There’s a lot of bloviating on the House floor right now about how the American people deserve the best rail system in the world. Amtrak, however, doesn’t provide this at all. Funding Amtrak, actually, is the legislative equivalent of setting fire to a big pile of money. Amtrak bleeds money every year.

For anyone who’s ever been on an Amtrak train, you’ll realize the low quality. The trains are dirty, they are always two hours late, and are ridiculously expensive.

Amtrak is a public-private cooperation, in the sense that it’s a government-protected pseudo-monopoly that is heavily subsidized. And, as I said before, bleeds money to the tune of $200million/year.

Perhaps we should consider the fact that the United States isn’t very suited for rail travel. Although airline fares aren’t great with rising oil, train tickets can easily outpace air fare. I paid $300 for a round-trip Amtrak ticket to New York City from Washington recently, for example.

I’m going to defer to Reason: it’s time to abandon this train wreck.

Take, for example, that old standby of conservatives: denouncing Big Government. Last week John McCain’s economic spokesman claimed that Barack Obama is President Bush’s true fiscal heir, because he’s “dedicated to the recent Bush tradition of spending money on everything.”

Interesting thought, Paul. McCain has gained a reputation as a deficit hawk and someone who has harped on government spending throughout his Senate career, and Obama has proposed a very radical spending plan. Perhaps this association is worth exploring a little further.

Now, the truth is that the Bush administration’s big-spending impulses have been largely limited to defense contractors.

This is just off the top of my head, but I could have sworn that the largest beneficiary has been the AARP. But that’s just me, and “facts,” getting in the way. Carry on.

But more to the point, the McCain campaign is deluding itself if it thinks this issue will resonate with the public.

This is an important argument to make, because the Republican Party has made this part of its platform for years. Hope you brought facts!

For Americans have never disliked Big Government in general. In fact, they love Social Security and Medicare, and strongly approve of Medicaid — which means that the three big programs that dominate domestic spending have overwhelming public support.

You’ve gotten it backward, Krugz. (That’s your thug name. When I refer to Krugz on the pickup court, they know I’m talkin’ serious.) Americans very much disapprove of big government in general, but do approve of big government in specific. The success in the public’s eyes of these government programs you’ve named is a disconnect on the part of the people, not a synchrony.

If Ronald Reagan and other politicians succeeded, for a time, in convincing voters that government spending was bad, it was by suggesting that bureaucrats were taking away workers’ hard-earned money and giving it to you-know-who: the “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks, the welfare queen driving her Cadillac. Take away the racial element, and Americans like government spending just fine.

There was no need for “success.” Since the founding of this nation, Americans have had a basic hostility toward government. I know you’re an econ guy, Paul, but read some Jefferson.

Also, apparently, Ronald Reagan was out there convincing the American people of this as late as 2006.

The cause of a right turn, as Mr. Perlstein shows, was white fear of urban disorder — and the associated fear that fair housing laws would let dangerous blacks move into white neighborhoods. “Law and order” became the rallying cry of right-wing politicians, above all Richard Nixon, who rode that fear right into the White House.

Law and order candidates: racist.

Krugman then goes on to talk about how racism has receded in the past few years (due to Bill Clinton, of course), and how this has paved the way for Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton’s defeat, however, is a sign that we’re a relentlessly misogynistic country. Ugh. It’s plain to see that if the opposite had happened (Hillary defeats Barack), all these articles would be written in an opposite way.

 Good news from the front lines: the Senate was unable to advance the Lieberman-Warner climate change bill today, as it failed to pass cloture 48-36. This, of course, raises a good question: granting the catastrophic environmentalists their arguments about the impending disaster, what can actually be done about global warming?

Even assuming that future climate models hold any degree of accuracy, and taking about the median assumption in between world-catastrophe scenarios and nothing-will-really-happen scenarios, how much could possibly be done to combat the incidence of warming?

The United States and most of the industrialized West have done the bulk of their carbon damage and could afford, at high cost, to curb their CO2 emissions to benign levels. But what of the rest of the world? China has recently passed the United States as the largest CO2 emitter in the world. India is rapidly rising. Are we, the industrialized West, to wag our fingers at these rising powers and demand that they go through the same things that we did a few years ago in a far more costly (eco-friendly) manner, perhaps handicapping their economies and solidifying our own advantage against them? And even if their governments do agree to such radical carbon-limiting proposals, is it moral for them to hinder their own and their (sometimes impoverished) people’s industrial development for the sake of a climate pact with the West?

Looking past the rapidly-industrializing second world, there’s the great moral problem that the third world creates. Huge segments of Asia and almost the entire population of Africa have been mired in a cycle of war, poverty, and disease for centuries. If carbon-based industrialization provides the cheapest, fastest, and most effective way to bring about positive change, should we place limits on what kinds of energy they can use and how they can use them? If it costs 1,000 people the ability to live in a heated home in a given year, risking death, can we do that? If it costs a single extra life per year, can we do that? We see our own action on global warming in terms of dollars and cents, but the third world views emissions curbs in terms of lives lost.

This is where the muddy predictive ability of climate models and the world of reality intersect and cause a great predicament. If Earth really is teetering on the precipice of destruction, of course we need to do every little thing possible to limit greenhouse gas production. However, if it’s viewed in more realistic and moderate terms, it is morally imperative that we take the human lives that are at stake in the developing world into account.

The United States and the West can, therefore, undertake their own attempts at curbing greenhouse emissions with the possibility of it having a negligible effect on their populations. The rest of the world would have to invest in the unknown numbers of future lives weighted against the tangible and visible poverty of current people. We run the risk of sacrificing many for the sake of none.

Scientific consensus, if there ever is or was one on the issue, cannot own the debate. Science, after all, can only take us so far. There are 2,500 members, political and scientific, on the IPCC panel. They agree that warming is occurring and that humans are probably the drivers of the change. Agreement ends there. Predictions of what will happen in the coming years, how much we can really affect the change at this point, and what policies should be undertaken all vary wildly. The IPCC, furthermore, is not the only voice on the issue. Many more exist on both sides, with the IPCC dealing with allegations that it’s too conservative and too extreme in its estimates and conclusions. And this is before taking into account the infighting that has occurred at the panel. The IPCC is not authoritative; it is but one voice in the night.

The global warming question is an endlessly complicated one. Those on the side of drastic action frame the question in moral terms. Those on the side of little or no action put it in economic terms. It must be dealt with on both these bases, and neither side has the right to sole ownership of either economics or morality.

Those wacky left-coasters! What won’t they do next?

I'm a big fan of Stanley Fish and his blog on NYTimes.com. Sure, he's definitely a lefty, but he's articulate and reasonable without resorting to typical extremity of any opinion.

His column of May 25 (I missed it at the time due to Memorial Day) is unfortunate. Fish is peeved by the story that the University of Colorado is considering a program in order to more advertise and air conservative views on its campus. UC is doing this to combat the (very) widespread perception that it's a very left-leaning campus.

Fish disputes the notion that it's left-leaning, raising the point that the university, as a body itself, doesn't take any official positions on any political topic. A legitimate point, but totally irrelevant to the conversation here.

The Fish argument rests on this line of logic: even though only about 2% of the faculty are registered Republicans, this shouldn't reflect the actual teaching that goes on in the classroom, because academic teaching is not concerned with convincing students of certain arguments, only teaching them the basics, including their intellectual histories and subsequent traditions.

He then enunciates the problem here: even if this were a problem, the way to address it is not to create a new program to teach conservative thought, it's to hire better teachers who don't instill their political views into the classroom.

I agree on the solution that he poses. The problem, however, is far different than he says. Fish, being a professor himself, may be acting on his own biases. He could be a great professor, he could be the professor that he idealizes, teaching only the facts without a personal bias. It is unfortunately very rare to get a professor of that kind.

Fish also laments the purely anecdotal nature of complaints of classroom bias. Though he's correct in this, it doesn't mean those complaints are irrelevant.

For instance, the best philosophy professor I ever had was incredibly biased. He was a great teacher, and used a very balanced curriculum with interesting sources, but made no attempt to hide his own philosophic love for liberal political philosopher John Rawls. Imagine the situation that a student is placed in this situation, even if the professor is a perfectly fair and balanced grader.

Armed with this knowledge, what is a student to do? Even if the student loves Rawls' philosophic opponent Robert Nozick, perhaps the student will be more influenced to study and praise Rawls, knowing the teacher will agree with the student and that it may, in some small unconscious way, be easier to argue with the teacher's own opinion than against it.

In my own experience (sorry Fish, anecdote) I only ever had one professor who hid (or tried) to hide political views. An econ professor did his damnedest to hide his own views from the class, and was fairly successful at it. At the end of the semester, he had the class take a vote on what they thought his views were, and the class split roughly 50-50 on conservative-liberal.

Fish is right that, in an ideal world, political views of a professor wouldn't matter. We are far, far away from an ideal world. Professor bias creeps into the classroom almost no matter what, and it could be that this is absolutely inevitable. The solution is a combination of hiring professors who strive for an unbiased classroom and setting a course curriculum that emphasizes opposing views of political thought.

Bias in the classroom is, unfortunately, a problem. Though I may not agree with UColorado's drastic decision to spend a lot of money to balance the debate, there is definitely a problem that pervades classrooms the country over.

One of the most famous images in this debate is the graph of correlation of global temperature and amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. While it’s true that there’s a large amount of correlation between CO2 and global temperatures, the relationship is often confused: CO2 levels have lagged behind global temperatures. It has been historically far easier to predict CO2 level changes using global temperature changes rather than the other way around.

The most popular anti- CO2-driven climate theory is the solar theory. When analyzing the data, a far closer and more predictive correlation can be found between solar activity (measured in amount of flares, sunspots, etc.) and global temperatures. And, contrary to the CO2 theory, this correlation works the right way around.

Both of these, unfortunately, confuse correlation with causation. The first thing that any basic statistics class will teach you is the fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc (roughly after this, therefore because of this). Just because one event follows another doesn’t mean that they are necessarily causing each other. With the incredibly confusing and complicated climate, it’s no surprise that this simple fact is often forgotten. Both of the theories make intuitive sense (carbon dioxide is hot, so more of it equals a warmer world… the sun is hot, so more solar activity might reflect upon the Earth), but stop at the level of correlation. And, of course, historical CO2-planetary temperature correlation has temperature as the independent variable with CO2 being dependent.

Predictions over what will happen in both the near and far future fluctuate almost as much as historical CO2 levels. Those estimates that have received the most press are often some of the scariest and least grounded in the statistical modular world. We’ve heard biblical end-of-days predictions of drought, famine, pestilence, and wars over scarce natural resources as well as measured-by-inches sea level rises and gently warming coasts. Obviously, the degree of severity with which our planet would warm greatly affects our decisions about what to do about it now. If our affect upon the planet approaches the world-ending calamity that some have predicted, we should obviously spare no expense in planning our survival. However, if the warming is more moderate, careful cost-benefit analyses are needed.

And this is where the global warming picture muddies almost beyond prediction. Predictive climate models are notoriously unreliable and border on random. It’s been much-publicized that, thirty years ago, scientists, the media, and climate models were predicting the same life-threatening global changes, but in terms of a cooling planet. Many counter this objection with the assertion that predictive knowledge and technology is better than the 1970s (true, obviously), and placate this objection with the notion that they’ve got it right this time. However, what we’ve learned over the past thirty years is simply that the climate is so complicated that it is impossible to predict with any authority or absolution. Climate models are at the mercy of an almost-unending string of variables due to the incredible complexity that defines our atmosphere. Changing one or two by the slightest amount often plunges the entire predicted future of our planet into chaos. A cliché holds true here: the only constant is change.

Previously, we visited the so-called “consensus” on global warming and the fact that it rests largely on postulation and anecdote. The always-vague group of “scientists” disagrees incredibly, and it cannot be claimed in any way that the debate on the topic is over. Now to examine some of the harder science and numbers involved.

The next question to ask is whether the planet is warming beyond what may be called a natural cycle. In the past, the Earth has warmed and cooled many different times, varying from periods where a huge segment of the planet was covered in ice to periods where Siberian Russia has been temperate, and all of these occurring well before humans ever laid so much as a footprint upon this world.

Looking at any major graph that has analyzed data, it must be concluded that the world has not currently warmed beyond what would be possible in a natural cycle. Depending on whom you ask, the world has been warmer than now no more than five hundred years ago during the “Medieval Warm Period,” and would be difficult to claim that the Earth has never been warmer. Indeed, the hottest years on record, according to NASA, are 1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, and 1931. This all must be taken with a grain of salt, as measuring “global temperature” is difficult and often inaccurate, but the point is that we have gone through comparably warm spells before. Records, by the way, only began to be kept 150 years ago. In the past 150 years we’ve gone through comparable warm spells, not to even take into account the past 150 million!

This is not to discount the fact that humans and our way of life could influence the environment. It’s not possible to argue that CO2 and other greenhouse gases are not warmer than our current atmospheric make-up (just stand behind the exhaust pipe of a truck to see how warm our emissions can be). However, the greenhouse gas that is identified as the main culprit in the current warming trend, carbon dioxide, currently composes about 0.04% of the atmosphere, up from approximately 0.03% one hundred years ago (and the number has been projected to be about 0.05% in 2100).

Many environmentalists have attempted to make our planet out to be a precariously balanced chemical concoction, with any error one way or the other poised to tip it into oblivion. Some conservative skeptics, on the other hand, have invoked God in arguing that our planet could not have been created so dangerously and believe that mankind is arrogant and self-centered to think that we could so harm a wondrous and divine creation.

The truth is most likely somewhere in the middle. Earth’s atmospheric chemistry is certainly not such a combustible mixture as to overload or reach some kind of tipping point if we slightly alter the overall combination. It is naïve to think, however, that humans should not be stewards of the planet for future generations. Because carbon dioxide is the principal agitator in the global warming investigation, it’s been researched more thoroughly than many other elements in the atmosphere. And, indeed, it has had a pretty variable degree of fluctuation over the years due to many different factors. While humans have been the principal driver of CO2 variance in recent years, its incidence in the atmosphere has been higher in the past than it is now. To think that the recent human additions to the atmosphere will seriously cause catastrophic climate changes on a global scale is to invest in hyperbole.

Mere association with lobbyists is enough to taint a politician in the eyes of some of the hardest lefties. Obsessed with cleansing politics of the stench of money, progressives see lobbying as an activity only a half-step removed from bribery.

The utter cynicism that the Left looks upon the lobbying profession with is frightening. If you’re a registered lobbyist, in their eyes, you’re an evil, destructive force in politics.

Lobbying, in its basest form, is an attempt to influence the votes of legislators by informing them about various interests and ins and outs of a bill. What could be any more American than being able to participate in the democracy laid out in the Constitution?

The Left must jog their memories back to Graeme Frost, a 12-year-old boy who appeared on Capitol Hill in order to speak out in favor of the proposed expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). This twelve-year-old boy was... speaking to Congressmen, appealing to them on an emotional level to vote in favor of the legislation. He was a lobbyist.

Obviously, this is only technically true. Professional lobbyists who work for corporations and are allowed to monetarily contribute to politicians have to be registered and regulated. Lobbyists also come from all different kinds of backgrounds: companies, trade associations, unions, membership organizations, the list goes on. Based on ideology, progressives probably have no problem with lobbyists from the AARP or SEIU, but do have a problem with lobbyists from Lockheed Martin.

In truth, we now have incredibly stringent lobbying laws. No lobbyist is allowed to give any gifts or meals to Congressmen any more (it used to be up to a $50 limit, as if that’s enough to sway a Congressman). They are bound to the same rules that individuals are for campaign donations (as are the companies they represent). And they must disclose almost all of their activities.

The hysteria that has engulfed the Left when scrutinizing their candidates with regard to lobbyists is ridiculous. “Ties to lobbyists” is progressive kryptonite. To wit, the Daily Kos is breathless to ridicule an L.A. Times Op-Ed regarding both McCain and Obama’s lobbyist relations.

The Left’s bloviations on this subject have been such exaggerations that a response is necessary. McCain has been, to the chagrin of conservatives, one of the foremost campaigners to get money out of politics. Distorting his record is necessary in order to turn him, in every way, into the other.

 

Supporters of drastic action often prop up what they claim to be a scientific consensus on our changing climate. This consensus looks shakier when prodded. There may be a majority of climatologists that agree on the most general of climate questions, but the inaccuracy of predictive indicators combined with the harm that many global warming policies would do to our world means that more research should be devoted to the matter, and drastic action would certainly be ill-advised.

Indeed, it is disingenuous to simply claim that there’s a consensus. Most consensus claims come from circumstantial and anecdotal evidence without a real survey of scientists. The most famous and relevant actual survey comes courtesy of Dr. Naomi Oreskes, whose survey Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change concluded that 75% of peer-reviewed climate literature either explicitly or implicitly endorsed the anthropogenic global warming. The survey has been scrutinized and become the subject of intense controversy. Attempts to replicate her survey have yielded substantially different results than those that Dr. Oreskes found. Putting aside the subjectivity of judging an “implicit” endorsement, the study’s methodology and detailed results have never been made available. Additionally, there have been new studies that put the number of recently-published peer-reviewed abstracts that contain “explicit or implicit” support for human-induced global warming at below 50%. And this isn’t even addressing whether or not even the 75% number can be called a consensus, enough to declare “the debate is over.”

Those who follow the Supreme Court are aware of certain infamous vagaries in the Constitution such as the Preamble and the “necessary and proper” clause. Reading the Constitution, it’s not immediately clear that these things would have been such great problems. However, the stretching nature of legislatures over the years has brought them into dispute.

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

This incredibly wide-ranging sentence is the Preamble to the Constitution. Is it necessary? What does it mean? Does it hold any real weight? The clause establishes that the Constitution is there for such things as “insuring domestic tranquility” and “promoting the general welfare.” Does this mean that the legislature is empowered to do what it pleases to promote what it considers to be the general welfare? Obviously, this is an ongoing debate in legal interpretation circles in terms of strict construction vs. loose construction. Conservatives, unsurprisingly, are more attuned to strict construction, believing the Constitution is a strict outline for the legislature, and anything not expressly allowed is, well, not allowed.

This problem is only compounded by Article I: "The Congress shall have Power - To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof." All laws necessary and proper? Who decides what’s necessary and proper?

The short answer to both of these questions, throughout the history of the United States, is that the Supreme Court decides what they mean. To put the Supreme Court in cynical terms: this is a body of nine unelected people who meet in secret and serve life appointments. Lovers of democracy everywhere should be quite against the historical expansion of the Supreme Court’s power.

Anyone who’s taken an introductory political science class is familiar with the Federalist Papers, a passionate advocacy of the Constitution written during the time of debate over its ratification. Less well known are the Anti-Federalist Papers, a collection of documents written by (small-r) republicans concerned over the power that the new central government would wield.

As it has turned out, the Anti-Federalists were right. They were concerned about the new central government being supreme over state authority, the sweeping power that the Presidency would have, and the elitism and disconnect with the people that members of the House of Representatives would feel (and this was back when the House numbered 1 rep for every thirty thousand… which has now ballooned to one rep for every 500,000!).

Yet another concern that they had that turned out to be prescient was on the exact question of the judiciary. Brutus’ twelfth essay, published in February 1788, declared exactly that the courts’ power would allow the legislature to exert its influence anywhere it desired.

“[The Constitution] will not be a compact entered into by states, in their corporate capacities, but an agreement of the people of the United States, as one great body politic, no doubt can remain, from the preamble, in which its end is declared, is to constitute a government which is to extend to every case for which any government is instituted, whether external or internal.

“The courts, therefore, will establish this as a principle in expounding the constitution, and will give every part of it such an explanation, as will give latitude to every department under it, to take cognizance of every matter, not only that affects the general and national concerns of the union, but also of such as relate to the administration of private justice, and to regulating the internal and local affairs of the different parts.”

What hath we wrought? It’s exactly as we knew it would happen.

The Democratic party, and progressives generally, love to pride themselves on being elite. It may shock some to know that I have some lefty friends who are exactly like this. So I posited, with my tongue firmly in my cheek, that the reason that Dems seem to be headed for such a resounding victory is that the general mood of Americans has trended toward Democratic ideas, and those ignorant rednecks simply aren’t sophisticated enough to get their heads around nuanced Republican ideas like social security privatization and healthcare reform.

This caused howls of outrage amongst my friends, because in their minds, the only reason we don’t live in a socialist paradise is exactly the opposite: that the anti-intellectual American people cannot see the wisdom and enlightenment of progressivism. Let’s look a little closer at my silly premise:

It was not so long ago that the GOP was touted as coming into a period of pure electoral dominance. An unprecedented 2002 midterm election followed by a decisive victory and increase in majority in 2004 had many demographic analysts predicting the decade of the elephant.

Ah, it was not so long ago at all. But things change with the wind. Whereas four years ago, the Republican Party was hailed as the party of ideas and the Democratic Party directionless, there are now those who proclaim the death of conservatism and the paper-stale taste of its ideas.

Perhaps it’s natural that such a long time spent in power will cause a party to become stale, at least in the minds of the voters. After all, it is time spent as an opposition party when politicians can come up with how they would govern differently. It is easy to gain power and enact what has been planned, but evolving and changing while there is the difficulty.

Nevertheless, the Republicans do still have innovative thinkers and refreshing policy proposals. When compared with Democratic ones, Republican solutions to social security and healthcare reform are comprised of outside-the-box thinking. Additionally, it’s far more difficult to explain the conservative approach to some of the pressing issues of the day than it is to explain the progressive one.

For example, the Democratic plan to solve the social security crisis is to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans and slightly alter the payout structure. This won’t raise enough money to be a long term fix and ignores the basic problem with Social Security in the first place: it’s destined to bankruptcy. George W. Bush’s plan, on the other hand, is nuanced, a complicated mixture of tax code manipulation, partial privatization, and investment regulation.

A recent CBS/New York Times poll indicated that a majority of Americans are in favor of government guaranteeing universal healthcare, even at the expense of rising costs. Another recent poll said that 80% of Americans believe that it’s the government’s job to guarantee a minimum standard for social security. In the face of this initial bias against Republican ideas, what chance does a conservative have?

All the lefty contender has to say is “I support government-provided universal healthcare” and “I believe in a guaranteed social security, I’m going to keep the system intact,” and they’re going to have large numbers, most likely a majority, of Americans on their side.

This is despite the fact that conservative ideas are good, solid ones. There’s an easy Democratic answer to be made, i.e. “The government will take care of it.” In an environment far less hostile to government than ever before, this might just be little enough and vague enough to win.

This, of course, makes no sense. For some reason, the “Congress is rotten… but my guy’s okay” mentality pervades the American electorate. This leads to over-90% incumbency rates in both the House and the Senate, ridiculous in light of their own approval ratings.

A parallel can be drawn directly with the government’s actions. Just like the people disapprove of their government institutions as a whole yet favor their personal representatives, they disapprove of big government and wasteful spending… unless that’s being done on themselves. Of course, most government programs are spend somewhere on something, so typically, a wasteful program is still going to have more vocal support than myriad detractors.

This is a problem of collective action. Those who benefit from unnecessary government spending and programs are going to be far more concerned about losing it than those passive Americans who are worried about runaway spending but have many other issues on their plate.

It is the hesitance to action and desire to value those government programs that benefit the self that has gotten us to this big-government point in history. It is a “soft” tyranny, a “milder” despotism that now permeates out lives. This path that the American government has undertaken has been foretold by many people. The Anti-Federalists, writing in the time of constitutional ratification, feared the many powers that the new government would have. Thirty years into the American Experiment, Alexis de Tocqueville saw the dangers that American freedom would face.

“It would seem that if despotism were to be established among the democratic nations of our days, it might assume a different character; it would be more extensive and less mild; it would degrade men without tormenting them.”

The degradation of will and character, the submission to the all-powerful and ever-growing State would lead men, de Tocqueville said, into a state in which Americans simply would be unable, in any, way, shape, or form to live without the aid of government’s benevolence.

“The will of man is not shattered [by the state], but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

The utter inability to cut or even limit the growth of new government spending is becoming more and more disheartening by the day. The collective action problem prevents any but the most well-funded and active group of citizens from making any impact at all. Perhaps government has not yet truly become the shepherd, but it is the supplier of such perceived indispensables it has become the mother, allowing the American people to suckle its great resources.

Liberte, fraternite, et egalite: this was the rallying cry of the French Revolution. Translated, of course, to liberty, brotherhood, and equality. Mighty interesting, as the forces of liberty and equality are always tugging against each other in the modern day.

John Gerring, political scientist at Boston University, argued that the one ideology that has consistently prevailed in the Democratic party throughout its history has been the yearn for equality. Earlier, they nobly strove to achieve equal rights and an equality of opportunity for Americans. Unfortunately, in the sixties and seventies, the Democrats turned away from an equality of opportunity and have tried to bring about an equality of outcome through a redistributive welfare state.

Lefties have changed their point of view from equality under the law. Now, because inequality still exists despite the widespread equal treatment laws, they assert that the system itself must be corrupt in some way. We no longer hear about individual racism and sexism, it’s racism and sexism on an institutional level. And how does one fix that? Change the institutions, change “the system,” and redistribute, redistribute, redistribute.

Indeed, the solution that progressives propose is to change the laws so that there’s no longer equality, there is inequality. Witness, for example, affirmative action laws, title IX laws, and sexual harassment laws.

The French must be thanked for creating such a catchy slogan. One Frenchman, in particular, warned us long ago against this inevitability, even though we didn’t heed his warning. Alexis de Tocqueville, someone who had seen the devastation wrought by the French revolution and the incredible success brought on by the American one, wrote about the dangers that a desire for equality would ignite in the souls of free men.

“For the principle of equality begets two tendencies: the one leads men straight to independence and may suddenly drive them into anarchy; the other conducts them by a longer, more secret, but more certain road to servitude.

“As the conditions of men become equal among a people, individuals seem of less and society of greater importance; or rather every citizen, being assimilated to all the rest, is lost in the crowd.

“When all conditions are unequal, no inequality is so great as to offend the eye, whereas the slightest dissimilarity is odious in the midst of general uniformity… This never dying, ever kindling hatred which sets a democratic people against the smallest privileges is peculiarly favorable to the gradual concentration of all political rights in the hands of the representative of the state alone.”

De Tocqueville is absolutely not an advocate of inequality, but his master work serves to warn us of the constant, unabated, and unrestrained lust for equality. Equality is a natural instinct of free men, yet can be a destructive and degrading influence if left unchecked.

Overt or not, the underlying philosophy of contemporary politics is a fierce battle between John Stuart Mill and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Mill, while perhaps best known for his development of utilitarianism as an ethical system, was politically a classical liberal, a fierce defender of liberty. His seminal work On Liberty is a must-read for those interested in intellectual history.

Rousseau, on the other hand, formulated the idea of a "general will," and thought that a nation should be governed according to these principles. This has proven disastrous throughout history, as individuals have fancied themselves to be the supreme arbiters of the "general will" (Hitler, Mussolini, for example).

Our nation's founding wasn't based on Mill (Mill was a mid-19th c. writer, coming well after the U.S.' beginning). Indeed, individual liberty wasn't as fierce of a strain in Revolutionary America. They desired collective liberties as laid out in the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights are all based around the phrase "Congress shall make no law..." This clearly was a way for states to keep their own autonomy from the central authority rather than preserving individuals' liberty. Indeed, in spite of the first amendment, many states had their own official religions.

We've evolved, however. Individual rights have become more and more important to our national character and our livelihoods. Indeed, our respect for individuality and responsibility are what set us apart from the trending-socialist Old Europe. Alexis de Tocqueville, touring America in the 1820s, saw our unique national character and wrote (in his absolute must-read Democracy in America) that he had high hopes for our relatively new republic.

"It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my own part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones, if it were possible to be secure of the one without possessing the other...

It does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to surrender the exercise of their own will. Thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated."

De Tocqueville clearly saw the direction our nation was headed in. He saw, even in our early days, our fierce love of liberty, and recognized that our nation would endure through struggle. He saw that our large liberties were by and large secured in the nature of our government and the nature of our people. He knew that the danger laid in the day-to-day meddling in minor affairs that our government is capable of.

Over the weekend I had a sojourn to Philadelphia to play a show with my rock band. I'd been there before, but never really as a tourist, so I decided I wanted to sample the local fare.

 

 

 

My Philly experience was good, America-loving, and cheesesteak-loving. Good job, Philly.