Worse than you might think, but...

Having recently addressed an example from the past of how a distorted narrative was employed in the world of arts and literature to misrepresent people and circumstances, let us turn to the world of journalism.

The perceptive Michael Walsh makes the following observation:

The suicide of American journalism, and the “objective” ideal I grew up with as a young reporter, continues apace, as I noted in this space yesterday and the IBD website mentions today:

Media Malfeasance: In less than two weeks, bombshell stories of a vicious gang rape and a millionaire teen investor were exposed as frauds that never would have made it into print but for gross negligence and liberal bias.
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There’s a reason that, back in the day, every revolution began be seizing the newspapers and radio stations. The Left understands, far more than the Right, that propaganda is everything — and if it has to kill American journalism to make its points, then so be it.

Over at Sultan Knish, Daniel Greenfield has some typically perceptive thoughts on “Life in Post-Truth America.” Well worth a read.

Worse than the hoaxes and reporting of half truths are the errors of omission.  The neglect of both stories that make their side look bad (as if they should be taking sides) and stories that present the opposition in a positive light.

Excerpts from the column by the prolific Mr. Greenfield include:

The unreliable narrator has crossed over from a fictional device in novels to memoirs, journalism and into politics.
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 The device of the unreliable narrator puts truth out of reach. It says that there is no such thing as truth, only various perspectives on an event.
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 In the absence of facts, there can be no reality. There is only ideology.
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 ObamaCare was an ugly collectivist bureaucratic dinosaur clothed in imaginary stories. The stories about it, about the economy, about the war are still being told. Added to it are new stories about racism. The stories are passionate, compelling and appealing. They are also completely unreal.

Progressives don’t only live in a post-American world; they live in a post-Truth world. A world without facts and without truth is one in which the America that was cannot exist.

America had prospered because of a firm belief in a discoverable and exploitable reality. That was the country that could build skyscrapers and fleets in a year. Post-Truth America has little interest in big buildings because it’s too busy enacting a psychodrama in which the earth is about to be destroyed. And fleets, like horses and bayonets and facts, are 19th century toys that are much less interesting than the manipulation of people through lies and deceit.

Lena Dunham’s Barry and Obama’s Barry are both imaginary creatures. They are the sophisticated products of disordered minds and a disordered civilization whose leading figures lie as instinctively and as shamelessly as any pre-rational culture that could not distinguish between lies and truth. 

The cause for optimism is that two of the redoubts of the left, media and academia, will come under increasing competitive pressure for many years to come.   (see also here and here)

Grumpy Uncles

A friend of mine recently accused me in particular, and libertarians (and probably conservatives) in general, of being "grumpy uncles":

"I'm still looking for the avowed libertarian who doesn't come across as a grumpy uncle."

I don't think I qualify as an "avowed" libertarian, but some background is in order.  I would describe my friend as being enamored with Statism and I take the definition of Statism right out of the dictionary: "the principle or policy of concentrating extensive economic, political, and related controls in the state at the cost of individual liberty."  He believes that the reduction of individual liberty is more than made up for by the solutions made possible using the resources available to a large and powerful government.

Each of us occasionally sends the other a book to read.  The last book I sent him was A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell which makes the argument (compellingly, in my opinion) that a vast number of ideological disagreements can be traced back to assumptions about human nature and the extent of the malleability of human nature.

My friend continued with:

"Although I've experienced plenty of times with you when joy was the operative factor, your written language almost always comes across as negative when it comes to evaluating the human condition (starting with yourself)."

I'm no angel and I know it and I rather doubt that the world is populated with all that many angels or even saints.  Perhaps I'm projecting, but I think it's likely that most people are like me, and with the right incentives have a capacity to live good lives that are beneficial to themselves and those around them.  However, without those incentives or with the wrong incentives, they have the capacity for evil, perhaps great evil.

An example I've given both to my friend and detailed in comment sections of various blogs (including this one) is that I'd be a disaster if I was working within a government framework and had much power.  While I probably wouldn't hurt any fellow citizens if it didn't benefit me (and my family, friends, and communities), if I was presented with a situation where I could extract a penny from every citizen and line my pockets with it, I wouldn't hesitate.  A mere penny.  Even the poorest of poor would hardly miss a penny.  And given a population of 300 million, that would be $3,000,000 in my pocket.  Definitely a worthwhile tradeoff to me.  I wouldn't even feel guilty - a mere penny!

When a million politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, government contractors, and constituents all do the same thing, it turns into many thousands of dollars out of the pockets of every citizen every year.  And that's pretty much how the whole lobbyist-bureaucrat game works.

So yes, starting with myself, I have a pretty skeptical view of the human condition when it comes to running governments.

The other reason I'm a grumpy uncle according to my friend, is my disdain for the concept of utilizing experts to tell me and the rest of us how we should live:

"The no-so-subtle loathing by people like Sowell for those of us who dare to imagine that we can actually make the world a better place by taking action at a level above that of the individual used to surprise me given how much empirical evidence there is for the progress wrought on behalf of collective ends.  Sowell and others deride "experts" as if experts have never accomplished something useful."

Yes, I am continually unenthusiastic about assigning yet more resources for yet more "experts" to come up with yet more regulations and programs administered by yet more government costing me yet more money while reducing my liberty every step of the way.  I can see how Statists would find my attitude as decidedly grumpy.

My friend can't understand why I might be grumpy just because I'm forced to fund and be subject to his beloved government and I wanted to try and enlighten him.  Conveniently, he's an avowed Atheist - the type that's certain that deities don't exist, that anyone who's not certain of their non-existence is seriously deluded, and that all religion is evil.  Given that, I wrote the following (unedited) to try to enlighten him as to the cause of my grumpiness:

But let me give an analogy that I think sheds light on why libertarians are "grumpy uncles"... 

So let's say that suddenly, the super majority of Christians in the country managed to get a constitutional amendment passed repealing freedom of religion and declaring the United States to be a Christian nation with forced daily church attendance and whatever the Christian version of sharia law is called including enforced donations to the church.  In addition, the Christians are absolutely certain that this move is required in order to halt and then reverse the rapidly degrading morality that, in their minds, is clearly leading to barbarism and the collapse of the nation.  Because of their certainty of the goodness of their cause, they're also convinced they have the moral high ground in addition to the constitutional and legal high ground. 

And let's take it one step further such that every country on earth also became a Christian country except a dozen poverty stricken hell holes.

So I rather imagine that if you found yourself in this Christian world with mandatory daily church attendance, you might be a rather grumpy uncle.  Or would you go to church with joy in your heart? 

That's what the world looks like to libertarians, except substitute centralized government for church.  That's why we're grumpy uncles.

I'm not religious and for me Big Church and Big Government look remarkably similar.  They have leaders, followers, power, corruption, certainty of rightness (moral superiority, better world or afterlife, etc.), evangelical leanings, ostracizing or dealing harshly with heretics, etc.

From the outside, all dogmas look the same and are annoying to everyone else.

Hence the grumpiness.

Barbarism and Tolerance

Richard Fernandez describes a couple of events in far reaches of the world (Tunisia and the Philippines) and concludes that barbarism is at least partly made possible by tolerance.

Possibly that is because moderation itself — with its emphasis on tolerance and rational cogitation — is vulnerable to violence in ways that the raw human instinct is not.  The moderate Tunisians are far too well mannered to act against extremists. Like tolerant people the world over, they withhold judgment until the last. Their moment of presentiment never happens; rational thought is retrospective to start with and the decision point may come not at all.

The basic man still has some advantages over the supreme intellectual in the immediate face of danger. What saved [some people] was not their education or refinement. It was the memory of living in dangerous places and the instincts formed thereby. ... education as much as anything else, prepared many Jews to voluntarily walk into the gates of Auschwitz. They could not conceive of something as awful, as barbarous as that death camp, even as they passed it portals. Only the men who had seen others at their worst could perceive the danger and ready themselves to resist what rational man could not apprehend.

He explains in more detail (In the comments):

It is fundamentally a good thing to be tolerant and civilized. But in order for civilization to work, barbarism must be constantly kept at bay. In the state of nature tolerance is repaid with death. Hence, it is the duty of the King’s Justice to keep totalitarian influences in check in order to preserve the luxury of civility. You need a fund of safety in order to afford to be decent. Run out of safety and you run out of civility.

Tolerance spent wastefully may eventually so empower extremists that it will destroy the tolerance itself in the long run. So while tolerance is good it must shelter beneath a roof through which the rain must never pour.

Barbarism was defeated so thoroughly 70 years ago that most of the Western World think it is just a boogeyman story; something that never existed except in the stories of old people to scare children today. They feel so secure they can’t comprehend the dangers of letting the plague get a foothold again. It is unfortunate they cannot conceive of the Design Margin running out.

In Michigan today, barbarism reared its ugly head.  In addition to a union thug punching out conservative comedian Steven Crowder at a protest, the crowd pulled down a tent and began walking across without knowing whether or not people were left inside the tent.  If there had been people inside, they would've been killed.

We're seeing more violent protests like this one in the west and in the United States.  Violent mobs that don't meet violent resistance and/or rapid retribution and punishment for their violence are likely to embolden others who have a penchant and/or use for violence, possibly causing violence, intimidation, and terrorism to snowball.  Like the moderate Tunisians, conservatives in the west may also be too well mannered to resist effectively.  The curse of interesting times may be rapidly approaching.

How Lobbying Works

Politicians need lots and lots of money for their election campaigns. Corporations want legislation that discourages competitors and boosts profits. Lobbyists, with the help of campaign finance laws, provide the match making between the politicians and corporations.

The executives of a corporation hire a lobbyist. The lobbyist figures out which Senators and Representatives can write and/or get legislation passed. The executives (and underlings) donate money to those Senators and Representatives and even the President in order to further that process. Because these donations are public information, the lobbyist is able to compile a list of donations from the employees of that corporation and calculate a total. The lobbyist goes to the politicians and points out the "generosity" of the corporation. The politicians push legislation through that benefits the corporation.

The politicians, the lobbyists, and the corporations win. The taxpayers lose.

There are some interesting subtleties. The corporation does not demand or require that anybody donate to various campaigns. That would be illegal. Indeed, they may not even suggest it directly. Instead, it's known through the grapevine (but certainly not officially) that your campaign contributions will be monitored (and can be because it's all public information).

When describing corporation strategy and business development in meetings and in company newsletters, the politicians that can help the company are identified. You then donate to those campaigns. You get raises and bonuses that are partly based on reimbursing you for those political donations. Again, not officially, but that's how it works. You don't have to do it, but it will adversely affect your compensation and career if you don't.

It's funny to me that most people think that making donation information public makes politics somehow more fair when, in fact, the whole purpose of doing it this way was to enable corporations to direct their executives and employees to support various candidates. If campaign contributions were secret, it would be much harder to do.

That's why a Media Matters "correction" (via an Instapundit post and Reason article) is so silly. The "correction" was that various articles in the main stream and non-main stream media were incorrect when they stated that Obama received a huge amount of money from BP. According to Media Matters, the money didn't come from BP, but rather from employees of BP.

It's pretty much the exact same thing!

What's News?

I'm sorry, but the entire punditocracy has missed the point.

It is NOT news that someone in show business makes an intensely rude, crude, lewd, insulting, disgusting and/or despicable comment regarding an entirely inappropriate subject. Indeed, if we demanded an apology every time that happened, we'd never get anything else done.

The point is that Letterman's comment is a shot across the bow. He is saying, "Governor Palin, if you so much as poke your nose outside the great State of Alaska, we will insult and smear and humiliate and hound you and your family and your community and anybody who thinks or even looks like you until you feel so degraded and miserable that you run back home with your tail between your legs and never, ever come back. We hate you, we fear you, we loathe you, and we will stop at nothing to destroy you."

That's the news.

Public Choice Theory and Taxation

I noticed this column in the WSJ the other day:

"People say all the time: 'We can't pick winners and losers.' Well then fine. Take every single dollar of subsidy out of the federal tax code. Get rid of it all. . . . Let's have a real level playing field where nobody gets a penny in subsidy."
– Hillary Clinton, quoted in USA Today, April 5, 2008

Now, there's a capital idea – and just in time for April 15. The simplest, fairest and most economically efficient tax code would end all special interest tax advantages and flatten tax rates. Except Mrs. Clinton was ridiculing this idea. She went on to say that if subsidies vanish from the tax code, we'd "hear the squeals of protest from Wall Street to Houston to Silicon Valley."

Her philosophy certainly fits with that of the current Congress, which is becoming a tax loophole production factory for the powerful.
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This giveaway came only a few weeks after the National Association of Home Builders threatened to suspend their PAC contributions to Congress "until further notice" – meaning until they saw more return on their political investments. Congratulations. That gambit paid off big time. Other winners include the large Wall Street banks that have lost money in the subprime mortgage meltdown, including Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley, which also qualify for rebates to offset current losses.

With this loophole factory open for business on Capitol Hill again, business lobbies are spending more money than ever to curry Congressional favor.

At least this exercise is making clear what Democrats really mean by tax "fairness." It means raising tax rates so they can then sell tax breaks to the highest corporate bidder. We have certainly come a long way from 1986, when a Democratic Congress joined with Ronald Reagan to strip the tax code of most tax deductions and lower tax rates to a high of 28%. That reform spirit is dead on Capitol Hill.

When people in great numbers profess to want tax simplification or the elimination of subsidies of various kinds and yet politicians ignore this it is often fruitful to examine the matter from a public choice theory perspective. Who better to turn to in such matters than James Buchanan.

I am reminded of this, reviewed here:

The editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Joseph Stiglitz, asked me to write a piece assessing the 1986 act from a public-choice perspective. I wrote an article that was pub­lished in 1987 in the Journal of Economic Perspectives (Bu­chanan 1987). I am very glad I am on record with that piece because all of my predictions turned out to be precisely on target. Because I predicted from a public-choice perspective that Congress had exhausted the rents that it could get from selling loopholes. Therefore if it could sweep them all clear and cut the rates, it would then have the chance to raise more revenue by immediately starting raising rates again with a wider base, which is what Congress did. Second and more important, once Congress had wiped out all those rents, it could then start reselling the rents. And of course that is exactly what happened. The act was hardly cool off the presses when Congress started putting in new loopholes, new changes. It did that in the 1990 schemes, and it did that again in the 1992 schemes, and, of course, Clinton is doing that with abandon now. When they talk about targeted taxes and targeted programs, which is nothing more than selling loopholes for these rents. I am unhappy, as Richard Mus­grave surely is, with what has happened since the 1986 act, but that is predictable, necessarily predictable, given the way we make tax policy. And I think if you come at this from a public-choice constitutionalist perspective, you do in fact get a totally different view on the whole fiscal state or fiscal structure.

The members of the sausage factory known as Congress are very adept at acquiring campaign contribution or other things they are desirous of in return for various tax breaks, subsidies or protection from onerous regulation (wait that last one is a good thing) . This is one reason why changes with very broad support are often difficult to realize.

I Was Once a Communist

No, really! I was! I wasn't a card carrying member or anything like that, but I strongly believed (perhaps even in a religious sense) in the communist ideology.

I was introduced to Marx's (Karl's, not Groucho's) works in high school history class when I was sixteen years old. I found that communism was an amazingly powerful and appealing idea. To me, it was by far the most powerful and appealing idea that I've ever heard. It was intoxicating even. A brotherhood of mankind! To each according to their needs!

So I can strongly relate to all frustrated Leftists. They are seriously addicted to an idea. An idea that appeals to the entirety of their heart, their soul, and their entire being. Have you ever been addicted to anything or interacted with addicts? If you have, you probably know that rationality is way, way down on the list of priorities for an addict. It's really pointless to try and have a rational conversation with an addict about his or her addiction.

I'm obviously not much of a communist now (though I've been called one recently at Cafe Hayek, so maybe a few traits still linger). Sometime between 16 and 46 I changed my mind about collectivism in general and communism in particular.

So what changed my mind? There were several things, of course. One of the biggest was to observe how people actually lived under communist rule.

There were always troubling reports of people fleeing communist countries There were the boat people and the communist countries did, after all, seem to build fences to keep people in. Why? The answer I was given from my respected friends was that it wasn't true at all, it was just U.S. government propaganda. As further evidence, they pointed out that government propaganda regarding marijuana was clearly bogus (as determined by our careful research and personal observations of actual users). Therefore, that was proof that the government lies about everything, right?

In 1984, Hungary and Czechoslovakia began allowing western tourists to visit. I went so I could see for myself whether or not these places were worker's paradises. What I saw with my own lyin' eyes was shocking.

First, the comparison with Germany, the country on the other side of the border from Czechoslovakia was stark. The farm land in Germany was completely planted, the barns well maintained, the houses pretty and painted. Everything was well kept up. Just on the other side of the border in Czechoslovakia, fields lay fallow, barns were falling over, and the houses looked like they hadn't been painted in decades. There was no physical reason why anything should have been different on these adjacent tracts of farmland, yet the difference was like day and night.

Prague is a spectacularly beautiful city, but it was terribly dirty and sooty, the air was terrible (I could hardly breathe), there were bullet holes everywhere (from WWII? from the ending of the "Prague Spring"? who knows?), and it was dark and dreary like a scene from an old haunted movie (I kept expecting to run into a vampire or something). And I did run into zombies - the people were depressed and lifeless. They almost never smiled. In pubs there would be many people so drunk that they had passed out on the bar. They walked slowly and sullenly as if they'd forgotten where they were going or didn't care - just like zombies.

It was a real eye-opener. But alas, my eyes were the only ones ever opened from that trip. Because as I describe this and you read it, you're probably thinking one of two things. If you've never been enticed by Marxism, what I've just described probably isn't very surprising to you. On the other hand, if you're a Leftist, you're probably thinking, "Bret's either lying or severely exaggerating, it couldn't really be that bad." In either case, my words have convinced nobody of anything. To actually be convinced to change your opinion, you would have to travel somewhere and see something you didn't expect. Like me.

One of the responses I heard was, "Oh, well, the eastern Europeans are just like that - you know, drunk and depressed." However, years later, after the Berlin wall bit the dust, I visited Prague again. I was stunned at the change. What was dirty was now clean, the air was fresh, what was dark and dreary was now bright and cheerful (perhaps a little too bright and cheerful as they had stuccoed over some of the historic stone buildings with yellow stucco), and the people had changed most of all. There were smiling faces everywhere, and everyone was moving briskly and with purpose. They radiated happiness. The zombies had come back to life and in just a few years. So no, eastern Europeans aren't "just like that." Communism made them so, plain and simple. Fortunately, it was temporary.

The point is that there's nothing that comes close to experiencing something in person as far as influencing ones perspective. Anything else is easily written off as lies and propaganda. It's harder to write off what you see with your own eyes. Your eyes might be lyin', but they're still so much more believable than anything else.