View 719 Tuesday, April 3, 2012

I’ve been whelmed with housekeeping and a bit down on energy. Probably funk over missing the big Colorado Springs conference. I had been looking forward to that. Thanks to all who asked. I’m all right and I’ll have new stuff to say tomorrow. Thanks to those who asked.

View 718 Friday, March 30, 2012

The demand for equality has two sources; one of them is among the noblest, the other is the basest of human emotions. The noble source is the desire for fair play. But the other source is the hatred of superiority. At the present moment it would be very unrealistic to overlook the importance of the latter.

There is in all men a tendency (only corrigible by good training from without and persistent moral effort from within) to resist the existence of what is stronger, subtler or better than themselves. In uncorrected and brutal small men this hardens into an implacable and disinterested hatred for every kind of excellence. . . .

Equality (outside mathematics) is a purely social conception. It applies to man as a political and economic animal. It has no place in the world of the mind. Beauty is not democratic; she reveals herself more to the few than to the many, more to the persistent and disciplined seekers than to the careless. Virtue is not democratic; she is achieved by those who pursue her more hotly than most men. Truth is not democratic; she demands special talents and special industry in those to whom she gives her favours.

Political democracy is doomed if it tries to extend its demand for equality into these higher spheres. Ethical, intellectual, or aesthetic democracy is death. A truly democratic education—one which will preserve democracy—must be, in its own field, ruthlessly aristocratic, shamelessly "high-brow."

C. S. Lewis “Democratic Education” (1944) as quoted in “Notable and Quotable” WSJ 03/30/2012

Of course Lewis speaks from a classic point of view, in which “moral effort” has meaning. These matters are presented in more detail in his classic essays which were combined into a volume called “The Abolition of Man”, available on Amazon in paperback or Kindle edition. If you have not read it, you should; Lewis asks hard questions in that book as he tries to reason his way to morality and the desirability of moral effort.

But the quote above contains a great truth, and should have been read by everyone involved in the national debate on “No Child Left Behind.” Alas, I suspect that not one of the Congress creatures who debated that bill had ever heard of it, such is the nature of our education, both higher and lower. When I was called to conduct the annual Scholar/leader program for selected graduating high school seniors in Oklahoma a decade or so ago (I was asked on the sudden disability of the professor who had set it up) I added Lewis’s Abolition of Man to the seminar text list. I only wish I could have got the state’s Senators and Members of Congress to read it. But that’s another lecture.

The demand for ‘equality’ is one of those inherent defects in democracy, and one of the reasons that the Framers in 1787 rejected a ‘democracy’ in favor of a Republic. As Lewis observes, Virtue and Truth are not democratic; of course to admit that you must admit that Truth and Beauty exist. And therein lies the key question for our times.

The notion that a majority should rule – that the votes of 50% + 1 should decide all political issues – makes no more rational sense than the notion that kings should rule, or aristocrats should rule. Not that this is an original observation; it has been debated by political philosophers for millennia, and was very much a part of the debate in the Convention of 1787. The American intelligentsia has accepted the notion that government ought to favor the lowest and most downtrodden, not as an act of charity but as simple fairness. The problem is that this is expensive, and unless the society is extremely rich it cannot afford to shower benefits on everyone, and worse, the attempt to achieve equality by leveling – by bringing down the successful so that they have no more than the unsuccessful – generally produces ruin, as the first settlers in the New World learned to their sorrow, and as economic history has shown for – well, for millennia, but it was also a lesson of the 20^th Century. See the history of Soviet agriculture.

If Education is an investment, then it ought to work to maximize return; meaning that more resources ought to be devoted to improving the education of the best and brightest than to bringing the just below normal up to normal. Yes, there is an economic advantage to improving the ability of everyone, but at the margin, and certainly under the current circumstances, we put way too much effort in that and way too little into making the top 15% more productive. The only way to achieve No Child Left Behind is to be sure that No Child Gets Ahead, and in many places that is relentlessly applied – and worse, where it is not, there is sure to be a charge of discrimination.

And of course that’s true. It is discrimination to devote more resources to the best and brightest. It is also necessary if we are going to have the resources to devote to improving the lot of the wretched of the Earth.

Enough. It is time for lunch.

Steve Feigenbaum of New Jersey, I need your email address.

I have had to cancel my trip to Colorado Springs. No doubt Air Force Space Command will get along without me. I was more looking forward to going for what I might learn than imagining I had much to contribute. I will have more on this another time, but apparently the airlines are so desperate now that they charge you about half what the trip costs just to have held a reservation for a few days; apparently I get to pay about $200 to Orbitz and the airlines for having made the reservations. Partly that is due to my having used Orbitz in the first place, I guess.

There was a time when I would have had American Express simply make the reservations for me and let them take care of cancelling if it turned out I couldn’t go, but I guess they don’t do that sort of thing any more. At least there are still competent and sympathetic people on the telephone – assuming that you can trick the nice computer voice into letting you talk to a human being – but the executive services young lady didn’t think there was much we could do about this; the airlines are just being desperate. 

I once had half million or million mile club cards in several airlines, and I have life memberships in all the VIP lounge clubs, but none of that matters. When the computer age started I imagined a story in which everyone had to deal with artificial intelligences all of them operating at about IQ 90, and all working through rules like any other bureaucracy, all passing a Turing test – can you tell if this is an AI or a human bureaucrat – Damn You! “Sir, it is unlikely that any curse you put on me will be effective. Have a nice day”.  I gave up the story as too depressing.  Now I am finding it coming true. The good news is that some of the AI entities are smarter than the humans they replaced. Or at least care more.

We have Windows 8 running. Eric named it Alien Artifact, largely because the handsome Thermaltake case is so spectacular. Windows 8 has some trickiness, as does the high end ASUS motherboard we ended up with, but it is becoming a pleasant experience.

I’ll use the time I have ‘saved’ by not going to Colorado to do a very belated first of the year/last of last year Chaos Manor Reviews column and trying to catch up with some of the routine maintenance of Chaos Manor.  I’m really disappointed at not getting to participate in the Space Command symposium and do some sight seeing at the Command and at the Academy. I used to be on one of the academic boards of visitors of the Academy and get there several times a year, but that was long ago; haven’t been there in a while. I am sure it has changed a lot since I was last there.

At least I am not still frantically working on stuff for the trip and conference. Not that I have much time to relax.

I have some dialogs over the equality/debt/deficit issue that I will get up shortly; they are informative.

We have got the new machine – Alien Artifact – working, but with Windows 7, not 8. Windows 8 works fine on less advanced machines, but on this one the ASUS board has some advanced features that haven’t had the drivers perfected yet; since it’s months to the release of 8 this isn’t really a problem. The system is fast, and all appears to be well. We had an interesting time for a while: my local network understood that a machine names Alien Artifact existed and had a login name and password that worked with Windows Live, since Windows 8 works that way. Which meant that machines on the net which had accessed the new system under the Windows 8 name could not longer find it and of course told us access was denied and we should see the system administrator and when told to trouble shoot that it told us, breathlessly, that we were denied access, and the remedy was to see the system administrator – in other words, Microsoft Help is about as useful as it ever was. Also Help doesn’t tell us how to delete a system from the Network according to this particular system.  Machines that had never accessed Alien Artifact before had no trouble doing it now that it had me as a local user with a password. Conversion from Windows 7 to 8 will be a problem for people who keep older Windows 7 or XP systems around. Boy will they ever. We managed it. Story in the column.

Bed time. The system is very well behaved in Windows 7; it’s a bit advanced for Windows 8 but I am sure that will all be taken care of over time. It’s drivers, and particularly the huge silicon cache boot system. Again more in the column I am doing. But all is well, there are 16 GB memory, and wow is this system fast. It’s also really cool looking and it runs cool. I love Thermaltake.

View 718 Thursday, March 29, 2012

I’m preparing for the big Space Command conference in Colorado Springs next week. Eric is over and we will try again to build the new machine. And we continue to find new attractive features in the Thermaltake case.

I have mail calling my attention to Dr. David Brin’s disquisition on what he calls “The Largesse Canard”,  and since it says

Among those who have carelessly bandied this smugly cynical assertion has been sci fi author Jerry Pournelle, along with many of his more right wing colleagues. It circulates widely among the dour Rothbardians and Randites who dominate today’s warped version of the libertarian movement….

http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2012/03/who-is-insulting-middle-class.html

I suppose I should say something.

First, “The Largesse Canard”. I don’t know what, precisely, that means. The statement in question is the familiar ‘quote’ to the effect that a democracy can last only until the citizens discover they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury, after which the democracy will destroy itself. The sentiment has been around a long time. Dr. Brin claims it originated with Plato, and perhaps so, but I never found it there. The most familiar version is credited to A Scots lawyer named Tytler whose works are not familiar to me, but who was apparently read by some of the Framers before the Convention of 1787. It reads

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.

There are some who say that Tytler never said that, and this may well be so, although I don’t know that anyone claims that he would have rejected the statement: he was certainly no advocate of democracy. Dr. Brin says this is ‘The Largesse Canard’. The definition of canard is “a false or unfounded report or story; especially : a fabricated report” so I presume he means that it is a canard that Tytler ever said this.

I would have said that is the wrong question to ask. I really don’t care who first made the observation. The question is not whether it was said by Tytler, or Plato, or originated with someone in a campaign staff in 1828 or 2000: the question is whether or not it is a valid observation. Attributing it to Plato may be thought of as an appeal to authority, but this is the first time I have been invited to think Plato said it (he certainly never did say it in that form) – and I really don’t care if it was said by an 18^th Century Scots lawyer whose works I haven’t read (and in fact I don’t know anyone who has read Tytler). I don’t consider Tytler an authority to begin with.

As to whether the observation is true, substitute the word ‘entitlement’ for ‘largesse’ and it certainly is not obviously false; it is at least worth considering.

It was not all that long ago that everyone in America understood that this nation wasn’t founded as a democracy, and that democracy, having been considered by the Framers, was rejected for a constitutional republic of limited and precisely defined powers. As to democracy, most of the founding figures of the American Republic rejected it flatly. John Adams was particularly vigorous in his rejection:

Democracy… while it lasts is more bloody than either aristocracy or monarchy. Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide.
John Adams

Cicero certainly rejected democracy in favor of a Republic, by which he meant a mixed government that contained elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and popular democracy in a mixture with checks and balances – and that is what the delegates to the Convention of 1787 thought they had achieved. Very few of them favored a democracy, and the fact that they had not created a democracy was known and they were attacked for it. The Federalist Papers – which I would think far more relevant than a Scots lawyer – dealt with that subject in some detail.

I would not think that dismissing the argument that democracies are in danger of destabilizing themselves, and in particular of overspending on entitlements – largesse, if you will – because there is some doubt as to the source of the assertion would be the right way to approach a point of political philosophy which has, after all, been a topic of debate among political philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to the present day. It is a tendency of democracies to vote entitlements – pork if you like – and to transfer resources from the productive to the non-productive. That would seem to be one of the issues this election is all about. Have entitlements gone too far? Can we continue to borrow money from China in order to fund entitlements? Should we tax the productive to fund bureaucracies? I would have thought these more relevant questions. Note that they are not ‘yes or no’ questions, either. As Niven often observes, rich societies can afford many uneconomic things, including bashing down the curbs to make life somewhat easier for the handicapped, but only wealthy societies can do that for long. Once you get in the habit of doing it, it’s hard to stop when you aren’t rich any more.

There was a time when there was a fairly widespread agreement about entitlements. There were some who said they weren’t big enough, and some who said there ought not be any, but the larger part of the American populace had accepted much of the New Deal and its entitlements. Over time they expanded. Social Security began adding payments to disabled people who had never worked and never would work, and certainly had not paid anything into the Social Security accounts – in other words, from a kind of insurance (with some Ponzi elements in it) Social Security became a system for transfer of money from the able who earned to the disabled who did not. That is largesse. It may be a good idea – but it is certainly not what Social Security was designed to be. It is certainly largesse paid from the public treasury. And it can be a heavy drain on the public treasury, and on investment for economic recovery in hard times.

There has been a great deal of mission creep in entitlements. I’ve watched them over the years. And perhaps there are entitlements which are not largesse, but surely that is not the crucial argument here? And certainly the whole notion of how much to transfer from the productive to the non-productive is a more interesting argument than whether a particular statement was made by a Scottish lawyer, or for that matter, by Plato.

On reading the above I seem to have left out something. The “Largesse Canard” is sometimes expanded to include a theory of cycles in government: democracy degenerates into disorder and is usually followed by dictatorship. Tytler is said to have written a great deal about this. http://www.commonsensegovernment.com/article-03-14-09.html

I’m not familiar with Tytler, but the cycles of government were described by Aristotle and were a pretty common notion among classical political philosophers. Cicero was very familiar with them. So were most of the Framers. Again it is irrelevant whether or no a Scots lawyer added to this theory, since it is not likely that he was the primary source of the views of many of the Framers. The notion that democracies end up as dictatorships was hardly new with Tytler, and probably the best discussion of the cyclical nature of government is C Northcote Parkinson’s Evolution of Political Thought, which I used as a textbook for senior political philosophy back in my professor days.

And while it hadn’t happened yet, the French Revolution followed by Napoleon does not seem to contradict the view.

And we have this from one of my right wing friends:

On a cause of corruption in popular governments.

James Chastek had a post last July which may be apropos the business about the public "voting themselves largesse from the public purse." He opens by saying:

After giving a lengthy discourse on the rise and extent of the decadence of popular government (with a focus on the rise of the regulatory state), Jacques Barzun concludes to the formula that the moment when good intentions exceeded the power [of the average reasonable person] to fulfill them marked the onset of decadence. There is evidence in Barzun’s discourse that this moment is very difficult to avoid, and that this formula indicates a way in which popular governments contain the seeds of their own collapse into decadence. So how does this corruption happen?

There is a fundamental desire in popular government to ensure fair play and equal access, and this requires regulation. There nevertheless remains a perpetual genius for a.) extending the scope of what will count as fair play and equal access (the gradual extension of rights) and b.) discovering ways to cut off persons from a fair share and equal access (new modes of fraud, monopoly, or impinging on the ever expanding notion of right). Both give rise to diverse sorts of regulation to ensure justice and punish crime, and the perpetual genius to extend equality or outwit the system lead to more and more regulation. At some point, the good intentions of the regulators amass to the point that no reasonable person can be expected to make his way through the labyrinth of regulation, and at this point the government is no longer a popular government. Thus the very regulations made to ensure the equal ability of everyone to compete amass to where they become an impediment to the ability of persons to compete.

This is not an argument for libertarian deregulation.

The whole essay – it’s fairly short – can be found here: http://thomism.wordpress.com/2011/07/27/on-a-cause-of-corruption-in-popular-governments/

I recall the essay. I suppose the simplest summary is that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. But then we have much cultural knowledge about that, including folklore dating back to Aesop and before. Those who measure success by intention rather than result will often find unexpected consequences, and some will die condemned as villains no matter their intentions.

Of all sad words, of tongue and pen, the saddest are these: But I meant well.

I also have mail from many pointing out that it is not the middle class who vote themselves largess from the public treasury, but those who are unproductive transfer wealth to themselves (or to all) from the productive. This isn’t strictly true: a number of public benefits including the one that Niven and I often use as an example, bashing down the curbs to make life easier for the disabled, are enthusiastically supported by those who pay the taxes. Aristotle defines the middle class as those who possess the goods of fortune in moderation, and generally when you have government by and of the middle class, it will often boost public benefits, generally to be shared by all. The problem comes when they can no longer be afforded, yet the tax structure is that most to all of the taxes fall on increasingly smaller numbers of people. Those accustomed to the public benefits, yet now cannot pay into the public treasury, still want and generally insist on the public benefits.

Example: Some 70% of American public school children now get a breakfast paid for by the public treasury. This is apparently necessary for some number of the children – I don’t know how many, but numbers claimed run from a few percent to 30%. That is, the children would have no breakfast if the public largesse did not provide it. This is not seen as a responsibility of the parents – let them work, or go to the streets to beg; it’s their job to feed their children – but a public responsibility. One can, and I will, argue that a republic is far better off to allow locals and particularly local charities to address this difficulty. This has the great merit of allowing those temporarily out of work to assume some responsibilities and claim some pride in doing community work without burdening the people in the next county or state with local problems. It is always a good thing for a republic that many of the citizens are involved in working on local problems, rather than entrusting it all to a paid (and increasingly expensive) bureaucracy. But that’s a matter for another essay.  It should be obvious that one requirement of self government is that those who can participate in governing, and at the lowest level possible.

Rule by the middle class is not quite the same thing as populist democracy which at one time was known by the more pejorative name of mob rule. Those who have nothing have every incentive to get something, and if the easiest way to do that is through politics, than that is an attractive course. And as Murray observed in Losing Ground, if you given enough benefits to those in poverty, then poverty becomes an very attractive state to be in.  If I hire people to be poor for a living I will get many applicants; yet it must be paid for by the productive or it cannot be paid for at all.  Incidentally it is no canard to say that Barzun, Murray, and Aristotle said the things I have said they said. They did say them, famously. In Aristotle’s case we have several sources, including Cicero.