Frank Schaeffer’s Open Letter to Obama:
“As someone who appeared numerous times on the 700 Club with Pat Robertson, as someone for whom Jerry Falwell used to send his private jet to bring me to speak at his college, as an author who had James Dobson giveaway 150,000 copies of my one of my fundamentalist "books" allow me to explain something: the Republican Party is controlled by two ideological groups. First, is the Religious Right. Second, are the neoconservatives. Both groups share one thing in common: they are driven by fear and paranoia. Between them there is no Republican "center" for you to appeal to, just two versions of hate-filled extremes.
…There's only one thing that makes sense for you now. Mr. President, you need to forget a bipartisan approach and get on with the business of governing by winning each battle. You will never be able to work with the Republicans because they hate you. Believe me, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter are the norm not the exception. James Dobson and the rest are praying for you to fail. The neoconservatives are gnashing their teeth and waiting for you to "sell out Israel" or "show weakness" in Afghanistan, whatever, so they can declare you a traitor.
...Your Republican opponents are not decent people but ideologues bent on destroying you. To quote the biblical adage sir, don't cast your pearls before swine."
----
A grain of truth to what Schaeffer is saying. But reading this makes me so glad that Mr. Schaeffer isn't president, and Barack Obama is. The reason is that Schaeffer (a former leader of the religious right, "converted" to the Democratic party) still seems like a fundamentalist to me -- a fundamentalist needs a definitive cause, and also needs a gospel to preach that excludes some people and not others, a gospel where some people have the light, and others are in darkness. To me, it seems like Schaeffer has simply switched sides, but hung onto this vision of the world.
He doesn't seem to believe in people--sure the people that sent him letters calling for God to kill him after he advocated Obama, are never going to embrace Obama or reason (which is not quite to imply that they're the same thing, though some hero-worshipping folk of late seem to confuse them :) --but they are the exception and not the rule when it comes to America. And I think that, contra Schaeffler's polemic, to get people to change, you need to first believe in them. The thing about Obama, is even though he is pragmatic and realistic in his policies and approaches, deep down, you suspect that he actually does believe that America doesn't have to always be a bunch of flaming ideologues, bent on irrationalist venting, forever split into factions that talk past each other without ever hearing. Now, I'm no fideist (and the initial cold, mostly partisan response to the stimulus bill isn't helping anyone's optimism for change in Washington) but believing that things are possible is part of actually making them happen. We still have the systemic difficulties that come from a nation being run democratically (which means the voters are getting their info from 30 second media spots or colorful talking heads) that reinforce the acrid partisanship common to our recent history and I don't see that part changing, but at least for now I think we've got the right guy in there looking for something beyond venting his own opinion of the "Truth," someone who is willing to listen to people--though it sounds like advice you hear in kindergarten, people in Washington have forgotten that to get people to listen to you, you must also listen to them. Obama's statement that he would meet with leaders of countries like Iran "without preconditions" is not naive, but a persuasive strategy. And this strategy of listening before expecting to be heard is one that he's good at, and one that he needs, whatever Schaeffer says, to continue to employ, not only abroad, but here at home.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Corn Subsidies (and why they are a failure)
Here's the letter I sent to Sen. Amy Klobuchar
Dear Amy,
I understand that the people of Minnesota have an interest in corn production and specifically the continuance of corn subsidies. However, sometimes good government demands not simply representing local people's current interests but broader, informed interest.
Three reasons why corn subsidies are indefensible:
1. Directly inflate food prices for poorer countries
2. Make possible the continuance of an artificial market (feed corn) that has unforeseen effects
a. Inflates price of corn further
b. Increases the use of fossil fuels for fertilizer
c. Increases amount of avoidable animal suffering caused from unhealthy diet.
3. Ethanol does not actually create more energy
1. As I'm sure you know, subsidizing the price of corn has an effect on the global price for corn -- thus artificially inflating the price of corn for people in developing countries it: “A World Bank study has estimated that corn prices "rose by over 60 percent from 2005-07, largely because of the U.S. ethanol program" combined with market forces.” (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,353380,00.html)
2. Overlooked as a factor for the gigantic hike in price in the above article, is the fact that only at the artificially low price of corn that it can be used as a source of food for livestock. Steer are fed enormous amounts of this cheap corn instead of their natural diet of grass (this happens to be unhealthy for the steer and requires farmers to use many antibiotics because of the frequent illnesses that result and, despite the antibiotics, often leads to avoidable illnesses). Not only does the artificially created demand for animal feed drive the price of corn up further, it also creates a new demand for fossil fuels—Peter Singer’s book “The Way We Eat” estimates that it take a whopping 184 gallons of oil per steer to fertilize the corn that a cow eats before reaching slaughter weight (p. 63 - http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/157954889X/ref=sib_dp_pop_sup?ie=UTF8&p=random#). Subsidizing ethanol production as a means to energy independence, then, has the unforeseen effect of creating a new market (feed corn) that demands the use of extra fossil fuels!
The worst part about all of this though is that
3. Ethanol has not been shown to create new energy:
---"David Pimentel, a professor of ecology at Cornell University who has been studying grain alcohol for 20 years, and Tad Patzek, an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, co-wrote a recent report that estimates that making ethanol from corn requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the ethanol fuel itself actually contains." (http://www.slate.com/id/2122961/)
The concerns with removing the corn subsidy? Obviously, it will affect both small farmers and factory farmers negatively since they have been enjoying artificially high prices for their crops. Secondly, it will make our meat more expensive since the time it takes to raise a steer to slaughter weight will increase by some months. It’s not that these concerns are trivial, but just that they pale in comparison to the negative effects that occur in the world beyond the farmers of Minnesota because of the subsidy.
Narrowly-interested government that is popular is not equal to good government. Even though it would be a very unpopular move for you to oppose a corn subsidy since you are from Minnesota, your opposition would actually give the movement more credibility nationally for that very reason.
Sincerely,
Matt Flaherty
Dear Amy,
I understand that the people of Minnesota have an interest in corn production and specifically the continuance of corn subsidies. However, sometimes good government demands not simply representing local people's current interests but broader, informed interest.
Three reasons why corn subsidies are indefensible:
1. Directly inflate food prices for poorer countries
2. Make possible the continuance of an artificial market (feed corn) that has unforeseen effects
a. Inflates price of corn further
b. Increases the use of fossil fuels for fertilizer
c. Increases amount of avoidable animal suffering caused from unhealthy diet.
3. Ethanol does not actually create more energy
1. As I'm sure you know, subsidizing the price of corn has an effect on the global price for corn -- thus artificially inflating the price of corn for people in developing countries it: “A World Bank study has estimated that corn prices "rose by over 60 percent from 2005-07, largely because of the U.S. ethanol program" combined with market forces.” (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,353380,00.html)
2. Overlooked as a factor for the gigantic hike in price in the above article, is the fact that only at the artificially low price of corn that it can be used as a source of food for livestock. Steer are fed enormous amounts of this cheap corn instead of their natural diet of grass (this happens to be unhealthy for the steer and requires farmers to use many antibiotics because of the frequent illnesses that result and, despite the antibiotics, often leads to avoidable illnesses). Not only does the artificially created demand for animal feed drive the price of corn up further, it also creates a new demand for fossil fuels—Peter Singer’s book “The Way We Eat” estimates that it take a whopping 184 gallons of oil per steer to fertilize the corn that a cow eats before reaching slaughter weight (p. 63 - http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/157954889X/ref=sib_dp_pop_sup?ie=UTF8&p=random#). Subsidizing ethanol production as a means to energy independence, then, has the unforeseen effect of creating a new market (feed corn) that demands the use of extra fossil fuels!
The worst part about all of this though is that
3. Ethanol has not been shown to create new energy:
---"David Pimentel, a professor of ecology at Cornell University who has been studying grain alcohol for 20 years, and Tad Patzek, an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, co-wrote a recent report that estimates that making ethanol from corn requires 29 percent more fossil energy than the ethanol fuel itself actually contains." (http://www.slate.com/id/2122961/)
The concerns with removing the corn subsidy? Obviously, it will affect both small farmers and factory farmers negatively since they have been enjoying artificially high prices for their crops. Secondly, it will make our meat more expensive since the time it takes to raise a steer to slaughter weight will increase by some months. It’s not that these concerns are trivial, but just that they pale in comparison to the negative effects that occur in the world beyond the farmers of Minnesota because of the subsidy.
Narrowly-interested government that is popular is not equal to good government. Even though it would be a very unpopular move for you to oppose a corn subsidy since you are from Minnesota, your opposition would actually give the movement more credibility nationally for that very reason.
Sincerely,
Matt Flaherty
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Against Libertarianism
(excerpted from:
SAMUEL FREEMAN Illiberal Libertarians: Why Libertarianism Is Not a Liberal View
_ 2002 by Princeton University Press. Philosophy & Public Affairs 30, no. 2 )
Here are some arguments (from a liberal perspective) against libertarianism. I am not a classical liberal, (or a libertarian) but I found these arguments compelling:
---
The Libertarian Rejection of Public Goods and a Social Minimum Libertarianism has no place for government to enforce the provision of public goods, those goods not adequately and effectively provided for by markets.
-Markets and Monopolies
Under competitive conditions, markets normally allow for efficient allocations of productive resources and increased output of goods to meet (effective) demand. But if market activities are left unregulated, freely associating individuals can just as well enter agreements designed to restrict others’ options, frustrating instead of promoting productive output. The right of unrestricted freedom of contract so central to libertarianism implies that markets are to be wholly selfregulating;
-Absolute Property and Invidious Discrimination
Consider next libertarian attitudes toward liberal institutions affording equal opportunity. Even if narrowly construed, equal opportunity implies more than simply an absence of legal restrictions on entry into preferred social positions by members of salient social classes. Jim Crow laws were not the primary cause of segregation in the South.60 In many places few laws, if any, explicitly restricted blacks from entry into desirable social positions, from purchasing property in white neighborhoods, from entering private schools and colleges, or from using hospitals, restaurants, hotels, and other private businesses frequented by whites.61 Still, these events rarely occurred due to tacit (often explicit) agreement among whites. Because of privately imposed restrictive covenants, discriminatory business practices, and blacks’ abject economic status, there was little need for laws imposing segregation and discrimination. It could be left up to the invisible hand.
-Political Power as a Private Power
One peculiar feature of strict libertarianism is the absence of legislative authority, a public institution with authority to introduce and amend rules and revise social conventions. The need for new or revised rules is to be satisfied through private transactions and the invisible hand, by the eventual convergence of many private choices. Libertarians generally accept that adjudicative and executive powers are necessary to maintain personal and property rights. But these functions are performed by private protection agencies and arbitration services (in Nozick’s account, a “dominant protective agency,” which is the minimal state). No public body, commonly recognized and accepted as possessing legitimate authority, is required to fairly and effectively fulfill these functions. Political power is privately exercised.69
H.L.A. Hart has argued that any society is bound to be static and primitive if it entirely relies on custom and people’s uncoordinated responses to new situations, and is without a commonly recognized and accepted procedure that identifies rights and duties and that issues public rules to promptly respond to changing conditions.
Having no conception of a political society, libertarians have no conception of the common good, those basic interests of each individual that according to liberals are to be maintained for the sake of justice by the impartial exercise of public political power.
Why couldn’t Nozick’s minimal libertarian state govern for the common good, understood as protecting people’s libertarian rights? Since the minimal state is just a private for-profit business, which happens to have a de facto monopoly on power, it cannot be said that it governs with any intention of promoting and maintaining a common good. It may be that the common good, understood as protecting libertarian rights, in fact is promoted (as a kind of positive externality) by minimal state action; but this does not really differ from the way in which any private firm, in seeking private benefit, incidentally promotes a common good. So if the libertarian state promotes the common good, it does so in the same way as does Microsoft, General Electric, or Pinkerton Private Security Services. I assume, however, that the idea of the common good has more structure than this in liberal political thought. It is an operative idea in liberal theory, not an incidental side effect, and government is instituted and designed with the intention of securing the common good. Securing the common good, even if understood in libertarian terms, is not an aim of the libertarian minimal state, as argued in the text. (For Nozick’s explicit rejection of the idea of the social good, see ASU, pp. 32–33.)
If people are led to believe in the inherent justice of market distributions and the “sanctity” of private property as defined by existing law, then regardless of classical liberalism’s theoretical justification (overall utility, market efficiency, a Lockean argument, or the Hobbism of Gauthier and Buchanan), citizens will likely come to believe that they have a fundamental moral right to whatever they acquire by market exchange, gift, and bequest. If so, then liberal institutions will periodically be jeopardized. Those better off will resent taxation to pay for public goods, social security and health care for the elderly and handicapped, and minimum income supports and other assistance for the poor. Moreover, democratic government’s very legitimacy may be questioned. These are familiar and recurring events in U.S. history.
(High liberalism should not be prone to the same instability, for it distinguishes personal property that is part of or essential to basic liberty from economic rights to control means of production, and construes the freedoms implicit in the latter rights in terms of what is needed to secure each person’s individual independence. See John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 114–15, 177. This complicated topic warrants further discussion since it goes to the main difference between the classical and high liberal traditions.)
Among nations, the United States is distinctive in that it celebrates as part of its national consciousness the Lockean model (some would say “myth”) of creation of political society by original agreement among free (and freeholding) persons, all equally endowed with certain natural rights. Modify this national story slightly (mainly by substituting a web of bilateral contracts for the social contract, and eliminating the duties it entails) and we have the essential makings of libertarianism. Perhaps this explains why libertarianism is such a popular and peculiarly American view. However slight these modifications may seem, their effects are far reaching, for what we have in libertarianism is no longer liberalism, but its undoing.
SAMUEL FREEMAN Illiberal Libertarians: Why Libertarianism Is Not a Liberal View
_ 2002 by Princeton University Press. Philosophy & Public Affairs 30, no. 2 )
Here are some arguments (from a liberal perspective) against libertarianism. I am not a classical liberal, (or a libertarian) but I found these arguments compelling:
---
The Libertarian Rejection of Public Goods and a Social Minimum Libertarianism has no place for government to enforce the provision of public goods, those goods not adequately and effectively provided for by markets.
-Markets and Monopolies
Under competitive conditions, markets normally allow for efficient allocations of productive resources and increased output of goods to meet (effective) demand. But if market activities are left unregulated, freely associating individuals can just as well enter agreements designed to restrict others’ options, frustrating instead of promoting productive output. The right of unrestricted freedom of contract so central to libertarianism implies that markets are to be wholly selfregulating;
-Absolute Property and Invidious Discrimination
Consider next libertarian attitudes toward liberal institutions affording equal opportunity. Even if narrowly construed, equal opportunity implies more than simply an absence of legal restrictions on entry into preferred social positions by members of salient social classes. Jim Crow laws were not the primary cause of segregation in the South.60 In many places few laws, if any, explicitly restricted blacks from entry into desirable social positions, from purchasing property in white neighborhoods, from entering private schools and colleges, or from using hospitals, restaurants, hotels, and other private businesses frequented by whites.61 Still, these events rarely occurred due to tacit (often explicit) agreement among whites. Because of privately imposed restrictive covenants, discriminatory business practices, and blacks’ abject economic status, there was little need for laws imposing segregation and discrimination. It could be left up to the invisible hand.
-Political Power as a Private Power
One peculiar feature of strict libertarianism is the absence of legislative authority, a public institution with authority to introduce and amend rules and revise social conventions. The need for new or revised rules is to be satisfied through private transactions and the invisible hand, by the eventual convergence of many private choices. Libertarians generally accept that adjudicative and executive powers are necessary to maintain personal and property rights. But these functions are performed by private protection agencies and arbitration services (in Nozick’s account, a “dominant protective agency,” which is the minimal state). No public body, commonly recognized and accepted as possessing legitimate authority, is required to fairly and effectively fulfill these functions. Political power is privately exercised.69
H.L.A. Hart has argued that any society is bound to be static and primitive if it entirely relies on custom and people’s uncoordinated responses to new situations, and is without a commonly recognized and accepted procedure that identifies rights and duties and that issues public rules to promptly respond to changing conditions.
Having no conception of a political society, libertarians have no conception of the common good, those basic interests of each individual that according to liberals are to be maintained for the sake of justice by the impartial exercise of public political power.
Why couldn’t Nozick’s minimal libertarian state govern for the common good, understood as protecting people’s libertarian rights? Since the minimal state is just a private for-profit business, which happens to have a de facto monopoly on power, it cannot be said that it governs with any intention of promoting and maintaining a common good. It may be that the common good, understood as protecting libertarian rights, in fact is promoted (as a kind of positive externality) by minimal state action; but this does not really differ from the way in which any private firm, in seeking private benefit, incidentally promotes a common good. So if the libertarian state promotes the common good, it does so in the same way as does Microsoft, General Electric, or Pinkerton Private Security Services. I assume, however, that the idea of the common good has more structure than this in liberal political thought. It is an operative idea in liberal theory, not an incidental side effect, and government is instituted and designed with the intention of securing the common good. Securing the common good, even if understood in libertarian terms, is not an aim of the libertarian minimal state, as argued in the text. (For Nozick’s explicit rejection of the idea of the social good, see ASU, pp. 32–33.)
If people are led to believe in the inherent justice of market distributions and the “sanctity” of private property as defined by existing law, then regardless of classical liberalism’s theoretical justification (overall utility, market efficiency, a Lockean argument, or the Hobbism of Gauthier and Buchanan), citizens will likely come to believe that they have a fundamental moral right to whatever they acquire by market exchange, gift, and bequest. If so, then liberal institutions will periodically be jeopardized. Those better off will resent taxation to pay for public goods, social security and health care for the elderly and handicapped, and minimum income supports and other assistance for the poor. Moreover, democratic government’s very legitimacy may be questioned. These are familiar and recurring events in U.S. history.
(High liberalism should not be prone to the same instability, for it distinguishes personal property that is part of or essential to basic liberty from economic rights to control means of production, and construes the freedoms implicit in the latter rights in terms of what is needed to secure each person’s individual independence. See John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 114–15, 177. This complicated topic warrants further discussion since it goes to the main difference between the classical and high liberal traditions.)
Among nations, the United States is distinctive in that it celebrates as part of its national consciousness the Lockean model (some would say “myth”) of creation of political society by original agreement among free (and freeholding) persons, all equally endowed with certain natural rights. Modify this national story slightly (mainly by substituting a web of bilateral contracts for the social contract, and eliminating the duties it entails) and we have the essential makings of libertarianism. Perhaps this explains why libertarianism is such a popular and peculiarly American view. However slight these modifications may seem, their effects are far reaching, for what we have in libertarianism is no longer liberalism, but its undoing.
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