Squaring the Culture

When McKay Hatch entered junior high school in Pasadena, CA, he noticed that a lot of his friends started cussing, apparently so they would fit in with the older kids. McKay refused to go along, and asked his friends not to talk like that around him. When they were 8th graders and about to head for high school, his friends informed him that his conscientious stand had influenced them to stop cussing, so he asked them what they thought about starting a “No Cussing Club.” They liked the idea, so they carried it out when they got to high school. It caught on, and today, there’s a web site and more than 30,000 members, representing all 50 states and several foreign nations.

This would be a human interest story to which I’d pay zero attention, if it were not for the death threats. That’s right, death threats. McKay has by now received more than 60,000 hateful emails, including several that threaten violence against him and his family. They’ve received phone calls on their answering machine, too, threatening enough to involve the FBI. And, they received some $2,000 worth of pizza due to a hateful prank. Of course, most of the emails are not threats, they’re just … well, strings of obscenities. What else?

Take a look at Fox’s news story:

It sounds like a pretty good idea, doesn’t it? Just knock off the rough language. Use language to build people up, not tear them down. So, what is it about this that enrages some folks — a lot of folks, apparently — about a kid starting a No Cussing Club?

Here comes the obligatory disclaimer: I cuss. I cuss like a sailor at times. I have anger issues, and when I get steamed, I use angry words. I dislike the fact that I talk like this, but I’ve never disliked it enough to change my linguistic habits, which I acquired early in life from my father. So in a way, I understand the angry folks who are writing nastygrams, even though I would never write one myself, and even though I think young McKay is doing a very good thing.

The issue is that everybody wants to think of themselves as decent, even if they’re not, and everybody really knows when they’re doing wrong, even if they claim they don’t. Consequently, as soon as somebody demonstrates genuine virtue, those of us who lack that virtue feel as though we’ve been exposed and belittled. Let’s be clear: the guilt does not come from the virtuous person, but from inside ourselves. Some have the good sense to know that they feel guilty because they ought to. Others, though, rev up their rationalizations and fire them off, and the deeper the sense of guilt, the angrier the rationalizations. As Whittaker Chambers once pointed out,

Experience had taught me that innocence seldom utters outraged shrieks. Guilt does. Innocence is a mighty shield, and the man or woman covered by it, is much more likely to answer calmly: “My life is blameless. Look into it, if you like, for you will find nothing.” That is the tone of innocence.

My own experience confirms this. When an accusation has no merit at all, I can take it calmly. It’s when I’m afraid inside myself that there might be some merit to the accusation that I react with rage. Notice that this does not mean I’m necessarily guilty as charged, only that I’m afraid I might be. However, I’ve also found that in an uncomfortably large percentage of cases, we feel guilty because we are guilty.

Guilty of what? In this case, that’s the reasonable question. Many of the objections to young McKay’s club come in the form of rationalizations about the meaninglessness of words. “There’s really no difference between ‘Oh, darn,’ and ‘Oh, shit,’” moderns are fond of philosophizing. Young Mr. Hatch is not impressed. “Words mean things. Everybody knows which words to avoid when you don’t want to offend anyone, or when you’re interviewing for a job,” he replies. It cuts to the heart of the matter. We really do believe, somewhere inside ourselves, that using harsh words is wrong.

Some apparently feel so sensitive about this topic that the mere presence of a 15-year-old somewhere in the world who encourages a higher standard sends them into a seething, frothing rage, a rage so deep that it prompts them to send strings of obscenities, dozens of unsolicited pizzas, and even threats of violence. I have to conclude that the topic is more important than anybody cares to admit. I’m frankly shocked.

Many social progressives among us love to scold, but on topics where their own opinions judge them superior. These are usually politically relevant topics about which one can call oneself righteous simply because one cares: equal rights for women and blacks, empowering the poor, protecting the environment, and so forth. Vote the right way, advocate the right social policy, and voila! you’re a righteous man or woman, regardless of any inner faults of character that you can’t control (or won’t try to.) It’s holiness on the cheap. In this manner, social progressives managed even to call President Clinton, manifestly a narcissistic, compulsive liar, a “good man.”

And so easily defended, too. The fact that one’s adversaries claim to care about the poor, for example, but do not agree that the socially progressive approach is helpful to the poor, can easily be dismissed. They don’t really care about the poor, you see. They’re just protecting their greed. If they really cared, they’d agree with us. See how easy it is?

Apparently this exercise of self-congratulation is extremely important to some, and also extremely fragile. The most narcissistic and self-absorbed cannot stand the existence of even a hint of the suggestion that they might be less than the moral paragons they imagine themselves to be. And a little snip of a kid, actually doing something to improve the way people speak to each other, addressing something that they, the narcissists, would like to excuse in themselves — why, it’s outrageous. He must be stopped.

Mind you, I can relate to the feeling a bit. The kid’s showing me up, too. He’s addressing something I have not changed in myself… and he’s just a kid! I’m a little ashamed of not having done this myself.

These same people like to claim that topics favored by conservatives are, by comparison, unimportant. They have it backwards; it’s the topics that address matters of family, love, commitment, and civility that truly matter. What determines whether one is a good man or woman has nothing at all to do with one’s political opinions, and everything to do with how we treat the person next to us. It is the goal of everyone committed to genuine virtue that they become harmless, doing good to those around them instead of hurting them while pursuing their own, selfish agenda. This is a difficult pursuit that often takes a lifetime to achieve.

So why is swearing so important? Harsh language seems like a minor thing, but it’s not. It’s not just the words themselves, but the harsh feelings in the words that matter. Harshness begets harshness. Politeness begets politeness. Love begets love. All of our lives would be more pleasant and less stressful if we just put a governor on what comes out of our mouths. Those who chant “All you need is love,” if they really believed it, ought simply to stop cursing just to spare the people around them from hearing things that make them feel uncomfortable.

Imagine yourself in a party in someone’s home, and you see somebody ball up a wrapper and throw it on the floor. The owner of the house comes up to the fellow and asks him not to throw garbage on the floor. In one scenario, the owner says, politely, “Please, if you don’t mind, would you put your garbage in the trash container under the sink?” In another scenario the owner growls, “What the (@*& is the matter with you, were you raised in a @#*$& barn like a (*&@ pig?”

Which approach is a) more likely to get cooperation? b) more likely to start a fight? c) more likely to make the person being rebuked feel belittled? d) more likely to make the people surrounding and listening feel uncomfortable?

If you’re inclined to rationalize the latter speech by saying that it’s not the cussing that makes the message so harsh, try doing the same exercise again, only this time make the only difference between the two scenarios be the expletives. Even phrased as roughly as it is, the rebuke without the cussing is less abusive than the one with it — and I think we all know it.

The publicity surrounding the”Don’t CUSS” nomenclature unfortunately obscures the more important message of the movement: “Use language to uplift, not to tear down.” This is the wholesome effect of McKay’s club, and it’s why the dupes of Hell want so badly to stop him. How we treat each other has eternal weight. Whatever you thought about cuss words before, you’ve got some evidence now that they’re a lot more important than you thought. I’m preaching to myself here.

I’m going to stop talking now and let the discussion begin. However, I have to warn you all that I’ll have no patience with “freedom of speech” complaints, because they’re just so far off the mark. A club where people pledge not to swear does not threaten any liberty of any sort. The First Amendment to the US Constitution prohibits the government from passing laws that abridge freedom of speech. McKay Hatch is not the government, and he’s not proposing any laws; he’s trying to make a case through social messages. If you don’t want to go along with him, you’re free to do whatever you like. There is no free speech issue here.

UPDATE: Shelly and I were discussing this article because we felt it was missing something, and we agreed what it is, so I’m amending.

There’s something afoot in the culture that’s deliberately unmaking Western civilization. We think it’s satanic. Whatever that is, whenever somebody good decides to champion goodness in some effective way, the demons jump on it immediately as hard as they can to try to stifle it.

It reminds me of a silly game at the arcade called Whac-A-Mole, where the player stands in front of a board with holes in it and a soft, black mallet in his hand, and smacks anything that pops its head up. Pop your head up and start saying “We shouldn’t cuss,” and Wham! down comes the mallet. “What gays do isn’t marriage.” Wham! “We shouldn’t murder our children.” Wham! “Our culture’s sexuality is out of control.” Wham!

This is not to rebut anything I wrote before. I explained the mechanism in human terms. I believe it has a demonic component as well, and that a lot of the people objecting to the No Cussing Club are motivated by things they don’t understand, nor do they even believe they exist. I regard the virulence of the reaction to this kid’s harmless goodness as evidence that such things really do exist, and I don’t regard the understanding of human motives to exclude the possibility in any way. They’re not mutually exclusive; they go hand-in-hand.

I’ve been looking on and off for months to find statistics bearing out the crisis that Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson announced back in October. If you recall, the crisis was kicked off by a quarterly readjustment of financial institutions’ books that were forced by Sarbanes-Oxley rules to reflect the badly depressed foreclosure values of mortgages. Other regulatory rules forced these same companies to find sources of loans to cover the deficits created by re-valuing the mortgage assets. They couldn’t get the loans — too much was needed too quickly, and there was every reason to expect the troubled financials to default in any case — and a bunch of them closed their doors, or sold themselves to bigger institutions.

Allegedly, the fear created by the revaluing of mortgage assets and the resulting collapses of major financial institutions made it impossible for businesses to obtain loans to do their daily business.

This all makes sense. The problem is, it’s pretty nearly impossible to see any of this in the statistics that have been published since. Skeptical observers should be asking why not.

The first indication came in a skeptical article published earlier this month by the American Institute for Economic Research. Titled “The Financial Crisis and Business Loans: The Credit Crunch That Isn’t,” the article by Dr. Richard Ebeling, a distinguished economics professor, claims that while banks have been tightening their credit-worthiness assessments, they have only slowed the growth of loans to businesses, not reduced them at all:

The impression of a financial sector that has ground to a halt, however, is not born out by the facts. To the contrary, lending and borrowing have continued to grow in America, albeit at a lower rate of growth all through 2008.

Banks have used a large portion of the Federal Reserve’s expansion of the monetary base (up 70 percent since July) to shore up balance sheets. But they have not “rebalanced” their balance sheets through any noticeable decrease in commercial and industrial lending.

At the time, I criticized the article because it only reported figures through the end of the 3rd Quarter of 2008, missing the actual credit collapse in October. That was all that was available at the time. However, Dr. Ebeling was correct at least in noting that the reports of tightening credit through the summer seemed to have been badly exaggerated.

Today, I checked the current figures from the Federal Reserve for business loans, and they continue to bear out Dr. Ebeling’s skepticism. I’ve included a reduced chart of commercial and industrial loans from banks in the US through mid-January 2009 below. The bottom line is large banks only; the top line is all banks. Click to enlarge.

As you can see, loans to commercial and industrial customers have been dropping since September, but are still well above the trend line beginning near the end of 2007. The big bulge in September and October represents the Fed’s increase in the money supply that I reported a couple of days ago, and possibly also the first round of TARP funds insofar as they went to financial institutions.

Dr. Ebeling observed that a lot of the new money went to “shore up balance sheets.” What that means is that the banks took their infusion of funds and used them to pay off their own debts to other banks. Those other banks then took the money and paid down their debts, and so on. The result would be that a lot of banks are in better financial condition than they were at the time, and won’t go out of business. They would not have loaned more money to customers based on this infusion of money, but neither would they have loaned less.

I’ve read a number of articles about the tightening of credit for small businesses in the last 24 hours. They’re all over the map, some saying there’s plenty of money but nobody wants to borrow with the economy looking so glum, others saying the banks have ratcheted up their credit criteria and are turning down anything other than sure bets, still others pointing out secondary market problems. These are all probably true to some extent, but the most powerful culprit all around seems to be that the secondary market for small business loans has dried up. Banks used to bundle small business loans for resale the way they’ve been bundling mortgages, but nobody’s buying bundled loans these days; wonder why? (That’s sarcasm.) The result seems to be that banks are less willing to lend to small businesses that have no track record. This article from money.cnn.com explains the problem pretty well.

The Fed has produced a program called TALF — an acronym for Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility — to funnel $200 billion of the expansion in the money supply into small business loans in an effort to restart small business lending. However, the federal restrictions limit the money to SBA-backed loans, leaving loans backed by private and local banks out in the cold. Moreover, there are some indications that the reduction in small business loans is more a result of excessive costs and paperwork associated with the loans, rather than market conditions. SBA loans dropped 57% in 2008, but they’d also dropped 30% in 2007, and this mostly reflected distaste for the program itself. TALF is an instance of a program that would work if the national government was not so bent on control; it’s over-regulation.

So, where does this leave us?

The October scare was real enough, but largely due to over-regulation, specifically Sarbanes-Oxley and reserve requirements. (That’s the proximate cause of the scare; I’ve discussed the underlying causes of the crisis elsewhere.) The credit freeze that Treasury Secretary Paulson warned against never seems to have materialized. Banks have naturally tightened credit-worthiness criteria, and that’s hurting marginal and start-up businesses, but the amount of money available for business loans appears to be very high, and the banks seem to be lending money. Measures being taken to loosen credit are not working because of bureaucratic pig-headedness, but they’re not hurting credit at all. All the talk about the crisis seems to be self-fulfilling; the more we talk “crisis,” the tighter everybody holds their dough.

It looks to me as though the best course of action is no action at all. The bulge in the money supply has made sure more banks won’t fold (this may be a bad thing; the closing of institutions in times of hardship performs vital pruning of inefficient players in the market.) The banks will gradually loosen their grip on their funds as the economy stabilizes; this is natural after a scare. The flood of new money is going to drive prices up, but is not helping the credit situation. If we all relax, things will right themselves.

I favor one exception: Congress or the Fed should write rules governing the packaging of loans for resale. The loss of secondary markets is hurting everybody, but they won’t come back without somebody clarifying the rules. Once the rules are clear, loans for resale will start looking safe again.

The government’s panicky efforts are worse than nothing at all, and will push the economy over a cliff that we would have avoided if they’d had the good sense not to panic.

Postscript: for chart geeks, here’s the lowdown from the Fed site concerning what’s represented in those commercial bank figures:

Short version: the numbers are not penny-perfect, but close enough for government work.

I came across the Center for Freedom and Prosperity on a tip from Hot Air, which has one of their videos featured today. It’s a good video, but they referenced an earlier video that I thought was more important — a brief and very simple discussion of why Keynesianism is off the mark. Listen:

Two minor complaints:

First, one of the features of Keynesian economics is that they assert a multiplier for government spending. They argue that when individuals have money to spend, they save some of it, but when the government has money to spend, they spend all of it. They argue that by taking the money as taxes and spending it as government spending, more money reaches the economy — the difference being what the taxpayers would have saved. That’s how they claim that taking money out of the economy through taxation then re-inserting it through government spending actually stimulates the economy.

This is nonsense, in my humble opinion, but it’s important to understand why Keynesians think their system works, and why they’re wrong. Dollars saved do not disappear from the economy, they get cycled into capital formation. Capital formation results in expansion, and expansion occurs by way of spending — Widget Manufacturing builds a new plant by buying materials from suppliers, paying construction workers, etc. So saved dollars circulate just as readily as spent dollars, only they cycle through the banking system first. I accepted the Keynesian multiplier when I first studied economics, because that’s what college freshmen do when their professors feed them an equation, but I’m not buying it now, especially with all the real-world examples of failed Keynesianism to work from.

And by the way, it probably was not WW II that got us out of the Great Depression. If you think it was, ask yourself why the economy would not therefore benefit if we simply bought goods from manufacturers and blew them up (which is what happens to many military goods produced for war.) WW II reduced unemployment by shipping so many workers off to fight the war, but it did not improve output of useful domestic goods. What ended the depression, in fact, was the exit of FDR from the scene, the repeal of several government programs, and a return to a predictable government.

Complaint #2 is that using the Nikkei Index as a proxy for the performance of the Japanese economy is not exactly right. It corresponds roughly to how things were going, but it’s not really a good economic indicator. That’s a minor technical dispute, though; the video is pretty much on the mark.

I suppose all conservative bloggers have weighed in on how they intend to fight the good fight while the inmates run the asylum. Last night at Power Line, John Hinderaker took his turn, and as is so often the case, he did it with style, man-handling a silly, partisan Washington Post piece by E. J. Dionne.

Hinderaker made fun of Dionne’s gush about Obama’s masterful stroke of postponing the approval of foreign aid for abortions until the day after the abortion protest in Washington, and observed that Obama’s job approval rating is not much higher than George Bush’s was in 2000. The real meat, however, came when he responded to Dionne’s suggestion that Republicans would “politicize” a terrorist attack on Obama’s watch:

National defense is the first responsibility of any President. If a President weakens our defenses against an enemy, and this leads to a successful attack by that enemy, the President somehow is above criticism? Absurd. And as far as “politicizing issues relating to terrorism” is concerned, why is this an offense that only Republicans can commit? When Democrats tell us ad infinitum that President Bush’s policies have made us less safe, why isn’t that “politicizing issues relating to terrorism”? When one of Obama’s first acts is to announce that Guantanamo Bay will be closed (someday, but with no idea where the detainees will then go), why isn’t that “politicizing issues relating to terrorism”?

The fact is that terrorism is the number one threat to our security. In a democracy, the question of how best to avert that threat is and must be a political issue, to the extent that the parties disagree as to the most effective approach.

Here be dragons. For years, Republicans have been objecting to Democrats politicizing President Bush’s measures to make the country safer, and Democrats have been responding that criticizing is protected, nay, is their patriotic duty. The shoe is now on the other foot, and we need to choose our words carefully. Criticism is protected speech, and has always been. Democrats crossed a hard line when their objections gave vital strategic and tactical information to America’s enemies, and crossed another when they actively attempted to undermine administration policy. Sadly, no Democrats will be prosecuted for either crossing, though in a just world they would be. We must not do as they did. We must object to bad policy, but be sure that our objections do not provide a blueprint for enemy activism.

Hinderaker likewise schooled Dionne regarding his suggestion that opposition to the stimulus bill is mere tactical partisanship:

Earth to Dionne: the Democrats’ bill is a trillion-dollar joke. It offends every principle of good government, certainly every principle to which Republicans subscribe. There is no theory of democracy on which Republicans are required to go along with a horrible piece of legislation in order to insulate the President from the awful prospect of disagreement, or the even more awful prospect of being held responsible for being wrong.

Here we’re getting some useful data from our brothers to the north. When Kate at small dead animals linked to me yesterday regarding Krugman’s tirade, a number of her readers from Canada (Kate’s blog hails from Saskatchewan) commented regarding their own descent into socialism at the hands of Pierre Trudeau, who was Prime Minister from 1968 to 1979 and 1980 to 1984. Apparently Mr. Trudeau was responsible for the PC-on-steroids policies from which Canada is still recovering.

The Obama stimulus package is less about stimulating the economy, and a lot more about jamming social progressivism down the nation’s throat in one, large lump. They’re not choosing spending items by the immediacy of their economic impact, they’re choosing them by their conformity to long-suppressed, socially progressive goals. If we manage to survive the Obama presidency as a sovereign nation — I’ve expressed my doubts about this in the past — it will turn out to have been something like consorting with a STD-ridden prostitute: the business part is over quickly, but it takes decades to get over the lingering diseases, and the shame may never leave.

Hat tip to Small Dead Animals, who in turn got the tip from NRO. Here’s the current level of the money supply, per St. Louis’ Federal Reserve Bank. Click on the image for a larger, clearer version:

See that vertical line at the far right of the graph? I thought it was a joke when I first saw it, but it’s no joke. The Federal Reserve has driven the money supply almost literally through the roof. And those moonbats in charge of the government are saying we need more stimulus. Holy jumpin’ Jehoshaphat.

I’m not a huge expert on macroeconomics, but the traditional interpretation of this would be “expect a truly monstrous inflation in the coming couple of years.” In particular, note that the Fed dropping the interest rate to around 1% has been noted as one of the primary causes of the bubble that recently popped with such force here in the US. Now, the Fed has dropped the discount rate essentially to zero. It will create another bubble. That one’s going to pop eventually, too.

The folks at Small Dead Animals are talking about stocking up on ammunition. I might suggest learning a little back yard farming as well.

WaSs up (translation: We are SO screwed…)

Germane to my lamenting the distortions of Democrats, Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman, runner-up in my own Most Frequently Wrong Human Beings category, today announces that to disagree with him constitutes Arguing In Bad Faith, and denounces the dishonest argumentation of Republicans generally regarding the stimulus bill.

It’s good that Mr. Krugman has decided, at long last, that dishonest argumentation deserves some scorn. It will be good to have him on our side to rebut the Democrats’ near-constant manufacture of intellectual horse manure, like calling the massive oil deposits in ANWR “only six months worth of oil;”(1) or calling slowing the growth of school lunch programs “a war on the poor;” or calling any failure to adopt Al Gore’s hysterical alarmism “demolishing science;” or calling legitimate objections to illegal border-crossing “racism and xenophobia;” or claiming that the crime rate of an entire state where a lot of religious people live constitutes a valid objection against religion generally; or even the nonsense we’ve seen from leftists here on this blog, like calling the President obtaining private legal advice from his attorney “a secret legal cabal.” I could go on listing examples for a long time. I’ve been debating liberals on topics like these for more than 25 years, and it’s difficult for me to recall conversations in which leftists did not raise this sort of disingenuous malarky. It’s one of the immutable truths of discussion with political leftists, that they’re going to engage in argumentation that’s so bereft of sense that it can only be explained by bad faith or insanity. It’s as predictable as the rising of the sun. Yes, it will be good to have Mr. Krugman as an ally in these discussions.

But I’m not holding my breath.

It’s not just that Democrats’ hyperventilating about dishonest arguments is selective along partisan lines, though that’s certainly true. The moral lapses from their own that Democrats take in stride are breathtaking at times. But no, this morning it’s that the arguments that have Mr. Krugman so horribly exercised are not nearly so bad as he seems to think.

First, he makes a half-hearted stab at “cheap shots,” things like John Boehner decrying a few hundred million bucks in the stimulus package for Medicaid family planning. Only, it’s not a cheap shot, it’s a warning about how the Democrats plan to lard up the bill. Boehner correctly objects that the “stimulus” has become a Trojan Horse for liberal spending desires that they’ve not been able to sneak through Congress for the past 30 years. His objection is not that a few hundred mil are going to wreck the economy, but rather that the choice of spending target has nothing whatsoever to do with stimulus, and that this is only one example of a more general pattern.

But that doesn’t really bother our Very Upright Brother Krugman. No, he aims his Morality Cannon at what he considers the truly alarming abuses of reason in the objections to the Democrats’ reincarnation of the New Deal. “Any time you hear someone reciting one of these arguments,” huffs Krugman, “write him or her off as a dishonest flack.”

So, let’s see what lowers one’s status to the nadir of Paul Krugman’s Definitive Ethical Hierarchy, and earns the label, “Dishonest Flackery”:

Flackery Primus:

First, there’s the bogus talking point that the Obama plan will cost $275,000 per job created. Why is it bogus? Because it involves taking the cost of a plan that will extend over several years, creating millions of jobs each year, and dividing it by the jobs created in just one of those years.

The interesting thing here is that the $275,000 figure is the result of applying simple mathematics to figures issued directly by the Obama administration. They claim the stimulus package will cost $825 billion. They claim it will create 3 million jobs. Rep. Boehner divided one into the other, and got $275,000 per job. Those are not John Boehner’s figures, they’re Barack Obama’s. If the number of jobs to be created is larger than 3 million, one of Obama’s advisors — someone like Paul Krugman, perhaps — should recalculate and issue a different figure. Before that happens, though, is Krugman truly serious that we should declare morally unsound any individual who takes Obama’s own figures at face value for the sake of the discussion?

President Obama has actually raised the predicted number of jobs above 3 million; but then, some Democrats have proposed the actual price of the stimulus package above a trillion dollars, so let’s call it a wash.

[Author notes long after the fact: if Mr. Krugman were really being accurate here, he'd insist on comparing the jobs created over time -- 3 million plus accrual over time -- with the money expended plus related interest on the national debt generated by the spending program over the life of the loan. Funny that it didn't occur to either of us.]

Flackery Secundus:

Next, write off anyone who asserts that it’s always better to cut taxes than to increase government spending because taxpayers, not bureaucrats, are the best judges of how to spend their money.

Here’s how to think about this argument: it implies that we should shut down the air traffic control system. After all, that system is paid for with fees on air tickets — and surely it would be better to let the flying public keep its money rather than hand it over to government bureaucrats. If that would mean lots of midair collisions, hey, stuff happens.

That’s pretty rich, that is. Keep in mind that Krugman says he’s comparing the effect of government spending against the effect of private spending. Is that what he actually compares? No; he compares government spending with no spending, in a single, highly technical field.

An instance that might begin to fit the argument correctly would compare the existing air traffic control system with one that might have arisen if the government had not taken over the function, a private air-traffic-control structure or a network of such structures. Or, he might, for a more cogent example, compare private mail delivery with public, since both already exist — the US Postal Service versus Federal Express and UPS. And when we make that comparison, we note that whereas the US Postal Service suspended delivery to Katrina-stricken coastal regions for 6 months after the storm, Federal Express honored its overnight delivery guarantee beginning the day after the storm receded. The US Postal Service is arguably the gem of government-service postal systems worldwide, but it does not compare well against well-constructed private systems.

The fact is, though, that Krugman’s argument creates a false analogy. Which government fiscal machinery does Krugman believe functions with the technical skill and necessity of air traffic control? Let’s hope he doesn’t think the decisions of economic advisors achieve either that level of necessity, or that level of skill; recent scholarship suggests that it’s precisely that sort of hubris that led to the original New Deal policies extending the Great Depression by about 10 years. Managing the economy is not like managing air traffic. What happens when you ignore air traffic is that planes crash into each other and cause disasters. What happens when you ignore the economy is that people conduct business properly without interference, and cause prosperity.

Krugman then adds:

Meanwhile, it’s clear that when it comes to economic stimulus, public spending provides much more bang for the buck than tax cuts — and therefore costs less per job created (see the previous fraudulent argument) — because a large fraction of any tax cut will simply be saved.

This suggests that public spending rather than tax cuts should be the core of any stimulus plan.

He’s speaking inaccurately. The claim that a huge fraction of a tax cut would go into savings is most likely based on the recent research suggesting that the 2001 economic stimulus check mostly wound up in savings accounts, like this article discussing findings from the University of Michigan. The problem is, the public does not behave the same way when receiving a tax cut as they do when receiving a one-time government check. In fact, liberal economists have historically argued that tax cuts do not increase savings; see here and here for examples. Mr. Krugman needs to tell us why he’s disagreeing with his ideological fellows on the subject; although, again, I’ll be glad to welcome him to our side if he really feels that way.

Flackery Tertius:

Finally, ignore anyone who tries to make something of the fact that the new administration’s chief economic adviser has in the past favored monetary policy over fiscal policy as a response to recessions.

It’s true that the normal response to recessions is interest-rate cuts from the Fed, not government spending. And that might be the best option right now, if it were available. But it isn’t, because we’re in a situation not seen since the 1930s: the interest rates the Fed controls are already effectively at zero.

That’s why we’re talking about large-scale fiscal stimulus: it’s what’s left in the policy arsenal now that the Fed has shot its bolt.

This is the closest Krugman comes to a correct argument in the entire article, but it still falls a little short. Larry Summers, Obama’s chief economic advisor, did cite negative consequences of fiscal stimulus, and whether it’s the only tool left in the bag or not, those consequences still apply, and it’s hardly a moral lapse to point it out.

More to the point, though, is that Krugman ignores one important tool left in the bag; namely, doing nothing. He assumes, as all Democrats do, that the hysterical impulse to do something, anything, cannot be ignored. It can. Adults do it frequently. It’s often the wisest choice. And to be frank, it’s not clear that the original stimulus spending accomplished anything, which in turn suggests that the original crisis was not quite so dire as we were led to believe. I suspect that if the government were simply to return to business as usual, the result of ignoring the “crisis” would be more positive than negative; stupid business decisions would be appropriately punished, and the economy would gradually return to an even keel.

So, do these arguments really deserve the level of Krugman’s ire? Are they truly so despicable as he says? Or is it perhaps the case that Krugman’s ire rises in proportion to his sense of having his nakedness exposed? That the scholarship suggesting that the original New Deal created a disaster, also suggests that his favored New, New Deal will likewise create a disaster, and he needs to huff mightily to deter critics from pointing it out?

Whichever it is, I’m not likely to take any economic cues, let alone moral ones, from Often Wrong Krugman.

Credit the photo to Freakanomics Blog at the New York Times. Clicking on the photo will also take you there.

(1) This is the result of dividing the low-end estimate of the contents of the oil field by the amount of oil used by the entire United States per year, to produce an absolutely meaningless statistic that makes the 2nd largest oil strike in US history sound insignificant to the uninformed.

Small Dead Animals linked to this article. Thanks, Kate, and welcome, Roadkill Diaries readers!

I just finished reading a brief article at Huffington Post claiming in its headline, “Controversial CBO Report on Stimulus Turns Out Not To Exist.” This refers, of course, to the CBO report Republicans in Congress have been chattering about for the last week, indicating that only about 1/7 of the stimulus package would be spent during the period when stimulus is expected to be needed, and most would be spent afterward.

Here’s the top of Huffington’s article:

Reports of a recent study by the Congressional Budget Office, showing that the vast majority of the money in the stimulus package won’t be spent until after 2010, have Democrats on the defensive and the GOP calling for a pullback in wasteful spending.

Funny thing is, there is no such report.

“We did not issue any report, any analysis or any study,” a CBO aide told the Huffington Post.

As you continue to read the article, you discover that the CBO did, in fact, run a computer analysis of a $300 billion portion of the stimulus plan, the version sent to the Appropriations Committee, and apparently then reported the results of the analysis to several Congressmen. No official report was published, hence the headline saying “It does not exist.” The results are real, though, and while they apply only to a portion of the plan, no reason is given to imagine that other portions of the plan would fare better.

The objective way to report this would be to say basically what I said in the last paragraph. As a careful blogger, that’s more or less how I would have reported it: the report is unofficial, and covers only about a third of the plan, but indicates that there could be lags in spending significant enough to prevent the plan from stimulating the economy when it needs to be stimulated. That’s more or less how the Washington Post reported it last Wednesday, along with the same discussion of the limitations of the analysis — that it only covered a portion of the plan — and announcement of how reporters came to obtain the report. It was the Washington Post that called this “a report.”

That’s not how Huffington Post reported it, though, and it was clear from the comments that the Democrats reading HuffPo thought they’d caught the Republicans lying. I linked to the story from a Crooks and Liars post that claimed it was a “phony CBO report” and that the report “did not exist.”

If either of these leftist bloggers had bothered to read the Washington Post’s article about the CBO report from last Wednesday, they would have learned all the details that the HuffPo’s “expose’” reported so breathlessly.

So the basic facts are, the CBO ran a computer analysis, the Republicans announced the results of the analysis, honestly representing it as an analysis of a portion of the stimulus and as an unofficial report, and for the next several years Democrats will be telling each other that the Republicans “invented” a CBO report that “never existed,” those dirty Republicans.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the Democrats Control Their Dupes.

It does not take a rocket scientist to understand that only a small fraction of the cost of a 10-year highway project will affect the economy during the first year or two of the project. Apparently, though, it does take a Republican to understand it. The Democrats seem incapable.

I’ve been teaching in a religious home group about wealth and prosperity, how they differ and how Christianity regards them. The subject has been on my mind for a while; I can’t say why. However, given that it’s likely that America’s historic level of wealth is about to recede into fond memory, it would do well for us all to examine our attitudes toward wealth, and to relax our grasp on material goods. President Obama thinks America’s wealth is a constant, and that it can be redistributed to produce “justice.” What he’s about to learn — if he has the wit and character to grow from the inevitable failure, which I doubt — is that wealth is a function of liberty and incentives, and that when you attempt to force even distribution, what you get is vastly reduced wealth for all. As he, and we, get reminded of this, we’d better learn to obtain our happiness from non-material things, ’cause the material things have made themselves wings, and are poised to fly away.

It’s become vogue to speak of capitalism as “greed,” and to denounce American consumerism in political terms. I agree that American consumerism really is something at least partly wicked; however, while the Democratic party has argued that this is a result of Republican policies and has attempted to make us all hate corporations, I don’t believe consumerism is a political problem at all.

Consumerism really is about the love of money, about vanity and self-promotion, which are dangers all rich people face (and lets face it, in terms of world income, nearly every one of us in the US is wealthy.) A prison minister I used to know named Jim Newsome once observed, “All the benefits of wealth are temporal, and all the dangers of wealth are eternal.” It’s not the case that wealth is evil; it is the case, however, that it takes a much more righteous character to manage wealth and remain holy than it does to live in poverty and remain holy. “For 100 men who can withstand poverty,” wrote Carlisle, “there is one who can manage prosperity.” This is why the author of the Proverbs prayed to the Almighty, “Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food I need.” (see Prov 30:7-9)

Various brands of modern Marxism have replaced references to “borgeoisie” in their dialectic with references to “evil corporations. ” Somehow, though, these arguments always end with a call to increase the power of government. That’s no solution; if corporations are driven by greed for money (they’re not, really, or at least, not entirely,) governments are even more driven by greed for power. How does it address the problem to remove power from the lesser sinner and hand it to the greater one?

We have to resist this sort of manipulation by politicians with ulterior motives, and recognize that the cure to consumerism has nothing to do with transferring power from corporations to governments, but everything to do with increasing the ability of individuals to do the right things with their wealth. This is not a problem for political parties to solve, but a problem for the Church to address through consistent charity, financial responsibility, self-policing of the wealthiest among us, and prophetic denunciation of rank consumerism. “The American dream” began as every man’s liberty to serve God according to his own conscience; it has morphed into a craving by every man to become a millionaire. This is evil. The Church cannot sign onto that quest; we must be in a position to speak against it, which means we have to repent of doing it ourselves, and we have to understand what we ought to be pursuing instead. It’s one thing to obtain wealth while serving others faithfully; it’s another to pursue wealth for its own sake.

Credit for the clip art goes to Barry’s Clipart Server.

I’m not a huge fan of Jon Stewart, but this is really funny. The poor guys just don’t know what to do about the fact that Obama’s foreign policy rhetoric is virtually identical to Bush’s. I dunno, maybe Valium would help. But my hat’s off to them, they’re taking shots like they ought to be. Watch.

“It’s like, when Obama says this stuff, I don’t think he really means it… and that gives me hope.” How many different ways is that revealing?

Tip of the bob to Ms. Underestimated and to Gateway Pundit.

One of my readers heard Ronald Reagan’s first inaugural address on the radio yesterday, courtesy of Mark Levin. In the discussion that ensued, another reader supplied a link to the video, which I’ve embedded below.

Ronald Reagan is dead, and I oppose laying our hopes on the reincarnation of past greatness. We need to be great ourselves, not hope for ancestors to be resurrected; it’s our turn. However, in the wake of yeasterday’s inaugural address that was underwhelming in its content and delivery, and which rested on insulting, partisan denunciations even while alleging a new, non-partisan spirit of hope, I thought it might be worthwhile to reacquaint ourselves with convictions that produced, at the very least, a 20-year respite in the decline of a great nation — not to mention that those same convictions produced the greatness of the nation itself. The video is 20 minutes long, if you can spare it.

Here are some inspirational nuggets for your consideration:

All of us need to remember that the federal government did not create the states; the states created the federal government.

If we look to the answer as to why for so many years we achieved so much, prospered as no other people on earth, it was because here in this land we unleashed the energy and individual genius of man to a greater extent than has ever been done before. Freedom and the dignity of the individual have been more available and assured here than in any other place on earth… It is no coincidence that our present troubles parallel and are proportionate to the intervention and intrusion in our lives that result from unnecessary and excessive growth of government.

If no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?

This last bears examination, because it’s the philosophical refutation of liberalism in a single sentence. In the heart of every liberal smolders the conviction that while the average man in the street has no idea how properly to manage his life in order to save himself, the nation, or the planet from disaster, they, the liberals, do possess that special knowledge, both for themselves and for everybody else. Reagan reminds us that if all men are created equal (this is the presupposition underlying this argument,) then no person can claim the unique ability to rule others. The self-evident truth that all men are created equal, drawn from the Declaration of Independence, is the cornerstone of our nation’s philosophical foundation. Modern liberalism thus embodies the rejection of America’s founding philosophy, and a return to the tyranny of elitism, a new, egalitarian-colored resurgence of the Divine Right of Kings. That Reagan could make this argument so succinctly demonstrates the genius of the man.

This was a very different speech from Obama’s address. Inaugural addresses tend toward rhetorical flourishes and deluges of swollen prose. Reagan’s was no exception, but it contained elements of genuine analysis and profound understanding that sadly were missing from yesterday’s oration. Reagan also paid homage to “giants on whose shoulders we stand,” recognizing the greatness of past Presidents, rather than arrogating their greatness to himself before he’d performed even a single act. Where Reagan criticized the direction of the past, it was with reference to specific statements of policy that he intended to change, not with vague and insupportable slurs to the character of his predecessor. This was the speech of a virtuous and brilliant man; yesterday’s oration was a blithe imitation from a shallow narcissist.

It should be noted that President Reagan failed to achieve several of the goals he articulated so well in this statement of intentions. Government did not shrink under his leadership, though several strangling regulations did vanish; it simply grew more slowly. Deficit spending did not vanish, and in fact increased, though that was more House Speaker Tip O’Neill’s doing than Reagan’s. However, these failures neither detract from the greatness of the man nor from the correctness of his thinking. The notion that such a foundational idea as limited government could be relevant in 1981 but not in 2009 is as sensible as the notion that an idea could be correct on Monday, but not on Thursday.

Ronald Reagan is dead. The principles he articulated are still true, and will remain true. Adjust your thinking accordingly.