A contrast of two arguments

Acemoglu and Robinson (do they really co-author their blog posts?)

Next comes the original part of Krugman and Wells’s argument: the main corrosive effect of this inequality is in preventing Keynesian policies to combat the recession 2007-2008 and the sharp increase in unemployment that resulted. The idea here is that the “right” (the GOP) opposes any government intervention, and Keynesian fiscal policies and work programs that would have increased employment and combatted the recession are opposed by the right because, with increased inequality, they have become more beholden to the very wealthy.

Though intriguing, this idea is not backed up with direct evidence by Krugman and Wells. It may well be true, but it is also a curious thesis. Here are some of the things we find less than fully clear about this thesis.

First, the distinction between “right” and “left” (or perhaps pro-elite and anti-elite) is not a natural one when it comes to Keynesian economics and policies. Many conservative politicians, and not just Nixon and Reagan, have embraced Keynesian economics.
. . .Third, even in the current US context it is not clear why the wealthiest Americans should be opposed to Keynesian policies. After all, wealthy Americans are the owners of the major corporations or at the very least are strongly vested in the US corporate sector, which would also be one of the main beneficiaries of expanded aggregate demand.
. . .Having said all of that, Krugman and Wells are probably right to some degree. Republicans prevented more aggressive Keynesian measures. . . All the same, the reasons for this hostility to Keynesian economics are still mysterious. Perhaps it was just politicking, with small p — a way of frustrating Obama’s economic policies. Perhaps it was based on a “slippery slope argument” — if the government starts being active now, what is there to stop it from becoming even more active in the future? Perhaps and just perhaps, it was for the same reason that some economists had a blanket opposition to Keynesian policies — on “ideological” grounds not clearly based on pure economic interest. Not as big a story, but a possibility.

Brad DeLong in response (leaving out the parts about Hitler)

My second reaction is that I do, to some extent, understand what Acemoglu and Robinson's impulse is here. The idea that we should engage in technocratic interventions in the macroeconomy to provide a stable economic environment in which free men and women can make their plans live their prosperous lives is, as John Maynard Keynes wrote back in 1936, "moderately conservative": it is in its essence neither left nor right, but merely sane.

The question of what technocratic interventions work best--pegging the price of gold, constant reserve stock, stable money growth rule, lender of last resort, nominal GDP targetting, automatic stabilizers, deposit guarantees, expansionary fiscal policy at the zero nominal lower bound--is not a question of values and goals, but rather a pragmatic question of what works, of what macroeconomic policy is properly "neutral" rather than deflationary. And that is an empirical-technocratic question, rather than a value-philosophical one.

But, even so, right here and right now both the policies of fiscal expansion in a depression advocated by John Maynard Keynes and the policies of massive quantitative easing in a depression recommended by Milton Friedman are strongly left-wing policies--not right wing ones. And, right here and right now, higher income and wealth inequality in our system of money-driven politics has strengthened the right.
. . .
I think that, once one recognizes this fact that both Keynes and Friedman are to the activist left of even the left edge of today's policy spectrum, one cannot then escape the conclusion that today the entire right wing and a good part of the center is simply not sane.
. . .
Acemoglu and Robinson, I think, want at some level to be thought of as Very Serious People, as part of the Bipartisan Center. They do, I think, fear that if they took those additional logical steps that they would find themselves dismissed as "shrill"--as like Paul Krugman and company.


So they try to avert their own--and everybody else's--gaze from the fact that right now to be truly technocratic and nonideological is to be advocating policies that are left of the entire political structure.

DeLong doesn't seem to notice that he is shifting from two very different claims. The first is that right-wing policies correspond to the influence of money on politics; thus they are the policies of those with the resources needed to wield influence in this environment. The second is that the policies advanced by the Republican party and abetted by "centrists" among the Democrats are "simply not sane." A&R acknowledge the possibility of the latter at the end of their post, though they label it as ideology "not clearly based on pure economic interest." This, for them, is "not as big a story." As what? As the first claim, that austerity is the agenda of a specific social group, namely the economic elite (and ultimately, as they note, business). This is at least the implication of trying to link inequality to the current political balance in Washington, but A&R's point is that it is far from clear why this should be so based on the interests of elites and the business community. Why, when business or other even more right-wing forces have in the past been perfectly willing to endorse the stimulation of demand by fiscal means, is there such intense opposition to it today? To repeat, it might just be "insanity" i.e. a kind of ideological blindness, but this is a boring answer. Of course, for the foot soldier in the battle over the management of the capitalist economy, such as DeLong, the degree to which the answer is theoretically interesting is totally irrelevant: it only matters that they are wrong, and must be shown to be wrong (and even pernicious) at every possible opportunity, and any analysis that does not highlight that is no more than a distraction. From DeLong's (and Krugman and Wells') perspective, they are simply championing the technically correct response to a problem in the economy; they are "political" only insofar they are defending the interests of everyone in the economy from a force opposing the correct response ("high unemployment because we will not repair our magneto is a choice, and a disastrous one, and an insane one, and a right-wing one").

However, politics is not an accidental by-product of the existence of an "insane" political party. It is the result of real conflicts of interest among different groups in society, and indeed, when they refer to inequality, or the influence of economic elites, or even to the "right-wing" as a meaningful modifier, they are implicitly at least appealing to this non-accidental level of politics. A&R's point, however, is that far from the simplistic explanation given by Krugman and Wells, it is not at all clear how the Keynesian/anti-Keynesian debate maps onto it, since it is easy to not only sketch out why economic elites (with their interests tied to corporations and the capital markets) could be expected to favor macro-economic re-inflation but also given plenty of historical examples of them doing so. The politics, in this sense, of anti-Keynesian policy is problematic.

Though perhaps it is less so than A&R claim: capital sees an opportunity--in the context of its hegemonic bloc with net savers--to definitively cripple the capacity of the state to intervene in the distribution of economic resources and more specifically the labor market (hence, again, the constant talk of social security and medicare). It might depress revenue a little in the short to medium term--though profits have been perhaps surprisingly buoyant--but that's a small price to pay. Sure, it sucks for the rest of us, but that's politics--as opposed, despite what Krugman and DeLong would like to believe about themselves (though there's evidence the former has been gradually educated), to mere technocratic policy.

Vile

Bill Keller's very existence infuriates me in a way rabid reactionaries cannot. Right-wing punditry's mix of vulgar bourgeois economics and "culture war" dog-whistling is bad, of course, but it is an honest kind of villainy. The self-important centrism of the uber-journalist--who as Times editor played a not insignificant role in the run-up to the Iraq war, which he has since kind-of-sort-of apologized for--is in some hard-to-define way worse. Perhaps it is just that he professes to care about things the right wing will unashamedly disregard, or to be reasonable when "partisans" are doctrinaire, and so when he earnestly reproduces neoliberal commonsense as the height of wise statesmanship, it is more galling.

The middle is not the home of bland, split-the-difference politics, or a cult that worships bipartisan process for its own sake. Swing voters have views; they are just not views that all come from any one party’s menu. Researchers at Third Way, a Clintonian think tank, have assembled a pretty plausible composite profile of these up-for-grabs voters.

And in what respect is "Clintonian" distinct from the mainstream of the Democratic party?

¶Swing voters tend to be fiscal conservatives, meaning they are profoundly worried about deficits and debt.

In other words, they are stupid, but this is a stupidity shared by the entire political class, so it hardly serves to differentiate, does it?

¶They are mostly economic moderates, meaning they are free-marketers but expect government to help provide the physical and intellectual infrastructure that creates opportunity.

But they refuse to pay for it.

¶They are aspirational — that is, they have nothing against the rich — but they don’t oppose tax increases.

¶They want the country well protected, but not throwing its weight around in the world.

Combined translation: On important issues, they'll answer differently worded poll-questions differently, and so they can consistently vote for any candidate whatsoever.

¶They tend to be fairly progressive on social issues; they think, for example, that abortion should be discouraged but not prohibited.

Probably a bad example. Gay rights would be better. But yes, the one front of progress. Congratulations.

Bruce Gyory, who studies voting trends at the State University of New York at Albany, says the swing voters are predominantly white and suburban, have at least some college, and have decent incomes. In this time of precarious jobs, devalued homes and shriveled retirement savings, they are more anxious than angry, more interested in fixing the future than in affixing blame for the past.

In other words, they've got theirs. Oh, and why is the top third of education and income the group that gets to decide these things? What's going on with everyone else? Perhaps there is some factor, let's call it a "balance of social forces," that leads to the effective disengagement of nearly half of the electorate so that the outcome of individual elections follows the whims of ideologically incoherent, upper-middle-class voters, between two sides sufficiently similar to not unduly threaten either this demographic, or the other one that foots the bill for the whole charade?

Swing voters, I think, are looking not for a checklist of promises but for a type of leader — a problem-solver, a competent steward, someone who understands them and has a convincing optimism. We don’t know exactly how they identify that candidate, but it is some mix of past performance (especially for the incumbent), campaign messaging and chemistry.

Shit, paragraphs like this make me want to become a poststructuralist. So they want a leader who understands what they want, which is not particular policies but instead a leader who understands what they want, which is not . . . AAAHHHH!!!! DO THE SIGNIFIERS SIGNIFY ONLY OTHER SIGNIFIERS!!?!!?!

Both Mitt Romney and President Obama have some legitimate claim on these voters. They are analytical, pragmatic, upbeat men who won elections by promising to transcend dogma and get things working again. The middle is probably more ideologically attuned to Romney — at least the old Romney — but finds Obama more likable, especially after Romney’s primary-season impersonation of Lurch from “The Addams Family.”

Ok, briefly channeling Paul Krugman: in what respect have Obama's policies contradicted the ideological nonsense shopping list above?

In the Democratic Party, a battle for Obama’s teleprompter is now under way between the moderates and the more orthodox left. The president sometimes, as in his last two State of the Union addresses, plays the even-keel, presidential pragmatist, sounding themes of balance and opportunity. Then sometimes lately he sounds more as if he’s trying out for the role of Robin Hood.

The problem isn’t that the Buffett Rule is necessarily a bad idea. It isn’t that “social Darwinism” is a slander on Republicans. (Heck, it may be the only Darwinism Romney believes in.) The problem is that when Obama thrusts these populist themes to the center of his narrative, he sounds a little desperate. The candidate who ran on hope — promising to transcend bickering and get things done — is in danger of sounding like the candidate of partisan insurgency. Just as Romney was unconvincing as a right-wing scourge, Obama, a man lofty in his visions but realistic in his governance, feels inauthentic playing a plutocrat-bashing firebrand. The role the middle really wants him to play, I think, is president.

So is Obama trying to steal from the rich (or engaging in "plutocrat-bashing") or is the Buffet rule a not a bad idea? Is he the candidate of partisan insurgency or is he accurately describing the political positions of his opponent?

I propose a definition: Centrists are those who assuage a nagging sense that all is not right with the world with a belief that they aren't likely to do better than the political status quo, and thus who, out of fear of seeming unsophisticated, mask the fact that they are mostly indifferent to politics with vague expressions of displeasure with whoever happens to be in office. They are the perfect analogue to the musical philistine who, despite never listening particularly closely to the Mozart and Beethoven they go to hear, are offended when the conductor dares to sneak some Schoenberg onto the program. One suspects that the root of this reaction is that their manifest incomprehension of the modern works--or, for the centrists, of expressions of any actual political opinions--brings them to the edge of the terrifying realization that they don't even begin to understand the music--or the politics--they claim to approve of.

The middle is the worst political category

Ok, I don't care for liberal hand-wringing about conservative aversion to science, etc.

The latest instance, in a post by Krugman, is noteworthy for including a graph that tells a somewhat different story than he wants to extract from it. It fits in with cliched political narratives that conservatives would trust science less than liberals, but why on earth until recently did moderates trust it substantially less than either?

Hear no politics, see no politics, speak no politics

Apparently, Swiss voters have just rejected a referendum that would have raised the minimum vacation time from 4 to 6 weeks. Which lead Scott Sumner to say this:

I see two possible interpretations for this vote.  First, it may be the case that all Europeans prefer 4 weeks vacations, but other governments don’t give them the chance to vote on the issue.  (By analogy, many Europeans supported the death penalty when their governments abolished the practice.)  But my hunch is that a referendum on moving back from 6 to 4 weeks would fail in many Western European countries.  In my view a more plausible argument is that the Swiss vote reflects the lower income tax rates in Switzerland, as compared to other Western European countries.  Thus is a tax sense, Switzerland resembles the US more than France.  A third explanation might be cultural, but my gut instinct tells me that a 2 to 1 vote against 6 weeks of vacation represents more than cultural differences.  That’s a pretty overwhelming vote.

[As an aside, I anticipate many commenters putting way more weight on cultural factors than they actually deserve.  When US MTRs on the rich were very high in the 1950s, wives of well-paid men rarely worked.  When MTRs fell sharply between the 1960s and 1980s, wives of well-paid men became much more likely to work.  Just the opposite happened to the labor force participation rate of poorer women, as their implicit MTRs rose a lot between the 1950s and 1980s.  But the effect of MTRs seems "invisible" to most people, hence both liberals and conservatives are likely to see these changes in cultural terms.  Liberals see more well-educated women working as being the result of feminism, and conservatives see less poor women working as representing cultural regress away from Victorian values.  Also note that when French tax rates were similar to US rates in the 1960s, they worked similar hours.]

It is an odd conceit of discussion of things like labor regulation among mainstream economists that they must be phrased in terms of individual preferences. Thus, someone like Krugman will point out that lower per capita production in say, France, is in large part the result of the French working less, and that this is at least plausibly rational as the result of a trade-off between work and leisure. I think this is what Sumner is referring to when he rejects a "cultural" explanation in favor of an emphasis on the individual return-to-work, i.e. marginal tax rates.

What is so odd about this is that it insists on looking at the issue entirely in terms of individual preferences for work, whether resulting from "cultural" preferences or marginal incentives. This, out of no reason except for pure ignorance, pretty much rejects the entire literature on comparative political economy, which sees the main explanatory factor as the legacy of institution formation as the result of the political balance among organized social groups. From this perspective, the most important fact in the news story that Sumner is quoting from is one that he omits: ". . . but business groups warned about the cost to the economy." Business groups say this about all labor market interventions, and whether or not they such interventions are put in place is largely a product of the organization of the labor movements and the strength of left or labor parties (which has secondary effects via the adaptive response of center-right parties).

The problem facing the individual is not merely the collective action issues of the trade-off between work and leisure (i.e., that employers expect a certain minimum of time spent at work, and it's often impossible to negotiate even a proportional reduction of both work and pay), which is the only issue the economists admit, but also the problem of judging the claims are the business class. The "cost to the economy" is a real concern for even the poorest members of society. If increased vacation reduces productivity and thus profits enough to restrict economic growth, than everyone really does suffer in the form of lower employment and constrained wage growth. Thus, they have good reason to take the warnings of business groups seriously, and overcoming these concerns requires political organization on the other side. This is more or less what politics has been about under capitalism, and economists are willfully ignoring it when they talk exclusively in terms of individual incentives and preferences.

About the parenthetical: even from a narrow economist's perspective, this is exceptionally daft, because it assumes out of existence the gender-wage gap--to put it in language that Sumner could understand, it's kind of like a high marginal tax rate (30% even today!) on being female. I don't know whether the correlations he's identifying hold, but at the very least he's describing trends that operated roughly simultaneously (I also couldn't find evidence that the labor participation rate of poor women decreased . . .). Notice again that he's thinking in terms of personal rather than social factors, thus feminism => increased desire among well-educated women to work => increased labor participation rate, as opposed to feminism => reduced barriers to entering high-status professions/reduced wage gap => increased labor participation.

Note of course that other than in the U.S., the highest female labor participation rates are in the northern european social democracies (another standard stylized fact of comparative political economy). Oh, and what about when there was not even an income tax that would have cut into wages received by "the wives of well-paid men"? It's like he's hardly even trying.

I read Daniel Larison for passages like this

I guess you could call him my favorite paleoconservative . . .

It is an exaggeration to say that the “third way” was buried in 2008. Let’s remember that the eventual 2008 Democratic nominee ran a fairly cautious campaign that put him to the right of both Clinton and Edwards, and it is difficult to see how Obama has actually governed as a left-populist. He pandered to anti-NAFTA sentiment as a candidate, but in office he has been a less-than-enthusiastic but reliable supporter of free trade agreements. Indeed, on virtually every issue Obama has arguably been less liberal than Bill Clinton as these things are conventionally defined, and even on health care the legislation that Obama signed was far less ambitious than anything Bill Clinton proposed, and for that reason it remains unsatisfying to many progressives. It must be mystifying to those progressives how anyone on the other side of the spectrum can see Obama as a left-wing ideologue, just as it was baffling to many of us on the right how Bush could be perceived as a big right-winger. The more insufferably “centrist” an administration is, the more its partisan opponents feel compelled to portray it as radical.

Of course, we call Bush a radical right-winger because we define the right wing as imperialist and hard-line defense of capitalists, which he was. Of course, by this definition the "third way" was the name given for the formerly left-of-center party signing on with the policies of what had been the far right wing of American (and British) politics through the 80s, which the right then took as an authorization to really go for broke. Of course, the "right wing" by comparison to which Larison wants to call Bush not-right-wing is just no more a purely imaginary political force than the "left" by comparison to which Obama is not-left-wing. The difference, though, is that although it has little or no force in contemporary politics, the left in this sense, has historically been a powerful force; unlike Larison's conservatism which I'm inclined to think has always been a pious mirage of a certain brand of disaffected intellectuals.

Do no harm

Sometimes Juan Cole can be kind of annoying:

The world community has failed Syria, just as it failed Rwanda and the Congo, though the human toll in Syria is a fraction of those killed in the African events. Russia and China have used their veto to block any effective United Nations Security Council resolution that might lead to regime change. India has also, unlike the Arab League, opposed any call for President Bashar al-Assad, the Butcher of Homs, to step down.

Those on the left and in the libertarian movement who stridently condemned Arab League and NATO intervention in Libya (which forestalled massacres like the one we just saw in the Baba Amr district of Homs) have been silent about al-Assad’s predations and clueless as to what to do practically. Perhaps they do not care if indigenous dictators massacre indigenous protesters, as long as there is no *gasp* international intervention.

Perhaps being "clueless as to what to do practically" is actually the realistic response? After all, as Cole seems to acknowledge later, in pure military terms Assad's grip on power is much stronger than Gaddafi's was, and so it's highly unlikely that a little logistical and air support is going to be enough to unseat him, as it was in Libya--and even there it was a close thing. So what exactly should the "world community" [ha] be doing? Sanctions? Because those have worked so well everywhere else they've been tried (Cuba, Iraq, Iran . . . ). Forceful statements of displeasure? His random mention of India implies Cole wants more of that. I suppose that would make us all feel better (and avoid accusations of not caring) but it's not going to make a whit of practical difference on the ground.

Yes, one bourgeois prejudice per paragraph is the proper rate for a blog on the Economist's website

The first offends my professional judgement, though the second is the more politically virulent by far.

I WANT to elaborate on one particular aspect of the institutional arguments in "Why Nations Fail". In the book, Mssrs Acemoglu and Robinson tell the story of a sad gentleman named William Lee. Lee was an English priest who invented a knitting machine in 1589 that promised to make the production of knitted garments dramatically faster and easier. Unfortunately for him, Britain had not yet evolved the institutions that would support extensive private enterprise. Queen Elizabeth essentially told him where to put his machine, and it would be two centuries more before significant automation came to the knitting industry.

I was thinking of that while reading through Alex Tabarrok's ebook "Launching the Innovation Renaissance". Mr Tabarrok notes that innovation is a critical source of sustainable economic growth, but he argues that barriers have arisen to innovation and entrepreneurship in several critical areas. Teachers unions are one example; a more educated workforce is needed to develop new technologies, but interests opposed to reform of America's school system make it difficult to invest appropriately in human capital.

"Partisan polarization"

One of most annoying memes of centrist commentariat is the idea that the major political problem in the contemporary U.S. is an exacerbation of "polarization" between the democrats and republicans. Via the economist, here's Ezra Klein:

Take any issue that you’ve actually heard a lot about. The headline clashes. The big-ticket bills. They’ve all got money on both sides. They’ve all got platoons of lobbyists swarming onto Capitol Hill. They’ve all got activists and interest groups and even ordinary Americans pestering their congressmen. And they all go the same way: the Democrats vote with the Democrats, and the Republicans vote with the Republicans.

That’s true even when the big money lines up in favor of another outcome. In 2011, the Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO joined together to call for a major reinvestment in American infrastructure. None passed. In 2010, most of the health care industry was either supportive or neutral on the Affordable Care Act, and if any one of them could have swung the votes of even a few Republican senators or congressmen, the desperate Democrats would have let them write almost anything they wanted into the bill. But not one Republican budged. In 2009, the Chamber of Commerce endorsed the stimulus bill as a necessary boost to the economy. Not one House Republican voted for it. Almost every major business group has been calling for tax reform and a big, Simpson-Bowles-like deficit reduction package for years now. But Congress remains deadlocked.

Klein is arguing that the political influence of wealthy interests, through contributions and the entire lobbying apparatus of "access," is greatly exaggerated. But notice the language of his supposed counter-evidence: "joined together to call for", "either supportive or neutral", "endorsed", "has been calling for." These all describe the public stances of various groups, but the hypothesis he is arguing against is precisely that the mechanism through which such groups exerts power is not their public pronouncements but their in-the-trenches lobbying efforts. The question is whether any of these groups actually mobilized their resources behind any of these initiatives: after all, politicians have an incentive to respond to the suggestions of even their most powerful supporters only insofar as there would be potential consequences--even intangible, in terms of "relationships"--if they don't. This doesn't disprove Klein's claims, it merely shows that his supposed evidence has no bearing on the claims he's challenging

What does put pressure more directly on Klein's view is that he's being very selective in the cases he's mentioning. The pattern he describes is indeed nearly universal during Obama's presidency. The scorched-earth policy of the republican party in the past 3 years is a curious phenomenon, and probably does require an explanation, but it is also relatively unique to this most recent period. Thinking back the past 20 years or so, most "big ticket bills" were completely bi-partisan affairs: welfare reform, financial deregulation, the bush tax cuts, "no child left behind", medicare drug coverage, and so on. Other than Obama's health care reform (which, it should be noted, despite being passed only on a narrow partisan basis in the end, was more or less written to be maximally appealing and profitable to the health care industry), these were all far more politically important than the fights Klein mentions.

The final issue in the passage I quoted from Klein is also noteworthy, for a slightly different reason. It is true that there is a big campaign for "deficit reduction." Klein's presentation would make it seem like one side was supporting the prevalent plans, while another was not, but this is not really true. Most politicians in both parties would endorse a "Simpson-Bowles-like deficit reduction package." It is true that any particular proposal ends up splitting on party lines and so no action is taken. Yet, and this is admittedly just speculation, the core of all such plans is so-called "entitlement reform," and it's a fair guess that insofar as there's any actual support from business groups it's focused on that one issue. In short, they want Social Security and Medicare stuffed and mounted on the wall. Tax reform, quite frankly, is almost certainly a side issue: after all, corporations have done quite well for themselves in the current, patchwork system, and even if they admit in principle that it's a ridiculous tangle, it not a high priority for anyone.

And so, what to make of the fact that both parties make noises in favor of "entitlement reform" but seem to gridlock on the issue of taxes? Maybe Klein is right that the "partisan polarization" is the real causal force, but I can't help but wonder: are reductions in medicare and social security benefits really politically viable? It's all well and good to talk about the need for "entitlement reform" in the abstract but to actually propose and fight for a specific reduction is something else entirely, and as basically the only universal social programs in the U.S., quite possibly one of the few issues that are truly electorally radioactive. In such a situation, it's better for everyone involved if competing plans essentially go nowhere legislatively, because it frees politicians from having to choose between explicitly opposing the plan (thus alienating all of the interests lined up in favor of it) or voting for it (making reelection essentially impossible).

Why would I ever read Ross Douthat?

But alas, I made the mistake of skimming this.

He very well might be right on the merits against Julian Sanchez, but who cares? I can think of few things less fun than judging spats between the social conservatives and the libertarians.

However, he also cites (via my favorite bourgeois economist) this passage from Wealth of Nations:

In every civilised society, in every society where the distinction of ranks has once been completely established, there have been always two different schemes or systems of morality current at the same time; of which the one may be called the strict or austere; the other the liberal, or, if you will, the loose system. The former is generally admired and revered by the common people: the latter is commonly more esteemed and adopted by what are called people of fashion. The degree of disapprobation with which we ought to mark the vices of levity, the vices which are apt to arise from great prosperity, and from the excess of gaiety and good humour, seems to constitute the principal distinction between those two opposite schemes or systems. In the liberal or loose system, luxury, wanton and even disorderly mirth, the pursuit of pleasure to some degree of intemperance, the breach of chastity, at least in one of the two sexes, etc., provided they are not accompanied with gross indecency, and do not lead to falsehood or injustice, are generally treated with a good deal of indulgence, and are easily either excused or pardoned altogether. In the austere system, on the contrary, those excesses are regarded with the utmost abhorrence and detestation. The vices of levity are always ruinous to the common people, and a single week’s thoughtlessness and dissipation is often sufficient to undo a poor workman for ever, and to drive him through despair upon committing the most enormous crimes. The wiser and better sort of the common people, therefore, have always the utmost abhorrence and detestation of such excesses, which their experience tells them are so immediately fatal to people of their condition. The disorder and extravagance of several years, on the contrary, will not always ruin a man of fashion, and people of that rank are very apt to consider the power of indulging in some degree of excess as one of the advantages of their fortune, and the liberty of doing so without censure or reproach as one of the privileges which belong to their station. In people of their own station, therefore, they regard such excesses with but a small degree of disapprobation, and censure them either very slightly or not at all.

The thing is, that both he and Cowen misread Smith rather badly, as advancing something along the lines of Charles Murray's recent book, that the sexual revolution, etc., has been integrated within an overall framework of discipline among the elite but has basically served to erode social order among everyone else. In fact, Smith is arguing the exact opposite, that the "common people" are more morally rigorous as a matter of material necessity, whereas the wealthy are libertine as a mark of their status. Indeed, in the section where there passage comes from, he goes on to note to argue, "There are two very easy and effectual remedies, however, by whose joint operation the state might, without violence, correct whatever was unsocial or disagreeably rigorous in the morals of all the little sects into which the country was divided." That is to say, that Smith is not worried--like Murray, Douthat, etc.--about instilling rigorous morality in the masses but instead in tempering the "excessive rigour" that comes from "carrying [the austere system of morals to some degree of folly and extravagance."

I was so surprised to learn that Jack Goldstone is into promoting revolutions abroad

Commenting on McCain's "bold" call for NATO intervention

Without substantial material support to the opposition, however, sanctions may have a different effect:  they may prompt Assad to fully crush the opposition as rapidly and completely as possible in order to eliminate any alternative before the external sanctions peel away his remaining support.
If Assad manages to remain in power, the result will be an emboldened Iran, with Syria more deeply in its debt, and greater confidence among Iran’s other regional allies, Hezbollah and Hamas.  Other counter-revolutionary forces in the region will gain confidence as well, and autocrats throughout the world are likely to draw the lesson that crushing any popular opposition quickly and thoroughly is far more likelier than reform to preserve their power.
In the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, revolutions against absolute monarchies scored success after success, producing new constitutional regimes from 1776 in America to 1789 in France, and on to Holland and Belgium and Greece.  But in 1848 the wave broke and was turned back when Russia supported Austria’s counter-revolution.   Whether Iran and Russia help Syria to crush its popular revolt may similarly determine the fate of democracy across the region for decades to come.

 Ah yes, the neverending game of emboldening and (what's the opposite of emboldening?) Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas. But really, the surprising thing is his reference to "success after success" of 18th and 19th century revolutions . . . I always took him as more of a conservative, "revolutions often cause more harm than good" type. I guess I can see the other side of it though, since he tends to blame the short-sightedness of elites for the crises that lead to revolutions (a criticism he's been extending to the U.S. as well).

Wishful thinking

Noahpinion:

Given my history of critiquing libertarianism, it would hardly be surprising if I felt a flash of gleeful schadenfreude to see the dismay with which so many movement libertarians are reacting to the Koch takeover of the Cato Institute. But I don't. I just feel sad. Here are a bunch of smart people who truly, honestly believe in their worldview - a worldview that shares some key elements with my own - discovering for the first time that they are in fact merely a proxy army for people who don't take them or their worldview seriously at all.
. . .

If I were a meaner-spirited type of person, I would say that this realization is too little, too late - that libertarians spent decades being apologists, water-carriers, and useful idiots for authoritarians, and only now that their masters are reeling in the leash do they suddenly want out. But instead I say: Better late than never. You guys made mistakes before, but now you see the truth. First, realize that the conservative puppeteering of the libertarian movement is not an extremely recent phenomenon, but was always present at some level. And then start thinking about what kind of political agenda and rhetorical emphasis will actually promote liberty in America. 

Freed from the conservative yoke, libertarians will have huge potential to do a lot of real good for this fundamentally libertarian country.

What exactly is the capacity of the libertarian "movement" without the Koch-funded institutional infrastructure?

A friend of mine used to say that libertarianism was for people who were used to thinking of themselves as smarter than everyone around them, but weren't actually all that smart themselves.

An epitaph for American politics

Ross Douthat, in the context of gently scolding people for writing nasty things about Breitbart after his death.

While it’s true that extremely important issues are at stake in our public debates, the appearance of the eternal footman can serve as a useful reminder that by the standards of human history — recent Western and American history very much included — the right-left stakes of the current era are often relatively low. Partisans on both sides may emphasize the world-historical consequences of our elections and policy battles, but compared to the world of our great-grandparents, the level of political agreement is far more remarkable than the level of polarization. Yes, there are still controversies (mostly on the culture-war front) that reflect radically divergent ideas about first principles. But fundamentally we’re an extraordinarily rich country with a remarkably stable consensus around our form of government arguing about whether federal spending should claim 18 percent of G.D.P. or 22 percent of G.D.P. — an important question, to be sure, but one that doesn’t always justify the level of heat and hyperbole that it generates.

Of course, he's right, though one can object to the fact that he pretty clearly thinks it's a good thing. The point, though, is that it's not for lack of their being issues of a magnitude that would justify intense political battles; it's that those battles will never be met in the mainstream political domain.