Worst Laid Plans
When Herman Cain made his irrelevant 9-9-9 tax plan a focal point of the current political debate, Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich were quick to shout out their 'Me too!' Perry's 20% flat tax, pulled out of the magic hat by a deft right hand, would produce a very serious revenue short fall, but we are not to worry.
Read the entire column on the Daily Mail.
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Dr. Fleming,
You seem to me to be criticizing the government for subsidizing sugar production in this piece, yet you spoke unapprovingly of my claim that tariffs (which are similar in both cause and effect to subsidies) were not good policy. I would like to know why a tax on many Americans to keep a few Americans employed in industries where they cannot compete with foreign producers is bad policy, but a tax on foreign products to make them expensive enough that a few American producers can now compete is a good policy.
Mr. Hyams. Why are you so shrill and with so much of an axe to grind all the time?
Relax. Chronicles is not a public policy think tank, where people submit policy suggestions, and come to consensus on it. It doesn't even matter what staff on an ultra-marginal publication with a few thousand copies in circulation think...in the big picture, that is. Chronicles is meant merely as entertainment for the few who enjoy it.
It doesn't matter if Dr. Fleming is being highly inconsistent on principle, because the rule of Tacitus applies to all stately affairs: Know all, but do not follow up on everything.
There is no inconsistency whatsoever. In the previous discussion I took issue with the dogmatic mysticism preached by free-trade fanatics who claim, simultaneously, that free trade helps everyone and that, while free trade may hurt some people who happen to be very near and dear to us, we should not care. In this discussion, even Mr. Hyams could see that the point of the argument is the futility of elaborate plans proposed by presidential candidates. As an illlustration cited the two parties' corrupt policies on alternative energy. The Republican plan is based on the erroneous assumption that it can be profitable and energy-efficient in these northern latitudes to convert corn into ethanol. This works in Brazil with sugar cane, but even in Louisiana, it was never efficient to produce sugar, which always required tariffs. If we were arguing this in 1850, however, a sugar planter could quite fairly argue that this domestic industry deserved as much subsidy as manufacturing done in New England.
In a general way I have always been basically opposed to interventions in the market, which distorted the economy and enriched the few at the expense of the many. This pragmatic approach, however, is something quite different from the free-trade ideology, a product of classical liberalism and libertarianism, which demands total and unquestioning allegiance. For the liberal/libertarian, it is quite wrong to privilege your own people--whether fellow-citizens or kinfolks--over 7 billion globally free-trading strangers. The sugar tariff does us comparatively little damage, and if it raises the price of sweets, so much the better for all of us. But the liberal/libertarian ideology is a moral poison that destroys human charity and leads inevitably to socialism.
By the way, since my attempts to comment at the Mail's section has repeatedly failed (they never approve anything I write, no matter how simple and harmless), I just have to say this.
Generally, the ruler is supposed to be an interpreter and not a master of people's fates. The ruler of a republic can't just propose anything he so desires, and must put forth his proposal to a council and defer to their judgment instead of ruling by his whims.
In other words, what is wrong with that man called Mitt Romney's flipflopping and lack of principle? You have criticized him for it in your Mail columns. He will change according to the mood of the electorate and the general public, and he will not be fixed on his ideology and principle as George Bush was. He will not set policy himself, but will meet Congress and Senate on it first, if only to protect his political career. Isn't that exactly what the ruler of a republic is supposed to do? That's how I (somewhat) understand what a republic is; I might be wrong, but still.
Mr. Sanjay, since I am the one with power to approve comments on my columns, I am baffled by your failure. Please try again, going directly to my simple blog posts, and I'll keep an eye out. Put up something like the above.
You are both right and wrong. An elected head of state in a republic does not possess dictatorial authority and must be willing to compromise at every step with his opposition. On the other hand, a practical compromise is not at all the same thing as a surrender of principle. Take this simple and start example. As a presidential candidate, I might state my unequivocal opposition to abortion on ethical and religious grounds. As President, however, I should be abusing my office if I attempted to impose my views via some executive order, and it would be counter-productive not to work constructively with Congress to begin to whittle away at the edges of the currently unrestricted abortion rights, e..g., by proposing to re-empower parents of minor daughters or give husbands veto power.
Prateek Sanjay, "It doesn’t even matter what staff on an ultra-marginal publication ( like Chronicles) with a few thousand copies in circulation think…in the big picture, that is."
This is so true, Prateek. It reminded me of an old Joe Sobran column written about the liars and lunatics who really matter these days. He was talking about George Will but it could have easily been applied to any of the hundreds of "conservative" kids writing to form the Big Picture for our dear, defenseless, public.
"In fact, in early 2003, George (Will) was applauding the other George for threatening to invade Iraq, using the full arsenal of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-neocon rationales and slogans: “weapons of mass destruction,” “regime change,” “Nuremberg trials,” etc., with swipes at Franco-European cowardice. In fact, to read those columns now is to return to the enchanted land of early Limbaugh. A book I don’t expect to read soon is The Confessions of George Will.
Conservatism? Again, it depends on how you define it. The English philosopher Michael Oakeshott, whose name Will used to drop when he was showing the rubes how tony true conservatism could be, warned against using government as “a vast reservoir of power” in pursuit of “favorite projects.” Such talk now sounds archaic. But so, already, do David Brooks’ “national-greatness conservatism” and Fred Barnes’ eulogies of Bush’s “big-government conservatism,” to say nothing of Barnes’ judgment that the Iraq invasion was “the greatest act of benevolence one nation has ever performed for another” and Richard Lowry’s 2005 effusion on the cover of National Review: “We Are Winning!” No wonder conservatives aren’t quoting themselves much these days. Only the neocons, or at least the few who still admit they are neocons, still insist that the war was a splendid idea until Bush & Co. made a hash of it.
How did it come to this? National Review has had to repudiate its own founder, the aging, ailing Bill Buckley, who has written that he would have opposed the war had he known in 2003 what he knows now. Will has taken a wiser approach: Get lost in the crowd, act as if it had all been someone else’s blunder, and pray that nobody digs up your old columns.
And if you write about someone who was right all along, such as Ron Paul, just sneer at him."
Not to sound to much like Bill Clinton, but what do we mean when we say something matters? Who matters more, culinarily, a great or even good chef, who serves perhaps 10,000 people in a year or McDonald's? A surgeon who saves perhaps 1000 lives or a quack selling milllions his cure for cancer? HL Mencken or Henry Luce? It is said that one of the most influential publications of the 20th century was a little German rag that numbered no more than a few thousand subscribers but profoundly shaped leftist ideology for decades to come.
I used to have this conversation with conservatives who believed they exercised influence when their stale repetitions of the liberal line were approved in the Washington Post. I used to say of the late Paul Weyrich that he spent his entire career trying to get in front of parades, waving his arms in the vain pretense he was actually leading the parade.
A few things, plainly, do matter. Our family and friends matter, and if that is not quite enough to satisfy us, then there is the satisfaction of writing a good poem or painting a good painting or fighting a god fight or preparing a good meal. Everything else, particularly catering to the mob, is not only worthless but pernicious. It is only the few people who know this that can be said to be truly human. The rest are Plato's featherless bipeds.
Tom,
It is still nice to know there exists, in the land of my birth,a place (however small, warm and charming)_ to eat Thanksgiving dinner where no "Tofurkey" is served. Keep up the good work.
"...and he will not be fixed on his ideology and principle as George Bush was."
George Bush had no mind or ideas of his own.
Mr. Sanjay, I believe that you have to be "logged in" to post a comment on the Daily Mail website, just as you have to be logged in here to post a comment. The difference is that at the Daily Mail they let you compose a comment when you are not logged in and then just discard it when you submit it.
@Peter Arnold of Australia
Even so, Bush was not known for changing his mind or admitting to be wrong and then changing course.
With a man like Romney in office nearly a decade ago, we would have seen a faster admission of how the War on Terror is not working well in its given form, and then he would probably even claim that was his position all along. At the very least, he would have been flexible enough to go 180 degrees on the idea that nation-building abroad is the same as fighting terrorism. (Then the rise of Sunni extremists who are currently eradicating the oldest Christian community in the world would never happen.)