| Thursday,
February 21, 2oo2 Spent the day filling the dumpster, and
climbing ladders to get to old books on top shelves. What to do with the
books? Maybe Dutton's will want them.
I would have thought certain things obvious.
First, if you are going to live in a liberal democracy, certain things
are certain. One is that the franchise will expand to include as many as
possible. Another is that the people will vote themselves largesse from
the public treasury. You can try to slow that process -- National Review
once said its mission was to stand astride the course of history and shout
Stop! -- but you will not halt it.
Thus, given that there is no possibility of victory by a political
party based on the proposition that government ought to contract a lot,
and people have no economic claims on that government, the externalities I
described in yesterday's commentary are fairly described as givens: things
we 'must' do in the sense that given our political system they will
happen. We can modify the benefits we hand out to people, but we will not
eliminate them, and you will not win an election on a platform of
"let them get religion" as Calvin Coolidge said when asked what
the federal government would do for the unemployed.
Second, justice consists of giving each man his due (in the modern
world each person his or her due). A just society is one that has the
fixed and abiding intention of rendering to each man his due. What are the
just desserts of a 45 year old sewing machine operator who has made over a
million sweat suits, earned a good bit of profit for her company, and now
finds that she has no salable skill while her job has been exported to
Bulungi? I ask seriously. We as a society owe her nothing? We insist that
she owes us loyalty, to the point of sending her sons to war; we insist
that she obey the laws not merely from fear but from choice. But we owe
her nothing economically?
Third, I am as aware as anyone and possibly more aware than most that
if your goal is to maximize economic gains and make efficient investments,
and that goal is so important that all other goals pale into
insignificance, free trade and laissez faire capitalism are the proper
choices to make, and economic regulations tend to muck up the system,
sometime to the point of collapse. Command economies don't work.
There remains the question, is free trade laissez faire likely to lead
to a just society? It certainly leads to Ariba and Global Crossroads if
not to Enron. Efficiency demands that bubbles be allowed to build and to
burst. Cotton mills move to the south, then offshore entirely.
Manufacturing jobs vanish. Economic efficiency abounds.
But that is in the absence of the externality of politics. Political
reality is that the US is divided deeply into nearly equal camps -- but
both sides are agreed that there shall be a "safety net" and
public benefits for those who through no fault of their own -- or even
through their own lack of wisdom -- find themselves impoverished or even
just greatly reduced in circumstances. You may find that reality monstrous
or comforting, but absent a drastic modification in our political
institutions, a modification possible only outside normal politics, it is
still reality.
Burke said that for a man to love his country his country ought to be
lovely. Certainly most of us would not find anything like The Great
Depression lovely regardless of our personal economic circumstances. We
don't want big socialistic government, but we don't want people sleeping
in shanties and cardboard boxes, and we don't want the kind of thing you
can find just outside Buenos Aries or Rio either. We don't want street
gangs, and we don't want mercenary death squads.
We have developed a fairly workable system that by and large most of us
find congenial and even agreeable.
My question was,
Given the externality that we must provide health care and some minimum
life support to citizens, is it really cheaper to have free trade as
opposed to tariff for revenue (which can be used to help pay for those put
out of work by free trade)?
I have a lot of mail accusing me of socialism. I have yet to see any
realistic refutation of the proposition that this is reality. And I have
yet to get an answer to my question, which is, again, is not imposing a
tariff calculated to maximize tariff revenue collected (and thus allowing
inefficient industries to continue to operate and employ people)
preferable to free trade with lower prices of goods but higher taxes to
support the unemployed? I ask it as a purely economic question; I
have asked it for years; and I have yet to see an actual economic analysis
leading to an answer. My attempts with spread sheets and input/output
models lead to ambiguous results -- and that's my point. I certainly
prefer to keep people working, both for their good (they feel valuable and
part of society, not alienated) and mine ( alienated people are very bad
for a social order and their children tend to be criminals).
Understand. I am by temperament "libertarian" in that I like
to be left alone and I have no great desire to mind anyone else's
business. At the same time, I am quite certain that without strong
government lawlessness would prevail. I have some experience in
organization and attracting loyalty and I would probably do well as a
pirate king, but it is not my preference as a way to live. I prefer a
republic and if that includes tariffs that raise the prices of what I buy
but save me in taxes to pay people to be unemployed, I'll gladly pay the
higher price until someone shows me just how much higher those prices are
likely to be.
And that's enough on that subject for the day. I have about filled the
dumpster and I am exhausted.
And here is interesting news:
The FBI has identified the man behind last
year's series of fatal anthrax mailings but is "dragging its
feet" over bringing charges because the suspect is a former
government scientist, it was claimed yesterday.
Barbara Rosenberg, of the Federation of
American Scientists (FAS), said many scientists working in the field were
aware of the suspect, who she said had been questioned at least twice by
the authorities. She said the FBI was reluctant to arrest him because he
knew government secrets.
You may believe as much of this as you want to. I have had little
confidence in the Federation of American Scientists since some of their
minions poured water over Edmund Wilson chanting "Wilson you're all
wet" while others were involved in the nuclear winter business.
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