Systems Part 3: Condensations And Fluxions

We begin with a paradox of sorts.

Imagine a committee of nine, whose decisions are made by majority vote. It would seem that a cabal of five "insiders" that resolve to act in concert could have its way with such a committee. After all, the four "outsiders" are effectively neutered by the existence of a coherent majority bloc.

But wait: That cabal of five could be dominated by a sub-group of three members who resolve to steer the group's decisions according to their preferences. The two "outside insiders" would not possess the means to override their "inside insider" brethren's collective will. So those three "inside insiders" could rule the bloc of five, and therefore the entire committee.

Wait, we're not done yet! That "inside inside" group of three could be dominated by an alliance of two of its members who always act in concert, effectively disenfranchising the third member. And so two members who stand together would dominate the group of three which dominates the group of five which dominates the committee!

What's wrong with this picture?

***

The above ridiculousness is what arises from a static, depersonalized picture of collective behavior. We have nine "votes" rather than persons capable of sensing their environment and reacting according to their interests in subsequent interactions. More, the sub-groups above are postulated without process: there is no hint of the negotiations and jockeying for position that always precede the formation of an effective bloc.

Among the most interesting studies in finite mathematics are those that analyze effective decision-making power in committee-like settings. Game theory dedicates enormous effort to the analysis of such things...and mostly fails to reach any firm conclusions. As with so many other aspects of life in society, the observable behavior cannot be shown to conform to a law with predictive power. Nevertheless, plausible explanations are available -- and critically important to the understanding of human-based systems.

Cabals of the sort described above do come into existence within bodies that decide and act collectively. However, their scope is never universal. Such a group of "insiders" will usually unite around a particular topic or range of topics; on matters outside that demesne, cabal members will "vote their consciences." Political scientist Jerome Huyler, in his little book Everything You Have, mentions a particularly interesting case: the "urban-rural coalition" that formed in Congress during the Sixties and early Seventies to countervail the growing political clout of America's suburbs. That coalition functioned mainly to promote the commercial interests of the cities and farm districts against suburban opposition; outside that sphere, it showed no influence.

More, such coalitions are not immortal. Bargaining never ends; neither do appeals to the narrow personal interests of individuals. Atop that, individuals' personal interests and larger commitments of allegiance are dynamic as well; if one cannot freeze Smith's priorities and values into an enduring stasis, neither can he guarantee Smith's loyalty to a larger group over an indefinite period.

These influences, and the dynamics they propel and condition, are important even within the most rigidly hierarchical systems.

***

In viewing an abstract hierarchical organization such as a corporation, we imagine decision-making as an orderly process. Policies flow downward from the chief executive officer, to be decomposed by subordinates into ever-smaller and more definite units, until front-line supervisors finally reduce them to implementable tasks for their subordinates. Inversely, information gathered during policy decomposition and implementation flows upward from lower to higher levels, effectuating modifications to existing policies and their implementation, and stimulating the development of new ones.

Both views are fatally naive. Consider the following Table of Organization:

A policy promulgated by Acme's CEO Smith to Vice-Presidents Jones and Davis will always be sufficiently general that the VPs can add their own glosses to it. Those accretions will always express the provincial priorities of the VPs to some degree. More, inasmuch as Jones and Davis are rivals -- persons at the same level on the Table of Organization always are -- their addenda will likely address some aspect of the competition between them.

Jones and Davis will further decompose Smith's policy for dispatch to Directors Blake, Swift, Allen, and Frank, who will infect their marching orders with their own personal and organization-provincial desiderata before passing bits of it on to Group Leaders white, Green, Sepia, Black, Scott, Whitt, Flynn, and Kurtz. In similar fashion those worthies will add a dash of personal and provincial seasoning to the bits they pass down to the unnamed grunts they supervise.

The grunts, however, are not without power of their own. Indeed, their degree of control over Acme's behavior might exceed that of the layers above them, for they determine how the implementation of the fully decomposed policy prescription will proceed, and what information about it will be reported upward. Subordinates have always "managed their managers" in this fashion; decision-making depends on information, and control of the most important information resides with the grunts themselves. The process recurs as information passes upward from group leaders to directors to vice-presidents to the Big Kahuna. If each level reports to its supervising level with 90% fidelity to the relevant facts, the reports that reach Smith will be:

(0.90)⁴ == 0.656 == 65.6% reliable

Thus, Smith will have been deprived of over a third of the information available about "what's really happening." In this organization of four supervisory levels -- a remarkably shallow one for American enterprises of any sort -- where 90% of the relevant facts are faithfully relayed upward by each level -- a highly optimistic estimate, empirically speaking -- the CEO's deductions, inferences, and subsequent decisions will be no better than 65.6% on-target.

This isn't a perfect guarantee that Acme will be in failure mode most of the time...but it comes damned close.

***

Add to the above simple depiction of the SNAFU Principle the competitive aspects of life in a hierarchy and the personal priorities of individuals at every level, and you have a formula for systems failure.

This is not to suggest that systems never accomplish any of their overt objectives. Rather, it predicts that:

• Over time, a system will expend its resources, including the time and energies of its members, on priorities other than the overt objectives of the system;
• To a degree that varies combinatorially with the number of individuals involved;
• And faster than linearly with the complexity of the command-and-control pathways specified for the system.

This can be good or bad, depending on the nature of the system, the quality of its overt objectives, and the degree of divergence between those objectives and the priorities of its component individuals and sub-groups.

More anon.

American morons.

My mother used to say that she never saw a people more willing to give away their country.

~ Caller to Chris Plante show on WMAL about his mother, one of the original refugees from Castro's Cuba. (Not an exact quote. BB)

A Cabal Of Its Enemies

[The following essay was first posted at the Palace Of Reason on September 2, 2003. I consider it a useful adjunct to the ongoing series on the nature and behavior of systems of all kinds.]

Robert Conquest's Three Laws of Politics:

1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

There's been a lot of discussion recently, on the Web and elsewhere, about the State Department's well known tendency to impede the implementation of Bush Administration policies as they touch on the Israeli / Palestinian conflagration, the Muslim Middle East generally, and the ongoing crisis in North Korea. Some have speculated that Secretary of State Colin Powell, though a retired soldier, is more comfortable with appeasement than with confrontation. Others have opined that the institutional tendencies of the State Department are simply more geared to talk, the polite fictions of diplomacy, and the consequent compromises, than to face-offs from which one side or the other must back down.

Professor Conquest, as noted above, had a simpler take on it. Historically, his capsule seems to hold true, at least for "mature" bureaucracies in which structural and personnel changes have dampened to "holding" levels. But questions of no little importance remain: Why should the incentives that govern America's State Department perennially produce results that better suit the interests of America's enemies than those of her people -- regardless of the ideological alignment of the executive administration or the majorities in Congress? What is the nature of the mechanism? Can it be exclusively the incentives produced by civil service tenure rules and governmental inertia? Why should those things work against us, rather than for us?

It's a life study. One of the master intellects of the past century, the great Cyril Northcote Parkinson, made such matters his special field. Despite his penetration, he left the work unfinished. But your Curmudgeon is here to pick up where that mighty mind left off.

---

Parkinson promulgated a number of laws of bureaucracy that serve to explain a huge percentage of its characteristics. They've exhibited remarkable predictive power within their domain. The first of these is the best known:

Parkinson's First Law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

Parkinson inferred this effect from two central principles governing the behavior of bureaucrats:

1. Officials want to multiply subordinates, not rivals.
2. Officials make work for one another.

Like most generalizations, these are not always true...but the incentives that apply specifically to tax-funded government bureaucracies make them true much more often than not. They make a striking contrast with the almost exactly opposite behavior observable in private enterprise.

In his wonderfully humorous book of business advice Further Up The Organization, former Avis CEO Robert Townsend advises the young manager to try to eliminate his own job. "No one ever got fired for telling his supervisor, 'They do it better without me than with me. What should I do now?'", writes Townsend, and in the world of free enterprise, he's right. Profit-seeking enterprises prize that kind of effectiveness. It is not so in government.

Government work is never done. In part, that's because, in the grand scale, the problems addressed by governments are eternal problems, to be solved only by the Last Judgment. But in greater part, it's because solving problems even on the small scale is antithetical to the personal well being of bureaucrats. Charles Peters, editor of the Washington Monthly, noted this in his book How Washington Really Works. He observed that it is the least effective organs within government that invariably receive the largest increases in funding and staffing. The lesson is seldom lost on the young bureaucrat with a hankering to move up.

That young bureaucrat will profit from deliberate ineffectiveness to the extent that he can get himself viewed as an asset by his superiors and a non-threat by his peers. His superiors want him to produce justifications for the enlargement of their domains. His peers simply ask that he not tread on their provinces.

To justify enlarging his sub-pyramid of the bureaucracy, a manager must represent his efforts as vital and his resources as inadequate. This can put peers in a bureaucracy into conflict with one another, but the budgetary constraints on the bureaucracy as a whole will often give way even if every sub-bureaucracy within it demands more people and funds simultaneously, provided only that Congress can be made to see the alternatives as unacceptably worse.

How does one engineer the required perceptions? By a combination of techniques, the most effective being the partial suppression of information, both about the nature of the problems one addresses and one's labors to solve them.

Contrary to what intuition might say, a fully informed superior is usually an unhappy man. Even if things are going swimmingly in his organization, if he knows exactly what's being done at the detail level, he'll always see things he disapproves -- because he once did those jobs himself, and will invariably contrast his subordinates' methods unfavorably with his own. The temptation to micro-manage is amplified by the possession of those details. His subordinates will know this, of course, and so will suppress any details below the level required for a broad-brush status report. This is an example of Robert Anton Wilson's "Snafu Principle" in action.

So the portrait of a bureaucracy's operations, as it emerges from the nether depths at which specific tasks are addressed, becomes ever vaguer and less detailed as it approaches presentation to "outsiders": the president, Congress, and the general public. In a sense, the "outsiders" are lucky to get any accurate information at all. If it could get away with it, a bureaucracy's status report to its external control authorities would say nothing but: "You need us desperately, and we're working as hard as we can, but we need more people and money. Send them soonest."

---

Another of Mankind's master intellects, Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, has approached bureaucratic inefficiency from the standpoint of the incentives that govern the use of resources, particularly money. He presented the following matrix of spending decisions:

	The Benefit Will Accrue To Me	The Benefit Will Accrue To Others
The Cost Will Be Borne By Me	I	II
The Cost Will Be Borne By Others	III	IV

This is the incentives matrix each of us faces any time he has to make a spending decision.

In Type I and II situations, the spender is spending his own money, and so has strong incentives to control cost. In Type I situations, where the spender will be purchasing some benefit for himself, he will attempt to maximize the quality of the thing purchased. In Type II situations, where the benefit will go to someone else, the quality of the thing purchased declines in importance, and is sometimes sloughed entirely.

In Type III and IV situations, which embrace all government spending, the spender is spending someone else's money, and so has little or no incentive to control costs. In Type III situations, where the spender is buying something for himself, he'll attempt to maximize the benefit. In Type IV situations, where the spender is buying something for someone else, there are no compelling reasons to control either cost or quality.

Most bureaucratic resource allocation falls into Type IV.

But Friedman's insight ought to be a starting point, not a stopping point, for the understanding of bureaucratic spending decisions. A bureaucrat will learn, given time, how to "spend on others" in such a fashion that the primary benefit flows to himself, particularly as regards the perception outside his domain that what he's doing is critically important and must not be interfered with. It's no accident that every department of the United States federal government runs a public-relations office, something that would be incomprehensible if each department did its work economically and effectively, and were viewed thus by the general public.

In the case of our State Department, it is the bureaucrats' desire that we see their operations as critically important to the nation's interests, as America's relations with other governments affect them. Central to the maintenance of this image is the related perception that, unless the State Department is allowed free rein and generous resources, America will be perennially, ruinously at war.

---

It's one of the present day's largest ironies that our Secretary of State, Colin Powell, is a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and one of the most celebrated soldiers of recent memory. The State Department and the Defense Department are bureaucratic peers and therefore rivals. Each strives to minimize the importance of the other.

Von Clausewitz and others have termed war "a continuation of politics by other means," but when viewed from the perspective of the State Department official, war is the declaration that his organization has failed of its purpose. He sees it as bad public relations for his entire function. Thus, even when the nation's interests would be overwhelmingly better served by war than by the continuation of diplomacy, the State Department man will prefer diplomacy. It's in his demesne, and enhances his prestige by enhancing the prestige of his trade.

It's not too much to say that averting war regardless of its desirability or justifiability is near the top of every State Department functionary's list of priorities. In this pursuit, the State Department will often find itself opposing even peacetime operations of the military designed to improve its effectiveness, such as the acquisition of new weapons or the enlargement of its ranks. Tom Clancy provided a fictional example of this in his novel The Cardinal Of The Kremlin. The State Department set its face against the perfection of an American anti-missile defense, in no small measure because it would reduce the desirability of arms-control treaties with the Soviet Union.

In the real world, we often find the State Department opposing military decisions, for example about troop deployments or weapons development, specifically out of fear of the reactions of other governments. Objectively, if those decisions made the United States stronger and safer at an acceptable cost, it would be madness to oppose them. But to a State Department loyalist, who has no control over the instruments of force wielded by the Defense Department and whose primary goal is to avert war at all costs, what matters most is the reactions of those other States. If they make unpleasant noises or military adjustments of their own, the State Department man instinctively assesses the risks of war as increasing. Other governments know this, and exploit it.

Not every new State Department employee enters his responsibilities with all these attitudes already in place, of course. But over time, the department's institutional incentives and outlook will filter out those who fail to adopt the dominant view in Foggy Bottom: War always means failure -- for the State Department.

---

There is a final set of considerations, the least agreeable of the major ones, that must be addressed before we conclude. They relate to the worldview that forms among diplomats and their supporting staffs as a result of their professional circumstances.

The diplomat lives among foreigners. His usual society is, therefore, not aligned with the supposed point of his job: the maintenance and advancement of his country's national interests. Given this, it would take a will of iron to resist the tendency to draw closer to the representatives of other nations, with whom he must work closely over the span of decades, even at the cost of distancing himself from his fellow citizens. He will unconsciously edge toward the attitudes and convictions of those who form his usual environment. This will affect everyone who makes dealing with foreigners his life's work; there is no obvious countermeasure for it.

Even more important, a professional diplomatic corps, organizationally separate from its control authorities, is a target of opportunity for the governments of other countries. Inducing America's diplomats and support staffs to see their own welfare as more aligned with pleasing other governments than with representing America's interests is a primary objective of foreign powers. They have many kinds of inducement at their disposal.

This is not to suggest that every ambassador, every consular official, and every State Department employee must be constantly scrutinized for indications of treason. However, it would be foolish to deny that foreign powers, who have a large measure of control over how pleasant America's representatives to them find their work, can thereby influence the mindset and responses of those representatives in all manner of venues. Obviously, that influence is unlikely to be in America's favor.

---

Inner Conclusions:

This survey of influences on the State Department and the incentives that affect its personnel appears very bleak. Unfortunately, its implications are strongly confirmed by experience. We've seen our State Department embrace the interests of America's adversaries far too often to wish the matter away.

Everything discussed here touches on motivation at the institutional level. Such motivations arise from the large-scale characteristics of the institutions and the surroundings in which they operate. They cannot be undone by changes in personnel, even the most massive, except over the very short term.

Can anything be done for the long term?

Possibly, but more likely not. The conditions discussed here arise from the nature of the institutions discussed: the State Department and the government milieu generally. They cannot be changed without changing the nature of those institutions in radical ways -- and the institutions could be counted upon to resist externally imposed changes with all the powers at their disposal.

A new Secretary of State would find himself thwarted in any attempt to reform his department, absent powers so sweeping that Congress would be exceedingly unlikely to entrust them to a presidential appointee. After all, those who labor in those institutions would easily persuade themselves that they knew better how things should be than any boss imposed upon them from outside their sphere. They would be "conservative about what they know best," naturally inclined to reject the suggestion that their worldview was in serious error. In the end, the Secretary would almost certainly accept the appearance of change in place of the real thing. Following the incentives that apply to his position in the bureaucracy, he would present it to the nation as a triumph. As Arthur Herzog has noted, "Change is hard, and difficulty makes people impatient."

---

Outer Conclusions:

In reflecting on the totality of the thing, your Curmudgeon finds himself struck by Parkinson's final Law, the last of his intellectual gifts to Mankind:

Law Of The Vacuum: Action expands to fill the void created by human failure.

Action takes many forms. In the world of geopolitics, the most perceptible form is the military kind: the exchange of fire as governments attempt to impose their wills upon one another. War is the ultimate negative-sum game. Even the victor is worse off after a war than before it. This is not to say that war must always be avoided; sometimes all the alternatives are worse. But war becomes ever more necessary to a nation whose professional representatives to foreign powers cannot bring themselves to do the job for which they were hired -- to champion their country's interests plainly, confidently, and fearlessly. To embrace any other agenda than that, whether out of habit, institutional inertia, or the promotion of personal or sectarian priorities above national ones, is to embrace failure itself, and thereby to create a vacuum into which bullets, bombs, and troops will rush.

Verbum sat sapienti.

"Brothers" And Their "Keepers"

Bear with me, Gentle Reader. It will take a few words to get this essay to where it's going. But the subject is an important one.

---

Back at Eternity Road, In April of 2008, my Vietnamese-American sweetie Duyen posted the following, under the title Helping By Not Helping:

Help can cripple or kill you.

There aren't many people who get that. It's so easy to allow someone else to carry your burden for you. It's so easy to allow yourself to become dependent on other people's kindness and generosity. If you're cursed with an accepting nature, you can become a charity addict as easily as breathing. It forecloses your future; everything you might have achieved slips away, forgotten in the relief of not having to work for your own security or prosperity.

It's very important -- critical -- not to help when help is not needed, or not appreciated, or not wanted, or wanted much too much. I know, my Church says otherwise, but I have to disagree. Charity to good people in sudden, unexpected need that's not their fault, who are uncomfortable at being the objects of charity, is usually all right. Charity to people who've never shown any initiative or prudence is always wrong. Good-hearted people have done more harm through generosity than all the murderers that have ever lived. Maybe even including the government murderers....

I don't expect everyone to agree.

And indeed, not everyone did agree...though no one came close to refuting Duyen's central point: "Help" can cripple or kill you. That didn't surprise me at all. For one thing, Duyen is so far above the common herd that most of us can't even see the soles of her Prada pumps. For another, those six boldfaced words don't express a conclusion reached by a logical process, but an observable fact.

There's a reason for that old saying about good intentions.

---

Way, way back at the original Palace Of Reason -- hosted on Yahoo's old GeoCities subsidiary! -- I posted the following, under the title The Circle Of Care:

"Charity" derives from the Latin word "caritas," the concern for others that springs from personal connection. A related word of Greek derivation is "sympathy," the ability to "feel with" another person. These are not relations one can truly have with faceless and nameless strangers at a distance.

True charity requires proximity, for at least two reasons. First, the necessary personal connection, the sense that one is helping one's own, fails at any great remove. Second, human fallibility and weakness guarantee that, just as some will fail to prosper on their own, others will fail to employ charity properly; indeed, to receive money from others sometimes makes one's troubles worse. When this occurs, the giver must give no further, for other measures -- criticism, instruction, discipline -- are clearly indicated. With any separation between the benefactor and his beneficiary, it becomes impossible to know whether help helps in fact, or only in theory and intention.

I meant every word. I still do.

---

I write today because of an event far more recent than the citations above. You can read about it at Big Government, and I hope you will.

What are the standout facts in that article?

• There's a fellow named George Obama who has a familial relationship with Barack Hussein Obama.
• George Obama is 30 years of age and lives in Nairobi, Kenya; Barack Hussein Obama is 52 years old and lives in Washington, D.C.
• According to published reports, George Obama lives on "a few dollars a month." Barack Hussein Obama is a wealthy man (and currently the president of the United States).
• George Obama has a sick son whose medical expenses he cannot meet out of his own resources.
• Barack Hussein Obama has not volunteered to assist George Obama with those expenses.
• Dinesh D'Souza, a conservative writer of some note, has stepped forward and done so.

Here are my questions about the matter:

1. Has Barack Hussein Obama ever met George Obama?
2. If so, what sort of relationship do they have?
3. If not, does Barack have a moral obligation to form some sort of relationship with George?
4. In either case, does Barack have a moral obligation to contribute to the material well-being of George and his family?

Take your time over it, because what's coming next is likely to shock the panties off you.

---

Let's take the segment above and strip off some irrelevancies:

• There's a fellow named Smith who has a familial relationship with Jones.
• Smith is 30 years of age and lives in Nairobi, Kenya; Jones is 52 years old and lives in Washington, D.C.
• According to published reports, Smith lives on "a few dollars a month;" Jones is a rather prestigious and wealthy man with a good income.
• Smith has a sick son whose medical expenses he cannot meet out of his own resources.
• Jones has not volunteered to assist Smith with those expenses.
• Davis, a writer of some note who has an ideological antipathy toward Jones, has stepped forward and done so.

Here are my questions about the matter:

1. Has Jones ever met Smith?
2. If so, what sort of relationship do they have?
3. If not, does Jones have a moral obligation to form some sort of relationship with Smith?
4. In either case, does Jones have a moral obligation to contribute to the material well-being of Smith and his family?

Compare your initial reaction -- i.e., to the first, non-anonymized scenario -- to your reaction to the anonymized version. How do they differ, and why?

---

I am a libertarian-conservative and a firm American patriot. I despise Barack Hussein Obama, his ideology, and the damage he has done to this country. I hope profoundly that Mitt Romney defeats him on November 6.

But I don't hold Barack Hussein Obama personally responsible for relieving the material condition of George Obama. More, I consider it a really cheap shot, well below the ethical level demanded of a decent person, to use George Obama's plight as a political stroke against him.

Half-brothers? So what? I have yet to read anywhere that they're even acquainted, much less "close." The difference in their ages makes it unlikely that they've ever had direct contact with one another.

We are supposed to be better than this. We're supposed to have some understanding of the limits of an individual's responsibilities -- most especially, his moral obligations to unknown others.

We're also supposed to be skeptical of supplicants who importune the well-off. What have you done for yourself? is the question that should rise immediately to our lips. In many cases the answer will be, let us say, unimpressive, especially if the supplicant has long benefited from the generosity of others. I owe you nothing should be the second thing we say, regardless of any and all representations about blood ties and regardless of whether our station in life is due to protracted hard work or a winning lottery ticket. Our subsequent decision to help (or not) must be founded on a cold appraisal of the probable consequences.

George Obama called Dinesh D'Souza and pleaded for material aid. D'Souza gave it to him, which was entirely his decision; never mind what political motive he might have had. But I contend that Barack Hussein Obama owed half-brother George nothing, that he has no more moral obligation to assist his half-brother than has D'Souza, and that his decision not to do so is entirely defensible from all standpoints.

---

I warned you that this was likely to shock you. I intended to shock you, to disorient you and compel you to think freshly about this supposed moral obligation to "help" a "family member." I also want you to think about what ethical boundaries you're willing to observe in our common attempt to remove a wholly unsuitable chief executive from the Oval Office.

We'd better have some, or we're no better than the miscreants we're trying to displace.

Mandatory

There are mornings when I come to the keyboard with a powerful idea for an essay -- Note: this is not the same as "an idea for a powerful essay;" not necessarily, anyway -- but then I perform my mandatory morning news sweep, which covers about thirty diverse sites and feeds, and thereafter find that I must write about something else entirely.

Today is such a day.

***

Over to your right, in the "Blogs And Other Sites" category, under the subhead of "Mainly Politics," you'll find a link for Vlad Tepes's site. Vlad and his Co-Contributor Eeyore concentrate on coverage of the words and deeds of Muslims worldwide. In this pursuit they are tireless, and frequently unearth stories the major media have completely failed to mention, even on page A38 of the Friday Late Evening edition.

If you've never been to Vlad's site, head over there and review today's offerings...and yesterday's, and those of the day before. Then come back here and dare to tell me that "Islam is just one more Abrahamic religion," no worse than Christianity.

***

Long, long ago, at the old Palace Of Reason, I wrote the following:

There's much truth in the old saw that to be anti-immigrant is to be anti-American, for America is a nation of immigrants. We celebrate our origins on other shores, and also our ancestors' good sense in fleeing those places and coming here -- and we never forget that they came here to become Americans, not just Irishmen, Italians, Chinamen, Swedes or Zambians in another land.

The xenophilia of earlier generations of Americans was founded on the assumption of assimilation, the sooner, the better. The demise of this assumption explains the burgeoning xenophobia of our time. The typical immigrant to this nation in this time is determined not to assimilate to American norms, but to retain his earlier national allegiance and cultural identity, sometimes even to the extent of refusing to learn the English language.

Among the least assimilable peoples to reach these shores are Muslims, whether from the Middle East or anywhere else. Though the overwhelming majority of them do learn English, their associations, family structures, religious, marital and other practices tend to isolate them in enclaves with impermeable borders. We've spoken of black ghettoes, of Little Italys and Chinatowns, and now and then of Jewish quarters in our cities, but none of these have demonstrated the Muslim communities' near-absolute resistance to diffusion.

In the face of such separatism, continued American goodwill toward a people who display so much hostility toward American norms and culture is a remarkable thing, for which Americans are to be congratulated. But it might not continue much longer.

Why would anyone come to this country determined not to partake of its virtues and bounties? Once he'd arrived here, what would hold him back from doing so?

The answer is Islam.

Alone among the major religions of the world, Islam:

• opposes material progress and condemns most Earthly pleasures,
• erases all boundaries between religion and politics,
• denies that its adherents have any ethical obligations to non-adherents,
• prescribes death for blasphemy, heresy, and apostasy,
• preaches the use of force to impose itself on all the people of the world,
• promises eternal bliss to those who die fighting to extend its dominion.

One cannot be a "tolerant" Muslim. The concept is internally contradictory. The infidel is the enemy, to be converted by any means fair or foul. They who resist conversion are to be allowed to live only until Islam has acquired sufficient force to pose them the choice of conversion or execution.

To the extent that a Muslim internalizes the precepts of Islam, he ceases to be open to Western concepts of freedom, justice, and tolerance for human diversity and variety. He resolutely resists all such notions, for Islam condemns them all explicitly. If you embrace them, he finds fault in you, and the more devout he is, the more serious the fault.

The Islamic attitude toward other religions and other ways is essentially medieval. It hearkens to the times when "Cuius Regio, Eius Religio" was the rule. The ruler of a realm could impose his own ways and creed upon all his subjects, who had no recourse. Philosophically, Islam, which denies the legitimacy of a secular State, is in accord with the assumptions of that pre-Enlightenment code. The main difference between them is that Islam's ambitions are larger.

Given that Islamic doctrine and the resultant insularity of Muslims preclude influence by more advanced ways and concepts, Muslims are exceptionally vulnerable to demagoguery by Islamic authority figures. Worse, the impenetrability of Islam's wall against the non-Islamic world makes it possible for a demagogue to demonize the infidel, paint him in colors that would justify any atrocity including extermination, and thus raise the cry of jihad against him.

Americans are coming to understand this.

Yet, for a long period after Black Tuesday, we were repeatedly told, and repeated to one another, that the enemy was not Islam, but rather terrorists acting out their depravity under an Islamic rationale. We called these "Islamists," and made a point of distinguishing them from "peaceful" Muslims for whom the use of force as a vehicle for religious proselytization was unthinkable.

The combination of the gradual comprehension of Islam's actual precepts, accumulating revelations of stealthy Islamic maneuvers here and abroad, and the recognition of the horrors Islam imposes on its subjects, has propelled a major shift in American attitudes. The typical American no longer considers himself safe in the presence of a Muslim.

He is right not to feel safe.

I cannot improve on that analysis. Indeed, in reviewing it, I find that I must resist the impulse toward self-congratulation for perspicacity and clarity. There hasn't been even one development in the ten years since I penned that essay that contravenes its obvious imperatives.

Try to refute it, if you're feeling brisk. But I must warn you: I spare no one.

***

The change in American immigration policy that removed the old notion of preserving the pre-existing ethnic balance has resulted in a flood of Middle Eastern Muslims to these shores. At this time, Muslims in America -- Note: I refuse to refer to them as "American Muslims" -- number somewhere around 3.5 million, though various Muslim mouthpiece groups such as ISNA and CAIR claim a higher figure.

In those parts of the nation where Muslims have concentrated, they've behaved exactly as Muslims have always behaved in non-Muslim-majority states: they've demanded ever greater respect for their creed while showing ever less regard for the laws and principles of the United States. As for respect shown by Muslims to other creeds...please! It's far too early in the morning for such ludicrousness.

To be as brief as possible, Muslims do not assimilate. Neither do they "immigrate," in the usual sense of the word. They invade. Their aim, all protestations and representations to the contrary notwithstanding, is to convert all the nations of the world into states ruled by Islam. Islamic rule requires:

• The removal from authority of all non-Muslims;
• The imposition of sharia law;
• The subjugation of all non-Muslims and the imposition of a jizya;;
• The chattelization and subjugation of all women;
• The pre-indemnification of all Muslims for any deed we would regard as criminal, if committed by a Muslim against a non-Muslim.

Any and every tactic that conduces toward that end is commanded of all Muslims by Allah. That includes lying about Islam and its aims to non-Muslims, as plausibly as possible.

Pressure for "respect for Islam," and the implied exemption of Muslims from various American laws and customs, is the first step in elevating Muslims above the rest of the people of their host nation, which of course is a prerequisite for all the rest of Islam's program of world conquest. It's happening here: in Hamtramck and Dearborn, Michigan; in Minneapolis, Minnesota; in parts of northern New Jersey; in several parts of continental New York; and in other counties and towns where the local Muslim fraction is more than 1% or 2%.

Don't take my word for it. Look into it yourself.

***

The following video snippet from Michael Coren's Canadian television show is most instructive:

Robert Spencer is dead on target in each and every one of his assertions. Barack Hussein Obama's attempt to edit American history for Islam's benefit has been under-scrutinized by our major media. Then again, the actual dictates of Islam, as set forth in its scriptures and promulgated by its clergy, are generally suppressed by our organs of communication; they regard the truth as leading to "Islamophobia," one of the past decade's premier terms of deception.

Spencer and others have said that "There are moderate Muslims, but there is no moderate Islam." This is exactly correct: There are Muslims who behave acceptably by American criteria, but Islam itself speaks otherwise -- radically so. More, and more important by far, "immoderate" Muslims -- i.e., those who take seriously the Koran's exhortations to jihad, world conquest, and the subjugation of all "infidels" under Islamic rule -- exert irresistible pressure upon their "moderate" brethren:

• To conceal the "immoderates" and their machinations from the law;
• To provide the "immoderates" financial and other material support;
• To concede the scriptural rightness of the "immoderates'" aims and their activities, however violent, in furthering them.

But we're not supposed to fear Islam, or doubt Muslims' allegiance to America and its principles. Oh, no! That would be wrong.

***

Among the measures contemporary Americans must take to preserve our nation for successor generations, none is more urgent than denying Muslims and Islam further ingress to the United States. If Muslims cannot be assimilated to American norms without fatally compromising their adherence to their creed -- and this is demonstrably the case -- then Islam and those who accept it do not belong in America.

Yes, there's a critical election ahead. Yes, we have a severe, ongoing recession to deal with. Yes, Russia and China are beginning to act like would-be hegemons again. Yes, there might soon be a very hot war in the Middle East, maybe even involving nuclear weapons. Yes, yes, yes.

Add this to the list of things to take seriously: the proper Muslim fraction of the population of the United States is 0%. Any and every effort Americans can make toward that goal, that's within the statute laws of this nation, must be taken at once and maintained in perpetuity.

We cannot allow avowed enemies of our Constitution and the rights it protects into this country. Therefore, we cannot have Communists here. Nor, for the very same reason, can we have Nazis, or Peronists, or Chavistas, or Sandinistas, or devotees of any other totalitarian ideology. We might never succeed in expelling them all. Nevertheless! That an ideal is only asymptotically approachable does not mean it should not be pursued.

The same applies to Muslims and Islam.

Refute me if you can.

Hypocrisy Thy Name is Government

This humble blogster has noted that Julian Assange, of Wikileaks notoriety has been granted political asylum by Ecuador and is currently in sanctuary at the London embassy of that nation.

Allow me to attempt to connect the dots in this political/diplomatic clusterphuk: Mr Assange (an Australian citizen) caused to be published reams of data embarrassing mostly to arrogant politicians and bureaucrats in the US. His acts have generated a hue and cry from these self same operatives and the brainwashed boobiose that he be tried and executed for "treason". Never mind the fact that his actions do not fall within the elements of the crime of treason. You cannot be guilty of the crime if you are not a citizen or legal resident of the nation claiming the violation.

Meanwhile, during a visit to Sweden (a nation this blogster has visited on occasion) two female groupies engage in sex with Mr Assange unbeknownst to each other. Semicasual sex is not unknown to occur within the borders of that country, especially within the environs of Stockholm. All parties seem to have been enjoying themselves, even to the extent of one of the groupies shopping for items to prepare breakfast for Mr Assange. Things however begin to unravel during this idyl when the two groupies discover that Mr Assange had in fact availed himself of the services of the two of them.

In the lines from the 1697 play "The Mourning Bride" by William Congreve: "Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned / Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned." The ladies, after comparing notes seek "justice" from the Swedish authorities who initially dismiss the "complaint" for what it is: sour grapes over a date gone bad. Days later, after Mr Assange has departed the feminist governed socialist scandinavian paradise, another "prosecutor" decides to arrest Mr Assange and "question" him for the heinous "crime" of engaging in consensual sex under "false pretenses" and for this "crime" proceeds to demand his extradition from the United Kingdom. Shades of Adolf Eichman! We are admonished to ignore the official swedish policy of refusal to vigorously prosecute the violent and forcible rape of swedish women by Muslim immigrants in the province of Skåne (see graphic above).

The UK, who considers itself a "close ally" of the US, proceeds to extradite Mr Assange to Sweden for "investigation" of a 4th class misdemeanor and through legal maneuvering Mr Assange manages to obtain sanctuary and political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The government of the UK issues what amounts to an ultimatum to the government of Ecuador to surrender Mr Assange or he will be "forcibly removed" from their sovereign territory. An act of war.

In this threat of an act of war we are called upon to ignore the fact that cardinal Minzente, beginning in the 1950s remained in the US embassy in Budapest for 15 years avoiding arrest by the communist government of Hungary for the felony of opposing communism. We are also called upon to ignore the protestations of the US government against the Iranian government for allowing the forcible entry of activists into the US embassy in Tehran in 1979.

Any sentient human being with two functioning brain cells can discern the fingerprints of the US government all over this ongoing clusterphuk.

Meanwhile, high ranking members of the Obama administration continue to leak sensitive national security classified information if it is believed to aid the re-election chances of the "TelePrompTer jesus".

I would have to ask: what is wrong with this picture?

cross posted at: Fighting in the Shade

Disparates

[This essay first appeared at the old Palace Of Reason, on December 17, 2003. Inasmuch as the Democrats have recently been promulgating the notion that the Republicans are conducting a "war on women," with specific reference to abortion and birth control, it strikes me as especially pertinent today.]

In response to this Curmudgeonly tirade, reader Noah commented as follows:

When the right declaims a new gun control law, and argues that it's the first step along the left's quest to completely disarm the people, everyone laughs. But it's true.

When the left declaims a new abortion control law, arguing that it's the first step towards a complete ban on abortion, or birth control, or indeed the complete nationalization of the bedroom, everyone laughs. But mightn't it be true?

The proponents of each kind of law see them as "common sense", while the opponents see them as utter lunacy, the first step on a slippery slope to open tyranny.

The truth is that there *are* Republicans who would like to see everything but marital/missionary outlawed, just as there are Democrats (and others) who won't rest until every privately owned firearm has been melted down. Take a survey of how many states criminalize sodomy, oral sex, adultery, even fornication and cohabitation (best of all prostitution, 49 states last I checked).

I'm not saying I agree with this woman's ramblings, or advancing a position one way or the other on the partial-birth abortion ban. What I am trying to say is that it would be folly to dismiss her comments as standard leftist trash without sifting them for kernels of truth.

Well, your Curmudgeon isn't about to defend laws that criminalize private acts that involve only consenting adults. But in drawing his parallels, Noah has provided a striking case study in disparates, and in how their juxtaposition can becloud political thought.

---

The history of sexual regulation by law goes back to the earliest years of European-derived human presence on this continent. Nearly all of the first groups to arrive here were inspired by the New World's opportunity for them to practice their religions without being persecuted for it. Ironically, nearly all of them looked forward to the opportunity to enforce their religious beliefs with the power of the State. It wasn't freedom they sought, but the dominant position in a realm of their own -- if you like, the opportunity to indulge in religious oppression in favor of their own beliefs.

Institutions of religion have always been hostile to sex. Sex is the earthiest of all earthly pleasures. Prior to the Industrial Revolution and what it brought in its train, it was one of the very few pleasures available to everyone. Any institution that wanted men to focus on the next world, rather than this one, would naturally frown on something so temporal, so universal, and so powerful.

Regional political power in the colonial era was usually united with some dominant religious sect, all the way into the early 19th Century. Of the original thirteen colonies, only one, Rhode Island, had no established church and no dictates in its founding charter derived from the doctrines of a particular faith. The clerical potentates of the colonies were quite as hostile to sex as any of their European predecessors had been -- and here, they had the opportunity to stamp the laws with their own preferences.

Alongside that, until quite recently there were substantial extra-legal risks involved in sexual indulgence. So the typical commoner had, not just the law and the admonitions of his local clerics to inhibit him, but also the possibility of rotting away from syphilis or conceiving children that would be his responsibility to feed and nurture. Marriage as it has been traditionally practiced originated to mitigate these risks. Long before religious hierarchies incorporated marriage into their theologies, it was well established as a force for social stability and the norming of sexual conduct.

Then came penicillin and the Pill. Advances in medical technology reduced the risks of sexual adventurism by orders of magnitude. Though new risks, such as herpes and AIDS, have arisen in the most recent years, these can also be held down by judicious choice of partners and attention to obvious signs of danger. With the rise of an ethic of privacy, made possible by the economic advance of the country, the laws against non-marital and non-reproductive sex, which had always been largely unenforceable, fell into neglect. What remained to inhibit us were the dictates of our consciences and the thunderings from the pulpits, neither of which has proved much of a barrier in practice.

Sex laws passed in the 18th and 19th centuries, driven by religious belief and protected from being laughed aside by forces entirely outside the law, dropped into the Slough of Irrelevance after 1960. Except for freak cases such as Lawrence v. Texas, which made news because they were freak cases, sexual regulation by law is dead in America -- and that is entirely as it should be.

Your Curmudgeon will allow that there are a very few Americans who'd like to bring back the whole legal regime, in full force. But they are a trivial rump, who will receive no respectful hearing short of an Islamic takeover. They are ignored by conservatives who appreciate individual rights and the supreme importance of laws that can be evenhandedly and uniformly enforced without violating those rights.

---

Compare the regulation of sex with the regulation of abortion, and a forest of differences springs up at once.

Sex, apart from rape and molestation, involves only consenting adults, presumed to be competent to make their own decisions and choose their own risks. That there are risks, even between partners who know one another well, cannot be denied, but a competent adult is expected to familiarize himself with them beforehand, make the appropriate mitigations, and shoulder the consequences should the dice not fall his way. Only one possible outcome of a consensual sex act necessarily involves a third party: conception.

The germination of a new life brings a new character onto the stage, one who was not allowed to read the script beforehand and is powerless to affect its ending. There is no question that he is a distinguishable presence; his DNA signature, his abilities, and his vulnerabilities differ radically from those of his parents.

The competent actors might not want him there. Indeed, they might have taken stringent precautions against his creation and were simply the "victims of bad luck." But there he is. The question before us is no longer about sex; it's about the rights of that third character, and what responsibilities the first two have toward him.

If the developing embryo is rightless tissue, morally no weightier than a tumor, then excising it and discarding it are morally neutral deeds. Surely a woman has the right to control her own body if in doing so she injures no one else's rights, just as she has the right to swing her arms freely if no one else's nose is in the way.

But if the presence in the womb is a human being with the same right to life as his mother, then to abort him -- to kill him -- is murder. It can only be justified in a "lifeboat scenario," where either the mother or the baby must inevitably die, regardless of anything that might be done by any involved party. The mother's prior intentions, and her disinclination to be a mother, are just as irrelevant as they would be once the baby has been born.

There are intermediate positions. Some argue that, until the baby is capable of living on his own, without support from the mother's body or some technological substitute, he cannot be held to possess rights, for no man has a right to the coerced support of another. Others argue that, even if all abortions are murder in principle, nevertheless, respect for the right of privacy requires that we not criminalize abortions before a certain point in gestation, as to do so would either require massive invasions of privacy, or would open the door to selective prosecution at some district attorney's sole discretion.

Let all of that pass. The central fact is that abortion has nothing to do with sex. The crux of the abortion debate is when the developing baby's right to life begins, and what can be done to protect it without incurring unacceptable costs.

---

If abortion has nothing to do with sex, then the debate over the legal status of abortion need have nothing to do with the legal status of sex.

Are there pro-lifers who seek the re-criminalization of abortion because they hope that it will inhibit sexual license? Yes, indubitably. But that particular motivation is not part of the political / legal debate. Indeed, your Curmudgeon cannot name even one person, public figure or private party, who's ever expressed that motive. He would regard such a position as unworthy and insincere, as would every other pro-lifer he knows. If the baby's right to life and the legal protection thereof are not the issues under discussion, there is nothing to discuss. We have had enough of laws against this because it "leads to" that.

It is illuminating to note that, while laws that regulate sexual conduct have had a controversial aspect for nearly two centuries, laws concerning abortion have only been actively discussed for about forty years -- that is, roughly since the development of oral contraception. Prior to that, the near-universal conviction was that abortion was absolutely wrong at any stage of gestation. If a man impregnated an unmarried woman, he was under an absolute obligation to do the right thing and marry her. If he would not do so and could not be compelled, the woman would simply have to bear the child, contriving as much privacy for her illegitimate birth as she could, and then arrange for the baby to be adopted.

The shift in attitudes arose because, once high-quality contraception that didn't interfere with sexual pleasure was available, sexual indulgence was inhibited solely by the possibility of contraceptive failure or negligence in contraceptive use. If only abortion could be legalized, even the remotest possibility of having to endure the shame of illegitimacy could be averted. The fear of the illicit abortionist, nicely dramatized in the movie Dirty Dancing, would cease to confine sexual appetites.

Herein lies the seed of the prevailing obfuscations. The crux of the abortion issue has never been sex, but interest in the thing has been driven from the first by sexual desire. All Palace readers will know the history, from the critical 1973 Supreme Court decision to the present day.

---

Some day, another topic will relieve abortion of its "most contentious" title, because it will engage a desire even more powerful than the sex drive: the desire to live. The topic will be human cloning.

Imagine that it becomes possible for a human to reproduce himself parthenogenetically -- that is, without a contribution of DNA from another party -- and therefore to replicate his body perfectly. Human bodies are usually equipped with human brains and minds. The brain is the only portion of such a clone that would not be medically useful to its progenitor.

The clone would be a perfect source for every sort of transplant. If the law were to treat clones as having no rights of their own, they could and would be disassembled at will, to extend or improve the lives of those whose DNA signature they share. Imagine how strongly men will desire that such a resource be available to them.

But if we omit the possibility of artificially induced brain death, such a clone would be human, in all relevant ways indistinguishable from any other. If he is acknowledged as such, to treat him as an organ farm for another person, denied an acknowledged right to life, would be clearly wrong: murder for medical reasons, under color of law.

The abortion controversy prefigures the cloning debate in its core issues, but will be a pale shadow of it in intensity.

So your Curmudgeon will ask: If the development of the clone were to involve a human womb, would the debate be about sex?

The rest, as they say, is an exercise for the reader.

Systems, Part 2: Fleas

Big fleas have little fleas
Upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas,
And so, ad infinitum.

I have no idea who wrote the above, but as a summary of why systems that incorporate human elements nearly always operate in failure mode, it's unsurpassed. Even in the absence of elements with coercive powers, most systems are in failure mode most of the time...because of their "fleas."

Ponder it a moment while I put up a pot of coffee.

***

First, let's agree on some fundamentals:

• A system, for the purposes of this discussion, is an organization with a declared purpose toward which it and its members are supposedly working.
• Smith is a member of system X if he has:
  1. Accepted, de jure, the authority of the system over his efforts;
  2. Accepted any form of compensation for those efforts.
• System X is in failure mode whenever:
  1. It is not advancing measurably toward its declared purpose; and:
  2. It is expending any of its resources: human, material, financial or otherwise.

(We must also agree that: some failure modes are worse than others; some are more perceptible than others; and some are more open to disagreement than others. In any discussion of human enterprise and human relations, there will always be gray areas within which there's room for differences of opinion.)

There's been a lot thought, said, and written about the habitual failure of significant systems. Many commentators have made accurate observations about parts of the problem. However, one ultimately piercing observation subsumes them all:

Virtually no one, regardless of the compensation offered, ever commits himself wholly and sincerely to a system or its purposes.

The key words in the above are wholly and sincerely.

If you're familiar with James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock's work in Public Choice Economics, perhaps you can see where this is headed.

***

As soon as a system acquires more than one member, it acquires more than one set of priorities, regardless of its declared purpose. This, like the abuse of power, should come as no surprise. Individuals possess individual motivations and goals, about which they're very seldom completely candid. Indeed, few of us are fully aware of our motivations and goals; this is in the nature of the human psyche. Thus, varying degrees of actual, as opposed to professed, commitment to the organization's purposes are inevitable.

It is also inevitable that as soon as a system begins to acquire resources, some of its members will view those resources as potentially applicable to purposes other than those of the system. Sometimes, this divergence is fan-danced by rationalization, e.g.: "I can keep working at home if I just take a few things from the supply cabinet / parts locker / petty cash box." Once in a great while, the member involved is perfectly sincere...at least at the outset.

We could go into rhapsodies about the fallibility of Man, about the frailties of human character, and so forth, but ultimately all such considerations, being premised on a set of abstract values which don't command universal agreement (or fidelity), are too personal to be used analytically. What does work analytically is to view systems as ecologies.

In the previous essay, I laid some foundations for an ecological approach to the study of systems, one of the most important elements of which was this:

Every ecological niche will eventually be dominated by an entity optimized for that niche.

If Smith, an individual member of the Acme organization, is not wholly and sincerely committed to Acme's purpose, then he will be animated by other purposes at least part of the time. That being given, Smith will be tempted to view the environment Acme provides him as a field of resources for his exploitation for those other purposes. To the extent that Smith succeeds in presenting, to Acme authorities above him, the appearance of good and valuable service, he will be permitted to continue in this practice.

Note also this: the "good and valuable service" need not be entirely -- on occasion, not even partly -- to Acme's purpose. If Acme is large enough to have a hierarchical authority structure, those above Smith will have some non-Acme priorities of their own. If Smith's supervisor Jones can exploit Smith as a resource for Jones's own non-Acme purposes, he will naturally be more tolerant of Smith's own peculations than otherwise.

Great fleas have little fleas, and little fleas have lesser fleas...

Highly applicable here is Robert Anton Wilson's "SNAFU Principle." The partial concealment of Smith's activities from levels of authority above him protects his divergences from full commitment to the organization's purpose. Even when "top management" is aware that it's not being fully informed about what's going on at levels below it, it seldom possesses the capacity to learn more than it's being told.

With this, it becomes clearer why corruption (as colloquially understood) varies combinatorially with the size of an organization. What's massively unclear is whether there's anything to be done about it.

More anon.

Metaphysics and Murray Rothbard

Man, Economy and State is a very, very long book, an interesting book, and a worthwhile book.  But I think it also suffers from a few very big flaws.

The main problem, in my opinion, is that Rothbard is just simply 'too modern' a man.  Even as he objects to economic approaches which are too tainted with the 'scientific' slant -- inappropriately 'mathematical' and 'objective,' as if all phenomena can be distilled down to something like classical physics -- nevertheless, he too is infected with the tendency on a more fundamental and less obvious level.

(And to be fair, I probably am, too, so maybe this is a case of the pot calling the kettle black.  But hopefully, maybe the pot and kettle can sometimes get together and scrape some of the soot off of each other.)

The biggest problem I have is a very broad objection which I think would qualify as what Michael Oakeshott calls 'rationalism,' but I think other authors have called by different names and addressed in slightly different ways.  Basically, I think he has some difficulty with the notion of abstraction and the application of the subjective point of view.

He actually talks about abstraction quite a bit, but in a way I've never seen anyone else use the word.  He tends to speak in terms of 'abstracting away' from certain irrelevant phenomena, such that the 'mental image' so obtained does not contain these irrelevant parts.  But, in principle, it still contains everything else. 

To my understanding (and I may be wrong, as I'm new to this myself), an abstraction is formed almost in the exact opposite manner.  This approach misses the whole point.  The reason one forms abstractions of concrete objects and phenomena is that these things in their totality are inconceivable to the human mind due to their immense complexity.  What can be conceived are idealized simplifications.  What is 'abstracted from' the concrete situation is the essential characteristics and parameters and everything else is excluded.  Thus the essential characteristics become manageable, and an idealized system with practical, predictive utility is constructed.

For example, in a problem of classical physics, one might be given an initial position, the mass, and an accelerating force applied to an object, and asked to predict its future position.  This is an abstraction of the problem in that only three parameters are used to characterize the situation (six if you want to make it a force vector in three dimensional space, but anyway...).  The position and mass of the moon and sun (with their consequent gravitational attraction), of every other particle in the universe, and the history of every particle making up the object in question, are not of interest insofar as their effects on the situation in question are minuscule.  In general, one wouldn't even think to include these things at all unless it were clear that they had some substantial bearing on the problem.

To do things Rothbard's way would have it all backwards and leave things impossibly complicated -- if one could actually do it.  He would have to expend a great deal of mental energy finding every parameter to exclude before settling on the few things that actually mattered, which tells me that he's not actually doing this.  If he were, as soon as he thought about a situation, he'd be like a computer that gets stuck in an infinite loop and winds up on the 'blue screen of death.'  He's really thinking more or less the way that everybody else thinks, but somehow his way of 'thinking about thinking' isn't quite on the same page.

Somehow he conceives of things as if his thoughts really encompassed concrete reality completely as a matter of simple inspection, and then he goes about excluding things he thinks aren't important, or more often, are complicating factors which he would like to exclude so that he can get at a particular point.  Because of this, for him, his thoughts seem more or less perfect images of the concrete, so his conclusions appear to him far more sweeping and inescapable than most people would think warranted.

Basically, he seems to believe that his thoughts and theories are actually exact expressions of concrete reality, allowing for some abstract contribution from external contingencies -- his oft invoked ceteris paribus.  This results in a curious 'feel' to his philosophy.  Sometimes he seems to want to say that his assertions are very narrow, that they apply very specifically, if absolutely, to only a narrow slice of human experience, and maybe shouldn't weigh quite so heavily on people's conscience if their thoughts don't much incline towards these matters.  Other times, he seems to think that they are extremely broad, that they touch on everything within their own peculiar capacity, in a very predictable and ironclad fashion.  This is the way he seems to view abstractions -- as 'slices' of reality, within which they are fully as concrete as reality itself, rather than as idealizations from which there may be considerable departure when the fully relevant picture hasn't quite been captured in the process of forming a mental image of the situation.

He thus falls into the trap of most modern thinkers -- of trying to take his thoughts too close to the concrete, so that rather than being valued for their capacity to convey truth to human consciousness, they fall in love with their own precision and logical 'consistency,' and emerge from the affair as ideology.  The truth which they do contain is lost in a torrid orgy of desire for absoluteness in assertion, usually expressed in an obnoxious particularness and an air of unwarranted certainty. 

For him, a good theory is like the snapshot from a good point-and-shoot camera -- all-encompassing field of view, every detail in sharp focus, all of the time, no matter what.  But most people recognize the superior quality of photograph from a professional camera, and some will pay good money for a camera that produces a much more natural image that essentially renders half or more of the image unfocused and blurry.

The blurriness is an essential feature of such a camera, not a liability.  The image it produces, with its indistinct suggestions of detail beyond and before the focal plane, but wonderfully sharp focus and detail at the point of interest, rings of truth because this is the way the eye sees the world.  Likewise, truth and understanding is not generally to be found buried in a morass of undifferentiated detail, however precise and fine, it is to be apprehended in a clear understanding of the relations of things.  The clearer, simpler, more elegant and vivid manner in which relations are manifested in thought, so much the better the apprehension of truth.  Detail which is unessential is detail which distracts, which is detail which obscures. 

This is not to belittle the necessity of precision or detail, but it is to point out the danger of habitually swimming as close to the shoals of the concrete as possible at all times.  Too often, in the pursuit of certainty, modern thinkers like Rothbard want to abstract as little as possible, and in doing so confuse themselves into thinking that they are not abstracting at all.  Thought exhausts itself at such an effort, and ultimately destroys itself when it is inevitably smashed against the concrete.  Thought which is too concrete ceases to be thought at all.  In attempting to apprehend reality too perfectly, it ceases to actually apprehend, and falls into an endless cataloging.

Anyway, enough flowery metaphors.  You get the idea.

This kind of confusion Voegelin identifies with positivism, and Oakeshott with rationalism.  Or perhaps these are two slightly different tendencies that revolve around a confusion of subject and object, the concrete and the abstract.  In any event, Rothbard's tendency is to believe that since he has perfectly apprehended reality in this body of semi-abstract theory, that it constitutes some body of inarguable truth perfectly binding upon all of reality.

That leads to the second major problem -- the ideological aspect.  A mathematician knows the laws of geometry, but if he's intelligent and given it some thought, he knows that geometry can never apply perfectly to reality.  There are, for example, no such things as Euclidean lines.  A true Euclidean line has zero thickness, and in a three-dimensional world, that corresponds to a nothingness.  Real lines must have thickness else they cannot exist, are never perfectly straight, etc.  Euclidean lines are an ideal never realized in reality.  Like all abstractions, they are a tool for thinking about other things.  Like all theoretical systems, geometry can only work perfectly applied to abstract idealizations. 

Rothbard does not seem to think that he has idealized anything, so he sometimes takes some things a bit too far, as it seems to me.  This becomes particularly acute and obvious as he wanders into territory outside his economic abstractions but continues to apply the same supposedly concrete and universally binding laws inappropriately.  I do not generally hold contradiction against people, at least at a certain level, and I'm not really doing it here.  I'm just using it to point out where he has made a mistake of application.

On page 1215, he argues that --

There is no objection at all to discussion of ethical concepts  when they are needed, provided that the economist realizes  always (a) that economics can establish no ethical principles by  itself—that it can only furnish existential laws to the ethicist or  citizen as data; and (b) that any importation of ethics must be  grounded on a consistent, coherent set of ethical principles, and  not simply be slipped in ad hoc in the spirit of “well, everyone  must agree to this. . . .” Bland assumptions of universal agreement are one of the most irritating bad habits of the economist-turned-ethicist.

Yet just 97 pages before, in dealing with the political problem of the administration of justice, he says that even in a completely free system--

Every legal system needs some sort of socially-agreed-upon cutoff point, a point at which judicial procedure stops and punishment against the convicted criminal begins.

Why did he cross himself up like this?  Because he wandered into the moral/political realm, where his theories do him little good because their abstraction of the situation is in at least some ways orthogonal to the dynamics actually in operation in this realm of thought.  If they didn't apply perfectly before, they will apply even less well now.

The 'we can all agree' blunder of 'democratic logic' is pretty typical of philosophers who want to construct viable 'value-free' legal systems out of pure logic.  Inevitably they trip themselves up with a statement like this, which gives away the true moral core about which their system turns.  They would have you believe (and they may truly believe themselves) that the core is actually the logical structure they have built up, that its most basic principles are readily observable, objective facts of the universe.  But in reality, the core will be found to actually consist of a body of  sentiment -- which the logical system will be found to protect and defend.  And try to hide.  At least, that is my experience with such things.  All such systems eventually boil down to moral sentiments; some of their purveyors are just not willing to admit it.

But this example is just to illustrate a general mistake -- thinking that since he is not really using abstractions, that the situation and the theories he derives apply to all sorts of areas where they do not.  The manner of thinking then goes on to produce a lot of nonsense and ideology.  If I were to choose a general abstraction under which to operate in the political realm of thought, I would probably go with something like Eric Voegelin's way of looking at things.  He really thought about the problem and came up with a powerful way to abstract it.  Rothbard, through his insistence on 'doing geometry' with everything, would not be anywhere near the top of my list in terms of politics.  I think that if he'd cleared this up a bit, he would have made a better thinker in this department, would have formulated some better ideas, and been able to defend them better.

Which is not to say that he has absolutely nothing interesting to say here at all, just that I'm more interested in his economics than his politics.

All of this I'm afraid too many readers will interpret as me 'bashing Rothbard,' which is unfortunate, because to my mind, I'm not really doing that.  I'm only criticizing, and my way if thinking and evaluating -- so I've learned -- is not like most other people's.

To most people, it seems that the measure of an idea's worth is how expansive and detailed it can get without getting 'contradictory.'  (Heaven forbid it outright contradict itself!)  It also needs to encompass a great deal of 'known fact' without getting anything wrong.  Once it starts getting a few things wrong, well, it IS wrong, and the holder of it needs to chuck it altogether if he is 'intellectually honest.'

I don't really care much if some idea -- or its purveyor -- contradicts itself or 'known facts' to some degree.  All thought and all theory is abstraction, which means it is simplification, which means it is 'wrong' from the outset.  I expect every idea to be 'wrong' -- at least if this is the measure of 'wrong' -- from the get-go.  To me, that is not the measure of an idea.  The only way a thought could not be 'wrong' would be if it corresponded exactly to concrete reality itself.  If it did that, it would in fact be a perfect articulation of concrete reality itself, unimaginably complex, meaningless, and unintelligible to the human mind.

But more damning, it would provide no window into truth.  It would be totally worthless as an idea. 

On top of this, consider that 'theory' (and everyone has heard at least one of these) that is totally consistent with an extensive body of 'known fact,' but presents a totally absurd, plainly incorrect interpretation of a situation.  One (supposedly, anyway) can't argue with it, but clearly it is totally wrong.  Now, which is the worse -- that 'consistent' system of thought, or one that gets some of the facts wrong and contains a few contradictory elements, but provides a reasonable, useful interpretation of things and clear insight into a situation?  I say the latter is better by far.

At least, that is my understanding of metaphysics, to this point.  I have heard that some philosophers think that the concrete reality of the mind, at least, can be known completely -- "I think, therefore, I am," and all of that -- but I am not that far along, and I'm not sure I'll agree when I get there.  But since we are talking about the concrete reality of economics, which encompasses more than a human mind, I think I can say with a fair amount of certainty that it falls under the aforementioned regimen of thinking -- that abstraction is instant death as far as contradiction and an incorrect correspondence to reality is concerned, but necessary to making reality intelligible.

Insight is a window into truth.  My measure of an idea is the degree which 1) it shows insight or reveals truth, and/or 2) it provides a useful 'mental picture' of things under which to operate that makes the universe more easily grasped, i.e., it is a good abstraction of a system.  I do confess that that might be two ways of saying the same thing.  I like good analogies, models, and insights.  To say in an argument that one had contradicted himself with most people would mean the argument was over and done with.  With me, it is a minor quibble, maybe something that might need a little work.  To say that something (or someone) is insightful, on the other hand, is no mere observation but very high praise in my book – about as high as you can get.

With that in mind, Rothbard is both very insightful and very good at constructing abstract systems for thinking about economic systems.  I got a great deal out of his discussion of the division of labor, the production structure, the relationships between price, income, profit, interest, wages, rents, factors of production, and the like, which I hadn't quite had straight in my mind for a long time.  His discussion of supply and demand were excellent.  Even his discussion of the incidence of taxation I found extremely worthwhile -- even where I disagreed with him!  What it really did was to help me to think about the problem, which is immensely helpful.  The post I did criticizing him on the sales tax was really a minor thing, in my opinion.  I wouldn't have even known how to think about the problem if I hadn't read his treatment of it.

But the reason I could get all of that out of the book is that I didn't blow it off as 'wrong' at the first problem I had with it.  I could spend months criticizing parts of it (especially at my pace of things...) but what would that accomplish?  To treat it the way most modern thinkers seem to operate would be like entering a vast and beautiful garden and getting hung up on a patch of thorns right at the entrance and never getting any further.  You'd never get to see anything else, because you got hung up on one stupid thing right at the beginning.  Even if it's a big thornbush, it's not worth it missing all the good things by getting caught up in nitpicking the bad.

Another great thing about the book is that the writing is very approachable and expressed very clearly.  Actually, I prefer slightly more convolution and 'vivid vagueness' than he uses, but I realize that that is a matter of taste, and it is a great thing to be able to express exactly what you mean so clearly and simply.  You may not agree with Rothbard, but you are never confused about where he stands.  Such precision and approachability is very difficult on such a complex topic. 

There are really only a few places in the book that become intellectually demanding, which is pretty amazing to me.  While it does make it a bit simpler to do such analyses when you decide ahead of time to simplify a problem the way that he did -- by abstracting it rather unrealistically -- still, if one just accepts that the way the situation has been framed is a little off, his approach is a very clear and useful way to get at some important insights.  I don't think there are many people, living or dead, who could pull off something like that.

***

Apparently, I'm getting at least fairly close with most of my metaphysics.  Ed Feser -- a professor of philosophy -- has a post discussing more or less exactly the error I'm talking about here.

For The Record

I have several Co-Contributors here. We have generally compatible views on politics, but we don’t agree on everything under the Sun. This is in the nature of things.

Now and then, one of my Co-Contributors takes me by surprise with a post. I might find that I disagree with it completely. However, if it’s not an outright endorsement of tyranny, a total condemnation of Christianity, or a statement of approbation for the Boston Red Sox, I simply shrug and remind myself that opinions will vary.

Recently, my newest Co-Contributor, Mark Butterworth, has posted several essays on his theological opinions. I don’t endorse those opinions; in fact, I disagree with them almost completely. But they are his opinions. His name, not mine, is the one attached to them, as anyone with moderately good eyesight can see. Therefore, there’s no basis in reason to assume that I share them, as anyone with the brains of a cockroach should realize.

For which reason, I view with consternation, and no small amount of anger, a tirade such as this one:

You [Butterworth] have nothing absolutely nothing to say. I simply cannot believe Porretto let you say so on his site.

But at least, the shallowness of RCC is out and about. Finally.

Porretto – you permitted a man, on your site, to openly deny the Incarnation. Your site, your call, but geezopete, man, do you monitor those who write for you under your umbrella?

It seems not. I confess I once did not measure up to your standards, by your own words, but you, or your surrogate, cannot measure up to the least of Christ’s words. But . . . you publish him.

If Bennie agrees . . .

‘Night, Sports Fans!

This...person, who doesn’t even have the courage to write under his full and correct name, claims to be a Lutheran. Well, whatever that particular denomination teaches its adherents, either it doesn’t include humility and Christian charity, or the lesson passed through his head without encountering anything solid that might retain it.

The first obligation of a decent person, of any faith or none, is to be tolerant of the divergent beliefs of others, as long as they do him no injury. Note: Tolerance, not agreement nor endorsement, is the requirement; in matters of faith, each one of us is utterly alone in his own skull until death should provide him with definite answers. But of course, that requires that he recognize his beliefs as beliefs, rather than trumpet them as mathematically provable facts.

Mister “jb” has a lot to learn and a long road to travel before he rises to the ethical stature of Mark Butterworth.

As I am in great pain and very short of sleep, I will close on that note.

Two Visionaries, Two Visions

The Ryan selection was a trigger. The ads and the attacks are already flowing, and the popular reactions are already being gauged. Polls are swinging this way and that, man-in-the-street interview clips are accumulating and being shown on various outlets, donation flows are being scrutinized, and (of course) analysts are straining to determine what it all means.

And here I am to tell them – and you.

***

In any worthwhile review of a political contest, if there’s an incumbent, our studies must start with him. In this case, that’s The Won himself, the Lightworker, the apostle of Hope’n’Change, the “sort of God” in the Oval Office: Barack Hussein Obama.

Obama is a visionary. The actual nature of that vision isn’t what will matter most in November; it’s what the electorate imagines it to be. However, I prefer facts to fantasies.

Obama has attempted, mainly by rhetoric, to present himself as a believer in the American Way: free markets, free enterprise, individual initiative, the rule of law, et cetera. However, the legislative developments he has endorsed, the executive orders he has issued, and the appointments he has made badly undercut that image...for anyone who’s disposed to believe deeds over words, at least. For us who have been watching, there can be little doubt that Obama’s vision is of Obama Uber Alles: federal policy as The Won prefers it and individual rights be damned, with “the good of society” as the rationale. Indeed, his recent speeches have explicitly veered into that channel, as if he had become impatient with the need to disguise his true creed.

Other commentators have opined that Obama hopes to impose upon the United States a version of the social-democracy practiced in Europe. I disagree. I think his aim is simple autocracy, in emulation of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, whom he admires greatly. There have been many indications in that direction, the most pointed one being Obama’s support of Manuel Zelaya’s failed attempt to suborn the constitution of Honduras.

Obama isn’t stupid enough to have his critics rounded up and imprisoned, as Chavez has done. I can hardly doubt that he’d like to, though – and that he’d enjoy taunting them in their cells. His vanity and arrogance show through whenever he’s publicly compelled to confront even the mildest criticism. Outright opposition literally enrages him. Note how several major donors to the Romney for President campaign have suffered unexpected attention from various alphabet agencies, most notably the IRS. It might be coincidence...but then, all the air in my office might migrate to one corner of the room, leaving me to asphyxiate.

What we have in the 44th president, then, is a Peronist: a ruler who’s his own biggest fan, who regards himself as unfettered by the chains of law, who rules via ukases from the palace balcony, who dispenses largesse to his backers and “welfare” to the masses according to his own preferences, and who disdains all attempts to constrain him, much less displace him. Obama himself would object; he wouldn’t want to be thought of as a reproduction of any other politician, even in rhetorical implication. His “base” might be aware of this, but it appears ready to accept it – and him – even so.

***

We have no need to analyze the “vision” of Mitt Romney. It would be a fool’s errand; he doesn’t have one. Romney is simply committed to becoming president, and he’ll say and do whatever he thinks will get him there. His personal convictions appear to be those of a network television producer: “Give the people what they want.” This is not proper republicanism, but it is typical of the sort of politician who’s dominated the GOP since Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The visionary on the Republican side is Paul Ryan.

Mind you, regardless of the rhetoric he employs, Ryan’s vision is not about individual rights or the proper sphere of government – at least, not a Constitutional one. He’s a numbers maven. He approaches our federal government, monstrous in both its size and its failures, from an accountant’s perspective. What matters to him is making the books balance.

Ryan has conceived of a route back toward balance, in which federal outlays will no longer exceed federal tax revenues. It’s unsparing of anyone’s bleeding heart. Given contemporary needs-are-rights attitudes, it took a lot of political courage to produce and promote his “Path to Prosperity” budgetary proposal. Ryan deserves credit for that; few among our political elite would dare to suggest, as he has, that Medicare be converted into a federal subsidy for the purchase of private medical insurance. But it’s a far cry from the unsparing Constitutionalism we of the freedom movement would love to see.

All the same, Ryan does cleave to a principle, though it’s an accountant’s sort of principle: The books must balance. Government cannot forever live beyond its means. He feels he must approach his goal in a gradual fashion, rather than through a ruthless application of the Constitution’s constraints on federal activity. That’s a political posture -- and a political weakness, as it opens the door to “negotiation” with an enemy who has no interest in peace. Ask the Israelis how well that sort of posture has worked for them.

Still, half a principle is better than none.

***

In summary: if there’s a clash of visions before us, it’s not social-democracy versus Constitutionalism; it’s Obamunist autocracy versus Ryanist fiduciary responsibility. It’s a clear choice, to be sure...but even if the nation should choose the Romney-Ryan ticket in November, and populate both houses of Congress with legislators agreeable to their aims, there will be much more to do.

Restoring the Republic may begin with a concentration on budgetary details, but it must not end there. We will need further, more exacting visions, and visionaries ready to champion them against all opposition. Where we are to get such men, I cannot say.

The Ryan Selection

All right, yes, this is a primarily political blog, and yes, we really ought to have something to say about Mitt Romney's selection of Paul Ryan as his preferred running-mate, and in all candor, I'd rather write about that than about my seemingly unquenchable shoulder pain, so...

Romney's choice of Ryan is a good one, though arguably not the best for purely political purposes. In the usual case, a putative presidential nominee chooses a running-mate for political impact above all other things. Perhaps the VP choice will help the presidential nominee to win a critical state. Or perhaps he's chosen to appeal to a particular demographic. Or perhaps he has biographical characteristics that make him unusually appealing, such that he'll bring increased enthusiasm to the ticket.

Ryan, a Congressman from Wisconsin, could conceivably assist Romney in pinning that state in the GOP's column. However, if the results of the recent recall elections can be trusted, Wisconsin is fated to go red anyway. Still, this will reduce the uncertainties in that regard.

Ryan is relatively young (42), and a practicing Catholic: two demographics that Republican presidential tickets have found difficult to penetrate. However, the vaunted "youth vote" is terribly dispirited this year, owing to its disproportionate economic difficulties, and is likely to be badly reduced from previous presidential campaigns. The Catholic vote was likely to go solidly red from the moment Barack Hussein Obama decreed that Catholic teachings about abortion, contraception, and so forth are forbidden to taint employers' decisions about medical insurance. Once again: Ryan will produce incremental gains, not necessarily decisive ones, in these segments.

I don't know much about Paul Ryan's path through life, but it would appear that it's solidly "American-normal:" no tremendous crises to defeat, no extraordinary obstacles to surmount, just a smooth progression of achievements that brought him the stature he enjoys today.

What Ryan does bring to the ticket is reassurance for the GOP's conservative base. He's been the Right's point man on budgetary and fiscal matters since Obama took office. He's crossed swords with Obama personally on more than one occasion. He represents a well-expressed financial conservatism -- a sincere commitment to responsible budgeting and transparency -- that "movement" conservatives are likely to take as a gesture of commitment by Romney to their ideals. Given Romney's record as governor of Massachusetts, that might have been the deciding consideration.

The one plainly negative aspect of the selection is that as a spokesman for conservative positions, Ryan engenders more excitement than does Romney. Perhaps that's not a terribly important factor; after all, there is a precedent.

Ryan strikes me as a good pick for that reason. Politically, the selection of Condi Rice or Marco Rubio might have yielded more electoral votes, but it's well to remember that not everything in politics is about demographic blocs. Conviction, commitment, and eloquence "on the stump" are at least as important as anything a campaign might do to woo voters according to regional sentiment, race, or ethnicity. I look forward with interest to Ryan's part in the campaign.