphysical premise itself forms a common cornerstone, then notions of "subjectivity" drop out as irrelevant, à la Wittgenstein's beetle in a box.  There might be another universe out there, but we are living in this one.

I write this as a preamble to making three comments about the U.S. economic and political debates.  Allow me to take as the first example what PolitiFact called the "Lie of the Year": the Romney campaign's Jeeps and China ad.

 How effective a criticism of PolitiFact's decision is it to note that every word of the ad is actually true?  Presumably not very, since that's held to not be the issue.  At the time, Politifact said, "In this fact check, we examine whether the sale of Chrysler came at the cost of American jobs" instead of examining what the ad actually claimed.  According to PolitiFact, the ad "presents the manufacture of Jeeps in China as a threat, rather than an opportunity to sell cars made in China to Chinese consumers."  Now that IS true, it is presented as a threat on the basis of the well established economic principle of opportunity cost (corporate resources spent on expanding plant in China are resources not spent on expanding plant in the U.S.) but the question is why outsourcing suddenly became an "opportunity" when Politifact treaded lightly on the Obama campaign's many charges that Romney was running to become Outsourcer in Chief.  Where is the coherency?  Now it's true that Romney could be challenged on his own "coherency" in choosing this line of attack by noting his track record at Bain.  But that's actually a charge of hypocrisy, not a truth claim.  As Ryan Chittum at the Columbia Journalism Review put it:

[The ad is] saying that Chrysler’s Italian owners “are going to build Jeeps in China.” But happens to be true, even if it was happening before 2009 under its German and private-equity ownership. Cars made overseas by an American company (even one with Italian owners) are cars that won’t be made in the U.S., and it’s fair to say those jobs are outsourced.
On the other hand, it’s high hypocrisy for Romney the free-trader private-equity guy to attack anyone for outsourcing production...

Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post dodged the fact that what the ad said was true by declaring that "The series of statements in the ad individually may be technically correct, but the overall message of the ad is clearly misleading."  Kessler assigned his most damning designation of Four Pinnochios on this basis, yet he assigned zero to Obama's claim in his second debate with Romney about his communications regarding Benghazi which were only technically correct and technically was not even technically correct.  The Columbia Journalism Review was founded by Victor Navasky, who has used his publication The Nation to, amongst other things, argue that Alger Hiss wasn't a spy for Stalin despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.  The CJR's Chittum nonetheless points out a mitigating factor re the Jeeps and China ad, namely that it started with a Bloomberg story with problematic wording and then was amplified inaccurately by a Washington Examiner blogger (before actually being dialed back in the Romney ad transcript from what the Examiner said).  No such mitigating factor exists with respect to Obama's misleading claim in the second debate.  Instead of getting "caught up in the liberal echo chamber," Obama's decision to create the impression that he called Benghazi a terrorist attack from Day 1 was a decision to create something, not picking up to forward on a liberal attack line already in circulation. Politfact, of course, also took a pass when it came to rating Obama's remarks, instead seeing the back and forth with Romney at the second debate as an opportunity to mark down Romney, calling his criticism of Obama on the point "half true."  The bottom line here is that it's a mug's game to try and expose "fact checking" bias by pleading the "facts."  One has to make an appeal to coherency, not correspondence.

There are other examples one could go into.  Romney's infamous "47%... pay no income tax" remark was taken to task by fact checkers in part because "nearly two-thirds of households that paid no income tax did pay payroll taxes."  Yet when it comes to trimming the growth of Social Security benefits, were these benefits paid for by tax revenue?  In that case, the payroll taxes are spun as being insurance policy payments or otherwise "earned" benefits; in other words, when the question is whether the 47% are carrying their share of the load, their payroll taxes are deemed to be building up the public pot, but when the question is limiting S.S. payouts, these same contributions are deemed to be building up a private entitlement.

Now the example I meant to talk about today (but which I've taken a while getting to) goes back to my last post about the extent to which U.S. unemployment is cyclical or structural.  In the context of the "fiscal cliff" debate the New York Times today claims that "Obama already agreed to more than $1.5 trillion in cuts last year."  This $1.5 trillion number comes courtesy of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, however it should be noted that these "cuts" nonetheless still not only allow "discretionary" programs to continue to grow with inflation, they allow for a further $65 billion in spending above and beyond that over the next decade.  How do you spin spending that exceeds inflation (and more) as "cuts"?  By reaching back to inflated 2010 appropriation levels and using that as the baseline.  The 2010 appropriation bills were actually adopted in 2009 when the demand on the social safety net was near its height and when Democrats enjoyed a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate in addition to their majority in the House, except for some special bills in 2010 for disaster assistance, border security, and the Patent and Trademark Office which the CBPP of course also included in order to further inflate its baseline.  The CBPP says that the 2010 appropriation "simply reflects the level that Congress deemed appropriate" at the time.  Well of course.  You could say the same thing about 2007, or 2013 (we're already more than than two months into the 2013 fiscal year), but of course then the claim of $1.5 trillion in "cuts" would collapse.

Now what would be an appropriate baseline?  The answer to that is what is most coherent with the view you have taken elsewhere.  Dean Baker, for example, has repeatedly insisted that the "graph that gives a better picture of the problem of the budget deficit in relation to the economy" is one that calls attention to projected deficits in January 2008 (I've copied his graph here).  The blogger Kevin Drum insists on using a graph that he cuts off at 2008 in order to argue that "Washington Doesn't Have a Spending Problem." Drum says he cuts off his chart because "numbers in the chart have spiked over the past four years because the recession has temporarily depressed GDP and temporarily increased spending, but that spike will disappear naturally as the economy recovers".  Yet Drum elsewhere tallies up "Discretionary spending cuts already passed in 2011: $1.5 trillion"  No "natural disappearance" here, it's "cuts already passed" by Congress!  Not passing another disaster relief bill like in 2010 becomes passing a cut.  Coherency here would mean tallying up the change in spending since 2008, although that would of course completely undermine the point about all the "cuts" that have occurred.

My last two blogposts about the U.S. prior to this one were about whether the current U.S. economic situation is the "new normal" and whether Obama's remarks at the second presidential debate were misleading or not.  People can disagree with the former and say that 2007 should be the touchstone, but if so, don't elsewhere start calling a level of federal government spending that was decided in 2009 the appropriate reference point.  People can disagree about my negative take on Obama's claim in October about what he said on September 12 by saying his words were narrowly true, but don't elsewhere say that Romney was a liar because while his ad was narrowly true it's what viewers were lead to believe that matters.  

Salutin vs Steyn

And life itself told me this secret: 'Behold,' it said, 'I am that which must overcome itself again and again.'
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

Two opinion columns, one by Mark Steyn in Macleans dated July 16, the other by Rick Salutin in the Globe and Mail dated July 17, have some interesting elements in common.

Salutin, on the left, defends Sonia Sotomayor's statements about the importance of her Latina identity by arguing that one's experience of overcoming life's challenges can "put us more in touch with what it is to be human" and that situating this experience within an identification with a visible group is existentially important:

Speaking as a Jew, I think one reason North American Jews identify so powerfully with Israel is a sense that the soulfulness of past Jewish experience is missing in their generally comfortable lives. They'd never want to repeat the horror, but they miss the intensity.

Meanwhile, on the right, Mark Steyn argues that

when government takes too much of the trouble out of things, it makes it impossible to lead a satisfying life. “Trouble”—responsibility, choices, consequences—is intimately tied to human dignity. And thus the human dignity in working hard, raising a family and withstanding the vicissitudes of life has been devalued. And society is just a matter of passing the time.

As if the Romantic sentiment expressed here needed to be more explicit, Steyn suggests that in today's modern welfare states, people's lives cannot read like "a 19th-century social novel" when maybe they should.

What's remarkable about this is that both writers argue that the members of ethnic groups within larger society should maintain their unique cultural identities for existential reasons. Although Steyn does not suggest that people experience Nietzsche's "overcoming" qua Latina or qua white male in his column here like Salutin does, from Steyn's other writings it is obvious that Steyn believes cultural identities should be preserved.

Where the two part, is that Steyn believes the preservation of cultural identities means limiting immigration. "Larger society" in the above paragraph thus means human society, not a multicultural nation-state. It's a key reason why he calls himself a "social conservative" (which he does in this column). For Salutin, one presumes that "larger society" can be a sub-global group, a nation state, and that it's permissible, even advisable, to take pride in one's particular heritage if the group one identifies with is struggling against oppression as opposed being the agent of oppression.

Now I'll grant that I am forcing Steyn and Salutin into boxes in order to make my argument. But my point is not really about what Steyn and Salutin believe anyway but rather what I am suggesting the right and left in general believe.

The true libertarian would disagree with both Steyn and Salutin because the views of Steyn and Salutin both follow from a Nietzschean depth psychology instead of fully conscious reason. The libertarian would point out that logic, and therefore right and wrong, does not change with a human's concrete particulars. And so it is that the libertarian finds Sotomayor's statements unacceptable for a would-be judge in a pluralistic society, the white male conservative finds them unacceptable because they imply a bias against his group, and the leftist finds them acceptable because a bias is appropriate when it is being applied on behalf of the long suffering underdog. For the libertarian, it is the process that matters and the abstract process alone. For the leftist and the conservative, concrete results matter as well because they are skeptical about the perfectibility of the process.

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 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

Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin's legal philosophy

In a speech in New Zealand, Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, Alberta's current representative on the Court, asked

what gives the judges the right to set forth constitutional principles capable of invalidating laws and executive acts, when Parliament has not seen fit to set these principles out in writing in the nation’s constitution?

Indeed, inquiring minds would like to know. Justice McLachin suggests an answer:

... it is certainly clear that the post-Second World War period can properly be called the "age of rights." Clearly something is going on here; ... What is going on is the idea that there exist fundamental norms of justice so basic that they form part of the legal structure of governance and must be upheld by the courts, whether or not they find expression in constitutional texts.

Fundamental norms? An interesting choice of term. Why not fundamental truths? Apparently because "contemporary" people understand that to believe in an absolute right and wrong like Kant did is to believe in an obsolete and discredited "theology":

The contemporary concept of unwritten constitutional principles can be seen as a modern reincarnation of the ancient doctrines of natural law. Like those conceptions of justice, the identification of these principles seems to presuppose the existence of some kind of natural order. Unlike them, however, it does not fasten on theology as the source of the unwritten principles that transcend the exercise of state power. It is derived from the history, values and culture of the nation, viewed in its constitutional context.

You see? The sovereignty of Parliament and the written law can and even should be trumped by something more "fundamental", something "deeper":

Lord Cooke ... urged courts not to be afraid to assume their role in protecting certain fundamental principles as essential to the rule of law and the expression of democratic will, even if these "deep rights" were not in written form. ... I am with Lord Cooke ...

but it can't be really, metaphysically, fundamental, because that would imply that there is something transcendent to the judges, like Truth, Justice, or Reason, such that judges would be accountable to that instead of to their own spin on "the history" [of white oppression?], "values" [of the 'progressive' agenda?], "and culture" [of entitlement?].

Having knocked down the authority of Parliament, Truth, and the written law, what's left? To make a twist on a line from the Nightingales:"There ain't nobody here but us [judges]!"

In fairness, Justice McLachlin did acknowledge a role for "reason" and did not reduce everything to sociology. She called attention to Benjamin Berger's question, "Is a just society the fruit of reason or will?" and posited the Courts as the agent of the former and Parliament as the agent of the latter.

But perhaps because this might leave some doubt about her commitment to slaying the dragon of transcendent Truth, she claims that even the crimes of the Nazis are relative, citing one of Spencer Tracy's lines in Judgment at Nuremberg (a fictionalized Hollywood rendering of the trials) to suggest that the Nazis in the docket were offside with just "higher principles as affirmed by Germany’s history, culture and constitution".

What, exactly, did the "Triumph of the Will" and the "Will to Power" affirm? Hitler reportedly told Max Planck that, "If science cannot do without Jews, then we will have to do without science for a few years." I'd suggest that a judge in a culture like that can hardly be faulted for concluding that whether "a just society [is] the fruit of reason or will" is pretty much a settled question for his or her particular nation, a conclusion that would leave no mandate for resisting the government according to Justice McLachlin's account.

I actually see some merit in the Chief Justice's argument. But Posner makes the case far more comprehensively and has spent a career calling for the application of objective principles like maximizing efficiency (see "law and economics") to the adjudication of legal disputes as opposed to leaving it to subjective sociological assessments. Posner has also stepped up to the plate with respect to vigorously addressing and responding to the opposing position as articulated by Ronald Dworkin. The work of scholars like Fred Schauer, who argues for a middle position between situational morality and absolute morality, should also be addressed when the Chief Justice is making the case for a non-deferential, situational approach as strongly as she is.