American politics

Democracy in America

  • China v America

    The end of the end of history

    Jan 18th 2011, 21:52 by M.S.

    Francis FukuyamaFRANCIS FUKUYAMA'S 1990 article "The End of History" profoundly shaped my political identity: I thought it was so completely wrong-headed that I spent weeks working out the many ways in which I disagreed. I found it extremely implausible that Friedrich Hegel had simply figured out the direction of human political evolution in the early 19th century, and that everything else had been a matter of slow progress towards that goal, culminating in the Reagan-Mitterand-era spectrum of Western welfare-state capitalist democracies (with a preference for the Reagan end). Worse, Mr Fukuyama's thesis seemed like a strange right-wing version of the complacency of Soviet ideologues: the arc of history has already been mapped, and we are its apotheosis. It seemed a recipe for intellectual stagnation and a likely excuse for all sorts of foolishness and misconduct. After all, if we're the goal of history, how can we do wrong?

    I never would have imagined that I would read a Francis Fukuyama essay 20 years later about the current direction of world history, and agree vehemently with every single word of it. Mr Fukuyama's Financial Times piece yesterday, headlined "US democracy has little to teach China", is brilliant. It's not the first time anyone has expressed these ideas, but Mr Fukuyama puts it all together in a fashion that's close to perfect. As he writes, America "managed to fritter away" the immense moral capital it held in 2000 "in remarkably short order", due to foreign-policy missteps such as the invasion of Iraq and, later, the American-centred global financial crisis. (It didn't help that American treasury and central-bank officials, who months earlier had been lecturing China on the need to decrease state involvement in the financial sector, found themselves feverishly doing just what Chinese officials were doing—funneling money to state-champion companies, hectoring large banks to cut profits and lend more—but with less success.) Meanwhile, China is "riding high", increasingly confident that it has nothing to learn from America. Here's the catch:

    But what is the Chinese model? Many observers casually put it in an “authoritarian capitalist” box, along with Russia, Iran and Singapore. But China’s model is sui generis; its ­specific mode of governance is difficult to describe, much less emulate, which is why it is not up for export.

    The most important strength of the Chinese political system is its ability to make large, complex decisions quickly, and to make them relatively well, at least in economic policy. This is most evident in the area of infrastructure, where China has put into place airports, dams, high-speed rail, water and electricity systems to feed its growing industrial base. Contrast this with [democratic] India, where every new investment is subject to blockage by trade unions, lobby groups, peasant associations and courts...

    Nonetheless, the quality of Chinese government is higher than in Russia, Iran, or the other authoritarian regimes with which it is often lumped—precisely because Chinese rulers feel some degree of accountability towards their population. That accountability is not, of course, procedural; the authority of the Chinese Communist party is limited neither by a rule of law nor by democratic elections. But while its leaders limit public criticism, they do try to stay on top of popular discontents, and shift policy in response.

    Mr Fukuyama thinks American hopes that China's economic modernisation will require a shift to multi-party democracy are misplaced.

    Americans have long hoped China might undergo a democratic transition as it got wealthier, and before it became powerful enough to become a strategic and political threat. This seems unlikely, however. The government knows how to cater to the interests of Chinese elites and the emerging middle classes, and builds on their fear of populism. This is why there is little support for genuine multi-party democracy. The elites worry about the example of democracy in Thailand—where the election of a populist premier led to violent conflict between his supporters and the establishment—as a warning of what could happen to them

    Ultimately, Mr Fukuyama's sympathies are clearly with a less statist economic policy and democratic governance. But he doesn't think this model is assured of triumph on its own.

    [I]f the democratic, market-oriented model is to prevail, Americans need to own up to their own mistakes and misconceptions. Washington’s foreign policy during the past decade was too militarised and unilateral, succeeding only in generating a self-defeating anti-Americanism. In economic policy, Reaganism long outlived its initial successes, producing only budget deficits, thoughtless tax-cutting and inadequate financial regulation.

    These problems are to some extent being acknowledged and addressed. But there is a deeper problem with the American model that is nowhere close to being solved. China adapts quickly, making difficult decisions and implementing them effectively. Americans pride themselves on constitutional checks and balances, based on a political culture that distrusts centralised government. This system has ensured individual liberty and a vibrant private sector, but it has now become polarised and ideologically rigid. At present it shows little appetite for dealing with the long-term fiscal challenges the US faces. Democracy in America may have an inherent legitimacy that the Chinese system lacks, but it will not be much of a model to anyone if the government is divided against itself and cannot govern.

    I really have nothing to add to this. What Mr Fukuyama understands, and what so many Americans can't seem to accept, is that the Chinese mode of governance seems to be quite stable. There is no plausible threat to the political monopoly of the Chinese Communist Party. Eastern Europeans abandoned belief in Soviet Communism because its economic model was a pathetic shambles, and even so, it took decades to collapse. The Chinese economic model, meanwhile, is a productive powerhouse. As long as it maintains the confidence of its citizens, there's little reason to think that China's political system is going to change on any timescale subject to punditry.

    More broadly, what Mr Fukuyama is doing here (and he's been on this track for years now) really retracts the thesis to which he subscribed in the early 1990s. History, he's saying, isn't closed. It's by no means clear that the United States or any other welfare-state capitalist liberal democracy is the goal. It's not clear where we're heading, and we should keep our wits about us and adapt; we can be left behind, just as others were before us.

    (Photo credit: AFP)

  • Harm reduction

    Fighting drugs through jujitsu

    Jan 18th 2011, 16:59 by M.S.

    VIA Kevin Drum, Keith O'Brien reports in the Boston Globe on a new study showing positive results from Portugal's nine-year-old experiment in drug decriminalisation. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, rates of hard- and soft-drug usage in Portugal were soaring, along with hepatitis and HIV rates.

    Faced with both a public health crisis and a public relations disaster, Portugal’s elected officials took a bold step. They decided to decriminalize the possession of all illicit drugs—from marijuana to heroin—but continue to impose criminal sanctions on distribution and trafficking. The goal: easing the burden on the nation’s criminal justice system and improving the people’s overall health by treating addiction as an illness, not a crime.

    But nearly a decade later, there’s evidence that Portugal’s great drug experiment not only didn’t blow up in its face; it may have actually worked. More addicts are in treatment. Drug use among youths has declined in recent years. Life in Casal Ventoso, Lisbon’s troubled neighborhood, has improved. And new research, published in the British Journal of Criminology, documents just how much things have changed in Portugal. Coauthors Caitlin Elizabeth Hughes and Alex Stevens report a 63 percent increase in the number of Portuguese drug users in treatment and, shortly after the reforms took hold, a 499 percent increase in the amount of drugs seized—indications, the authors argue, that police officers, freed up from focusing on small-time possession, have been able to target big-time traffickers while drug addicts, no longer in danger of going to prison, have been able to get the help they need.

    Some researchers caution that Portugal's results may be due not so much to tolerance for drug possession as to making more treatment available. But of course these two always go hand in hand, in any harm-reduction strategy for drug use: it's only by decriminalising possession that you get problem users to come in for treatment.

    Portugal is far from the only country that's embraced such harm-reduction strategies, and the verdicts everywhere seem to be similar: they may lead to greater usage of soft drugs, they don't seem to lead to significant increases in hard-drug usage, and they significantly reduce the costs of drug addiction to society. That doesn't mean that drug policy disappears from the political agenda in countries that move towards harm reduction. The newspapers in the Netherlands reported today on a very American-seeming scandal: a website set up by an association of heroin users in Amsterdam, intended to provide addicts with advice on health and safe non-infectious usage, could be read as effectively providing how-to advice on how to shoot up, accessible to web surfers of any age. A conservative-leaning Dutch youth expert wants the site to be somehow restricted to those over the age of 12. But it's instructive to read the reaction of a council member from the right-wing, laissez-faire VVD party, which currently leads the Dutch governing coalition:

    On the one hand, we must ensure that the lowest possible number of people use that stuff. On the other hand, if they do, they should use clean needles, not borrow them from each other. And they should try to limit the health risks. That's the perspective from which I look at the site.

    This is a perfectly rational conservative perspective. And the fact is that Amsterdam's heroin-addict population has been stable or falling for two decades. That's even though, since 2002, the Dutch authorities have been doing something even more radical than Portugal's for heroin users: they've been giving them free heroin, as long as they show up to inject at government-run "safe injection points", under the eyes of police and health staff. Dutch drug researchers now say that the youth population "doesn't relate to hard drugs at all", and that there's no danger that Dutch kids reading the advice site will find heroin use attractive. They're more likely to find it pathetic.

    Drug abuse is driven to a significant extent by fashion. If there's one thing government has going for it, it's the ability to make anything unfashionable. This insight into government's jujitsu-like capability to render the cool uncool should be more obvious to conservatives than to liberals. And yet, in America, the very people who are most distrustful of government's ability to do anything right are the ones who are steadfastly opposed to letting the government use its secret power of deadly uncoolness to fight drug abuse. It seems like a huge wasted opportunity.

  • Partisan rhetoric and public opinion

    Believing our own nonsense

    Jan 18th 2011, 14:41 by W.W. | IOWA CITY

    IT'S clear by now that Paul Krugman thinks there is something seriously wrong with Republicans. The theme of yesterday's column was Republican contempt for logic and good-faith policy analysis. Late last week, Mr Krugman's theme was Republican immorality as the basis of our nation's irreconcilable political divisions. Though it is a challenge to accept that a man of Mr Krugman's intelligence truly believes America's ills flow exclusively from the intellectual and moral failures of the people who disagree with him, I don't believe he is arguing in bad faith. He really is that self-righteously Manichean. What drives Mr Krugman absolutely nuts is that people who are wrong about everything are just as self-righteously Manichean as he is. Where do they get off? 

    Anyway, Mr Krugman's signal lack of charity and gross oversimplification in the following passage from last week offers grist for less vehemently partisan analysis of the state of American public opinion and discourse.      

    One side of American politics considers the modern welfare state—a private-enterprise economy, but one in which society’s winners are taxed to pay for a social safety net—morally superior to the capitalism red in tooth and claw we had before the New Deal. It’s only right, this side believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.

    The other side believes that people have a right to keep what they earn, and that taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft. That’s what lies behind the modern right’s fondness for violent rhetoric: many activists on the right really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty.

    This is just silly isn't it? (Free advice: leave always-wrong "two Americas" columns to David Brooks.) Even a glancing familiarity with the literature on American public opinion shows that a very large majority of conservatives—"the other side of American politics"—approve of Social Security and Medicare, the principal institutions of the post-New Deal social safety net. To a first approximation, everybody in the United States is on the side of Mr Krugman's angels. Furthermore, the ideas that individuals are entitled to the fruits of their labour and that taxation beyond necessity is an unfair imposition are so widespread among Americans that it is quite misleading to attribute them to one "side". As Lane Kenworthy puts it in this useful overview of American political attitudes, "Americans are ideologically conservative but programmatically progressive."

    Later, Mr Krugman writes:

    This deep divide in American political morality—for that’s what it amounts to—is a relatively recent development. Commentators who pine for the days of civility and bipartisanship are, whether they realize it or not, pining for the days when the Republican Party accepted the legitimacy of the welfare state, and was even willing to contemplate expanding it.

    So belief in the legitimacy of the welfare state fell among members of the Republican Party "relatively recently"? Well, look:

    Overall public support for increased safety-net spending hit a low around 1994, in the Contract-with-America era. Since then, support for welfare-state spending has risen above pre-1994 levels, despite a decline in support for increased health and Social Security spending. And this dip is more pragmatic than ideological, reflecting a growing cognizance of the infeasible fiscal trajectories of these programmes. In any case, this is not the picture of a nation in which approximately half the electorate has recently rejected the legitimacy of progressive redistribution. Maybe Mr Krugman has evidence that something extreme has happened since 2008, but I know of none. 

    There is significant support for increases in progressive redistribution, even among those who say they want less government. Behold:

    This data is ten years old, but, again, there's not much reason to think public opinion has recently taken a dramatic turn. (The graphs are from the paywalled version of this 2009 paper by Greg M. Shaw, a political scientist at Illinois Wesleyan University.) The 2006 and 2008 elections suggest a small leftward turn in public sentiment. The 2010 elections suggest a rightward turn, somewhat but not entirely counteracting the voting public's prior leftward tack. 

    This chart is complicated, isn't it? Terminology matters to a baffling degree. Programmes specifically cast as "welfare" do especially poorly with this group. Even then, half or more of respondents want to maintain or increase current levels of "welfare" spending. But look at "aid to poor people"! Very large majorities of those who think "the less government the better" or that the "free market should handle complex problems without government involvement" support maintaining or increasing levels of aid to the poor. Just don't call it "welfare" or "food stamps"! In any case, this is not a picture of a group of ideologues who believe that "taxing them to support others, no matter how needy, amounts to theft", or who "really do see taxes and regulation as tyrannical impositions on their liberty". 

    Yet there is something quite significant about the evidently negative rhetorical charge of "welfare" and "food stamps" among smaller-government, freer-markets types. And there is something quite significant about Mr Krugman's evident confusion about American public opinion and his genuine alarm over libertarian "taxation-is-theft" rhetoric. Although Americans left and right have remarkably consistent "ideologically conservative but programmatically progressive" preferences when it comes to redistributive social policy, it benefits political parties and party politicians to greatly exaggerate their differences. Partisan brand identity and distinction is achieved largely through a commitment to a certain stock of rhetorical tropes and symbolic gestures that float almost entirely free of the party's substantive commitments. People are suckers for rhetoric, which is why merely rhetorical differentiation works at both the grocery store and the polling station. It is also why we are prone to believing crazy things about what the other "side" believes. And this leads to a rhetorical atmosphere corrosive to the trust necessary to facilitate compromises over policy that would be agreeable to most everyone. Our problem, and Mr Krugman's, is that we believe our own BS. 

  • Partisan rhetoric

    McCain once more into the breach

    Jan 17th 2011, 16:36 by M.S.

    LAST week John McCain cast his lot with those who are making some kind of effort at bridging our partisan rhetorical divide. In a Washington Post op-ed responding to Barack Obama's speech on the Arizona shootings, he wrote, 

    john mccainWe should respect the sincerity of the convictions that enliven our debates but also the mutual purpose that we and all preceding generations of Americans serve: a better country; stronger, more prosperous and just than the one we inherited. We Americans have different opinions on how best to serve that noble purpose. We need not pretend otherwise or be timid in our advocacy of the means we believe will achieve it. But we should be mindful as we argue about our differences that so much more unites than divides us...

    I disagree with many of the president's policies, but I believe he is a patriot sincerely intent on using his time in office to advance our country's cause. I reject accusations that his policies and beliefs make him unworthy to lead America or opposed to its founding ideals. And I reject accusations that Americans who vigorously oppose his policies are less intelligent, compassionate or just than those who support them.

    Our political discourse should be more civil than it currently is, and we all, myself included, bear some responsibility for it not being so.

    Which is fine. In addition to the substantive content, there's clearly a tactical angle here: Mr McCain is trying to regain some of his squandered "maverick" credentials. Slate's John Dickerson thinks gestures like this one, and Mr McCain's proposal to have members of Congress assigned to random seats during the president's state-of-the-union address so as to forestall pep-rally shenanigans by hostile right and left blocs, have some chance of winning back the former presidential candidate's reputation for bipartisanship. At worst, in a prior era, his op-ed might have been considered boilerplate post-national-tragedy pablum. But these days, this stuff just doesn't go down very well with a large portion of the conservative movement. The response to Mr McCain from Tea Party Nation (members only) is entitled "The Lunacy of John McCain".

    John McCain represents everything that is wrong with the Republican Party.  He acts more like a liberal democrat than a Republican....Barack Obama a patriot?  Yes, and I am the Pope.

    Obama is intent on using his time in office to advance our country’s cause?   When?  When he assaulted the rights of Americans? When his regime tried brand patriotic Americans as extremists?  When his regime tried to take over the Internet?   When they tried to impose a “fairness doctrine” on the only media conservatives dominate?   When they tried to shove a socialist agenda down the throats of Americans, despite overwhelming proof that Americans did not want this?  How about when he went out apologizing to every third world tyrant for America?  How about when he bowed to foreign leaders?

    ...What we see from Obama is not an incompetent fool.  He knows exactly what he is doing.   From being raised by a mother who hated America, to associating with America hating communists in his youth, he gravitated to communist, America hating professors in College and associated with America hating political groups until it looked like he might actually go somewhere in his political career...

    Obama hates America and that is obvious.

    The folks at Tea Party Nation apparently share Julian Assange's most unsettling trait: a fondness for double-spacing after periods. Anyway, I don't think there's any chance that the efforts of either Mr Obama or Mr McCain will have much effect on the kinds of people who publish this sort of spittle-flecked garbage. What they do instead is to create a counter-narrative of civility and respect that can be deployed in public discussions that threaten to get out of hand, and that may prove appealing to people who aren't temperamental bomb-throwers, or who haven't yet staked themselves to weird, inflammatory, and simply false propositions that are too cognitively embarrassing to retract. If you already strongly believe that Barack Obama is a communist who hates America, bows in obeisance to the king of Saudi Arabia and the prime minister of Japan (hard to square with an affection for communism, but never mind), and "tried to take over the Internet", then it may be difficult to backtrack. But hopefully most people's partisan convictions are a bit more reality-based, and for them calls to refrain from name-calling and wild accusations may be more effective.

    (Photo credit: AFP)

  • Nasty words

    Toxic v ballistic rhetoric

    Jan 14th 2011, 19:55 by M.S.

    CONOR FRIEDERSDORF proposes a quixotic project apparently designed to coax dogmatic partisan ideologues to admit that they are dogmatic partisan ideologues. There's no way out of the I'm-rubber-you're-glue dynamic of arguments about which side's rhetoric is nastier, but what if each side agreed to fess up to examples of inexcusable speech from its political allies, as part of a bargain?

    Every day for a week, Monday through Friday, [National Review Online's] The Corner’s designated blogger could draft one post for publication on [a] left-leaning blog. The catch? They’d be limited to offering five direct quotations per day of lefties engaged in indefensible rhetoric, however they define it (in context, of course).

    In return, the liberal interlocutor could publish the equivalent post at The Corner. And every day for a week, the participants would have to read one another’s five examples for that day, and decide whether to acknowledge that they’re indefensible and assert that the source should apologize if he or she hasn’t done so… or else defend the remark(s).

    Mr Friedersdorf suspects that Matthew Yglesias, Kevin Drum or Jon Chait would be open to such an exchange, while "it wouldn’t be approved at The Corner in a million years. Why do you think that is?" He seems to be tossing out this last point as a kind of dare in the hopes of prodding The Corner to respond. (Though Kevin Drum says he doesn't have time.) But he also thinks the key difference between the sides is that Matthew Yglesias, like many other lefty opinion-mongerers, is quite willing to criticise the ridiculous things Keith Olbermann sometimes says, while people like Victor Davis Hanson never acknowledge the madness of Glenn Beck.

    Andrew Sullivan has been running rhetorical-excess prizes for both the right and left for years now, and he says "the simple fact of the matter is that there's far more on the right than left." More important, he thinks excessive rhetoric on the right routinely involves dehumanising one's enemies and invokes the spectre of violence in a way leftist rhetoric rarely does. He runs down a few entries for his "Michelle Malkin Award":

    "If the [North Koreans] start anything, I say nuke ‘em. And not with just a few bombs," - Glenn Reynolds.

    "I’m not filling out this [census] form. I dare them to try and come throw me in jail. I dare them to. Pull out my wife’s shotgun and see how that little ACS twerp likes being scared at the door," - CNN's Erick Erickson.

    Certainly, one way in which excessive rhetoric on the right is different is its link to pro-violence political sentiments, both in terms of individual gun rights and in terms of militarism in foreign policy. Most Americans on the right believe that a crucial reason why individuals should own guns is to protect themselves from government tyranny, and that widespread individual possession of guns is one of the main reasons why American citizens enjoy freedom of conscience, religion, and the rest of our civil liberties. You can read this argument any day in the NRA's house magazine, "America's 1st Freedom", and I doubt you could find a Republican politician who would demur. But it's a hopelessly mistaken ideological belief. Looking around the world, there is no link between individual ownership of firearms and democratic governance or civil rights and freedoms. The main determinant of guns per population member, as for cars per population member, is wealth. And yet, while the United States has the most guns per person in the world, the number two country appears to be Yemen, not usually considered a bastion of democracy or civil rights. Individual ownership of firearms is much higher in Saudi Arabia and Russia than in Britain; it is much higher in Pakistan than in India. The idea that individuals could use their private firearms to mount a serious challenge to government hegemony is only plausible in very weak states. When individuals, militia or criminal gangs foolishly attempt to directly challenge police or the National Guard in the United States, they are quickly overpowered, killed or arrested, which is why Erick Erickson would never actually point a shotgun at a census worker, regardless of any strange boasts he may make on his blog. Americans and Britons have freedom of conscience and secure property rights because of the strength of American and British democratic civil culture and legal and governing institutions, not as a function of whether or not they are allowed to own private guns.

    What's scary about extreme right-wing rhetoric, to a great extent, is the way it's bound up with a legitimation of private violence as a defence of freedom. This has not always been the exclusive domain of the right. In the late 1960s and 1970s, it was extreme leftist groups such as the Black Panthers and the Weathermen whose rhetoric legitimated armed violence as a defence of "the people". It was appropriate for cooler heads then to denounce such rhetoric as scary on its own terms, and crippling to democratic politics. That lesson was effective: even the most inaccurate and excessive rhetoric on the left these days doesn't invoke violence. For the same reasons, today's right should drop its habit of couching political points in violent terms.

  • Hayek v Obamacare

    Let there be prices

    Jan 14th 2011, 16:15 by W.W. | IOWA CITY

    I APOLOGISE to my colleague for not replying right away to the question in his post responding to my post about libertarianism and health-care reform, but I thought I would make fewer typos if I waited until my tears of frustration dried. He asks:

    I suppose my question for my colleague is: if he doesn't think that liberals have steadily incorporated Hayekian concerns into their proposals for universal health insurance, what exactly does he think ObamaCare is, and how does he explain the difference between ObamaCare and HillaryCare, let alone Medicaid?

    Hayek's most famous insight, about the indispensible informational function of the price mechanism, in his most famous paper, "The Use of Knowledge in Society", comes in the course of an argument to the effect that central economic planning boards are bound to fail. On it's face, it's hard to agree that the Affordable Care Act does much to incorporate the fundamental Hayekian lesson when one of its key provisions is the establishment of the Independent Payment Advisory Board, a sort of central price-setting committee thought by its advocates necessary to contain the runaway cost of the American health-care system. And why has American health-care spending exploded so? In large part because market prices for insurance and health services have been abolished and obscured. Had the ACA incorpated the Hayekian concern, it would have enlarged the role of freely-moving market prices in the provision of insurance and health care, but it does the opposite.

    Actuarially-sound insurance policies are by and large illegal in America. That is to say, the price of a health plan is not allowed to communicate information to consumers about their individual risk. The ACA has doubled-down on the prohibition of risk-sensitive insurance by reducing in various ways the discretion of health-plan providers to take into account pre-existing conditions or changes in health.

    The health plans individuals or empoyers are allowed to purchase (and, under the ACA will be forced to purchase) have functioned to insulate individuals from the cost of care, depriving the system of the efficiency and innovation enabled by price-responsive consumer behaviour. For the most part, in our system there is no such thing as the "price" of a health service or medical procedure. Reimbursement rates are generally unknown to consumers and often unknown to doctors. They are a far cry from the dynamically-adjusting posted prices Hayek proved so necessary for the efficient allocation of resources. And the ACA does less than nothing to restore to the system market pricing or price-responsiveness. Under the ACA there will be fewer co-payments and less payment of deductibles. The contribution limit on tax-exempt flexible spending accounts has been cut in half. New restrictions on FSAs and HSAs require consumers to visit a doctor and get a prescription before using these accounts to purchase non-prescription drugs.

    Milton Friedman's 2001 summary of the pragmatic libertarian approach to health reform has a Hayekian appreciation for the indispensible informational role of prices in its DNA. See if it reminds you of Obamacare.

    The high cost and inequitable character of our medical care system are the direct result of our steady movement toward reliance on third-party payment. A cure requires reversing course, reprivatizing medical care by eliminating most third-party payment, and restoring the role of insurance to providing protection against major medical catastrophes.

    The ideal way to do that would be to reverse past actions: repeal the tax exemption of employer-provided medical care; terminate Medicare and Medicaid; deregulate most insurance; and restrict the role of the government, preferably state and local rather than federal, to financing care for the hard cases. However, the vested interests that have grown up around the existing system, and the tyranny of the status quo, clearly make that solution not feasible politically. Yet it is worth stating the ideal as a guide to judging whether proposed incremental changes are in the right direction.

    If we compare the Affordable Care Act to Friedman's ideal, it's clear that its changes are not in the "right direction".  Now, I don't agree with all the details of Friedman's ideal, but I agree with most of it, and, more generally, I share his and Hayek's way of thinking about social insurance. First, set up dynamic free-market institutions and enjoy the blessings of their efficiency and innovation. High levels of growth and technical invention are the best social insurance, period. Then, use some portion of our enlarged national income to buy insurance for those who can't afford it and to buy care for those who are uninsurable. If a mandate to purchase insurance is really necessary, I don't mind. If some version of an IPAB is needed to decide how much of what care to provide to those who are houses afire, that's fine. But let there be competitive markets. Let there be prices.  

    One of my complaints about this debate is that the left has been committed to a fundamentally dirigiste vision of univeral health care for so long that it has difficulty even conceiving of a system that combines relatively laissez faire market institutions with generous social insurance. My colleague's insistence that Obamacare represents some kind of culmination of liberals' appreciation and incorporation of Hayekian concerns only reinforces my complaint and leaves me in despair.   

  • Wine and money

    Another blow to supply-side economics

    Jan 14th 2011, 14:01 by M.S.

    THE search for safe investments and risk hedging has apparently led some in recent years to start investing in fine wines. "In the past, one of the attractions of fine wine as an asset was its non-correlation with mainstream financial markets," wrote the Financial Times' John Stimfig in 2009. "This provided investors with valuable portfolio diversification." What could be less closely linked to the Fed funds rate than whether or not it was a good year for Bordeaux? But now the FT reports that a new paper by two IMF economists, Serhan Cevik and Tahsin Saadi Sedik, says that if this were ever true, it's not anymore. Fine wine prices are just like oil, they find: they go up or down depending on how the rest of the economy is doing.

    “Our results suggest that although fine wine can be considered as an investable asset, its behaviour is not significantly different than other commodities and therefore may fail to enhance portfolio diversification,” they wrote in an IMF research paper.

    Mr Cevik and Mr Saadi Sedik dispute that supply factors such as climate conditions, grape quality, age effects and external quality ratings drive prices.

    “Fine wine prices are sensitive to macroeconomic shocks, just like crude oil and other commodity prices,” they said, adding that demand is what really matters.

    Weirdly, this analysis comes just as global prices for the food that accompanies those fine wines are spiking. And there, it seems, prices are being driven by supply concerns, not demand.

    Dan Basse, president of AgResource, a Chicago-based forecaster, added: “There’s just no room for error any more. With any kind of weather problem in the upcoming growing season we will make new all-time highs in corn and soy, and to a lesser degree wheat futures.”

    Agricultural traders and analysts warn that the latest revision to US and global stocks means there is no further room for weather problems. The crops in Argentina and Brazil, to be harvested soon, look fragile due to dryness.

    I find both of these investment classes to be superior to gold, for apocalypse-related reasons. There's that old saw about how if the bomb drops and you're stuck in your fallout shelter, you can't eat your gold. But a large position in either corn or soybeans, or fine wines, might be just the ticket.

    (Photo credit: AFP)

  • Barack Obama's speech in Tucson

    Having his cake and eating it too

    Jan 13th 2011, 17:00 by E.M. | WASHINGTON, DC

    PRESIDENTS, the received wisdom has it, are supposed to help soothe the nation after a tragedy like the attempted assassination in Tucson on Saturday of Gabrielle Giffords, the local representative. But presidents are also politicians, who cannot help looking for political advantage at every turn. Was Barack Obama, the pundits asked, capable of the same political agility as Bill Clinton, who, after the Oklahoma city bombing in 1995, managed both to feel the nation’s pain and put his most vociferous Republican critics on the backfoot?

    At first, it looked like the president might fluff things at the memorial service on Wednesday for the six bystanders killed in the attack. The setting was awkward: a sports arena converted into an assembly hall, rather than a somber church or peaceful cemetery. The crowd, perhaps influenced by their surroundings, behaved more like sports fans than mourners, clapping, cheering and whooping at upbeat moments.

    Eric Holder, the man responsible as attorney general for keeping church and state separate, appeared uncomfortable reading to a bunch of rowdy college kids from Paul’s Second Epistle to the Corinthians. Jan Brewer, Arizona’s governor, delivered her remarks in her signature faltering and slurred style, as if reading from an unfamiliar text with no punctuation. There was a lot of ludicrous to-ing and fro-ing about whether Daniel Hernandez, the aide who helped to succour Mrs Giffords as she lay injured, was or was not a hero (Mr Hernandez insisted that he wasn’t; everybody else browbeat him with glowing accolades).

    Mr Obama, as is his wont, spoke for too long: over 30 minutes compared to the ten or so Mr Clinton devoted to the atrocity in Oklahoma city or the five Ronald Reagan took to console America after the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle and the death of all its crew. There were a few rather wordy passages about “discourse”, which probably left most listeners cold. And although his tone was suitably solemn, he did not come anywhere near Clintonian levels of emotion.

    But the speech was nonetheless masterful. First, he presented himself as truly presidential and above the fray by dissenting with other Democrats’ unfair claim that over-the-top Republican rhetoric had somehow provoked the attack. But within a few sentences he nonetheless managed to make the Democrats’ fiercest critics seem petty and bullying by comparing their approach to politics with that of Christina Green, the nine-year-old girl who was killed as she waited in excitement to meet her congresswoman. In short, Mr Obama got to have his cake and eat it too, appearing magnanimous while embarrassing his adversaries.

    It helped, of course, that earlier in the day Sarah Palin, one of the supposed Republican inciters, had got caught up in a debate about whether her talk of “blood libel” had been anti-Semitic (Ms Giffords is Jewish). In an even bigger blunder, John Boehner, the new speaker of the House, spurned the offer of a lift to the memorial service on Airforce One, attending a Republican fundraiser in Washington instead. The most prominent Republican figure to show up was John McCain, the man Mr Obama drubbed in the past presidential election.

    Whether all this matters is another question. It is almost two years to the next presidential election, by which point the tragedy in Tucson, and Mr Obama’s response, will be the dimmest of memories. In the meantime, the Republicans are not likely to go soft on the president, even if they quell the bombast for a spell. But after a period during which Mr Obama appeared to have ears of solid tin, he seems to be rediscovering some political nous.

    (Photo credit: AFP)

  • Blood libel

    The mama-bear's tale

    Jan 13th 2011, 14:43 by M.S.

    THE world is full of coincidences. Last night, I was reading "The Canterbury Tales", because at dinner my daughter had observed that the word vracht in Dutch resembles its English translation, "freight", even more closely when you note that "freight" has a "gh" in it. I then told her what I knew about Middle English and how "gh" actually used to be voiced like a Dutch ch, the "voiceless velar fricative", before the 15th century with its Great Vowel Shift and other changes, and about "The Canterbury Tales", the prologue of which I thought contained a word with that sound. After she went to bed I looked it up, and it turned out to be the word "droghte", which is in fact exactly the same as the modern Dutch droogte, "dryness" or "drought". Then, naturally, I went looking for the dirty bits, particularly that hilariously nasty pun on the word "quaint", but I misremembered those as coming in the Prioress's Tale rather than the Miller's Tale. So I wound up reading the Prioress's Tale, which I didn't remember, and which turns out to be a peculiarly horrible version of the blood libel, celebrating the massacre of a town's Jewish population on the absurd pretext that they had conspired to murder a little Christian boy because he sang Christian hymns too beautifully while walking down a Jewish street.

    sarah palinSarah Palin also had the blood libel on her mind yesterday. But as she so often does, she used the term in a way that suggests she may not know quite what it means. From the video she posted on her website Wednesday:

    Especially within hours of a tragedy unfolding, journalists and pundits should not manufacture a blood libel that serves only to incite the very hatred and violence that they purport to condemn. That is reprehensible.

    It's not exactly a surprise that Mrs Palin uses the English language the way most people do: confusingly. This is part of her demotic charm. At critical moments, she has an uncanny, or perhaps very canny, ability to say precisely the wrong thing, or a strangely garbled version of the commonplace thing, in a way that makes a significant segment of the population sympathise with her because they might have done the same. And after all, linguistic mistakes are a relative concept; the people who made the Great Vowel Shift happen did so by speaking "incorrectly", and in a hundred years our progeny may all be speaking more like Mrs Palin, as disturbing as some of us may find that prospect.

    In the case of "blood libel", it's not even quite clear that Mrs Palin's use of the term is incorrect. If she were under the impression that "blood libel" simply meant a false claim of responsibility for murder, then she would be misusing the term due to ignorance of its origins and implications. But she may in fact intend those implications. She may be saying that liberals are falsely accusing conservatives, and Mrs Palin in particular, of responsibility for the shootings in Arizona last weekend, and that this is analogous to the false claims by Christians throughout the Middle Ages and up through the 20th century that Jews ritually murdered Christian children, which were used as excuses for pogroms and anti-semitic persecution. In that case, she would be cannily exploiting the extraordinary conservative sense of being an oppressed minority, a persecution complex that has also long played a part in her political appeal.

  • The Arizona shootings

    The dust settling

    Jan 12th 2011, 19:26 by E.G. | AUSTIN

    AFTER the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, George Bush promised to get Osama bin Laden dead or alive and to smoke him out of his hole. The (Texan) journalist Molly Ivins later wrote that when she saw those television appearances, her first reaction was along the lines of, "Sign me up for the posse, sheriff." It was a long time, Ivins later wrote, before it even crossed her mind that some people might find that kind of commentary inappropriate given Mr Bush's position.

    I've had that in mind over the last few days, as the debate over political language continues to rage in the wake of Saturday's shootings in Arizona. As reporters parse Jared Lee Loughner's paper trail, and talk to his neighbours and acquaintances, it's become clear that he had some interest in Gabrielle Giffords dating to at least 2007—before Sarah Palin appeared on the national scene, before the tea-party movement coalesced, and before the recent uptick in angry rhetoric—so attempts to link him directly to any of those phenomena have to be somewhat qualified. 

    Now, I'm pretty sympathetic to voluble anti-government cranks. It's part of my broader position that cranks of all ideological stripes are natural allies in the fight against complacency (and boredom). And as the Ivins example suggests, people have different metaphorical underpinnings and premises. It doesn't make them bad people. But I still think that the shootings present a worthwhile occasion for politicians to do a little gut check on how they talk about their opponents. Why so defensive, conservatives?

    On the one hand, I understand the argument that the shootings should not be understood as a political action. All credible politicians and parties in the United States are opposed to violent action, and in his actions over the weekend Mr Loughner put himself irretrievably outside of any normal civic life, if he wasn't there already. In a state the size of Arizona there would have to be thousands of politicians shot before the p-value approached significance. On the other hand, the idea that the shootings were completely apolitical seems to be whistling past the graveyard. The shooter was demonstrably interested in politics and his views, as expressed in internet ramblings, were of a paranoid anti-government strain that has found a welcome in some corners of the political right. It's possible to consider that without assigning blame. Do mainstream politicians really want to share a rhetorical stance with a murderous paranoid schizophrenic, if that is the going diagnosis?

    Rhetoric aside, I would partly disagree with my colleague below, that the appropriate thing to do right now is nothing. Political emotionalism can be dangerous, but political opportunism is merely in bad taste, and I've never noticed that stopping anyone before. Lax gun laws in the American southwest have facilitated problems outside our borders. If Mr Loughner's actions prove to be the catalyst for some tightening, I wouldn't oppose it on procedural grounds.

  • Rating teachers

    The big brawl

    Jan 12th 2011, 17:42 by C.H. | CHICAGO

    HOW can you identify a good teacher? It seems like a simple question. But for years states and districts have not even attempted to answer it, rating the vast majority of teachers as satisfactory. This is changing, at last, as reformers push for new systems to evaluate teachers. But change still depends on unions. 

    Teachers' unions are at an important juncture. Their erstwhile allies, the Democrats, are prodding them to reward good teachers and get rid of bad ones. Even the National Education Association (NEA), the country’s biggest union, is talking about reform, albeit not very convincingly.

    randi weingartenThe most interesting struggle is playing out in the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Randi Weingarten (pictured), the AFT's president, insists that unions will be part of the solution. This is at least in part a survival tactic—the AFT has to advocate for reform or it will be left out of the debate. "I've worked very hard to make the AFT and rank-and-file teachers part of the conversation," Ms Weingarten told me last month. But she has done more than join a dialogue. By declaring herself to be open to change, she has become tremendously powerful. As one reformer told me: "If you're in education and you want change, you need the union's approval. And she's all you've got."

    Ms Weingarten likes to talk about collaboration. She praised Colorado’s bold reforms (that state’s NEA denounced them) and she points to the AFT’s innovative new contracts in New Haven and Baltimore. But she is also a fighter. Last year Ms Weingarten and Michelle Rhee, then the schools chief in Washington, DC, engaged in an all-out brawl over proposed reforms. Politico reported that the AFT spent $1m to help defeat Ms Rhee’s boss, Adrian Fenty, the then-mayor. Ms Rhee resigned soon after and the local union elected a vigilant, old-fashioned leader. The union election, Ms Weingarten told me, was "a response to the frustration that teachers have, where they are being told what to do and they haven't been listened to."

    The fight will become only more intense. Arne Duncan wants the next version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (last known as "No Child Left Behind") to transform evaluation systems across the country. Ms Rhee has founded a new group, StudentsFirst, which aims to be a counterweight to the unions. "The purpose of the teachers’ union is to protect the privileges, priorities, and pay of their members," she wrote in Newsweek in December. "We need a new voice to change the balance of power in public education." She plans to raise $1 billion for reform-minded candidates. 

    Ms Weingarten hates being cast as the bad guy, as she was on a panel with Ms Rhee in September, a pained smile fixed on her face. She insists that progress will only come with the union's help. For better or worse, she’s right.

    (Photo credit: Bloomberg News)

  • The shooting of Gabrielle Giffords

    The case for doing nothing

    Jan 12th 2011, 14:45 by W.W. | IOWA CITY

    THERE are uncountably many ways to die. Most deaths, though, fall under a handful of familiar categories: heart disease, car crash, suicide, etc. There is comfort in this generality. It makes the struggle for survival tractable. We can discover in ever greater detail the determinants of disease, traffic accidents, and dark thoughts, allowing us to do something about them—to give ourselves a little more time. But try as we might to cushion the whole world, there will remain an infinite storehouse of freakishly singular hazards that elude imagination and defy the generalisation that feeds caution. For instance:

    PARKLAND, FL (CNN) - A bizarre accident involving a neck massager has killed a well-respected South Florida doctor.

    Police say Michelle Ferrari-Gegerson had just finished wrapping some presents on Christmas Eve and was using a neck massager when the device strangled her.

    Her husband found her unconscious on their bedroom floor.

    "The massager got entangled with a necklace, and it probably caused her to black out very quickly," Broward County Sheriff Jim Leljedal said.

    Of course, it is always possible to draw some general lesson from an exotic calamity. Remove your necklace before using a neck massager! But precepts of such fine grain rarely apply, multiply beyond memory's capacity, cripple life if unfailingly observed, and, in any case, do nothing to guard against the remaining millions of unimagined possibilities. Still, freakish death is profoundly unnerving and facing its immunity to reason tends to aggravate rather than soothe our cellular fear of disorder and death. Far from leading us to resignation, the inscrutability of a sui generis disaster sets our minds in mad motion. We desperately and pathetically grope for some blameworthy failure of foresight, some forward-looking lesson, some food for prudence. It doesn't matter if there are none to be found. We'll make it all up if we have to. 

    Not every general feature of Saturday's shootings in Tucson has been seized upon. No one is proposing new rules for supermarkets, young white guys, or sun-baked locales. The things we already fear and already desire more thoroughly to control are most vividly salient to us. We seize on those: guns, crazy people. Did Jared Lee Loughner shoot government officials with a gun? Ban guns within 1,000 feet of government officials! Was Jared Lee Loughner detectably crazy? Make involuntary commitment easier! Did Jared Lee Loughner buy a gun while detectably crazy? Tighten background-screening requirements! Did Jared Lee Loughner's gun sport an extended magazine? Ban extended magazines

    Some of these proposals may have merit, but no more now than on Friday. The issues they address have become no more urgent. Sadly, people are shot to death every day. The odd and the infirm roam our streets. Some of them buy guns and use them. With the incarceration of Jared Lee Loughner, the odds of crazy people shooting and killing officeholders (and untitled, less newsworthy human beings) has gone down, not up. There is no more reason now to deliberate publicly about mental-health and gun-control policy. Indeed, there is every reason to postpone deliberation and debate until we recover from the panicked burst of irrationality and high emotion predictably induced by a highly-visible but singular, largely ungrokkable enormity.

    The groundless yet tenacious insistence of partisan rhetoricians that Mr Loughner's evil deed was somehow brought about by partisan rhetoric is Exhibit A in the case that our opinion- and law-making classes are now in no condition to reason responsibly about guns and insanity. If our instinct for order and self-protection really needs something to chew on, consider a new cultural norm discouraging public deliberation and policymaking regarding the issues that spring immediately to mind in the aftermath of a traumatising tragedy. Wouldn't the PATRIOT Act be better had Congress waited six months, or at least long enough to read the thing, before voting on it? Good arguments for banning extended magazines will still be good in two months, and it will be easier to tell.       

    We may badly want to do something, but we will be better off in the end if we hug our jerking knees and find our cool. The ordinary operation of the criminal-justice system is enough for now. If you've got to do something, why not tell a pundit or politician yammering on about background checks or forced institutionalisation to please shut up, since it's just too soon for reason to prevail.  

  • Teachers

    The recruitment problem

    Jan 11th 2011, 22:03 by C.H. | CHICAGO

    A GROUP of second-graders gaze at their teacher, Mauricia Dantes. Morton School of Excellence, on Chicago’s West Side, used to be one of the city’s worst schools. With new staff, that is changing. Ms Dantes is the kind of teacher students want to impress. Ms Dantes asks a question and hands shoot up. She calls on a lucky boy. Another squirms; Ms Dantes silences him with a quick look. The boy talks about Helen Keller’s determination, then gets shy. Ms Dantes coaxes him on. "I feel like I’m in college", a girl says proudly. One day she may be.

    A teacher can have an enormous effect on a child in his classroom. No school factor—budget, class size, curriculum—is more important. But America does a horrendous job recruiting teachers. 

    High-performing countries select teachers carefully. In Singapore, for example, the teacher-training programme accepts about one in eight applicants. In America teacher-training programmes have a financial incentive to admit almost anyone who applies. In the old days finding good teachers was much easier. Talented women taught because they couldn't find work elsewhere. Now just 23% of new teachers rank in the top third of their academic class, according to a report from McKinsey. The share is even smaller in poor schools. 

    The question is, how do we get better teachers in America's classrooms? Raising teacher salaries would help, but budgets are tight. One option, posited by McKinsey, would be to start by raising salaries in poor districts. Schools might also pay more money to fewer teachers—a big class with a good teacher may be better than a small class with a bad one. 

    The teaching profession also needs a better image. This seems like a fluffy proposition, but it’s an important one. Talented workers are attracted to prestigious fields. Teach for America has helped to give teaching a caché (12% of Ivy League seniors applied last year) but only as a temporary job. More promising are programmes that recruit an elite group for a career in teaching. In Chicago the Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL) recruits smart candidates such as Ms Dantes (formerly a consultant for IBM). AUSL trains them in a residency programme, then places them in a public school managed by AUSL. Graduates must teach in a Chicago school for at least four years, a requirement that weeds out those who want only a short stint of teaching.  

    But perhaps the biggest problem is that schools do not value good teachers over bad ones. A talented professional wants to feel recognised for his work. The current education system does not identify good teachers, let alone reward them. Distinguishing between good teachers and bad ones, however, is reform’s most controversial question. I’ll tackle it in another post tomorrow.

    (Photo credit: AFP)

  • Libertarian responsibilities

    Where liberals have become more libertarian

    Jan 10th 2011, 23:38 by M.S.

    IT WOULD take me much too long to figure out a rationally or ethically consistent answer to the question of what libertarians can be blamed for, so I've been following the debate on that question, which my colleague responds to, with some trepidation. I tend to strongly disagree with libertarians on most questions of economic justice and social organisation, but as to what libertarians, as a group, can be blamed for, or must take responsibility for...I'm not really sure I want to take the time to think about that.

    But I did have a pretty strong reaction to my colleague's last paragraph, which I think misses the obvious.

    The problem is not so much the notion that access to health care is a human right—a notion I think most Americans endorse in some form or other—but the distinctively progressive vision of government's maximally extensive role in managing the provision of the entitlement. That is to say, our stupid health-care system cannot be attributed to the influence of the likes of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, neither of whom opposed a universal entitlement to health care. On the contrary, we would have long ago achieved the dream of universal access to decent care had liberals let go of their dream of big government's supervisory role and paid more attention to the likes of Messrs Hayek and Friedmen when they talked about about how to get this sort of thing done. Health-care pundit, heal thyself.

    The Affordable Care Act is precisely this. It is exactly the result of 30 years of liberals letting go of the idea of a simple, centralised government programme of national health insurance, and instead devising increasingly market-based, decentralised, Friedmanite or Hayekian systems to achieve universal access to health care through private health-insurance corporations. I literally cannot imagine a more market-based, private-sector system for universal health insurance than the one that the Democrats implemented last fall. In all the world, a world which contains many conservative-leaning countries beside the United States (Switzerland, Japan), there is no more private-sector-oriented universal health-insurance system than ObamaCare. Historically, HillaryCare was already a huge shift towards decentralised market-oriented universal health insurance, much more Hayekian than the plan Nixon proposed. The Republican plan proposed to counter HillaryCare in 1993 was functionally the same sort of plan as RomneyCare in Massachussetts, or ObamaCare today.

    I understand that my colleague doesn't think much of any of the plans that have ever made it to the level of serious proposals in Congress. I find the preferred ideas he volunteered in 2006, to which he refers in comments, to be unrealistic and undesirable. They include, as central planks, ending government licensing of doctors and abolishing the Food and Drug Administration. I don't want to get into a long argument here about why I think these are misconceived ideas. But the ideas he sketches out seem to me to be fatally unaware of issues of adverse selection, and to gloss over basic concerns of fairness towards people who cost more to insure because they are born with poorer health outlooks than others, through no fault of their own.

    But I take it back: I do want to go back to the issue of what libertarians should take responsibility for. I think what's revealing is that liberals, who by and large would prefer a universal health-insurance solution much more aggressive than ObamaCare, have nevertheless taken political responsibility for defending it. Many liberals believe that private health-insurance companies do not add any social value, or nowhere near enough to justify their added costs. Nonetheless, liberals have been willing to patiently explain why, having struck a bargain with Friedmanites who refuse to countenance large public programmes, complicated measures and market interventions (including a buyer mandate) are needed for any private system to provide universal insurance.

    In contrast, libertarians have refused to be tied to any actually-proposed specific plan with any sizeable constituency. Just as frustrating, they have refused to admit that the steps that liberals took towards increasingly Hayekian or Friedmanite market-based private-sector universal health-insurance systems were such steps, or that they had been taken at all. Liberals, in discussing these issues with libertarians over the past two years, frequently felt that they were having a conversation with a group of charming tropical birds, who responded to each advance by retreating further into the bush. I suppose my question for my colleague is: if he doesn't think that liberals have steadily incorporated Hayekian concerns into their proposals for universal health insurance, what exactly does he think ObamaCare is, and how does he explain the difference between ObamaCare and HillaryCare, let alone Medicaid?

    (Photo credit: AFP)

  • Spinning Tucson

    Krugman's toxic rhetoric

    Jan 10th 2011, 20:42 by W.W. | IOWA CITY

    HOW did a deadly shooting spree by a disturbed young man with the typically inscrutable politics of political killers turn into a crazy referendum on the state of American political discourse?

    Mere minutes after the identity of the alleged Tucson gunman hit the wires, partisans began a reprehensible scramble to out Jared Loughner as ideological kin to their political opponents. Actually, well before that time, some left-leaning opinionators began suggesting that Sarah Palin's now-infamous crosshairs map probably had something to do with the shootings. At the very least, intemperately fiery right-wing rhetoric probably had something to do with creating a cultural "climate" unusually encouraging to would-be assassins. Before anybody really knew anything, some people seemed to have become convinced that if not for the heavy weather of partisan antagonism summoned by intemperate tea-party types, Gabrielle Giffords would not have got a bullet through the brain.

    In a blog item on Saturday, before any significant details about Mr Loughner's motivations had come to light, Paul Krugman wrote:

    You know that Republicans will yell about the evils of partisanship whenever anyone tries to make a connection between the rhetoric of Beck, Limbaugh, etc. and the violence I fear we’re going to see in the months and years ahead. But violent acts are what happen when you create a climate of hate. And it’s long past time for the GOP’s leaders to take a stand against the hate-mongers.

    This struck me as irresponsibly premature, and one might have thought that, given a little more time and information, Mr Krugman would change his tune, or at least turn down the volume. Nope. In today's column on America's alleged "climate of hate", Mr Krugman reports that he's been "expecting something like this atrocity to happen" since 2008, conjures in his fevered imagination a "rising tide of violence", and spots his hated political foes behind it all:

    [I]t’s the saturation of our political discourse—and especially our airwaves—with eliminationist rhetoric that lies behind the rising tide of violence.

    Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right.

    What's more, unless the ranting right reins in the kind of talk that leaves Mr Krugman "with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach", "Saturday’s atrocity will be just the beginning." Welcome to crazytown, my friends, where it does not seem crazy to disgorge toxic, entirely evidence-free rhetoric about the mortal threat of toxic rhetoric. Does the man honestly think he's helping?

  • When socialism and libertarianism collide

    Who's to blame for American health care?

    Jan 10th 2011, 16:22 by W.W. | IOWA CITY

    MOUNTING toward his conclusion in a much-discussed post attempting fairly and precisely to pinpoint the ways in which libertarians have and have not made the world lousy, Ezra Klein says this:

    That libertarian dreams of a privatized (or completely dismantled) Medicare system haven't come to pass is no more relevant than dreams of minarchy. What has come to pass is an aggressive and successful effort to stop America from following other countries' paths to national health-care systems. And the result can be seen here: If our costs had followed their costs, we'd have no budget deficit to speak of. Libertarians shouldn't have to answer for minarchy. But they do have to answer for that.

    One can tell a lot from a thinker's constants and variables. Aristotle taught that it is of the essence of terrestial bodies to move always toward their "natural place", the earth's centre, unless impeded by contigent forces. In Mr Klein's telling, advanced liberal democracies, being what they are, tend always toward more thoroughly nationalised health-care systems, their natural state, unless prevented by contigent, contrary forces. Mr Klein imagines libertarianism as an antagonist to the natural progress of decent nations effective only if fatcats "pump a lot of money" into it, and he imagines they have. So we can specifically blame libertarians for the baleful state of America's health-care system because libertarian ideology is that variable social force without which the natural apotheosis of the American social insurance state would have been clinched. 

    Of course, the story can go the other way 'round. If not for the vast and lavishly subsidised conspiracy that has enabled ideologues of social democracy to dominate America's premier opinion-shaping institutions, America would now enjoy the abundant blessings of thoroughly free and competitive markets in insurance and health services. After all, efficient and free markets are the natural and just condition of a free people. This story is at least as compelling as Mr Klein's, and I'll admit I once believed something like it.

    As it is, libertarianism and social democracy are rival ideologies, and their proponents have fought bitterly to shape public opinion and America's public institutions. The standard of justice, the telos of progress, is hotly contested, so it begs some big questions to take one as given when tallying the costs of competing creeds. Left-wingers labour mightily to explain away America's libertarian streak as a paid-for product of the upper crust, and right-wingers strain to brand even the mildest public collectivism as an invasive ideological species. Really, each impulse is both a bit native and a bit bought, and Americans with money tend to buy what they have absorbed coming up American. America's deep and longstanding libertarian tendencies explain why this country produces so many libertarian theorists and any libertarian billionaires at all. It explains why communist politics were a flop on the fruited plain ages before the ages of Ayn Rand and the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. And it explains why the attractions of Saskatchewanian social insurance never caught fire in Kankakee. 

  • Gabrielle Giffords

    Bleeding Arizona

    Jan 10th 2011, 5:04 by E.G. | AUSTIN

    IF YOU were to hear that on Saturday a congresswoman was shot during the course of a political event, would you guess that the representative in question was a Democrat or a Republican? I would guess the former, as indeed was the case Saturday when Gabrielle Giffords, along with 18 other people, was shot in Tucson. (Six were killed, and Ms Giffords was in critical condition Sunday evening.)

    It looks like the shooter was an isolated paranoiac, as they often are, so it would be unfair to blame a political party for his murders. However, the intuition highlighted at the beginning of this post is probably a common one. What is its basis? It probably has to do with the sense that Republicans have more prominently pugnacious rhetoric, and a greater affinity for guns. I've defended exaggerations on this blog before and will continue to defend them as a form of political expression from intellectually and emotionally engaged citizens. Just last week I was criticising Democrats for not being aggressive enough. To some extent, I agree with Jack Shafer:

    The great miracle of American politics is that although it can tend toward the cutthroat and thuggish, it is almost devoid of genuine violence outside of a few scuffles and busted lips now and again. With the exception of Saturday's slaughter, I'd wager that in the last 30 years there have been more acts of physical violence in the stands at Philadelphia Eagles home games than in American politics.

    Any call to cool "inflammatory" speech is a call to police all speech, and I can't think of anybody in government, politics, business, or the press that I would trust with that power.

    Policing entails regulations and the capacity for enforcement, but it's reasonable to make the milder statement that politicians would do well to curb their overtly inflammatory rhetoric. There's a difference between Sarah Palin's "death panels" and her now-infamous "crosshairs" map. Only a disturbed person would interpret the latter as an actual call to violence, but it's a deliberately provocative image that suggests a threat which is actually, as we saw yesterday, in the realm of the vaguely credible.

    Does that mean all such metaphors should be verboten? Before the weekend, I would have thought the risk of actual political violence was vanishingly small. If I were a politician I would be giving it some very serious thought this week. Mrs Palin's rush to push back against her critics shows a real lack of sensitivity, contemplation, and judgment, although she isn't the only prominent Republican to have indulged in such imagery. The party obviously shouldn't be held accountable for Saturday's violence, but this should push its leadership to some serious reflection about the limits of responsible political rhetoric.

  • Corporate tax rates

    Everybody loves the business flat tax

    Jan 7th 2011, 23:14 by M.S.

    Corporate tax ratesTEEING off a Wall Street Journal article on growing movement towards reforming and simplifying the corporate tax code, Jonathan Chait suggests this is an area of genuine bipartisan agreement where success is possible. The WSJ piece certainly indicates that Democrats, Republicans and corporations are interested in pushing one half of reform, the part about lowering the nominal corporate tax rate to European levels. It provides reason to doubt that Republicans or corporations are interested in the other half of reform, the part about eliminating the loopholes and gimmicks that currently ensure American companies actually pay less in taxes than their European counterparts.

    Obstacles to a deal to revamp corporate taxes include the likelihood corporations will fight to keep tax breaks that work to their benefit, and White House concerns that any tax overhaul not result in less revenue...

    Republicans, however, are unlikely to support a plan that substantially raises the government's total tax take. Rep. Pat Tiberi (R., Ohio), the incoming chairman of a House Ways and Means panel on federal revenue, says it is "unrealistic" to expect businesses to give up enough of their tax breaks to hold revenues flat.

    So Mr Tiberi thinks a deal is possible, so long as it cuts taxes and increases the deficit. Anyway, Mr Chait provides a Wall Street Journal graph that raises an interesting point.

    What you're seeing in that divergence between the nominal rate corporations are supposed to pay, and the rate they actually pay after loopholes and gimmicks, is institutionalised clientilism and favouritism. In many other countries, the same phenomenon is expressed as corruption, but in America and other advanced economies it's incorporated into the tax code so as to fan away the stench. The problem with trying to get rid of clientilism is that it tends to be supported by the clients.

    For example, I used to get around in Vietnam on a motorbike. Officially, if you committed a traffic offence, you were supposed to pay a fine of five to ten dollars. In practice, anyone hauled over for an offence would negotiate with the traffic cop and pay a lower fine which would go directly into his pocket. People driving expensive cars or motorbikes were almost never stopped, as they were assumed to be well-connected. Westerners, meanwhile, were always treated with exaggerated deference and never really got stopped by the traffic police no matter what we did. We would then constantly complain about the fact that people ran red lights so often. In theory, everyone should have been amenable to a deal that lowered the official fine but ensured that everyone would actually pay it. In practice, everyone with the clout to avoid the rules had an interest in keeping the corrupt system in place.

    These are the reasons for scepticism that a deal on corporate tax rates will actually succeed in closing many loopholes. The ability to negotiate tax breaks is a core competency of large American businesses, and the ability to award tax breaks is a core competency of politicians. And you don't give up your areas of core competency.

  • The Texas budget

    Minding the gap

    Jan 7th 2011, 20:42 by E.G. | AUSTIN

    TEXAS is forecasted to have a hefty budget deficit over the 2012-2013 biennium—probably more than $20 billion, although the comptroller's latest forecast isn't due until next week. Paul Krugman, shocked by the numbers, sees it as a rebuke to Texas's model:

    The point, however, is that just the other day Texas was being touted as a role model (and still is by commentators who haven’t been keeping up with the news). It was the state the recession supposedly passed by, thanks to its low taxes and business-friendly policies. Its governor boasted that its budget was in good shape thanks to his “tough conservative decisions.”

    rick perryWe've written quite a bit about the Texas budget, including here and here. As I said last summer, Rick Perry was being overly cavalier about the budget outlook, saying that he wasn't even sure it would be a problem, even while simultaneously ordering across-the-board spending cuts at all state agencies:

    ...an odd stance, but not inexplicable. The budget cuts will have to go through the state legislature, which does not meet again until January. The elections, of course, are in November.

    Now, of course, it is January, and when the legislature reconvenes next week they are going to have a big challenge. There is still about $8 billion in the state's "rainy day" fund, although Republicans are historically reluctant to touch it. Given the deeply conservative tilt of the new legislature, cuts are far more likely than tax increases (although not impossible; even a few Republicans have endorsed the idea of raising the petrol tax to help pay for the roads).

    It would, of course, be nearly impossible for any state to avoid a severe national recession entirely. However, I don't think it follows that Texas's approach over the last few years was the wrong one. Three years of economic indicators showing Texas out well ahead in lots of measures (unemployment, foreclosure rates, job creation) translates into a tremendous amount of foregone suffering and distress. That's one of the reasons Texas has seen significant population growth over those years—a kind of economic osmosis as people came here to work—and, in fact, the more recent rise in unemployment is partly because the rate of job creation hasn't quite kept up with population growth. At the moment, the state's economic performance is still better than that of the nation as a whole, although the gap has narrowed on measures such as unemployment. Going forward, the companies that relocated to Texas in the past few years aren't going to pull up stakes and vanish overnight, and in growing industries such as wind and solar energy, Texas has made inroads that position it well for decades to come.

    As Mr Krugman points out, the most serious costs are Texas's relative underinvestment in education, health care, and social services. It's partly a philosophical question. Is it more important to focus on building a good safety net, or to try to create the conditions that would reduce the chances of people needing the net? Ideally you'd have both; in practice, sometimes, neither. Texas's approach has favoured the latter, with demonstrable results in the form of the economic osmosis I mentioned earlier. There appears to be a coalescing consensus in Texas that more attention needs to be paid to schools (although, Texas-ishly, the argument is being made on the grounds that a substandard educational pipeline will undermine global competitiveness). However, the political will is lagging. In my view, that's one adverse effect of Texas's comparative success during these past few years. The state hasn't experienced the kind of crises that occasionally stimulate productive risk or visionary change. However, it's a bargain that most Texans were happy to take.

    (Photo credit: AFP)

  • William Daley

    There's a new chief in town

    Jan 7th 2011, 19:16 by E.M. | WASHINGTON, DC

    william daleyTHE inner workings of the White House, are, by definition, somewhat opaque to the world at large. So it is no surprise that we saps on the outside have analysed Barack Obama’s appointment of Bill Daley as his new chief of staff more for its symbolism than its substance.

    The most common line is to declare the appointment a sop to the business world, with which Mr Obama has had a testy relationship (if I had a penny for every time someone has complained that Mr Obama has never had to "make payroll"…). Mr Daley, after all, is a former secretary of commerce and telecoms executive who currently works for JPMorgan—one of several stints as a banker. He even once made payroll, when he set up an insurance brokerage in Chicago with one of his brothers. True, he has landed his grander private-sector jobs more as a political fixer rather than as a business brain—but his appointment still sends a welcome signal to America’s boardrooms.

    A variant on this interpretation depicts Mr Daley’s elevation as a sign that Mr Obama is determined to try to get on with Republicans and eschew polarising positions over the next two years. The best evidence for this is a much rehearsed comment of Mr Daley’s that Mr Obama’s health-care reforms, which the newly ascendant Republicans despise, went too far. In the administration of Bill Clinton, Mr Daley was instrumental in persuading Congress to pass NAFTA, perhaps the left’s most hated free-trade agreement. The fact that he worked for Mr Clinton at all, for that matter, suggests a reassuring, middle-of-the-road pragmatism, as well as experience dealing with a hostile Republican Congress.

    A slightly gloomier way of looking at things concludes that the Democrats’ defeat in the mid-terms has caused Mr Obama to fall back on the services of a narrow political clique from his home town. Mr Daley’s brother Richard is Chicago’s long-serving mayor. His father held the same job before him. Mr Obama’s previous chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel, left the job in the hopes of becoming mayor of Chicago himself later this year, when Mr Daley (Richard, that is) gives up the post. By this reckoning, Mr Obama is too cowed and defensive to step outside his comfort zone these days.

    Perhaps he is. But if Mr Obama is even half as intelligent and competent as we have been led to believe, he would not treat the selection of a new chief of staff as an exercise in escapism or semiotics. Far more important than sending signals by human semaphore to Wall Street or to independent voters is to pick someone who might actually do a good job. After all, the media will have lost interest in Mr Daley’s background in a week or two, and the broader public probably had little of it in the first place.

    Happily, Mr Daley has a reputation for steadying listing ships and making the best of bad situations. Al Gore is said to have blamed his loss in the presidential election of 2000 on his failure to recruit Mr Daley as campaign chairman until too late in the day. Even senior Republicans speak of him as a guy who can get things done. Any benefits he brings to the White House in terms of public relations are surely simply an added bonus.

    (Photo credit: AFP)

  • Defence cuts

    Those spending cuts you said you wanted

    Jan 7th 2011, 17:16 by M.S.

    TEA-PARTY groups are warning the GOP to cut government spending dramatically or face primary challenges, The Hill reports. Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation posted an open letter to John Boehner on his website (access for Tea Party Nation members only!) demanding "serious and meaningful cuts in the budget." Fortunately, Robert Gates, America's secretary of defence, provided Mr Boehner with an easy way to do so yesterday.

    Robert GatesGates surprises lawmakers with plan to cut $78 billion from defense budget

    By Erik Wasson 01/06/11 12:24 PM ET

    Defense Secretary Robert Gates Thursday told Congress the administration is seeking $78 billion in cuts to the Defense budget over the next five years on top of $100 billion in efficiencies.

    Not bad. $15 billion per year is about 75% as much as the government could save by eliminating earmarks entirely. Mr Gates is continuing his remarkable record as an elder statesman at Defence with the dedication, long-term strategic vision and political independence needed to cut wasteful programmes and bring spending down to sustainable levels. It really is surprising to see.

    The GOP leadership's reaction? Less surprising.

    House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) said after the morning briefing that he was deeply concerned about the surprising depth of the spending cuts. McKeon said he had gone into the meeting expecting to oppose the plan to trim $100 billion in waste when Gates announced the additional $78 billion in reductions.

    “We are fighting two wars, you have China, you have Iran: Is this the time to be making these types of cuts?” McKeon said.

    Presumably the time to make these kinds of cuts is after China and Iran cease to exist. Note that Mr McKeon isn't just against the new $78 billion in cuts; he opposes the initial $100 billion in cuts, too. And GOP congressmen aren't just a bunch of airy talkers; they're getting ready to do something about it.

    In anticipation of the Gates announcement, House supporters of the Marine Corps, which is being especially hard hit, gathered Thursday morning to plan a strategy. The meeting was attended by Armed Services Committee members Reps. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), John Kline (R-Minn.), Mike Coffman (R-Colo.) and Todd Aiken (R-Mo.), an aide said. Rep. Robert Wittman (R-Va.) also attended. 

    Defense contractors are hoping to rely on this informal Marine Corps caucus to revive the EFV [the Marine Emergency Fighting Vehicle] and preserve F-35B [the Marine Corps version of the F-35 fighter] after the two-year probation period.

    Like the Marine Corps, Congress has a long, proud history of combat. In Congress's case, it's mainly a history of fighting the Pentagon to force it to accept weapons systems it doesn't want. Clearly, the House's new Republican leadership plans to continue this exemplary tradition. I expect Judson Phillips and Tea Party Nation will denounce the GOP's refusal to accept these budget cuts approximately never. But maybe they'll surprise me.

    (Photo credit: AFP)

  • Getting tough

    "A nation of fearless, bumbling morons"

    Jan 7th 2011, 14:23 by E.G. | AUSTIN

    LAST week Ed Rendell, the governor of Pennsylvania, scolded the NFL for postponing a football game because of a snowstorm. "We've become a nation of wusses," Mr Rendell said, and the Wall Street Journal picked up the comment to investigate the question of whether the United States has, in fact, become wussier over time:

    The United States defined itself by its pioneer spirit. "We were the brash Paul Bunyan nation with a don't-tread-on-us culture," says John Strausbaugh, author of the 2008 book "Sissy Nation."

    Mr. Strausbaugh argues that World War II traumatized a generation of American men. Looking to shake off all that they had witnessed—horrific battles, Nazi atrocities—many of these former soldiers retreated into the U.S. suburbs, building lives of conformity. They became less adventurous, raising coddled children whose offspring would be even more indulged.

    The print edition illustrated the decline in macho-ness with a photo of John Wayne ("Fort Apache") next to one of Jeff Bridges ("The Big Lebowski"), although the photo of Mr Bridges was taken from his role in True Grit (a wonderful film, and not a wimpy one).

    Objecting to Mr Rendell's characterisation was one Lisa DeNoia of Virginia Beach, who wrote a stern letter to the governor saying, "We're not a nation of wusses. We're a nation of fearless, bumbling morons in pickup trucks who like to drink beer, go shirtless in the freezing cold for football, and drive in blizzards." I rather warmed to Ms DeNoia's description, which strikes me as funny, unpretentious, and not untrue.

    On balance, I find the evidence interesting, but not conclusive, but of course I come from a state where the governor recently shot a coyote during the course of his morning jog. Indeed, some of our international friends would welcome a more mild-mannered America. But I thought I would bring it to our commenters, as the "wimps?" question picks up on our discussion from last week about the difference between conservatives and liberals. Later today or tomorrow, I'll return to the notion that America is somehow intrinsically "conservative". Is that true and if so, what does it mean? 

    But in the meantime, let me offer a salute to my colleague M.S., who is as tough as any John Wayne fan could hope for. I agree that increased contraceptive use would reduce the abortion rate, although I maintain that there's room for people to disagree over the appropriate fora for government to promote such methods. There are certainly many Americans who belive that extramarital sex is sinful and should therefore be discouraged; I don't think that's an invalid view, although it's not mine and although the epistemological basis of the belief isn't the type that I usually go in for. There are also atheists who would hope their kids postpone their age of sexual debut and Christians who aren't opposed to extramarital sex. In my view, abstinence-only sex education is less effective than the comprehensive variety, and the pragmatic approach would be to challenge it on those grounds, rather than on the basis of its cultural history. Still, once again we have a variety of valid perspectives, including mine and my colleague's.

  • The BP spill report

    Too complex to sue

    Jan 6th 2011, 23:17 by M.S.

    YESTERDAY the National Commission on the Deepwater Horizon spill released a chapter of its forthcoming report in which it excoriated BP, Halliburton and Transocean for failures of management that directly led to the blowout. "Given the documented failings of both Transocean and Halliburton, both of which serve the offshore industry in virtually every ocean, I reluctantly conclude we have a system-wide problem," said commission co-chair William Reilly. The next morning, BP stock opened up 2%, and Halliburton and Transocean opened higher as well. Huh? The Financial Times' Kiran Stacey explains it's because the commission condemned everybody. He quotes an industry analyst:

    This supports our view that a gross negligence case against BP looks hard to prove and could ultimately reduce BP’s liabilities.

    The key conclusion is that there was a systemic industry wide and government regulatory failure to manage a number of separate risk factors, oversights, and outright mistakes which combined to overwhelm the safeguards meant to prevent just such an event from happening.

    So the report savages BP for having inadequate oversight of its drilling procedures. And it blasts Halliburton for failing to wait for the results of a crucial test before pumping cement into the well. And it slams the government Minerals Management Service for being so cowed and incapacitated by industry deregulatory pressure that it failed to exert any serious oversight either. Which means neither BP nor Halliburton will likely be held to be negligent. If a case goes to trial, BP will blame Halliburton, Halliburton will blame BP, they'll both blame the regulators for failing to regulate them (after they had finished destroying the regulators' ability to regulate), and everybody will get off easy.

    I think I, too, am reluctantly concluding that we have a system-wide problem. We have a system-wide problem with system-wide problems. A basic function of government is to make people pay for negative externalities. In both the financial crisis and in the Deepwater Horizon disaster, companies seem to be getting around this problem by ensuring that multiple large players are involved in every deal, so that if something blows up, everybody is to blame—which means nobody is. On the other hand, after that initial overnight bump, BP, Halliburton, and Transocean all closed down for the day. Maybe there's still a bit of accountability out there somewhere.

    (We have more coverage of the spill report here. Photo credit: AFP)

  • Abortion and contraception

    What ought to be settled

    Jan 6th 2011, 14:16 by M.S.

    MY COLLEAGUE is right that the question of why black teen pregnancy rates have fallen dramatically since 1990 while Hispanic teen pregnancy rates have not is important, and requires research and public-health responses. But I'm not sure why such discussion would be inhibited by a widespread social consensus that women who don't want to get pregnant should use effective contraception, that men should use condoms to prevent unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, that parents should pro-actively and non-judgmentally discuss sex with their teenage children and make sure they're using birth control by the time they become sexually active, or that the government should help prevent unwanted pregnancy and abortion through public-health programmes that get more women to use birth control and family planning. All of these statements should be non-controversial in America. They're not.

    Many Americans believe that parents should not discuss sex in a non-judgmental fashion with their children, that teenagers should not have easy access to birth control, that the use of condoms should be discouraged because they do not protect against sexually transmitted diseases and will encourage extramarital sex, and that government efforts to prevent abortion or unwanted pregnancy should not involve promoting contraceptive use. I'm not sure why these beliefs should be called "reasonable". Many people's belief that contraception should not be promoted is rooted in a religious belief that extramarital sex is sinful. That is a religious dogma, not a rational belief. Societies that encourage open and frank discussion of sex and sexuality along with responsible use of birth control have much lower rates of teen pregnancy and abortion, and much lower rates of sexually-transmitted infections. Specifically, the post I wrote was based on an idea that seems pretty obvious to me: if civic society groups and government want to reduce the abortion rate, they should promote contraceptive use. This is actually a controversial issue in America, and I find that absurd.

    As to why societies with prudish or puritan attitudes towards sex would have higher teen-pregnancy and abortion rates, I think this has been addressed pretty well over the decades. But I really can't do more than re-recommend that Rachael Phelps photo essay, which does a great job of illustrating the way European contraception campaigns focus on responsibility and maturity with a wink towards the idea that sex is fun, while American ones focus on danger with a wink towards the idea that sex is explosive and wild. I think that's a pretty interesting insight that applies in much wider contexts than that of birth control; in many ways sexuality in northern European societies is treated in ways that don't quite line up with American ideas of what's "sexy". Britain seems a bit closer in that regard.

    On that side note, it's true that the burdens of hormonal birth control fall entirely on women. So do the burdens of pregnancy and abortion. I'd be interested to hear of any studies suggesting deleterious health effects of high rates of hormonal birth control among European teens; I haven't seen any such evidence. The deleterious effects of teen pregnancy are easier to establish.

  • Politics and the Senate

    Inside man

    Jan 5th 2011, 22:24 by J.F. | ATLANTA

    mitch mcconnellONE does not often see the words "compelling" and "Mitch McConnell" in close proximity to each other, so it gives me a particular thrill to recommend Joshua Green's compelling, if slightly creepy profile of Mr McConnell in this month's Atlantic. The Senate majority leader comes off as a rather pallid cyborg, devoted entirely to amassing and wielding power in the arcane institution in which he serves. Mr Green argues that in Washington Mr Connell sits at the top of the Republican heap. There certainly is some truth to that claim: the gasbags (Limbaugh, Palin et al) emit more heat and fire but burn out more easily, while simply by virtue of institutional rules he played a more active legislative role in the past two years than did John Boehner. There is also some truth to Mr Green's claim that Mr McConnell's real adversaries are not Democrats but other Republicans, namely Jim DeMint, who campaigned for a number of tea-party candidates last fall, including Rand Paul, who defeated Mr Connell's chosen candidate (Trey Greyson) in the primary of Mr Connell's own state and party.

    Yet the more interesting battle will not be the internecine one between Messrs McConnell and DeMint but the far grander one between Mr McConnell's dogged and rather crabbed obstructionism and Barack Obama, who surely will return to campaign mode sometime soon. Matt Yglesias explains why Mr Connell's strategy is both effective and paralysing, and it also seems a promising line of attack: Mr McConnell's quest for short-term political gain is both bad for the country (because our political system does not accommodate relentless and uniform partisan opposition as well as a parliamentary system would) and craven. Mr McConnell's statement that his most important task was making Mr Obama a one-term president may have been red meat to the Republican base, but it also seems petty. Surely the most important task of a legislator is to legislate, not to use the legislature as a weapon, no?

    (Photo credit: AFP)

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In this blog, our correspondents share their thoughts and opinions on America's kinetic brand of politics and the policy it produces.

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