Reply to Pat - Trust in Politics

As per usual, my posts are prompted by friends and great thinking.  Today my fraternity brother, Pat Aurience posted to his blog something that is really good, take a read at: 

http://paurience.blogspot.com/2012/06/why-i-am-incompatible-with.html

Here is my reply and response:

Pat,

Great post, and I am similarly concerned.  It does come down to trust, but my question lies in why is it we don’t trust?  Now in asking this I am not asking why we don’t trust our current leadership, because you laid that out quite well.  My question is how is it that a government, or as Alexis Tocqueville stated, the American Experiment, has devolved so far that we feel that a government founded under a preamble that starts, “We the people, …” cannot be trusted?

I see two fundamental possible answers:  1) that there is something wrong with the people or 2) there is something wrong with the government.  And/or there is the possibility it is both.  I also think we have a bit of a complex regarding our founding generation and the perfection or lack thereof they wrought in the founding of our republic.

On the people side of the equation you have tragic voter apathy, civic institutional membership apathy, and you have complacency in our way of life.  I saw a recent poster that showed that the last national election had a 38% participation rate as compared with the Iraqis at 95%.  If having 62% of Americans sit out from the election process in a democratic based society doesn’t spell disaster for making the political process responsible, I am not sure what does.  My hometown Boy Scout troop recently posted to Facebook the fact that it may fold next March because there is no one who will step up to be Scoutmaster.  I serve as the President of my Lutheran congregation, and it continues to be challenging to fill the council seats, never mind actually having committees to do the ministry of the church.  I also am a participant in many regional and local government efforts (through my work) and when you look at who all is partaking, its mostly technocrats, professionals and those that at the table as part of their job/local politician's office; citizens represent less than a handful.  A recent politician said corporations are people; he was only partially right and only if I take his message out of its context.  Institutions, no matter what they are only as good as the people that take part in them and work for them.  In a representative society, we have no choice but to partake, as our lack thereof allows for others to make choices for us.  The less and less we engage, the more and more it becomes a smaller group telling the larger group how life is going to be.  So apathy, both at the polls and in the hard work of meeting and grappling with issues with our neighbors (broadly and locally defined) is a vicious spinning whirlpool that only continues to go downward until something breaks the cycle.

Now why the apathy?  I contend that Americans default to a role of being lazy, complacent, and unwilling to have to face up to responsibility.  Your notion that we ought to be responsible for ourselves is not misplaced, but we like the fact we don’t have to be.  Just think about the last time you were in a car accident.  We like the good life, and we get disturbed when we are inconvenienced by the fact that we live a privileged life that the vast majority of the globe could only wish to have.  We have building codes that require public water fountains that provide free water to anyone who walks in.  I can promise you that in Africa, Asia, South America, and even parts of Europe such a provision would be seen as an absolute luxury.  How can American’s say that healthcare is a “right”, when children can’t get malaria pills in Africa, young women can’t even find a doctor to give birth in Central Asia, and there isn’t even a hospital on most of the south pacific islands in nations like Micronesia?  Perhaps our first place status in obesity is the icing on the proverbial cake in this regard.  My point is we, as a people, take everything for granted and, as I see each successive generation post the Depression/WWII generation come to the fore, I see one that feels more entitled and yet less willing to earn those entitlements.  I can speak from my own experience in this regard, being a part of the 1% that has chosen to defend the rest, even I feel a sense of entitlement that I may or may not deserve.  We have a lack of housewives/husbands, engineers, doctors, technologists, laborers in the political process because everything is seen as “their job/problem” and not ours.  Our problem is the great run of the Pax Americana is going to close unless that changes drastically.

So that is the people side.  How about the institution; the government?  I have written elsewhere on this, but there are several things that are broken that we need to relook.  I would contend that the direct elections of Senators is one.  While repealing the amendment that allowed for this would be less “democratic,” it would reassert a balance that has been lost with regards to: a) separation of powers between the states and the federal government, b) the ability for lobbying in Washington (albeit in the states it may still yet occur) to drive the agenda of the body because Senators are not beholden to running for elections publically but with the state legislators (albeit they are politicians too, but I will get to this), and c) keep them from getting as radicalized and give better geographic influence instead, thus weakening power of political party in this body.  Another issue is the problem that on a per-capita basis, each of our representatives in congress have way too many of us to represent.  The result has been ever growing distance between the voter/opinion holder and that of the one that is supposed to speak for us.  While it may become unwieldy (which may end up requiring a two tier body), I would suggest that we cap the number of people any one representative can represent at a specific number.  Having 435 people represent a nation of over 300 million can’t even get close to addressing in a real way the various concerns and enable the brokering that is required to effectively govern.  I firmly believe the closer the politician is to the people, the less radical, the more responsible to them, they become.  I would also assert that with a representative body that is larger, the media would have a harder time keeping up, thus, perhaps, making their influence on the process decrease.  There are also legislative things that can be done (relook how we budget things (somewhat ridiculous to run all of the things that government ought to be doing on one year increments) for instance) but I think we need to also look long and hard at where we came from and where we are going to in our government and our society.  The constitution has proven a reliable and malleable document for us for over 200 years.  The question is, isn’t it high time we review and rethink it given our separation from the milieu where it was formed?  It became clear that the articles of confederation were not working well, so a group came together to write the document we have today, and that was within a decade.  How much longer should we rely on a document that was lucky to survive its first 25 years?  I am not one for throwing the baby out with the bath water in this regard, but if some trusted men and women came together, statesmen of good repute from all walks of life (just imagine if Bill Gates, Colin Powell, Oprah, Bill Bradley, and others got together and put in 6 months of effort) redrafted the document, what it might look like.  In my final analysis on the two sides of a need to regain trust, I think that without fixing both sides, ourselves as people and our form of government, a “more perfect union” is still in the works.

My final theme is our god complex, as a people, about the founding generation.  It is often hard to separate fact from fiction with this group; who can’t remember the cherry tree story for Washington.  But the more you study and know this generation and each generation subsequent, the more you realize that there has never been a “golden age” of good governance in America.  Our government, from the get-go was filled with flawed squabbling people.  Whether it was the prima-donna Thomas Jefferson or the unscrupulous Aaron Burr, or it was the headstrong and unabashed Alexander Hamilton or the overly analytic John Adams, or even the head in the sand Washington, the founders couldn’t be trusted, ask George Mason.  I contend that America still hasn’t a clue as to what it wants to be.  The tension of rights and organization, the tension of states versus the federal, the tension between legislatures, the courts, and the executive, all remain unsolved and a work in progress.  Lincoln was right, our founders “brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”  And we also are “testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”  Our role, our job, I suppose, again using his words, is to ensure “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”  To sum up from Tocqueville, “Let it not be said that the time for the experiment is already past; for the old age of nations is not like the old age of men, and every fresh generation is a new people ready for the care of the legislator.”  We need to get on with the business, because no one is going to do it for us, and no one can build the trust until we do.

Yours,

Erik

Free Market Economics, History, Thoughts

Of late, I have been following, as most American’s have, the reports, commentary and opinions in the political sphere regarding the economy.  The strongest, or more accurately, most clarion voices in this discussion have been those on the political right calling for “free markets” while those on the left focusing on protecting the poor, the elderly, the vulnerable desiring “fair share” economics (at least, at this moment, this is the core of what I am hearing; thus, putting a label on it is very hard at this point, making it muddled, and thus less clarion).  This has gotten me thinking, more about the former position than the latter, and its place in history.

What this got me thinking about is when in history have we seen a pure free market economy in action?  I will not sidetrack into what a “free market” economy is except to say that it, in its purest sense, is one based on individual sovereign right to act/own things, in which the exchange of goods and services are evaluated, developed and done based on individual perceptions between the parties involved without any outside influence or stricture.  So when did this occur in history?  When was the golden era of free market economics that we can look back on with longing eyes?

I would posit that perhaps one such era was circa 600 AD in Northern and Central Europe.  I use this point, given that by this time, the last vestiges of Roman governance were void and the collection of tribes and government control of commerce was nearly non-existent.  Coinage, the medium of trade in the Empire, was still around.  However, there was no central system to provide controls on the use of coinage or even determine its value.  It was also an era well before the Carolingian dynasty started by Charlemagne, lulled Europe into feudalism and the manor system of much study in our high school history classrooms.  It was a period when what you could get for something was what you got.  It was a time when the rules were what you made, and your power to enforce them was based on your ability to garner support, by charisma, the sword, or whatever means you might have.  Save for familial relationships, you were unbound to stake claim to what was yours (or you supposed it to be) or to stake out to a new place so long as you had the means to carry you.  There wasn’t taxes in the sense we know them, however if you sought security or other things from someone to protect you from the bands of thugs that abounded, you would pay a portion of your bounty to one who could prevent their stealing.  Matters of justice and equity were resolved in the most basic of manners, retribution or revenge, until the rounds of which lead to exhaustion of family lines or physical separation and/or settlement between the mutual parties.  I could dive into a satirical painting at this point, but I am trying to be quite serious.  In the utter chaos of the loss of Roman administration and before secular or religious administration could take hold, this period was one where there was the true unfettered interference of government, government of any type.  A “free market” economy?

In putting this example forward, and admittedly it is an extreme case and somewhat still flawed, I am trying to provide the purest example of what the logical conclusion of a fully free market economy would be.  I would not say, in any way, that I think this is the best system or that it worked well.  Nevertheless, it was an economy, for its time, which was without stricture of false markets created by floors or ceilings imposed by governments, without tariffs protecting the weak from the strong, and it was fully functional for a period of years.  I for one would not want to go back to that kind of system, nor do I think those that purport to support “free markets” want that kind of system in reality, but it is the consequence that their rhetoric is calling for.

I could cite other more modern examples (perhaps an ironic but good one might be Afghanistan from 1991 to 2001, or numerous African cases), but I think the point is made that no one, if you think about the inevitable conclusion, wants pure free market economics.  Businesses want to have predictability and stability in financial markets and laws that give them a shield of corporate protection.  People want to have a reasonable expectation of stability and support to ensure contracts are honored and equity is established between parties, never mind wanting safety for themselves, their progeny, their liberties, and their property.  Thus, enter governments, that have existed since time immemorial that regulate the transactions of groups and individuals to provide this level of protection and stability, especially after having gone through the dark ages of chaos that nearly every society has encountered at one point or another in its history.  So order, order established by some form of government, is good for the development of an economy, one has to submit.  Thus, fully free markets are not what are desired, but disciplined markets with relatively free actors are desired.  The degree of discipline in the market and the relative freedom of the actors is still left for conjecture as to the right mix, fully submitting that fully controlled economic systems are just as inadequate as full free market economics (e.g. Soviet market control, state controlled feudalism, etc.).

I will be the first to admit that I do not empirically know what the right balance is.  One cannot discount the individual actor and their rational or illogical/poor choices (the Austrian school) nor can one deny that there are trends that ring true about supply, demand, price controls and tariffs (Keynesian economics).  I submit that both sides have Pollyanna visions of their positions.  The right, that everyone will act in a way as to not damage others and everyone will be able to have equal opportunity; the left, that the government will not quash the individual actor and that people will be equally industrious in their pursuits.  My thesis was what was a “free market” economy that I can draw from history, and what does it mean.  I have not even entered into a religious or moral argument as a part of this effort.  Regardless, however, I do not look with longing eyes on the closest to pure examples that I can think of for “free markets”, so I am not sure that a golden era exists for them.  While I could do a similar analysis for controlled economics, and find it equally undesirable, it really is already in evidence given our very near-term, bipolar, communism – democracy struggle of the latter half of the 20^th century.  I cannot speak for the left of the political spectrum, but I do not hear rhetoric for state controlled economics like the rhetoric I do for “free markets”.  I would beg those that are supporting “free markets” to be careful that they do not destroy the centrist disciplined economy with relatively free actors that truly uplifts all.