The Boy Who Could Change the World (23 page)

The Attraction of the Center

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whycentrism

July 12, 2006

Age 19

“Centrism” is the tendency to see two different beliefs and attempt to split the difference between them. The reason why it's a bad idea should be obvious: truth is independent of our beliefs, no less than any other partisans, centrists ignore evidence in favor of their predetermined ideology.

So what's the attraction? First, it requires little thought: arguing for a specific position requires collecting evidence and arguing for it. Centrism simply requires repeating some of what A is saying and some of what B is saying and mixing them together. Centrists often don't even seem to care if the bits they take contradict each other.

Second, it's somewhat inoffensive. Taking a strong stand on A or B will unavoidably alienate some. But being a centrist, one can still maintain friends on both sides, since they will find at least some things that you espouse to be agreeable with their own philosophies.

Third, it makes it easier to suck up to those in charge, because the concept of the “center” can easily move along with shifts in power. A staunch conservative will have to undergo a major change of political philosophy to get a place in liberal administrations. A centrist can simply espouse a few more positions from the conservatives and a few less from the liberals and fit in just fine. This criteria explains why centrists are so prevalent in the pundit class (neither administration is tempted to really force them out) and why so many “centrist” pundits espouse mostly conservative ideas these days (the conservatives are in power).

Fourth, despite actually being a servant of those in power, centrism gives one the illusion of actually being a serious, independent thinker. “People on the right and on the left already know what they're going to say on every issue,” they might claim, “but we centrists make decisions based on the situation.” (This excuse was recently used in a fund-raising letter by the
New Republic.
) Of course, the “situation” that's used to make these decisions is simply who's currently in power, as discussed above, but that part is carefully omitted.

Fifth, it appeals to the public. There's tremendous dissatisfaction among the public with the government and our system of politics. Despite being precisely in the middle of this corrupt system, centrists can claim that they're actually “independents” and “disagree with both the left and the right.” They can denounce “extremism” (which isn't very popular) and play the “moderate,” even when their positions are extremely far from what the public believes or what the facts say.

Together, these reasons combine to make centrism an especially attractive place to be in American politics. But the disease is far from limited to politics. Journalists frequently suggest the truth lies between the two opposing sources they've quoted. Academics try to distance themselves from policy positions proposed by either party. And, perhaps worst of all, scientists try to split the difference between two competing theories.

Unfortunately for them, neither the truth nor the public necessarily lies somewhere in the middle. Fortunately for them, more valuable rewards do.

Exercise for the reader: What's the attraction of “contrarianism,” the ideology subscribed to by online magazines like
Slate?

The Conservative Nanny State

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/cns

May 22, 2006

Age 19

For years, progressives have watched as both Democratic and Republican administrations have taken away what little remained of economic liberalism in this country. Bill Clinton, for example, took away what meager assistance the government paid to poor single mothers, signed NAFTA, and began attempting
to chip away at Social Security
.

But even worse than these policy defeats are the conceptual defeats that underlie them. As cognitive scientist
George Lakoff has argued
, people think about politics through conceptual moral frames, and the conservatives have been masterful at creating frames for their policies. If the left wants to fight back, they're going to have to create frames of their own.

Enter Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and one of the people instrumental in fighting back against the most recent attempt to privatize Social Security (as author of
Social Security: The Phony Crisis
, he had plenty of facts to demonstrate that the crisis was, in fact, phony). He has a new book out,
The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer
, which takes decades of conservative frames and stands them on their head. (Disclosure: I liked the book so much I converted it to HTML for them and was sent a free paperback copy in return.)

His most fundamental point is that conservatives are
not
generally in favor of market outcomes. For far too long, he argues, the left has been content with the notion that conservatives want the market to
do what it pleases while liberals want some government intervention to protect people from its excesses.

No way!
says Baker. Conservatives
love
big government—only they use it to give money to the rich instead of the poor. Thus the conservative nanny state of the title, always looking out for crybaby moneybags to help.

Take, for example, trade policy. The conservative nanny state is more than happy to sign free trade agreements that let manufacturing jobs in the United States flee offshore. And they're happy to let immigrant workers come into the country to replace dishwashers and day laborers. But when it comes to the professional class, like doctors, lawyers, economists, journalists, and other professionals,
oh no!
, the conservative nanny state does everything it can (through licensing and immigration policy) to keep foreign workers out.

This doesn't just help the doctors, it hurts all of us because it means we have to pay more for health care. NAFTA boosters estimate that the entire agreement saved us $8 billion a year. Using competition to bring only doctors' salaries down [to] the levels seen in Europe would save us
eighty
billion dollars—nearly $700 per family per year, just from improved prices for doctors. You'd see similar amounts from other major professions.

Baker's book is also one of the few to reveal the shocking secret behind the Federal Reserve Board you always hear messing with interest rates on the news. This unaccountable technocracy, most of whose members are appointed by banks, uses its power over interest rates to drive the economy into a recession so that wages won't get too high. That's right, the government tries to slow down the economy so that you get paid less. (Full details are in the book.)

Baker's book is also chock-full of fascinating new policy ideas. He points out, for example, that corporations aren't part of the free market, but instead a gift offered by the government. (A very popular one too, since companies voluntarily pay $278 billion each year for it.) And because of this, there's absolutely no reason the government can't tweak its terms to make us all better off. For example, Baker points out that currently, corporate rules count shareholders who don't vote at all as voting in favor of whatever the directors of the corporation prefer. Baker suggests requiring that all CEO pay packages
get approved by a majority of those actually voting, instead of letting major CEOs pick how much to pay themselves, as they do now.

Or what about copyright and patents? Again, this isn't a law of nature, but a big government gift. People who really care about shrinking government would want to try to get rid of or shrink the laws that say the government gets to make rules about what songs and movies we can have on our personal computers.

Americans spend $220 billion on prescription drugs, largely because of government-granted patents. Instead of handing that money to big drug companies, the government could spend far less (only a couple hundred million) funding researchers itself and making the resulting drug discoveries free to the public. College students spend $12 billion on textbooks alone. Again, the government could make free textbooks for one-thousandth that. And we spend $37 billion on music and movies. Why not create an “artistic freedom voucher” (vouchers—a conservative favorite!) that can only be spent on artists who place their work in the public domain?

None of these would require outlawing the existing system—they could work side by side, simply forcing the existing drug, textbook, and movie companies to compete with this alternate idea. If their version works better, then fine, they'll get the money. But if not, there'll be no conservative nanny state to protect them.

Similarly, the government could expand the Social Security program, allowing everyone to buy additional personal accounts from a system with amazingly low overhead (.5% versus the 20% of private funds) and a 70-year track record of success. Or it could try to improve our pitifully bad health care system by letting people buy into the government's Medicare program, which again has amazingly low administrative costs (did you know that, on a per person basis, we spend 80% of what Britain spends on health care altogether simply on administration?) and serious bargaining power to push down prices. Again, why not let the private companies try their best to compete?

The book itself also discusses bankruptcy laws, torts and takings, small businesses, and taxes. And it goes into far more detail on each of these subjects. And it's all available for free on the Internet, so there's no excuse for not reading it. It's a fun read, the kind of book that turns the way you think about the economy upside-down.

Political Entrepreneurs and Lunatics with Money

http://crookedtimber.org/2009/05/01/politicalentrepreneurs-and-lunatics-with-money/

May 1, 2009

Age 22

One of the interesting things about capitalism is that, if you have money, people seem to just magically appear to meet your needs. When it rains in New York City, vendors materialize to sell me an umbrella. When I was walking to the inauguration, the streets were lined with people selling hats and handwarmers. I certainly didn't ask anyone to bring me a hat; I didn't even realize I would want one, or I would have brought it myself—but people predicted that I would and brought it for me.

The more money you have, the more crazy these desires can get. If you're rich, people offer to
launch you into space
,
build large buildings with your name on them
, or
set up lavish cemetery plots
. Or, as Steven Teles demonstrates, push the law to be more to your liking.

What's striking about the rise of modern conservatism is that it was
not
, in large part, the creation of big business. Big business, all things considered, was pretty happy with the liberal consensus. They weren't exactly itching to
drown the government in the bathtub
, especially when it did so much for them.

Teles makes this clear with his brilliant first chapter
^*
*
on the
liberal
legal network. “From the perspective of the early twenty-first century,” Teles notes, “it is perplexing why these wealthy, well-positioned, white men—presidents of the American Bar Association,
leaders of the nation's largest foundations—put their support behind a project to liberalize the legal profession.” You had groups as respectable as the Ford Foundation, the ABA, and the OEO supporting a project as activist as the Legal Services Program, which, Teles writes, “helped transform the administration, and ultimately the politics, of public aid” (32). Law schools started pro bono clinics, and the Ford Foundation funded a dozen legal activist groups. (Admittedly, the other major foundations refused to join in.)

Corporations did attempt to strike back—as Teles documents in a chapter called “Mistakes Made.” He quotes an influential report on these early attempts, complaining that they simply took money from a company and spent it fighting that same company's legal battles, a law firm structured as a tax dodge. Afraid of alienating the shareholders of their corporate donors, they shied away from principled ideological stands and didn't influence the larger political debate.

But the real conservative movement was funded instead by wealthy extremists on the fringes of the business world. It was the creation of people like Richard Mellon Scaife, who inherited part of the vast Mellon fortune from his alcoholic mother. Joseph Coors inherited a brewing company, John M. Olin ran a relatively obscure chemical company, R. Randolph Richardson inherited the money his father made by selling Vicks to Procter and Gamble.
^*
*
None of them can exactly be called Titans of Industry, or even titans of industry. Yet these are the men who bankrolled not just the conservative legal movement, but the conservative movement in general.

This fact is sometimes obscured by a document called the Powell Memo. Written by Lewis Powell, shortly before Nixon made him a Supreme Court Justice, it calls on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to defend “the free enterprise system” from “the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians” that would dare to criticize it.

The Powell Memo kicks off most histories of the right-wing think tank, not because it was so clearly influential, but because it was
so clear: “The national television networks should be monitored,” Powell wrote, “in the same way that textbooks should be kept under constant surveillance.” What passionate critic of the free enterprise system could resist such a quote?
^*
*

But the quotes have disguised the fact that Powell's suggestions didn't exactly come to pass. It wasn't the Chamber of Commerce or major businesses that took on these tasks, but a network of independent, ideologically based think tanks. And these think tanks weren't founded by eminent Men of Business, but by a new class of people—a group we might call political entrepreneurs.

Dan Burt was a little-known Massachusetts lawyer when he took over the Capital Legal Foundation and turned it into one of the first effective conservative-movement law firms. Henry Manne was merely a legal scholar when he began pitching Pierre Goodrich (millionaire stockpicker) on building a new right-wing law school. Lee Liberman Otis was just a law student when she started pitching Scaife and others on the need for the Federalist Society.
^†
†

The field even has its serial entrepreneurs. Paul Weyrich was the press secretary for a Republican senator when he met Joseph Coors. Over the next few decades, Weyrich used Coors' money to start the Heritage Foundation, the Free Congress Foundation, Moral Majority, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and various other groups that haunt any history of modern conservatism's rise.

Just like the vendors at the inauguration, political entrepreneurs sought out people with money and tried to sell them something they didn't even know they wanted. (Manne to Goodrich: “The Augean stables were cleaned by diverting a stream of water through them. . . . One law school dedicated to propositions like those you
propound . . . would do more to discipline all the other[s] than anything I can think of.” Note how Manne claims to promote the ideas
“you
propound.”) Nonprofits are small enough and rich people are wealthy enough that it only takes a handful of lunatics with money to fund a whole forest of think tanks.

And yet, there must be crazy lefty billionaires too. So why do most lefty think tanks rarely go any farther than the Clintonite consensus? (To take a story in the news recently, conservatives have
had some fun
pointing out the Center for American Progress, like Obama, is in favor of sending
more
troops to Afghanistan.) It's easy to understand why big corporations wouldn't want to push left-wing ideas, but it's harder to understand why there aren't any brazen rich people who do.

Which leads me to suspect the limiting factor isn't the funders, but the entrepreneurs. The average lefty wants to
do stuff
, not hobnob with rich people and manage a staff. They're not particularly cut out for organizational work nor do they hang around with the kind of people who are. If they do hang out with entrepreneurs, they're more likely to be the kind who start small, hip technology companies, which just makes them wonder why they're not making millions doing that instead of wasting time on this political bullshit. (One friend recently left lefty activism to make Firefox plug-ins.)

As a good institutionalist, I'm a bit uncomfortable proposing what basically amounts to a cultural explanation for this phenomenon, but while it's less intellectually satisfying it's at least more politically optimistic. If one of the things holding the left back is a lack of political entrepreneurs, then all we need to do is make more.

Now I just need to find some lunatics with money.

Full disclosure:
Aaron Swartz recently co-founded
the Progressive Change Campaign Committee
, making him something of a political entrepreneur himself. Before that he was one of those lame tech start-up entrepreneurs, founding
reddit.com
. This piece is written entirely in his personal capacity, of course.