Brad DeLong

Hoisted from the Archives: A Shiver in My Spine: Chevauchee

December 12, 2003: A Shiver in My Spine: Chevauchee

One side effect of having the text of 10,000 books from Project Gutenberg newly-downloaded onto your laptop is that you can read the introduction to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales while proctoring your undergraduate exam. But I just ran across a passage that puts a shiver in my spine, a passage about the KNIGHT'S son, the SQUIRE:

With him there was his son, a younge SQUIRE,
A lover, and a lusty bacheler,
With lockes crulle as they were laid in press.
Of twenty year of age he was I guess.
Of his stature he was of even length,
And wonderly deliver, and great of strength.
And he had been some time in chevachie,
In Flanders, in Artois, and Picardie,
And borne him well, as of so little space,
In hope to standen in his lady's grace.

"...had been some time in chevauchee..." (as it is usually spelled).

DeLong Smackdown Watch: Eric Rauchway on the Morgenthau and Marshall Plans: "almost nobody wanted the Morgenthau plan except Morgenthau"

http://crookedtimber.org/2012/11/12/on-morgenthau-and-peace/

The Morgenthau Plan and the Marshall Plan

J. Bradford DeLong: Comment on Albrecht Ritschl on the Morgenthau and Marshall Plans: University of Pennsylvania Social Science History Seminar: November 2, 2012:

Let me pick up on some threads we’ve already heard this afternoon.

Let me provide a complementary, but I think supportive, perspective on what was going on with Morgenthau versus Marshall in Washington DC in the three or four years after World War II. Possibly my story will have some lessons for the present and the future. But possibly it will not.

Perhaps the most fruitful way to look at the debate between Morgenthau and Marshall that was carried on--largely below the surface, largely without explicit confrontation--at the end of WWII is that it was an attempt to figure out how to resolve call it two historical problems: the problem of European military culture, and the problem of modern industrial war.

The Great Escape From Slavery of Ellen and William Craft

From Ta-Nehisi Coates: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Great-Escape-From-Slavery-of-Ellen-and-William-Craft.html#ixzz2B20Rxd7N

Brad DeLong: The 7% of GDP That America Totally Wastes

CENTER FOR LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES, UC BERKELEY: INEQUALITY: DIALOGUES FOR THE AMERICAS, FALL 2012: OCTOBER 15, 2012 http://www.clas.berkeley.edu/Events/series/inequalityfall2012/index.html

• Full cleaned-up transcript
• Video

---

As for the other question, yes, over the past generation the U.S. government has decided more or less by accident--in the same way, that Britain decided by accident to conquer two-thirds of the world starting in 1750--that it wants to shift seven percent of GDP out of manufacturing and other sectors and into what the market was telling us were the sectors of the future.

So we shifted three percent of GDP into health care administration, and four percent of GDP into finance.

Now even at the time we noticed that shifting an extra three percent of GDP into health care administration was a huge mistake. What the extra three percent of people working in health care administration are doing was working for insurance companies trying to find ways not to pay for the treatment of sick people. They are not only not producing anything useful, they simply increase risk and fear--and make people scared that if they do go to the doctor they then will not understand the bill they get and will not be able to pay it.

We still have a three dollar dispute with NorCal Radiology. It impacts our credit rating. It does not make us terribly happy.

There is also the four percent increase in the share of GDP going to finance. This, too, is surely a zero or a negative sum game.

Consider one of Mitt Romney’s big backers--I’m picking on Mitt Romney more than usual these days, I’m not quite sure why--Anthony Scaramucci. Wall Street mogul. Thinks that what the world really needs is far less regulation of Wall Street, and far more room for Anthony Scaramucci to go about his business.

What is his business? His business is charging people one percent of their wealth each year for the privilege of hearing him tell them which hedge funds will do best over the next year and thus which hedge funds they should invest in.

Now if Anthony Scaramucci actually knew enough about hedge funds to know which would do best over the next year, he would be making even more money by running a successful hedge fund himself. He would be competing with Renaissance or Bridgewater. He’d be up there as someone who was making money for his clients. But he doesn't.

He’s in a position where lots of people want an expert to tell them what to do, have been told by their friends that he is the expert to listen to.

As near as I can see, what the extra four percent of U.S. GDP devoted to finance is doing is taking money not so much from the bottom eighty percent but from the rest of the top ten percent that wants to know where to put their money--through price pressure, through arbitrage, through fees. It doesn't do anything productive in terms of spreading risk, improving corporate governance, or diminishing moral hazard in the credit channel--rather the reverse. But it does increase uncertainty. And it has brought us our current depression.

So we have moved seven percent of the U.S. economy into activities that are at best completely unproductive. Now we have to figure out how to move resources out of these sectors. At the moment we’re unable to do so because we’re still fighting the lesser depression and trying to keep it from turning into a greater depression.

Any advice as to how to deal with our short run problem, so we can then turn to the long run problem of structural adjustment, would I think be very welcome.

David Haglund: D. Michael Quinn and Mormon excommunication: What happened when Michael Quinn challenged the history of the church he loved.

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/faithbased/2012/11/d_michael_quinn_and_mormon_excommunication_the_complicated_life_of_a_mormon.single.html

An Address to the People of Missouri: Todd Akin Is What We Left Europe to Free Ourselves From Weblogging

Please do not vote for Todd Akin for Senate.

When our ancestors--the overwhelming bulk of our ancestors--left Europe to come to the Great Valley of America that was the Missouri-Mississippi-Ohio, it was in large part to escape the poverty, the cruelty, and the ignorance of Europe's Middle Ages and reach a place where we could breathe freely.

Todd Akin's long- and strongly-held belief that there is no such thing as a child in a "legitimate rape" is the cruelty and ignorance of Medieval Europe. It has no place here in the Missouri Valley.

My spouse brings home her copy of James Mohr (1993), Doctors and the Law: Medical Jurisprudence in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 0801853982):

p. 71ff: [Doctors'] approach appeared to be straightforward: enlightened science should triumph over both ancient legal precedents and entrenched folk perceptions…. Champions of improved medical jurisprudence [in America] battled… the widespread and legally-accepted popular belief that conception could not take place without "a certain degree of enjoyment" on the part of the woman, and the conditions for female pleasure would be unlikely to exist unless the woman had acquiesced. Physicians could finally demonstrate by the second quarter of the nineteenth century tha pregnancy was not a matter of volition. Women had conceived while under the effect of narcotics and anesthetics; they could also have a pregnancy forced upon them by a rapist. All of the leading authorities in the field of [American] medical jurisprudence agreed on this point by mid-[nineteenth] century. Yet the old notion did not die easily…. By maintaining a constant and nearly unanimous drumfire of testimony in rape cases to the effect that pregnancy could follow a rape, American physicians were self-consciously crusading in behalf o science and rationalism against what they considered barbaric anachronisms inappropriate to an enlightened republic. Only in the late nineteenth-century, however, were they able to all but eliminate that long-standing British excuse for acquittal…

Don't vote for a guy who wants to bring it back. 13th century medicine and law has no place here and now.

Fidel Castro: I Was Wrong to Tell Khrushchev to Obliterate the U.S.

Fans of the dictatorial and short-sighted Fidel Castro should think that he really wanted to climb the ladder of thermonuclear escalation all the way to the top back in 1962. Effectively halting economic growth in your country for two generations with nothing to counterbalance it is a heavy burden to plead before the Bar of History. Thank God he didn't actually have his finger on any of the buttons...

Stalingrad at 70

Perhaps we should turn our historical-memory attention here a little bit away from the Cuban Missile Crisis at 50...

Our Debt to Stalingrad by J. Bradford DeLong - Project Syndicate:

BERKELEY – We are not newly created, innocent, rational, and reasonable beings. We are not created fresh in an unmarked Eden under a new sun. We are, instead, the products of hundreds of millions of years of myopic evolution, and thousands of years of unwritten and then recorded history. Our past has built up layer upon layer of instincts, propensities, habits of thought, patterns of interaction, and material resources.

On top of this historical foundation, we build our civilization. Were it not for our history, our labor would not just be in vain; it would be impossible.

And there are the crimes of human history. The horrible crimes. The unbelievable crimes. Our history grips us like a nightmare, for the crimes of the past scar the present and induce yet more crimes in the future.

And there are also the efforts to stop and undo the effects of past crimes.

So it is appropriate this month to write not about economics, but about something else. Seventy-nine years ago, Germany went mad. There was delinquency. There was also history and bad luck. The criminals are almost all dead now. Their descendants and successors in Germany have done – and are doing – better than anyone could have expected at grappling with and attempting to master their nation’s unmasterable past.

Seventy years ago, 200,000 Soviet soldiers – overwhelmingly male and predominantly Russian – crossed the Volga River to the city of Stalingrad. As members of Vasily Chuikov’s 62nd Army, they grabbed hold of the nose of the Nazi army and did not let go. For five months, they fought. And perhaps 80% of them died in the ruins of the city.

Center for Latin American Studies, UC Berkeley: Inequality: Dialogues for the Americas, Fall 2012

http://www.clas.berkeley.edu/Events/series/inequalityfall2012/index.html

"Uncertainty" Will Decline When (a) Fiscal and Monetary Policies Are Stimulative Enough to Bring About Full Recovery and (b) the Republican Party as We Know It Vanishes from the Page of TIme

Paul Krugman:

The "Uncertainty" Scam: For the most part, “uncertainty” seems to reflect the fact that the economy is weak. Not surprising: while economists may define uncertainty in terms of second moments, most people use the term to mean fear that things could get worse.

Now, there is a spike in uncertainty in mid-2011. And we know what that’s about: the confrontation over the debt ceiling. There’s also some correlation between the Bloom uncertainty index and troubles in Europe.

So think about it: even if you accept the Bloom et al paper as gospel (which you shouldn’t), what it’s really saying is that the US economy is being held back by Republican extremism, by the GOP’s unprecedented willingness to hold the full faith and credit of American hostage for political gain. It is not, repeat not, about Obama looking at rich people funny.

Video: Brad DeLong and Oscar Landerretche, "The Politics of Inequality": Berkeley Center for Latin American Studies

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80zPkYzDFfU

Earlier

12:00 Noon PDT: Politics of Inequality

12pm today @clasberkeley "Politics of Inequality" with Cal Econ Prof @delong & Chilean scholar @olanderretche on.fb.me/TdVesd

— CLAS Berkeley(@clasberkeley) October 15, 2012

Audio

Monday: Inequality in the Americas

UPDATE: Video

Monday: Inequality in the Americas: Center for Latin American Studies University of California, Berkeley:

Economic and social inequality is critical throughout the Americas. CLAS has organized a path-breaking real-time dialogue across the hemisphere. Using the web, we are connecting Berkeley professors and audiences to colleagues and audiences throughout Latin America.

MONDAY

Oscar Landerretche and Brad DeLong: The Politics of Inequality

Oscar Landerretche is the director of the School of Economics and Business at Universidad de Chile. Previously, he worked as the Chilean consultant for Global Source Partners’ Consulting Network in New York (2006-2011) and was the Executive Secretary of the first phase of Michelle Bachelet’s presidential campaign. He is an editorial columnist for La Tercera.

Brad DeLong is a professor of economics at UC Berkeley, chair of the Political Economy of Industrial Societies major, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy from 1993 to 1995.  

Monday, October 15, 12:00 PM Room 370, Dwinelle Hall

Erik Loomis: The Dark Side of Jefferson is the Dark Side of America

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2012/10/the-dark-side-of-jefferson-is-the-dark-side-of-america

Harry S Truman: Message to Congress on National Health Insurance: November 19, 1945

Harry S. Truman: November 19, 1945:

To the Congress of the United States:

In my message to the Congress of September 6, 1945, there were enumerated in a proposed Economic Bill of Rights certain rights which ought to be assured to every American citizen.

One of them was: "The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health." Another was the "right to adequate protection from the economic fears of . .. sickness ...."

Millions of our citizens do not now have a full measure of opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health. Millions do not now have protection or security against the economic effects of sickness. The time has arrived for action to help them attain that opportunity and that protection.

The people of the United States received a shock when the medical examinations conducted by the Selective Service System revealed the widespread physical and mental incapacity among the young people of our nation. We had had prior warnings from eminent medical authorities and from investigating committees. The statistics of the last war had shown the same condition. But the Selective Service System has brought it forcibly to our attention recently--in terms which all of us can understand.

As of April 1, 1945, nearly 5,000,000 male registrants between the ages of 18 and 37 had been examined and classified as unfit for military service. The number of those rejected for military service was about 30 percent of all those examined. The percentage of rejection was lower in the younger age groups, and higher in the higher age groups, reaching as high as 49 percent for registrants between the ages of 34 and 37-

In addition, after actual induction, about a million and a half men had to be discharged from the Army and Navy for physical or mental disability, exclusive of wounds; and an equal number had to be treated in the Armed Forces for diseases or defects which existed before induction.

Among the young women who applied for admission to the Women's Army Corps there was similar disability. Over one-third of those examined were rejected for physical or mental reasons.

These men and women who were rejected for military service are not necessarily incapable of civilian work. It is plain, however, that they have illnesses and defects that handicap them, reduce their working capacity, or shorten their lives.

It is not so important to search the past in order to fix the blame for these conditions. It is more important to resolve now that no American child shall come to adult life with diseases or defects which can be prevented or corrected at an early age.

Medicine has made great strides in this generation--especially during the last four years. We owe much to the skill and devotion of the medical profession. In spite of great scientific progress, however, each year we lose many more persons from preventable and premature deaths than we lost in battle or from war injuries during the entire war.

We are proud of past reductions in our death rates. But these reductions have come principally from public health and other community services. We have been less effective in making available to all of our people the benefits of medical progress in the care and treatment of individuals.

In the past, the benefits of modern medical science have not been enjoyed by our citizens with any degree of equality. Nor are they today. Nor will they be in the future--unless government is bold enough to do something about it.

People with low or moderate incomes do not get the same medical attention as those with high incomes. The poor have more sickness, but they get less medical care. People who live in rural areas do not get the same amount or quality of medical attention as those who live in our cities.

Our new Economic Bill of Rights should mean health security for all, regardless of residence, station, or race--everywhere in the United States.

Dog-Eating Jew-Counters for Romney!

I see Fred Malek is back in the news...

Vernon Smith: Constructivist and Ecological Rationality in Economics

http://www.international.ucla.edu/media/files/Smith.pdf

Eric Hobsbawm, RIP

Let me correct the late Tony Judt, who said:

If he had not been a lifelong Communist, [Eric Hobsbawm] would be remembered simply as one of the great historians of the 20th century.

It should read:

Even though he was a lifetime Communist, Eric Hobsbawm was one of the greatest historians of the 20th century.

A thousand years from now people are likely to still read The Age of Revolution and The Age of Capital. I have tried to write reviews of those two books, and so far I have failed--I have been unable to write anything that conveys just how good they are.

Against Whacka-Whacka Claims That Al Gore Would Have Been "Likely" to Attack Iraq in 2003 as George W. Bush Did

Seems to me not "likely" but rather unlikely. That's what I thought when I heard this. That's what I believe now:

Former Vice President Al Gore: Sept. 23, 2002: Iraq and the War on Terrorism: Commonwealth Club of California: San Francisco, California: Like all Americans I have been wrestling with the question of what our country needs to do to defend itself from the kind of intense, focused and enabled hatred that brought about September 11th, and which at this moment must be presumed to be gathering force for yet another attack. I’m speaking today in an effort to recommend a specific course of action for our country which I believe would be preferable to the course recommended by President Bush.  Specifically, I am deeply concerned that the policy we are presently following with respect to Iraq has the potential to seriously damage our ability to win the war against terrorism and to weaken our ability to lead the world in this new century.

In Which I Feel I Understand Where Elijah Muhammed Was Coming From More than Ever Before...

General Conference Report of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 1960:

I saw a striking contrast in the progress of the Indian people today….

The day of the Lamanites is nigh. For years they have been growing delightsome, and they are now becoming white and delightsome, as they were promised. In this picture of the twenty Lamanite missionaries, fifteen of the twenty were as light as Anglos, five were darker but equally delightsome. The children in the home placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation. At one meeting a father and mother and their sixteen-year-old daughter we represent, the little member girl—sixteen—sitting between the dark father and mother, and it was evident she was several shades lighter than her parents—on the same reservation, in the same hogan, subject to the same sun and wind and weather….

These young members of the Church are changing to whiteness and to delightsomeness. One white elder jokingly said that he and his companion were donating blood regularly to the hospital in the hope that the process might be accelerated…

The Propaganda Model: Son of Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman in Counterpunch!

I had zeroed out all memory of "Counterpunch". Alex Tabarrok brings knowledge of it and its Alexander Cockburn memorial issue back. I suppose he is doing a good deed: I should not forget that such things as "Counterpunch" and its Cambodian Holocaust deniers exist:

Israel Shamir: Pol Pot Revisited » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names: Now, in the monsoon season, Cambodia is verdant, cool and relaxed…. It’s a pleasant time to re-visit this modest country: Cambodia is not crowded… Cambodians are not greedy…. They fish for shrimp, calamari and sea brim. They grow rice, unspoiled by herbicides, manually planted, cultivated and gathered. They produce enough for themselves and for export, too….

Elizabeth Drew: The Republican Voter Suppression Effort is the "Worst Thing That Has Happened to Our Democratic Election System since the Late Nineteenth Century"

Elizabeth Drew: The Republican Voter Suppression Effort is the "Worst Thing That Has Happened to Our Democratic Election System since the Late Nineteenth Century"

I've Heard of Rockefeller Republicanism. I've Never Heard of Rockefeller Fascism...

Yes, they are very odd ducks over at National Review:

@mattyglesias Love the ellipses. James Burnham was also NR's most avid fan of Nelson Rockefeller and a defender of the welfare state.

— Reihan Salam (@reihan) September 20, 2012

Back in 1975, James Burnham's praise of Franco included the marvelous claim that:

The whole concept of "fascism" for that matter has been a fraud from the beginning. Like "peaceful coexistence" and "detente," it is a tactical invention of the Soviet Agitprop, and boils down in practice to the simple definition: fascism is any regime that outlaws Communism…

George Romney Explains Why We Must FIght His Son's Republican Party

Mitt Romney's Republican Party is all about using legal process to deny the most basic of political rights--the right to vote--to as many of the "moochers" as possible.

What would George Romney have said about such a party? We don't have to wonder: we know:

George Romney, Letter to Barry Goldwater, December 21, 1964:

You have requested an explanation from me…. First, as to your remark… concerning the possible realignment of the Republican and Democratic parties into "conservative" and "liberal" parties… you have indicated that… this might be "a happy thing". I disagree…. Dogmatic ideological parties tend to splinter the political and social fabric of a nation…. We should exert every effort to broaden and strengthen our Republican party… [as] an essential element of a free country….

In the newspapers I read that when you were questioned about our getting together for… my well-publicized desire for a discussion in depth, you said you had sent me a printed statement of your positions, and if I didn't understand it I could get in touch with you…. [T]he need for such a meeting had become all the more important. You were just about to take a position on the 1964 Civil Rights Act contrary to that of most elected Republicans… there were disturbing indications that your strategists proposed to make an all-out push for the Southern white segregationist vote and to attempt to exploit the so-called "white backlash" in the North….

Mitt Romney and "Those People": Reading Ta-Nehisi Coates Weblogging

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

No One Left To Race-Bait To: Dave Weigel points out the difference between the covert racism of a young cagey Pat Buchanan in the days of the Southern strategy, and overt racism of the pariah Pat Buchanan banished to Fox News…. Calling the first black president a "drug dealer of welfare" is… Buchanan deploying symbolism. The problem is that the world has changed, and this is precisely the kind of rhetoric that would end a presidential candidacy today.

As I argued on Tuesday, as a racist appeal becomes more abstract, it doesn't simply become "more devious, it becomes less racist, and thus less potent. Inveighing against the 47 percent isn't racist; "Welfare Queen" kind of is;  William F. Buckley claiming black people don't want to vote really is; and John Booth mumbling "That means nigger equality, by God I'll run him through" and then shooting the president in the head is straight white supremacist violence.

I See That Yves Smith Has Realized That the Newsweek Cover of Niall Ferguson Praising Mussolini Was a Parody...

…and pulled her critique.

To fill the gaping hole in the internet this has created, let me offer National Review's obituary for Francisco Franco, written by James Burnham:

Francisco Franco was our century's most successful ruler.... [H]e outstayed all his great contemporaries, friend and enemy: Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Churchill, Eisenhower, de Gaulle….

"[A] patient stubbornness, a flawless prudence, and an unshakable faith in his mission.... Before coming to a decision he meditated before a portable Blessed Sacrament.... 'I Francisco Franco Bahamonde, Caudillo of Spain, conscious of my responsibility before God and before history...' And, besides all the rest, luck."

Franco commanded the winning side in a ferocious civil war... held Spain aloof from World War II.... Under his postwar rule Spain transformed itself... into a modern industrial state.... Illiteracy has been halved....

[W]ith the exit of Franco... the regime was going to confront a formidable array of basic political and social problems. This fact is sufficient proof of how fundamentally Spain's regime has differed from genuine totalitarian regimes like Hitler's Reich.... Under a consolidated totalitarian regime, succession... does not raise issues involving the essential nature of the regime....

The whole concept of "fascism" for that matter has been a fraud from the beginning. Like "peaceful coexistence" and "detente," it is a tactical invention of the Soviet Agitprop, and boils down in practice to the simple definition: fascism is any regime that outlaws Communism…

As Benjamin Franklin Said: "A Rising, Not a Setting Sun": 911 Anniversary

The first 911 on which the dead can sleep somewhat easier.

Osama bin Laden is dead too…

Barry Ritholtz

9/11 Recollections | The Big Picture: This is the first anniversary of 9/11 where Justice has been served. It is 11 years later and the wounds still seem fresh. Even the NYC weather — bright, crisp autumnal sunshine — feels similar. Each year, I try my best to avoid writing anything about September 11th. Given the history, it has become nearly unavoidable. Rather than write something new, I will instead point you to my experiences that day (which I wrote on the evening of 9/11). I was the Market Strategist for a firm headquartered at 2 WTC. I was fortunate to be in the LI office as events unfolded. I managed to get my head trader on the phone, and he gave me a full play by play of what was occurring to him in real time, until the towers went down and broke our phone connection. I put all of what he said down on paper, and published it the next day: A Personal Recollection From a Day of Horror (September 12th, 2001).

There is nothing else for me to add…

The Supreme Court Justices Who Elected George W. Bush Have an Awful Lot of Explaining to Do: 911 Edition

Kurt Eichenwald:

The Bush White House Was Deaf to 9/11 Warnings: On Aug. 6, 2001, President George W. Bush received a classified review of the threats posed by Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, Al Qaeda. That morning’s “presidential daily brief” — the top-secret document prepared by America’s intelligence agencies — featured the now-infamous heading: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” A few weeks later, on 9/11, Al Qaeda accomplished that goal.

On April 10, 2004, the Bush White House declassified that daily brief — and only that daily brief — in response to pressure from the 9/11 Commission, which was investigating the events leading to the attack. Administration officials dismissed the document’s significance, saying that, despite the jaw-dropping headline, it was only an assessment of Al Qaeda’s history, not a warning of the impending attack. While some critics considered that claim absurd, a close reading of the brief showed that the argument had some validity.

That is, unless it was read in conjunction with the daily briefs preceding Aug. 6, the ones the Bush administration would not release.

Daniel Davies: New Ideas From Dead Political Systems

Daniel Davies:

New Ideas From Dead Political Systems — Crooked Timber: Back in the days before I had realised that a guy who takes five years to deliver a simple book review probably ought to rein in the ambition a bit when it comes to larger-scale projects, I occasionally pitched an idea to publishers of management books. It was going to be called Great Ideas From Failed Companies, the idea being that when you have the perspective of the entire history of a corporate story, you’re probably going to get a more honest appraisal of its strengths and weaknesses, and that although companies like Enron, Northern Rock and Atari clearly had major problems, they quite likely also had some good points too, or how did they ever get so big in the first place?

Obviously, carrying out a similar exercise on failed social and political systems is a bit of a minefield, since most social and political systems which have been tried and failed have tended to take down a hell of a lot of innocent lives with them as they did so. I don’t think anyone but the most studiedly mindless (and tasteless) contrarian would bother to ask the question “but what did the Nazis get right?” at any great length[1]. But there’s always a temptation to do so with Soviet communism[2]….

[1] At short length, the answer is “monetary policy”. The rather embarrassing introduction to the first German-language edition of the General Theory is quite thoroughgoing in its endorsement of Hitler and Schacht’s adoption of broadly Keynesian policies. So now you know.

[2] The exercise is probably best carried out by someone who, like Francis Spufford, has never been a Communist themselves. As Mark Steel notes in his autobiography “Reasons to be Cheerful”, on the subject of old Stalinists constantly finding themselves post-1989 in conversations where they ended up backsliding into wondering whether there weren’t a few progressive elements, Communism is like smoking in this way, you’ve really just got to give it up cold turkey.

Buce Embarks on the Quest for the Historical Muhammed

Don't do it, Buce!

Four Twelve things seem to me to be crystal clear about the quest for the historical Muhammed:

The Grammar of Gender

Victor Gay, Estefania Santacreu-Vasut, and Amir Shoham:

[W]e construct four individual dummy variables capturing the intensity of female/male distinctions… for the most commonly spoken language in a country. In Santacreu-Vasut and Shoham (2012) we find that countries whose dominant language marks gender more intensively have significantly lower female labour-force participation rate. We also find that, relative to men, women in those countries work more in services, and less in agriculture. These are robust to controlling for geography, colonial history, religion, and climate…. [H]aving a sex-based gender [language] system decreases female labour-force participation by 12% points compared to having no gender [language] system…. We also find that female/male distinctions in language are related to gender political quotas…. [C]ountries whose dominant language emphasises female/male distinctions more intensively are more likely to formally regulate women's presence in politics through the use of quotas and sanctions for their enforcement. Furthermore, those countries show a sharper increase in female political participation ex post quota adoption….

As Borodistsky et al. (2003, p. 65) argue:

Needing to refer to an object as masculine or feminine may lead people to selectively attend to that object's masculine or feminine qualities, thus making them more salient in the representation. This salience in the grammar of languages may influence the salience of gender in speakers' mind (cognition) and/or may reflect the salience of gender distinctions in the culture…

Does Tampa Mark the End of the Exceptional America of Alexis de Tocqueville?

We are live at Project Syndicate:[1]

When French politician and moral philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville published the first volume of his Democracy in America in 1835, he did so because he thought his France was in big trouble--and had lots to learn from America.

The grab for centralized power by the absolutist Bourbon monarchs followed by the great French Revolution and Napoleon's Empire had destroyed the good parts of the French neofeudal order as well as the bad. In Tocqueville's imagination, at least, the subjects of the neofeudal order had been eager to protect their particular liberties and jealous of their spheres of independence. They had understood that they were embedded in a nationwide web of obligations, powers, responsibilities, and privileges.

But for the Frenchman of 1835, Tocqueville thought, adopting:

the doctrine of self-interest as the rule of his actions… [has produced] egotism… no less blind…. [W]e have destroyed an aristocracy, and we seem inclined to survey its ruins with complacency…"

To sick France in 1835 de Tocqueville counterposed healthy America, in which attachment to the idea that people should pursue their self-interest was no less strong, but was different. It was, he thought, because Americans understood that they could not flourish unless their neighbors prospered as well: they thus pursued their self-interest, but their interest "rightly understood".

Vaughan Bell: Unusual Cognitive Dissonance...

A dark and complex past « Mind Hacks:

[O]ne of the world’s pioneering anthropologists has been found to have been a member of both the Nazi SS and the French resistance during the Second World War. Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff retains legendary status in anthropology and particularly in Colombia, where he first lived with many of the country’s remote indigenous people during the 1950s and 60s founded the first department of anthropology. He died in 1994 but his legend has only grown since his passing…. He was actually born in Austria but talked little about his past. This is not surprising….

Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo, an anthropologist at the University of Florida, has been researching the background of this legendary figure…. Oyuela-Caycedo began his investigation as a tribute to his friend and mentor only to discover a grim past well documented in the Nazi archives. At one point in the presentation, he is brought to tears as he reads a description of how the yet-to-be Austrian anthropologist murders an old man with a pistol. It turns out that Reichel-Dolmatoff was a member of both the Nazi Party and the SS, in the personal guard of Hitler himself and a participant in Gestapo death squads. He later trained guards in the Dachau Concentration Camp….

Reichel-Dolmatoff did not seem to make the typical Nazi exit from Europe. He had what is vaguely described as a ‘mental crisis’ in 1936 and was declared unfit for the SS and publicly expelled from the Nazi party. Curiously, he turned up immediately afterwards working for the anti-Hitler resistance in France and continued to support the French resistance after he arrived in Colombia in 1939, to the point where he was eventually awarded the National Order of Merit by the French president.

Reichel-Dolmatof’s subsequent anthropological work is completely devoid of Nazi overtones – no hints of eugenics or ‘racial hygiene’ – and throughout his life he attempted to demonstrate the amazing diversity of the native peoples of Colombia, the Amazon and the Sierra Nevada mountains.

The case raises a number of difficult questions. The nature of Reichel-Dolmatof’s ‘mental crisis’ remains completely obscure. As the Spanish-language magazine Arcadia asks – how did a young Nazi end up working in Colombia for a Hitler resistance movement? Was it a crisis of conscious or something more opportunistic?…

How Did I Wind Up with Two Copies of Franklin L. Ford (1953), "Robe and Sword: The Regrouping of the French Aristocracy After Louis XIV"?

Ta-Nehisi Coates: Fear of a Black President

Fear of a Black President - Ta-Nehisi Coates:

The irony of President Barack Obama is best captured in his comments on the death of Trayvon Martin, and the ensuing fray. Obama has pitched his presidency as a monument to moderation. He peppers his speeches with nods to ideas originally held by conservatives. He routinely cites Ronald Reagan. He effusively praises the enduring wisdom of the American people, and believes that the height of insight lies in the town square. Despite his sloganeering for change and progress, Obama is a conservative revolutionary, and nowhere is his conservative character revealed more than in the very sphere where he holds singular gravity—race.

Hoisted from Comments: T on Niall Ferguson's "The Pity of War"

Hooted Hoisted from Comments, Hoisted...

Hoisted from Comments: T on Niall Ferguson's WWI Book:

His WWI book was awful. It's entire premise is anachronistic, and it shows the same predilection for snide ad hominem attacks as the rest of his writing.

I beg to differ. I thought that Ferguson"s World War One book was pretty good.It suffered to a small degree from AJP Taylor disease, but a very mild case only--you learn a lot from TPOW, while you learn nothing from "Origins of WWII".

My main criticism is that it does not make its central thesis clear. The central thesis is that British intervention in World War I was an absolute trainwreck clusterf%#+ because Britain was strong enough to prevent an early German victory yet not strong enough to impose an early Allied one, and an early German victory would have led to a Europe much like the one we have now while avoiding all the 1919-89 unpleasantness.

I think that Ferguson's central thesis is probably wrong. The Europe we have now is one that is dominated by a large German-speaking Palatinate. The Europe in Ferguson's scenario would have been one dominated by a large German-speaking Prussia. There is a huge difference.

And I think Fergusons harsh judgments of British policymaking in 1914 are wrong as well: the British played the game of nation according to the rules of the time, had very good reason to assume that Germany was weaker and Russia stronger than turned out to be the case, this had reasonable confidence in a rapid victory, and the German High Seas Fleet was a true existential threat.

But it is very clear to me that TPOW is a useful and valuable contribution discourse about political military economic affairs in a way that Ferguson's current ravings are not.

Vanessa Heggie: The Missouri Republican Party Gets Really, Really Medieval

Vanessa Heggie:

The legal position that pregnancy disproved a claim of rape appears to have been instituted in the UK sometime in the 13th century. One of the earliest British legal texts, Fleta, has a clause in the first book of the second volume stating that:

If, however, the woman should have conceived at the time alleged in the appeal, [the claim of rape] abates, for without a woman's consent she could not conceive.

This was a long-lived legal argument. Samuel Farr's Elements of Medical Jurisprudence contained the same idea as late as 1814:

For without an excitation of lust, or the enjoyment of pleasure in the venereal act, no conception can probably take place. So that if an absolute rape were to be perpetrated, it is not likely she would become pregnant.

This "absolute rape" is not quite the same as Akin's "legitimate rape". Akin seems to be suggesting that the body suppresses conception or causes a miscarriage, while the earlier idea of Farr relates specifically to the importance of orgasm. Through the medieval and early modern period it was widely thought, by lay people as well as doctors, that women could only conceive if they had an orgasm.

The biological basis for this idea is what the historian Thomas Laqueur has termed the "one sex system". The one sex system suggests that women's reproductive organs are fundamentally based on men's reproductive organs, so the vagina is represented as an inverted penis, the ovaries are testes and so on. Women had "cooler" constitutions, and therefore lacked the heat or force to drive the gonads out of the body, to convert ovaries to testes.

Thinking of the sexual organs as mirrors of each other obviously led to questions about the existence of a female "seed" or ejaculate. There was a disagreement about the roles of male and female seed – did they mingle to create the offspring, or did they contribute different things? Whatever the female seed contributed to conception, it was thought necessary, and so in theory a female orgasm was as important as a male orgasm.

Not everyone agreed with this interpretation. Helkiah Crooke, in his 17th century anatomy book Microcosmographia suggested that women's sexual organs were not simply inverted versions of men's, and said that a woman's orgasm was not always needed, although conception was much more likely, and a pregnancy much more secure, if she had one.

Generally, though, the idea that a women had to orgasm in order to conceive (although not necessarily at exactly the same time as her male partner) was widespread in popular thought and medical literature in the medieval and early modern period…

DeLong Smackdown Watch: Tsesis to Rakove to McCarthy to DeLong to Callahan to Weinberg "New Birth of Freedom" Blogging

Harry Jaffa, alternately brilliantly right and insightful and incredibly wrong and obtuse, the "high priest emeritus of the Claremont Straussians", ex-Goldwater 1964 speechwriter, is one of the most thought-provoking, brilliant, and obtuse political theorists of American history.

If you can get through them (they are not at all easy to read), you really should read his alternatingly brilliantly insightful and obtusely insane books Crisis of the House Divided and A New Birth of Freedom.

Hoisted from Comments: Stephen Weinberg writes:

Brad DeLong: I See I Have Made Gene Callahan Terribly Unhappy: Dred Scott v. Sanford Blogging: It can be very hard to follow this sort of blogosphere conflict. We have here Delong responding to Callahan responding to Delong responding to McCarthy responding to Rakove responding to Tsesis. And in the middle McCarthy and Brad refer to some guy named Jaffa, whom Brad ends up agreeing with, but whose views I don't see laid out….

[McCarthy's] point seems to be that the Constitution is the basis for governing, not the Declaration, and that seems correct to me. My understanding is that the Dred Scott decision was correctly decided on Constitutional law, and that this should be seen as a huge indictment not of the Court but of the Constitution of the time. Taney should not have based a decision on the Declaration, but on the Constitution.

Where is Brad's problem with this?… [I]f you want to change the governing structure of the country, you have to amend the Constitution, not just assert the Declaration. How is that the same as siding with Taney over Lincoln?

There are two ways to read the Constitution: there is the Taney-McCarthy way, according to which the Constitution should be read as a very modest "carefully considered and debated" document that does not itself embody any ideals but rather creates space for debating what our ideals should be; and there is the Lincoln-DeLong way, according to which the Constitution should be read as an imperfect attempt to implement the admittedly-utopian ideals of the Declaration.

If you adopt the Taney way of reading the Constitution, according to the plain meaning of the Constitution Dred Scott was rightly decided.

If you adopt the Lincoln way of reading the Constitution, according to the plain meaning of the Constitution Dred Scott was wrongly decided.

If you adopt the Taney way of reading the Constitution, 1861 saw the Confederate States of America exercise their constitutional rights to withdraw from the compact--and then saw Lincoln orchestrate a violent, unconstitutional, revolutionary military assault on people who were only seeking to peacefully exercise their constitutional rights.

If you adopt the Lincoln way of reading the Constitution, 1861 saw the Confederate States of America break the compact and attempt to subvert the framework of the government--designed to protect and implement the principle that Americans, like all people, have inalienable rights, and that among these rights are "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"--and that Lincoln orchestrated the North's (and Southern loyalists', Black and white) taking up arms in defense of the Constitution so "that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth".

These are very different ways of understanding what the plain meaning of the Constitution is, and they hinge on what one asserts about the relationship between the Declaration and the Constitution.

I would not say that one way is right and the other way is wrong. I would say that the two ways are different. And I would say that this difference matters.

I See I Have Made Gene Callahan Terribly Unhappy: Dred Scott v. Sanford Blogging

Callahan writes:

Brad DeLong: How Low Can He Go?: DeLong decides to smear Daniel McCarthy as being pro-Dred-Scott simply because he favors the Constitution over the Declaration. Gee, Brad, why not throw in a comment about how Dan must be a sociopath as well?

I've kept DeLong on my sidebar because, despite his frequent ugly displays of character assassination, he often says very interesting things. But I've had it: I can't with good conscience promote this verminous human being any longer.

Oh, dear, dear, dear...

In 1857 Dred Scott was not a close decision.

It was 7-2 against Mr. Scott. The northern justices split 2-2. The southern justices were 5-0. Only if you read the Constitution as an imperfect attempt to implement the principles of the Declaration is a decision for Dred Scott likely--and that is, indeed, one of the things the Civil War is about.

Thank God We No Longer Have to Rely on the Honor of H.R. Haldemann to Keep Nixon's Command to Firebomb the Brookings Institution and Plant Evidence Blaming It on the Left from Being Carried Out

38 years ago was Gerald Ford's first day as president.

Hasn't been a Republican president I can be proud of since.

And, yes, I take Nixon's plans to firebomb the Brookings Institution seriously and personally. All of those of us who have worked there late at night--and thus can envision ourselves being on the seventh floor when it would have happened--do.

Over at The American Conservative, Daniel McCarthy Sides with Roger B. Taney Against Abraham Lincoln

Daniel McCarthy:

How Not to Read the Declaration [of Independence]: John Tsesis… get[s] the relationship between the Declaration and the Constitution very wrong: [Jack Rakove writes:]

Tsesis gives Jefferson’s concise statements an extraordinarily authoritative sweep. The Declaration’s “message of universal freedoms,” he asserts early on, remains “the national manifesto of representative democracy and fundamental rights.”… The Constitution, in this view, remains a partial and less-than-perfect instrument for achieving the ends of the Declaration.… These are powerful moral claims, but as statements of history they are highly problematic…

Rakove himself is torn: the Declaration does not establish the ends of the Constitution, as the likes of “Harry Jaffa, high priest emeritus of the Claremont Straussians” would have it. But Lincoln did expand the Declaration’s rhetoric into a national mission…. Historical honesty requires one narrative, while understanding Lincoln’s mythopoesis, which planted equality at the center of the American tradition, may require another…. Lincoln’s “vision of the Declaration” is so engaging for many Americans — particularly for dreamers and con men in the press, academy, and politics — that it threatens to blot out the Constitution…. Replacing the carefully considered and debated Constitution, in all its modesty, with the passionate idealism of wartime rhetoric is a prescription for crusading in place of governing.

Roger B. Taney would agree with Daniel McCarthy--that was, indeed, the point of his Dred Scott decision.

Abraham Lincoln would disagree--that is, indeed, one of the points of the Civil War.

The Constitution is a mechanism for implementing the principles of the Declaration of Independence as well as they can be implemented in this Sewer of Romulus--a mechanism 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". But McCarthy's and Taney's proposed reading transforms the document signed in Philadelphia in 1789 into the source and parent of all the other atrocities--a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell..

Me? I'm with Harry Jaffa on this one, myself. The pre-Civil War Constitution may indeed have been a dead black-letter document. But Abraham Lincoln raised it up from the tomb…

Prompted by the Attempt to Purge Bob Zoellick from the Republican Party; Hoisted from the Archives: U.S. Republican Party: "It's Even Worse than It Looks": Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein at U.C. Berkeley on May 18, 2012

James F. Baker saved Reagan's presidency from disaster, won the presidency for George H.W. Bush once, and won the presidency illegitimately for George W. Bush. Now the ruling faction in the Republican Party wants to push his star protégé Bob Zoellick out.

And what is the reaction from Baker, from the elder Bush, from the younger Bush, and from their ex-spear carriers? I have not seen one…

Tom Mann and Norm Ornstein at U.C. Berkeley on May 18, 2012:

Brad DeLong: I am Brad DeLong, an economist, I have been telegraphing this to Norm for a while. The big question I don’t understand: the Democratic barons of the center, the Lincolns and the Nelsons now, in an earlier day the Sassers, the Borens, the Kerreys from Nebraska, even the Moynihans. People who seemed to think that their proper political and policy strategy was to say “we restrained the Hick from Arkansas or the Hick from Honolulu from doing more liberal things”.

That’s a complete disaster as a strategy for your own reelection. You are likely to lose your job. You are likely to lose your majority status. You are likely to lose your chairmanship--which Moynihan felt extremely bitterly--if the president of your party is not perceived to be a big success in his first two years.

And yet while someone like Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins or even Voinovich will, when the chips are down, be a Republican partisan first, last, and always, this doesn’t seem to hold for the Nelsons, the Lincolns, the Sassers, the Moynihans, the Borens, the Kerreys from Nebraska and a whole bunch of others. What’s going on with them?

Tom Mann: Most of the ones you mentioned are gone, or are on their way out. There isn’t much of that left anymore.

It’s perfectly clear within the Democratic caucus in the Senate that the opposition party cannot be talked to, negotiated with, bargains cannot be struck. And so the whole notion that you could sort of move and optimize the policy choices by engaging in this kind of strategic coalition-building outside the parties—it just doesn’t exist. Ben Nelson, one of the latest, is floundering with a very red constituency in Nebraska. If you look at his record on most things, he came through and stuck with the Democrats. On the important things, he extracted a price along the way--but then so too did Arlen Specter, if you go back to the stimulus, and Susan Collins and others who extracted a price.

But I think much more important than any difficulties within the Democratic Party are the structural reality of the Senate and the filibuster in the face of an opposition party that’s determined to defeat and kill. Not use it as a device to extract a different end point in negotiation, but to kill. Nothing less than that.

I think that’s the new reality that we face now.

One last point, the period of time during Obama’s first two years in which he actually had 60 Democrats in the Senate was relatively small. We were with Al Franken three days ago, and remember Al didn’t get into the Senate until July.

It took some time to get to the 60, and then you still had the Nelsons and the Landrieus that you had to negotiate with. You had to negotiate with Republicans to get them, even if you never got any Republicans. So it was difficult, but they managed. I think Obama actually maximized the output of the first two years in terms of legislative achievements. We can criticize the sufficiency of some of what he did, but I think the nature of the opposition party trump, I think, those factors you were discussing of those annoying Democrats.

Norman Ornstein: You know, it’s a really interesting question and some of this goes back way. Look at Franklin Roosevelt’s deep frustration with the Southern Democrats, and even his decision to campaign against many of them in 1938. I think it reflects a deep cultural difference between the two parties in a host of different ways.

Part of it is the Republican part. In the Republican Party, moderates and progresses were always a relatively small minority. They were there, they were significant, but they never made up more than 20, 25, 30% of the party. For the Democrats, the southern conservatives made up 50% or 40% from a very long period of time. And so there was a different sense of the importance and the power that those people had.

Secondly, I do think there is simply a cultural difference. For Republicans, it’s almost more of a religion or a tribal identification than it is for Democrats.

That is sometimes really curious to see. Watch Olympia Snowe get caught up in this the way that she did. I worked with Olympia very closely on the campaign reform staff. She was under enormous pressure from McConnell and others. She stood fast. When we worked with Olympia, when campaign finance reform was floundering over the Republicans' insistence that if you are going to keep corporations out of the game, you need to freeze labor out too. Trying to find a common ground. So we came up with something that ended up being the Snowe-Jeffords amendment--which was a way of keeping corporations and unions out of elections and communications when we are close to elections, all of that stuff.

It passed the court when Sandra Day O’Connor was still there. It was the target, as much as anything in particular was, of Citizens United.

Then you fast-forward to the aftermath of the Citizens United decision.

We get the response to Citizens United--the "Disclose" act. Now you can quibble with portions of that. But this is a bill that passes the House handily, and then gets to the Senate and all 59 Democrats support it. And not one Republican, including Snowe—this was her most important legislative achievement--would vote for cloture, and so it dies.

We would be in a different place if that bill had passed--not radically different but different, and you will see more of this sort of coming forward. The desire not to be shunned within your own party is a part of it.

It’s almost like you are in a religion. You look at misbehavior on the part of the leaders of that religion, and you are shocked and dismayed, but you are not leaving your religion. And you are still going to go to church: you just can’t give up something that you held in a lifelong way.

I think Democrats are just different in that front. They don’t have the same discipline. I see even some of it outside. You get a talking point that gets distributed. Now, for example, we can’t meet anybody in or out of office who doesn’t say: "Well, what do you say about the Senate not passing a budget resolution for three years?" They picked up on a talking point. It’s a phony talking point. But it’s a talking point. It's not like they have a phone call every morning where everybody dials in and they are given marching orders. It’s just there and they pick up on it.

By contrast Democrats are all over the map.

So there is a difference in culture there. But I would just add that I think Thomas was right in pointing out that given all of that, Obama’s achievement--and you know you have to give some of it to Pelosi and to Reid--at getting all 60 democrats from socialist Barney Sanders to Ben Nelson to vote for a health care bill…

Brad DeLong: The Heritage Foundation’s healthcare bill. Romney’s healthcare plan. Something that’s significantly to the right of Olympia Snowe's policy priorities, as demonstrated by her life up to 2008.

Norman Ornstein: Okay. And they got socialist Barney Sanders to vote for it.

Brad DeLong: Yes.

Norman Ornstein: You know it’s the Heritage Foundation's bill, but it’s also the Hatch-Grassley healthcare bill.

Brad DeLong: Yes.

Norman Ornstein: But the fact Pelosi got enough Democrats to support a cap-and-trade bill, even if it never went though the Senate.

Brad DeLong: But they were not organized enough to pass a carbon tax through reconciliation in February of 2009 and then bargain back in the Senate to cap-and-trade.

Norman Ornstein: Well, you know, let’s remember: this is the Democratic Party. Will Rogers said: “I am not a member of any organized political party, I’m a Democrat.” So that’s built into the culture as well. But there is a difference here. I think it’s one of the things--part of our frustrations, I could easily pick out 30 Republicans in the House who are problem solvers, and who would love to be out there working with Democrats--and in some cases they do in committee and sub-committee. Then there are bills which they contributed to, and they have been compromised before they even get to the floor, and they all vote against him. And of course the other part of this is there is no Democratic Club for Growth that says: "We are waiting for you, and if you vote in way that we don’t like, there will be millions in to knock you off in the primary." It happens to Democrats, but nowhere near as significant and the threat is nowhere near as deep.

Brad DeLong: So is the problem that Daily Kos and Netroots Nation are not strong enough?

Norman Ornstein: No, we are not advocating having both parties have an ideological police. Yes?

DeLong Smackdown Watch: Mandos on "Chris Bertram Confuses Me What Is the Rule of Law Edition"

Hoisted from Comments: Mandos writes:

What is Bertram's point? I thought it was obvious from the post.

That the rich can buy their own laws, and can in fact buy the laws in such a way that they never have to pay again. Including constitutional changes, or simply stacking the Supreme Court.

In that case, social justice and law no longer match, and redistribution will have to occur extra-legally.

The post is sufficiently evasive that I am not sure that that is the point he wants to make. He, as I said, confuses me.

But you may be right: the underlying point may be that we neo-Rawlsians cannot win by the ballot, and so we must use the bullet instead.

If so. I reject that.

Remind Me Again: Friedrich Paulus

The Nazis planned to push four armies forward and only four armies forward in the summer and fall of 1942--Sixth, Seventeenth, First Panzer, and Fourth Panzer. One can understand why an army personnel office would choose Hermann Hoth as commander of Fourth Panzer Army and von Kleist as commander of First Panzer Army. But Richard Ruoff as commander of the Seventeenth Army? And Friedrich Paulus as commander of the Sixth Army? What was there in their previous careers to mark them as the right people for army command in Southern Russia in the summer and fall of 1942?

Soviet Jokes

Francis Spufford:

Red Plenty by Francis Spufford: Soviet Jokes: Brezhnev is showing his mother how well he’s done.  He shows her his suite in the Kremlin, his dacha in the country, his Black Sea villa, his Zil limousine.  ‘All very nice, dear,’ she says.  ‘But what will you do if the Bolsheviks come back?’

For the Weekend: July 27, 2012: Free as in Beer, Free as in Speech, Free as in Ours Department

The Extra-Large Omelet of Death...

Hat tip to Steven Lukes's The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat:

Marquis de Condorcet: Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Carita… 1743… 1794…. French mathematician, philosopher and Revolutionist….

Being of a very genial, susceptible and enthusiastic disposition, he was the friend of almost all the distinguished men of his time, and a zealous propagator of the religious and political views then current among the literati of France. D'Alembert, Turgot and Voltaire, for whom, he had great affection and veneration, and by whom he was highly respected and esteemed, contributed largely to the formation of his opinions. His "Lettre d'un laboreur de Picardie à M.N…" (Necker) was written under the inspiratiqn of Turgot, in defense of free internal trade in corn…. In 1785 he published his "Essai sur l'Application de l'Analyse aux Probabilités des Decisions prises à la Pluralité des Voix", a remarkable work which has a distinguished place in the history of the doctrine of probability…. In 1786 he married Sophie de Grouchy, a sister of Marshal Grouchy, said to have been one of the most beautiful women of her time….

He was the chief author of the address to the European powers when they threatened France with war. He was keenly interested in education, and, as a member of the committee of public instruction, presented to the Assembly (April 21 and 22, 1792) a bold and comprehensive scheme for the organization of a system of state education which, though more urgent questions compelled its postponement, became the basis of that adopted by the Convention, and thus laid the foundations on which the modern system of national education in France is built up. After the attempted flight of the King, in June 1791, Condorcet was one of the first to declare in favor of a republic….

At the elections for the Convention he was chosen for five departments, and took his seat for that of Aisne. He now became the most influential member of the committee on the constitution…. Condorcet objected to the assumption of judicial functions by the Convention, objected also on principle to the infliction of the death penalty; but he voted the King guilty of conspiring against liberty and worthy of any penalty short of death….

His severe and public criticism of the constitution adopted by the Convention, his denunciation of the arrest of the Girondists, and his opposition to the violent conduct of the Mountain, led to his being accused of conspiring against the Republic. He was condemned and declared to be hors la loi….

When the execution of the Girondists showed him that his presence exposed his protectress to a terrible danger, he resolved to seek a refuge elsewhere. "I am outlawed," he said, "and if I am discovered you will meet the same sad end as myself. I must not stay." Madame Vernet's reply deserves to be immortal, and should be given in her own words: "La Convention, Monsieur, a le droit de mettre hors la loi: elle n'a pas le pouvoir de mettre hors de l'humanité; vous resterez."…

[H]is wife and some of his friends, with the co-operation of Madame Vernet, prevailed on him to engage in the composition of the work by which he is best known -- the "Esquisse d'un Tableau Historique des Progrès de l'Esprit Humain"….

Condorcet, by a fatally successful artifice, at last baffled the vigilance of his generous friend and escaped. Disappointed in finding even a night's shelter at the chateau of one whom he had befriended, he had to hide for three days and nights in the thickets and stone-quarries of Clamart. Oh the evening of the 7th of April 1794 -- not, as Carlyle says, on a "bleared May morning", -- with garments torn, with wounded leg, with famished looks, be entered a tavern in the village named, and called for an omelette. "How many eggs in your omelette?" "A dozen." "What is your trade?" "A carpenter." "Carpenters have not hands like these, and do not ask for a dozen eggs in an omelette." When his papers were demanded he had none to show; when his person was searched a Horace was found on him. The villagers seized him, bound him, haled him forthwith on bleeding feet towards Bourg-la-Reine; he fainted by the way, was set on a horse offered in pity by a passing peasant, and, at the journey's end, was cast into a cold damp cell. Next morning he was found dead on the floor. Whether he had died from suffering and exhaustion, from apoplexy or from poison, is an undetermined question.

Toleration and the Public Sphere

Samuel Goldwyn goes too far:

Germany Outlaws Judaism: Well, not quite. But a ruling from a court in Cologne… circumcision is serious physical damage that can be justified only by the informed consent of an adult…. The convenant of Abraham is now against the law in Cologne.

[T]he ruling is the logical consequence of a concept of religion implied by Protestantism and articulated philosophically by Benedict Spinoza and John Locke…. [R]eligion is rooted in private belief. Associations and rituals are legitimate only to the extent that they are submitted to voluntarily by consenting adults, who can withdraw their consent at any time. And religious obligations can never trump the civil law.

There are good reasons that this position was appealing in the 17th and 18th centuries. Trouble is, we’ve forgotten not only that it doesn’t fit many older traditions, including Judaism and Roman Catholicism, but that it was specifically designed to exclude them. The understanding of religion’s legitimate sphere that informed the Cologne court’s ruling, in other words, is not theologico-politically neutral. It was, and remains, a polemical concept that elevates state over church, individual over community, consent over continuity in ways that traditional Catholics and Jews find hard to accept….

[M]odern liberalism... requires that every religion transform itself into a variant of Protestantism--or find itself on the wrong side of the law.

I must say that I find Samuel Goldwyn's idea--that a theologico-politically neutral politics of religion would accept as legitimate associations and rituals that are involuntarily imposed on unconsenting adults, who cannot escape no matter what they wish--distasteful.

Your children are not your chattels.

They make their own choices about who to be and what to do.

And if you try to act as though your children are your chattels, then you are the kind of parent who when your children ask for bread give them stones, when your children ask for fish hand them serpents...

Jesse Walker: Plato in Syracuse Watch

Jesse Walker:

The Mad Dream of a Libertarian Dictatorship: In her 1926 book Concerning Women, the libertarian writer Suzanne LaFollette had some surprisingly sympathetic words for the Bolshevik regime in Russia. She nodded briefly to the Soviets' "alleged mistreatment of political dissenters," but she concluded that "Whether or not the Soviet Government succeeds in getting beyond dictatorship to the establishment of economic justice in Russia is not really important." The important thing, she felt, was that "the idea released by the Russian Revolution will prevail over the combined forces of European and American imperialism."

There has long been a strand in the classical liberal tradition that dreams a temporary dictatorship could be a stepping stone, even a shortcut, to reform…. LaFollette wasn't the only pro-market writer with a soft spot for a dictatorship of the left: As late as 1970, you could see a future president of the Mont Pelerin Society writing kindly about Lenin, Tito, and Mao. Other classical liberals, alarmed at the realities of red rule, swung the other way and endorsed authoritarian governments of the right. Jorge Luis Borges, to give one infamous example, supported the Argentine military regime that seized power in 1976.

And then there are the admirers of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, iron-fisted ruler of Chile from 1973 to 1989. A new paper in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, written by Andrew Farrant, Edward McPhail, and Sebastian Berger, explores the free-market economist F.A. Hayek's opinion of the Chilean dictatorship… the most exhaustive job I've seen of tracking what precisely the Austrian intellectual said about Chile. Farrant and company debunk some of the claims that have been made against Hayek, but they make it clear that he combined an appreciation for Pinochet's economic policies ("From the little I have seen, I think it is no exaggeration to talk of a Chilean miracle") with a belief that a temporary dictatorship could be a salutory thing (Hayek said he would "prefer to sacrifice democracy temporarily, I repeat temporarily, rather than have to do without liberty, even if only for a while"). In Pinochet's Chile, Hayek predicted, "we will witness a transition from a dictatorial government to a liberal government...during this transition it may be necessary to maintain certain dictatorial powers, not as something permanent, but as a temporary arrangement."

That may not be full-throated praise, but it's an awfully sanguine way to talk about a state that tortured its opponents, censored the press, and imprisoned and murdered people for their political views. Hayek may have "prefer[red] to sacrifice democracy" if the alternative was "to do without liberty," but Pinochet restricted liberty in intolerable ways….

[M]any myths about the dictatorship still circulate, mostly among conservatives but also sometimes among libertarians. I periodically hear it claimed, for example, that Pinochet was a reluctant ruler who stepped down from power of his own free will, a Cincinnatus who did what he must to set the stage for freedom. (Here's George Reisman: "General Pinochet was thus one of the most extraordinary dictators in history, a dictator who stood for major limits on the power of the state, who imposed such limits, and who sought to maintain such limits after voluntarily giving up his dictatorship.") In fact, when Pinochet lost a plebiscite that he had expected to win, the alleged Cincinnatus reacted by ordering his armed forces to impose martial law. His dictatorship ended because they refused to obey him.

Yet the legend persists. And it persists in part because of that fantasy of a benign temporary dictatorship—a "liberal dictator," in Hayek's phrase.

It is certainly true, as Hayek argued, that liberty and democracy are not the same thing…. But dictatorships tend overwhelmingly to be illiberal as well as undemocratic; if you search for examples of liberal dictators, you'll come up almost entirely dry. Hayek cites Oliver Cromwell, who wasn't really all that liberal, and Ludwig Erhard, who wasn't a dictator…. This paucity of examples should not be a surprise. As Farrant, McPhail, and Berger point out in their paper, Hayek's idea of a temporary liberal dictatorship was inconsistent with his other arguments:

Hayek's defense of transitional dictatorship appears to assume away a bevy of public choice warnings about the self-interest of political actors. Moreover, it is unclear why Hayek's argument about the supposed capture of the planning bureaucracy by "bad" planners would not similarly apply to the dictatorial bureaucratic machinery—supposedly a merely temporary expedient—that is created by Hayek's "liberal" dictator. Indeed, public choice reasoning suggests that any would-be "illiberal" dictator who can overthrow Hayek’s "liberal" dictator will seize control over whatever dictatorial machinery is already in place (the bureaucracy and the military) and—once in power—nationalize vast swathes of the economy to squarely cement their position as dictator and to greatly strengthen their ability to extract rents from the private sector….

The classical liberals who defended dictatorships often came to regret their enthusiasm. Borges finally signed a statement opposing the Argentine junta's habit of disappearing its opponents. LaFollette managed to move too far from her soft-on-the-Soviets stance, becoming a McCarthyist. But the dream of the liberal dictator persists in some corners of the libertarian universe. It is a dream that deserves to die.