Nenshi: Right About LRTs, Wrong About Ideology

Calgary's Mayor Naheed Nenshi visited Toronto last week and made some sensible comments about LRTs.  He also made some mushy and poorly reasoned comments about ideology, his ideas are popular, but fundamentally wrong and beliefs like this actually hinder progress on issues people care about.  You cannot wish away ideology.  It doesn't go out of style because it is simply how you view the world, and how you think a better world can be made.  Here's what he said:

“Here’s the thing: nobody cares about those old labels of left or right and liberal and conservative. Is removing the snow a right-wing or left-wing idea? Is fixing the potholes more New Democrat or Conservative? It’s ridiculous,” he said.

This is very unpersuasive.  It isn't hard to find libertarians who disagree with the ideas of having the state tax its citizens to provide & maintain public roads or plow those roads during winter.  Are such people a significant political force on the municipal scene?  No.  But then all Nenshi is saying that the politically potent forces agree on these particular ideological questions.  Even so, you can find plenty of left/right division in the details:  Should the workers providing these services be government employees or private contractors?  Should sidewalks be plowed?  Should homeowners be responsible for shovelling & fined if they don't? etc. 

Further, Nenshi here has (cherry) picked two quite settled matters of debate.  That the contemporary left and right mostly agree about these two things hardly means the End of History and agreement on everything else City governments might do.  Nenshi himself, who has been targetted by right wing forces in Alberta for his urban centric policies must know this.  Try asking conservatives whether public transit should be a subsidized public service or a for-profit business.  Or whether city governments should provide free or subsidized services for their residents from pools to libraries to parks, homeless shelters and sporting fields.  Ask whether urban planning should preference mass transit & higher density construction or sprawl & car-centric roads.  Ideological divisions abound once you stray from the easy matters of largely settled issues. 

The general positions that left and right take on these issues can be relatively easily derived if you understand what the division of "left" and "right" mean.  The labels themselves are arbitrary, a throwback to the French pre-revolutionary parliament.   We could call them "coke" and "pepsi" or "dogs" and "cats" - but the underlying heuristic employed by each camp does not tend to vary much across cultures or time periods.  It's not an accident that these labels have survived centuries & crossed oceans intact.  If you understand what drives the right, you can then understand why say, they want car-centric sprawl and public services minimized.  The eternal cry for "smaller government" applies just as much to municipal government as national ones.

The basic cleavage is this: The left seeks to enlarge the circle of human compassion, and the right seeks to shrink it.  There are other ways to express this, (you can state that the left seeks greater equality and the right greater hierarchy) but this basic division underlies the policies positions on specific issues taken by "liberals" and "conservatives."  This does not mean necessarily that people on the left and right think of their positions as such, in these terms (or even consciously), but the high consistency in finding these cleavages on such a disparate set of issues as handled by the modern municipality it not a mistake.

How is that Relevant to Municipal Politics?

One objection might be that municipal politics are "low-level" nuts-and-bolts issues that should not really concern people concerned with the high questions of the human condition.  But of course this is untrue.  Who needs reliable, affordable and timely public transit more than the poor?  What decides which communities the poor can afford to live in more than municipal policy?  Whether you live in a violent slum or a safe and healthy neighbourhood are largely decided by things like land zoning, provisioning of parks, and how the local schools are funded.  I'm sure some issues exist that don't easily translate into grand questions of social equality, but whatever their prevalance, municipal policy affects such questions in important ways.   

What is Ideology?

Nenshi doesn't use the word (and even mixes in partisanship by referencing political parties) but that's really what he's talking about.  It's important to spend a few words defining "ideology" - never mind whatever dictionaries say, ideology usually has a derisive meaning when used, and you frequently see people trying to dismiss someone else's ideological position in favour of their own ideological position by labelling it as such.  Typically anything that challenges universally accepted ideas is "ideology" but those universal ideas are not understood as such.  Much like "treason", ideology doth never prosper.

So what is it?  Ideology is your heuristic means for understanding how the world works.  It is a set of beliefs, both conscious and unconscious about how people behave, what is right and wrong, and what is the "good life."  Are you pre-disposed to think people are basically honest and will behave ethically with minimal supervision, or that they're dishonest and require monitoring and enforcement to behave themselves?   What do think "right" and "wrong" mean and are decided?  The Bible?  Utilitarianism?  Your ideology decides how you address these.

None of this is to say that all ideological beliefs are empirically or ethically equal.  Evidence matters (says my ideology, at least!).  Our heuristics may lead us to think that say, lowering taxes improves economic growth.  Does it actually do so?  This is an empirical question (to the extent reliable empirical tests of large numbers of people can be accomplished and accurately measured).

Nenshi is rejecting ideology.  That belief is, itself, ideological.  How do you know?  Well if my disagreeing with his ideology isn't enough, let's ask what empirical proof he can provide to prove me wrong?  Two sample consensus issues in a universe of divisive ones?

Yes, Nenshi's Statements Are Popular

“If we went on to Bay Street today and asked 100 people, ‘Are you left-wing or right-wing?’ I guarantee you, 85 of them would have no idea what we were talking about and 11 of them would answer incorrectly. And the rest would be John Tory.’” he said, to wild laughter.

This is also weak. First off it is an argumentum ad populem fallacy.  That most people might have trouble placing themselves on a left-right axis doesn't mean one doesn't exist, it just means many people don't think very much about ideology.  Why should they? 

But at a deeper level, most of those people will be relatively easy to place on such a spectrum if you actually query them on their views of various issues.  Yes, there will be iconoclasts who are difficult to place, and most people have an issue or two in which they differ from their otherwise prevailing ideology.  By and large Nenshi's 100 will divide fairly predictably.  This is an empirical result of psychologists quizzing thousands of people on moral questions and finding wide agreement on the moral issues liberals and conservatives found more important.  The ethical bases of liberals and conservatives are different in significant and persistent ways.  People may widely believe they are not ideological, but that doesn't make it true.

What's the Harm?

We should think about the harm this does.  The biggest harm is that ideology that is not understood as such is the most dangerous kind.  These are the kinds of beliefs that are the most difficult to challenge and change when evidence mounts that the belief is not working.  Those of us who admit our basic ethical systems are ideological and that those systems guide our beliefs about what even municipal governments should do, and how they do it are at least conscious of these choices.  Those who treat their ideolical beliefs as "self-evident" or "common sense" are the least apt to accept evidence to the contrary.

The other major harm is that it makes a negative out of the highly necessary process of democratic disagreement and debate.  Challenging ideology is the surest way to ensure only the best ideas win out.  Many of the worst debacles started with unanimous or overwhelming supermajority votes.  Many of the most cherished and successful government programs started in strife over vehement opposition.  I realize Nenshi did not explicitly say so, but you frequently see this kind of talk followed by calls to "move past" the old divides and "work together to get things done."  Whenever you hear someone say that, ask "get what done?  How?  Why is that thing something that should be done?"  You will quickly see ideology at work.  We cannot "work together" on common goals unless we have those goals in common!  We cannot agree on means to achieve those goals unless we share enough ideology to agree those means will achieve the agreed ends, and further that they don't have ideologically undesirable other effects which outweighs our desire to achieve that agreed goal.

An example may help bring this last, crucial point home.  Let's leave the field of road maintanance and talk about poverty reduction.  Left and right will both tell you (usually) that they agree reducing poverty is a noble goal.  Great.  But how?  The left supports policies like a minimum (or "living") wage, income support programs paid for by progressive taxation, free public education up to and including post-secondary, etc.  The right generally opposes these things, and proposes freedom, choice, deregulation, private enterprise personal responsibility and negative disincentives to poverty (e.g. that you'll starve in the dark if you don't work will incent you) to reduce it.  They may or may not support private charity intervening, funded only by voluntary donations.  To the extent they support government helping out, they want strings attached, from drug tests to "workfare."  The differences between these approaches cannot be papered over.  In fact, the differences are so vast, and the empirical results of right wing approaches so apparently counter-productive that most on the left conclude that the right's support of the basic goal is not an honest representation of its views.  That it is disingenuous.  Whatever, not going to settle this here, but the point is that you cannot wipe away these vital debates over both means and ends and get to some magical place where we all agree on what and how we should be doing.

None of the above is to say that one should consciously self-identify with the "left" or "right" and then adopt the positions of that tribe for the simple reason that they are the tribe's beliefs. That's partisanship, and a very different matter than ideology.  If that were all Nenshi meant, fine. Great. Of course it is better if people arrive at their policy positions by individual thought, and even desirable that intra-ideological debate occur.  What "liberals" believe is not a fixed and eternal quantity.  It can and should change as new evidence arrives as to the results of previous real world policy experiments.  This in fact has already happened, with the major shift of 19th century liberals away from laissez-faire capitalism and toward mixed-mode social democracy.  That liberals today believe in, say, the minimum wage, should not mean they must always believe such.  A sufficient quantity of quality evidence showing that policy is counterproductive to the underlying goals of liberalism should change the beliefs of liberals. 

If it were just Nenshi, one politician saying such things it would not be worth replying at such length, but as he himself says, such beliefs are common and receive applause when expressed.  No one wants to be one of those silly ideologues who are closed minded and unreasonable.  Except the aversion to recognizing your own ideology as such is about as ideological as it gets.  I would infinitely prefer an honest debate between ideologues to one in which some are pretending to be above ideology, claimants to the one, true, pure nature of the world. 

Why Do Conservatives Accuse Everyone Of Marxism & Nazism So Much?

Anyone familiar with politics online has encountered the very common strain of right winger (some are "libertarians" instead of conservatives, but I didn't want to burden the title too much) who run around equating all forms of left wing politics from liberalism, social democrats and other soft-socialists to full bore Marxist-Stalinists, Maoists & (of course, nonsensically) Nazis & fascists.

Why do they do this?  I mean, the distinctions between left-of-centre politics as practiced in the entire rich world set of democracies and those totalitarian ideologies are glaring and numerous.  It can't be persuasive to anyone who can just look at a European style welfare state and realize whatever the faults, there aren't gulags, reeducation camps, political thought police, single party rule, abolition of private property, emigration controls and on and on.  Add to that the obvious general prosperity, happiness, health and long life in most such states and it's really boggling to reconcile on any kind of conherent or intellectually honest line of thought.

I'm sure many such people who make these absurd claims really don't get it, and actually can't see the distinction between liberalism and Stalinism (nevermind fascism).  Mostly though, this comes from their manifest inability to really argue against the outcomes of reasonably successful welfare states.  The people are mostly happy, well fed and prosperous.  It's not perfect, and you can imagine many criticisms but it's really not that bad.  Nothing about it aligns with the kind of catastrophe they're always predicting from any policy deviation from hard core laissez faire economics.

A fictional movie President of the United States (Michael Douglas in the speech at the end of The American President) called this when he said of an opponent:

I've been operating under the assumption that the reason Bob devotes so much time and energy to shouting at the rain was that he simply didn't get it. Well, I was wrong. Bob's problem isn't that he doesn't get it. Bob's problem is that he can't sell it!

This sort of right wing hyperbole against the liberal welfare state & interventionists government has long roots going back (at least) to 1944 with the publication of Friedrich Hayek's "The Road To Serfdom."  1944 was a long time ago, seeing as we're not at "serfdom" yet (and really right wing neoliberal economics is what threatens to make serfs of most of the population if anything does) it's got to be one hell of a very sticky & gentle "slope" we're on here. 

Let us know when Norway implements single party rule, but until then this is just another right wing effort to reinvent reality to suit their myths.

Market Totalitarianism

In a recent post I referred to conservatives who would prefer to return to the failed strategy of every person for themselves when it comes to retirement security as "free market totalitarian ideologues."

The term actually occurred to me (and I expect I am not the originator or first user) when wondering how we let conservatives and libertarians get away with referring to surrendering popular sovereignty to the cold, imperious and unfeeling hand of so-called "market" mechanisms to decide nearly all of society's big questions and solve (or not solve) its problems.  How is that "freedom"?

My liberalism embraces the idea that the decisions that affect my life are not all made by people who merely see me as a revenue source to be maximized or a cost to be minimized for their personal benefit.  That thinking, feeling human beings would retain the capacity to direct society's direction and outcomes.  This is the heart of democracy.  I can accept market mechanisms solving certain issues where they are known to work well enough but in no way is it the default choice, and the loss of democratic control over the result has to be understood as a drawback, one which the upsides in the arrangement have to be worth it.

Let's look at drug research.  One big problem with market driven drug research is that the big pharma companies are mostly interested in generating patentable slight variations of their existing patented drugs in order to keep a steady stream of economic rent flowing.  But that problem aside, they are overwhelmingly interested in first world medical problems, hence the obvious bias toward things like heart disease, sleep disorder and erectile dysfunction drugs.  But are these really the socially optimal places for drug research resources and talent to be deployed?  What about curing malaria or polio?

In the society that market totalitarians want to build, the democratic impulse to have government ensure research into non-profitable but lifesaving treatments takes place would be curtailed and left to the market to decide.  Naturally they're rarely this specific as to propose, say a constitutional amendment banning government funding of such research, but the more general constraints they favour (such as requiring legislative supermajorities to raise taxes along with strict balanced budget laws) would make such things practical impossibilities.

Further constraints take myriad form in the intricate network of treaties and trade rules that comprise what we call "globalization" - if government X funds cancer research, government Y (at the behest of corporations) will cry "subsidization!  Unfair trade practices!" and sanctions could result.

If there aren't specific rules to prevent government acting, globalization sets up such a race to the bottom as to make many other democratically favoured policies economically challenging or outright unfeasible.  Minimum wage laws (and increasing them) are nearly universally popular yet the incessant refrain from the right is that any polity raising its minimum wage will see itself losing jobs to neighbouring ones that now have lower prevailing wages (or labour regulations or unionization rates or anything else ordinary people like to have that makes their lives better but is bad for big business and now fast becoming economic suicide).

This is the world of market totalitarianism, one in which democracy no longer means anything, because no polity exists that is capable of restraining a globalized business elite.

It's also no coincidence that the right so hates the United Nations (which is a terrible insult to national sovereignty) but loves giant multilateral corporate approved (if not corporate written) trade treaties which go much further than anything the UN ever proposes in terms of stomping on national sovereignty, with measures allowing corporations to sue national governments in special corporate friendly venues and be compensated for "losses" due to actions of that government.  Whereas the UN operates mostly openly and its treaties are negotiated in giant open conferences with plenty of real debate and published drafts, these trade treaties are negotiated in secret and presented to national legislatures as faits accompli, where each legislature faces an awful choice of accepting some awful deal "as-is" or being the lone hold out and losing out on whatever pitiful benefits the agreement brings.

From a class and power relations standpoint it is obvious enough that conservative elites think this way because they are, or represent the people who most benefit from this arrangement, global business elites.  The "free market" is a useful abstraction in some circumstances, but in reality it is mostly about this tiny billionaire class who make the majority of the decisions we call the "market."  Whether a given country has a currency crisis is really not very much about whether masses of people around the world decide to sell of that currency, or the government bonds they own from that country, but what a few billionaire level people or corporations decide to do.  They may not really coordinate in any direct sense, but it remains that yours or my opinion about whether say, Greece's latest austerity measures are acceptable is not going to determine whether or not there is a run on Greek debt and a big spike in interest rates for Greek bond issues.

But the rest of us should not let them get away with calling these arrangements of society "freedom" - where democratic governments are helpless to respond to the demands of their citizens for fear of punishment by imperious market forces that are immune to popular will.  This is market totalitarianism and inch by inch it continues to quite literally take over the world.

Conservative Pension Behavioural Utopianism

Conservatives like to portray themselves as hard-bitten "realists" who look objectively at the world as it really is and shake their heads at silly liberals with our rose coloured glasses.  Yet I often find conservatives pushing policy ideas that are based on Utopian standards of human behaviour.  This is where they make policies that will work only for people who act and behave in certain ideal or near-ideal ways, and fail miserably for people who don't do X, Y or Z where most people realistically will not do X, Y, and Z for whatever reasons.

The prime example would be retirement savings. We have something like a century of real-world experience here in the rich world which shows that when the government does not guarantee a minimum retirement income via some kind of social insurance program like CPP or Social Security, the result is that the majority of the elderly live (or die) in real poverty.

Conservatives frequently argue that without the nanny state looking after them, people will "take responsibility" and make better choices by saving more for their retirement. This is false, we have already tried this "system" of leaving people to freeze in the gutter if they didn't manage to save enough to pay their own freight once too old to work. Here's what one source found to be the case in Canada in 1961 (p154):

Incidence of Low-Income - 1961
All Families: 25.3%
Families with Head 65 or over: 43.9%
Individuals 60-64: 50.7%
Individuals 65-69: 64.1%
Individuals 70+: 72.5%

The steady and alarming progression of poverty as one ages is very clear.  And "individuals" should be understood to mostly mean "widows" since men tend to die first and particularly at that time, women would be very unlikely to have any form of job-related pension of their own.  As the article notes on p152:

At the time, of course, Canada lagged well behind the United States in social policy. In 1947 in Canada a means-tested old age pension was available for the destitute at $30 per month (equivalent to about $289 per month at 2001 prices), but that was all. Not until 1952 was it replaced by Old Age Security (OAS). OAS was a universal payment of $40 per month, worth about $274 per month at today’s prices. With income support at this level, the result was widespread and acute poverty among Canadians over 65. Canada had to wait until 1967 for the introduction of the Guaranteed Income Supplement and Canada Pension Plan.

So this isn't even the pre-1927 days when there was no federal pension program of any sort, but even with the government kicking in $40/month to everyone, the majority of people over 60 were below the "low income" cutoff (what Stats Canada uses instead of "poverty") and for those over 70 it was over 70% of them.

These people had no reason to expect the government would save them if they were destitute in poverty since there were no such government programs in existence, or only very minimal ones that no one would expect to be enough to live comfortably on.  Yet they did not save enough. These were people who had lived through the Great Depression and World War Two, and had seen much greater depths of deprivation than most Canadians today, if despite all that most of them did not save enough, it clearly is not a matter of incentives or desire. Whatever the causes of their lack of thrift, the reality is that governments of that day realized they had a problem to solve and so they solved it by creating the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) and the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) to bolster OAS.

The result today is that old age poverty in Canada is under 7%.  In fact, seniors in Canada are less likely to be in poverty than children and (remarkably) working age people (who generally have less poverty because they can more often work). This drop from a majority in poverty in 1961 to single digit poverty is quite simply because the government's programs successfully ensure most seniors do not end up in poverty.  We don't have to speculate about technological change or other temporal factors because we have a great test comparison with Australia, a very similar rich-world nation with a very similar economy, population and even history as a former British colony.  Here's what the Conference board of Canada reports:

Australia has the highest rate [nb: of the nations in their survey] of elderly poverty—nearly 40 per cent of Australian seniors live in relative poverty. An OECD report notes that the high risk of elderly poverty in Australia is mainly due to the relatively low level of the age pension—which is an income-support payment program. The lead author of the report, Edward Whitehouse, commented: “Australia has a very high rate of old-age poverty and the fiscal room for manoeuvre to address the problem. Public pension spending is only 3.5 per cent of national income in Australia, compared with an average of over 7 per cent of GDP in OECD countries.”

Australia has a less generous old-age pension system and thus has much higher old-age poverty. Australians are not lazier, more irresponsible or worse investors than Canadians.  Their government doesn't ensure (and insure) their retirement security so many fewer of them have it.

Conservatives who insist on a system that relies on individuals taking steps to ensure they have ample retirement savings are in fact quite simply re-creating the 19th and early 20th century baseline where most older people were in poverty.  That would be the real world outcome of such policies.  RRSPs, TFSAs and other individually-driven retirement savings vehicles are a general failure and waiting for working people of today to behave differently than working people did 50 or 100 years ago with respect to retirement saving is simply utopian idealist nonsense.

In fact, as private pensions for the last generation have largely moved away from defined benefit payments to defined contribution systems, these problems will be worse for most current workers since very few of them will have access to guaranteed sufficient income via a defined benefit pension.

There's an old joke that said of communism "nice idea, wrong species."  This criticism easily applies to conservatives for the same reason.  Maybe somewhere there's a planet with intelligent life where in the absence of a government program to guarantee minimum retirement income, most or nearly all people save enough money and invest wisely to ensure they have a comfortable income after their working years are done, but that species is not homo sapiens and the planet is not Earth.

We need policies that work for Earth, for the real people we have, not some fantasy version of humans that are better than we really are.

None of this is to ignore the very real likelihood that many conservatives who make arguments like this simply do not care if most seniors shiver in the dark eating catfood because they are too poor for light, heat or adequate nutrition.  It does allow us to call them out as callous and immoral and prevent hiding behind unsupportably optimistic rationalizations.  Humans with normal functioning empathetic capacities simply cannot tolerate the majority of their elders suffering before going to early graves and will react to solve such problems through the vehicle of government, and those policies will inevitably look a lot like CPP, OAS and GIS.  These are the realistic "hard-bitten" policy results of real-world hard-taught experience, rather than the fever dreams of free market totalitarian ideologues.

Why Liberalism? Part 2

In part 1, I outlined a view of what liberalism is, and an understanding of what "ideology" is.  In part 2, let's look at some evidence for the views I'm promoting, in summary, the thesis that:

[Liberalism] does not start from a sacred writ that outlines all outcomes and presupposes all solutions.  It attempts to understand how real humans actually behave, and what motivates them and goes from there to find the best available policy options to bring about the desired outcomes in terms of widespread happiness and prosperity, of, as the title of this blog says, autonomy for all.

This piece looks at several issue cases where the liberal, libertarian and conservative dominant positions demonstrate the distinction I am describing.

Money and the Monetary System

The intro to part 1 covers this, but to re-iterate, the general right wing view on "money" is that it is something that should be holy and eternal, of fixed (or even hopefully) growing value and the supply limited by some natural law, like the gold supply.  This post is not the place to get into an extended discussion of why any attempt to make the monetary system work this way is doomed to fail, but I will summarize by saying the most important part:  It has been tried before and failed spectacularly and repeatedly.  The gold standard (or even gold and other precious metals themselves) were the monetary system well up to the early decades of the 20th Century pretty much everywhere.  Frequently gold standard advocates will claim that "fiat" currency is responsible for various economic catastrophes ignoring the myriad of crises, recessions and depressions that plagued the world while under the gold standard.  My favourite of this breed is to remember that the "Great" depression is named such, partly as a means to distinguish it from all the other depressions that had occurred within living memory of the early 1930s, most notably the Long Depression (1873-1879) which predated even the speciously often blamed Federal Reserve as cause for all economic ills.

An infamous moment occurred when Alan Greenspan once apologized to Milton Friedman on behalf of the US Federal Reserve for causing the Great Depression.  While anti-fed gold standard types may think to cheer this admission by a Fed Chair, Friedman's case against the Fed was that it did not create enough money when needed after the 1929 crash.  It stood pat and let the crisis develop.  For awhile, Friedman's view that monetary expansion via an arms length central bank can be employed to allay recessions was nominally accepted by right wing elites, it has never really been accepted by rank and file conservatives and libertarians who mostly want to abolish the Fed, and central banking generally.

The history of the 20th Century shows a progression of iterative steps away from the gold standard in response to the various problems it cause once those problems became acute.  Far from some sweeping liberal ideological statement of opposition to the gold standard issued by John Maynard Keynes from atop some mountain, a variety of hybrid experiments were attempted between the Great Depression, Bretton-Woods and Nixon's eventual full floating of the US dollar as a fully convertible  fiat currency legally mandated only to be usable in paying debts denoted in US dollars.

Right wing ideologues seeking to defend the gold standard or other forms of "hard money" policies often find themselves appealing to literal ancient history (like in Paul Krugman's debate with Ron Paul, with the latter citing Diocletian Rome as if we have anything like reliable records of economic conditions in that period) - this is because more recent economic history provides very little grist for their mills.

Liberalism does not "require" floating fiat currencies.  It does not dictate arms-length independent central banks as the arbiters of a nation's currency.  Instead, we are experimenting to find what works, iteratively and progressively in reaction to the evidence.

Markets and Capitalism Generally

The right wing view on markets amounts to their most salient and powerful infatuation with a simplistic, elegant theory that does not work out as intended when applied to real, living human societies.  There is an old joke about communism that goes "nice theory, wrong species" and this applies very much to the dominant right wing modes of thought about markets being perfect, self-correcting, rational and efficient.

A common right wing illusion is to assume that because liberals and other left wingers differ with their view on markets, that must mean we believe something close to the diametric opposite of them.   They want smaller government, so liberals must want "bigger" government as an end in itself.  They support deregulation so liberals must want endless arbitrary regulations. Hardly so.  Certainly there are such things as bona fide socialists, Marxists and anarchists who actively oppose capitalism and free markets.  Liberalism itself can even allow for these views (if one thinks the evidence supports them).  Yet liberals broadly do not oppose markets and capitalism to the degree that right wing ideologues support them.  Every small-l liberal party in the world, from the US Democrats, Canada's Liberals (and arguably, NDP in my broad definition of liberalism), Australia's Labor, Britain's Labour, and on down the list believe in employing market capitalism to some degree in pursuit of society's aims.  Every economy in the world is some mix of private and public spending, some balance between "socialism" and "capitalism."

Liberals support things like minimum wages and unions precisely because we recognize markets bring certain benefits but wish to limit the evident harms we empirically observed from the periods before such things existed.  There are some on the left who oppose such attempts to ameliorate the harms of capitalism precisely because they wish to see capitalism fail and be rejected by society and liberal harm reduction measures are contrary to that revolutionary goal.

I have written at length on the evolution of liberal thought on capitalism in my piece "One Liberalism Through the Ages" which details the creation of capitalism by liberals like Adam Smith, and the slow liberal realization that while capitalism was better than what it replaced (variations on mercantilism and feudalism) it still needed state intervention in various forms to achieve the real goals of liberalism.  Libertarians (many of whom call themselves "classic liberals" thinking this is some kind of insult to current liberals) have largely (or entirely in many cases) remained fixed on the ideas and form of capitalism liberals developed in the 19th century.  Conservatives too.  Liberalism looks at the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and say "businesses should be required to keep fire exits, extinguishers, etc etc" - right wing thought says "rational actors look at an unsafe work place and find a job somewhere safe, consumers will choose not to buy from businesses that have horrific fires" and so forth.  Their answer to any workplace complaint from wages to safety to harassment is to quit and work "elsewhere" under the assumption that a good alternative exists.  It must, their theory dictates it.  If it somehow does not, the individual is always to blame for not having worked or studied hard enough or having picked the wrong employment skills to pursue (like the cliche and glib assumption often appearing in comment sections that college grads having trouble finding good jobs must have studied "useless" subjects like the arts or humanities).

Taken to their logical conclusion, the right wing view amounts to:  "If you don't succeed in our chosen economic system, that's your problem, and your suffering is no concern to anyone but you."  This is backwards.  The economic system should most broadly serve humanity's needs and wants and if large numbers of people find it impossible to succeed under the chosen system, the system should be changed.  To right wing ideologues, it is humans who should conform to the dictates of the system.

Again and again right wing thought applies capitalism first principles and contrives whatever specious and cherry picked evidence they need to keep face in debates in support of unregulated, minimal (and flat) tax capitalism.  A century and more of experience with the problems such policies cause have not deterred them, as every crisis somehow ends up being the fault of government interference, from the "federal reserve caused the Great Depression" theory to the ones that attribute the 2008 financial collapse to Fannie, Freddie or the Community Re-investment Act.

Sex

A social issue to change the tone, and one where libertarians side more closely with liberals, but where conservatives have the holy dogma:  Sex is properly for procreation, not pleasure.  Pleasure from sex is typically incidental, and sometimes even actively sinful (particularly for women).  At best, pleasurable sex may be enjoyed only between married couples and even then contraception is discouraged.  Thus we have a long litany of conservative favoured laws prohibiting forms of non-procreative sex, sex between same-sex couples, and even banning contraception.  Lately conservatives have taken to conflating contraception and abortion and claim that the most effective contraceptives (the pill, IUDs) and the ones that women have the most control over (not requiring consent of a male to employ) are abortifacients and thus morally abhorrent.

In reality, most people want to have sex for pleasure at least sometimes and usually quite often if they can arrange it with partners they find appealing.  They don't however wish to have children nearly as often as biology would dictate and are happy to employ contraceptives to avoid this.

Conservatives evidently prefer that women suffer the consequences of recreative sex in the form of undesired children (and possibly disease).  They expect people to conform to their views of how we should behave sexually and oppose efforts to reduce the risks associated with the behaviours we evidently prefer to engage in.  Liberalism does not mirror conservativism.  It does not seek to enforce, coerce or do more than mildly encourage people to engage in recreative sex.  Liberalism seeks to accept people as they are, and craft policies to support them in their desired modes of action with as little risk and harm as possible.

Libertarians tend to be closer to liberals with respect to adult consensual sex (though I would note at least the last 3 US Libertarian party presidential nominees have been personally anti-abortion, and libertarian hero Ron Paul believed in state restrictions for abortion) but the distinction with liberals can be seen more clearly when it comes to prostitution.  To libertarians, prostitution is permissible so long as the prostitute is there by choice.  The liberal view on prostitution is that there really isn't one, at least not a single dogmatic one.  Liberals see the empirical reality that very few women willingly choose a career in renting their bodies except by harsh economic necessity and thus have complex views from support of prohibition, to various regulated schemes such as what you see in Amsterdam or New Zealand.  Again, rather than dogma there is an effort to maximize autonomy and minimize evident harms like disease, abuse, slavery and pimps.

Climate Change

By now it should surprise no one that conservatives are the least likely to accept the need for concerted action to avoid a climate change catastrophe.  Yet libertarians are generally speaking just as vehemently opposed if not more so.  Why is this so?  The evidence is abundantly clear and grows more compelling day by day.

In part their denial is a part of their denial of problems with free reign market capitalism.  Markets are perfect and should price everything that needs pricing.  The solutions to climate change all require activist government intervention in markets in some form - whether a carbon tax, a regulatory cap and trade system, sheer flat out government imposed limits on industry emissions or even just massive subsidies for otherwise uneconomically viable green energy technologies.   All of these are anathema to right wing economic holy writ.  So the need for them must be a liberal contrivance to implement their desired redistributive and government growing schemes on an unwitting society.

Conservative and libertarian reasons for denial change somewhat.  Religious conservative denialists cite various bible verses and exhibit certitude that God simply wouldn't permit such a thing to happen to us.  Libertarians simply have faith that if there was a problem, markets would have priced it, and if there's a need for a solution, some for-profit technology will be developed in time anyway.  That the people of Easter Island really did run out of resources and thus die off without finding a solution or alternative means of supporting their civilization doesn't seem to worry them.  It won't happen to us.  It can't.  The dogma says it won't.

As for liberalism, acceptance of the need for action on the climate problem is near universal, but the favoured solutions are a subject of considerable debate.  Again, there is no holy writ on how to solve the climate crisis.  In Canada, we somehow ended up at one point with the Liberal party in favour of a carbon tax, and the NDP advocating Cap & Trade.  In other places, Cap & Trade tends to be the favoured approach of the more centrist pro-business liberals.  Still others believe both schemes unworkable and simply want government to engage in a kind of "Manhattan Project" to develop renewable energy technology to the point of being cheaper than carbon based energy sources.  It is true that liberal policies in response to the climate crisis still seek to maintain or broaden economic equality, but this is consistent with my arguments here.  Liberals also, do not broadly seek to "undo" capitalism and seek some kind of revolutionary alternative economic system which does not yield dangerous levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

Here at last in the climate crisis we have right wing ideologues not just seeking to have humans conform to their views of how the world works, but frankly they wish to have the world itself so conform.  This is the ultimate danger of allowing right wing prescriptive and unchanging ideology to dictate human policy reaction to events.  Conservative intransigence on taxes, money or social issues lead to increased human misery, but these miseries end the moment the bad conservative policies are ended.  Humanity can rebound.  The climate crisis is a disaster that cannot be so easily undone.   It will not heal itself the moment we stop contributing to the problem, and adopt policies that react to the physical realities of the world we live in, rather than ignoring and denying them.

As Paul Krugman finished the post I started on with:

The bottom line is that we aren’t really having a rational argument here. Nor can we: rationality has a well-known liberal bias.

Why Liberalism?

In early January, Paul Krugman wrote something that actually cuts to the heart of perhaps the most important distinction between liberalism and other ideologies, particularly right wing ideologies like conservativism and libertarianism.  Discussing the idea of minting a platinum coin in order to circumvent the Republicans' ability cause a US debt default, Krugman writes:

For many people on the right, value is something handed down from on high It should be measured in terms of eternal standards, mainly gold; I have, for example, often seen people claiming that stocks are actually down, not up, over the past couple of generations because the Dow hasn’t kept up with the gold price, never mind what it buys in terms of the goods and services people actually consume. 

And given that the laws of value are basically divine, not human, any human meddling in the process is not just foolish but immoral. Printing money that isn’t tied to gold is a kind of theft, not to mention blasphemy. 

For people like me, on the other hand, the economy is a social system, created by and for people. Money is a social contrivance and convenience that makes this social system work better — and should be adjusted, both in quantity and in characteristics, whenever there is compelling evidence that this would lead to better outcomes. It often makes sense to put constraints on our actions, e.g. by pegging to another currency or granting the central bank a high degree of independence, but these are things done for operational convenience or to improve policy credibility, not moral commitments — and they are always up for reconsideration when circumstances change.

I submit that this pattern is not unique to the issue of monetary policy.  Krugman has hit upon a nearly ubiquitous theme that underlies the debate between ideological schools over the ages.  Whatever you call these sets of ideas (liberal, progressive, conservative, traditional etc.), and allowing for individuals who evade the norms while still realizing there are meaningful norms, you end up seeing that again and again, the ideologies of the right (though not solely, them, Marxism for example falls into this trap) start with a notion of what "should" be that is abstract and supposedly self-evidently correct, and then insist that policy and sometimes reality itself should conform to that ideal.

So, money should be permanent, fixed value, unchanging (or even growing in value over time) and never mind how the policies that come closest to meeting this ideal (gold standard) don't work very well for the real people and societies they're tried on, that's the ideal, and it should be adhered to whatever the costs.

Liberalism doesn't work this way.  It does not start from a sacred writ that outlines all outcomes and presupposes all solutions.  It attempts to understand how real humans actually behave, and what motivates them and goes from there to find the best available policy options to bring about the desired outcomes in terms of widespread happiness and prosperity, of, as the title of this blog says, autonomy for all.

First:  What is Ideology?

It's impossible to discuss ideology without first defining the thing.  People have a lot of notions about this, and I find most of them wrong.  But this is not the place to debate it.   For my purposes, ideology is simply your view of how the world works, and to some extent your desired organization for it, that best meets your goals for the world.  How do you decide whether tax cuts would be a good policy?  Or mandatory minimum sentences?  Or drug prohibition?  All this must be based on some view you have about how people think and act (either individually or in large groups) that tells you whether human responses to these policies will be desirable or detrimental to your pre-existing goals for societal organization.  If you think lowering taxes leads to increased economic activity and growth, and think "growth is good for society" than you are ideologically in favour of lowering taxes (absent other details like how much, and what government services might need to be cut and so forth).

Even if you think there is a hard, true "pragmatic" set of policies that "work" - you still need ideology to tell you what goals to have for those policies.  A hammer is good for driving nails, but without a plan for what to build, it does not itself build a barn or a doghouse.  Goals matter, and are intricately linked to ideology.  Two people agreeing a hammer is the best tool for building do not share "ideology" if one wishes to build a barn, and the other a doghouse.

Next:  What is Liberalism?

This is another major topic with many plausible perspectives.  Hopefully you need not wholly agree with my definition in order to follow the remainder of this essay.  I have previously borrowed the definition of liberalism supplied by political scientist Alan Wolfe, who supplies a definition I will summarize as "as many people as feasible should have as much autonomy as possible."  But I wish to extend this somewhat today, as that is merely a statement of goals and values - it doesn't specify how liberals approach this problem.  That is a vital and necessary part of what comprises a liberal.

In my last post at Open Left, I hit upon this other side of the issue.  I posit that what brought humanity out of the Dark Ages of ignorance, fear, witch burning and lethal leechcraft was what we now call "the scientific method" - the process by which those we call "scientists" examine evidence, posit explanations for phenomena, contrive repeatable experiments that could invalidate those hypotheses, and analyze the results, ready to modify their theories if the experiments provide a different result than the hypothesized outcome.  Science has no special name for this.  It is not called the "Davinci method" or the "Newton method" - there is no competing or alternative scientific method that tries to grow the field of human knowledge of nature in some alternative way.  It is simply the scientific method.  If you are not employing this method, you are simply not doing science, and anything you discover or learn is sheer happenstance and of dubious value until confirmed by someone using the scientific method.

Science does not claim to have a perfect understanding of anything.  It is always open to revision upon presentation of new evidence.  Even such things that are sometimes called "laws" (like thermodynamics, or gravity) are in fact merely highly regarded theories for which there is no current evidence providing any reason to doubt them.

Liberalism, in short, is that, but applied to ideology, as I wrote:

In the field of pursuing the ideal human society, liberalism is the science of pursuing human well being.  It combines the empiricism and rationalism of science with the goal of maximizing human happiness.  The process is iterative and the specific means change as well meaning ideas are found wanting, and as science improves our understanding of humans themselves and what it takes to make them happy.  There is no other school of thought that both seeks to improve the lot of all, and actually can do it.  The ultimate goal of liberalism is that we should not need the word "liberalism" because no one would need a special word to describe the self-evident way people determine solutions to societal problems.  That's what liberalism is, and why it must win or all humanity will fall back into ruin, scarcity, ignorance and fear.

That is the twofold definition of liberalism's means and ends I wish to employ and distinguish from the primary ideological schools of right wing thought.

This essay will be continued in a second post.

Standing Up To Bullies

As part of their ongoing mission to destroy the Enlightenment, the right has latched onto a tweet by Lawyers, Guns and Money's Erik Loomis, a non-tenured academic at a Rhode Island university. 

They're of course trying to get him fired.  It's completely hypocritical, the substance of their complaint is preposterous and too often this shit works.  They stage a disingenuous freak out, some nervous school administrators over-react and someone's career is in tatters to the chortling glee of a bunch of sociopaths.

I have signed this open letter and emailed the University's mucky-mucks.  This post is to do my little bit to raise its profile.

Newtown: Another Expose on Conservative Ideological Bankruptcy

While liberals debate various forms of gun control, improvements to the psychiatric care system, and other actual measures to make slaughters like Newtown less likely, the abject bankruptcy of conservative thought is something to behold.

The Tea Party suggests more George Zimmermans are the answer.  Armed vigilante squads patrolling school zones.

Gun "academic" John Lott suggests abolishing even more gun laws, specifically gun-free school zones.

Libertarian law Professor Glenn Reynolds approvingly cites a pro-gun man who later shot and killed his wife in a botched (?) puerile gun stunt.

Supposed "reasonable" conservative Eugene Volokh says to arm the teachers.

Libertarian individualist Megan McArdle proposes a creative collectivist solution:  Train seven year olds to rush adult shooters and overpower them.

Is there anything one needs to say in response to such stupidity?  They can't honestly believe this egregious nonsense.  This is the utter and complete bankruptcy of conservativism and right wing thought in general.  It is incapable of responding to this, and thus can only provide risible self-satirizing ideas to cover its shame.

I wrote about this some time ago, and this is more of the same.  Conservativism has no useful answers to the problems of society.  They simply wish to leave problems to fester, where action would impose the least inconvenience or costs on themselves.  If some problem magically solves itself, they might be ok with that, but for anything else, we are simply left to endure what we must.   They simply don't really believe problems can be solved. 

There shouldn't be 40% of Americans (and 30% of Canadians) willing to call themselves "conservatives" in the face of this.  This is shameful, and frankly disgusting.  The Emperor has no clothes.  People with ideas this monstrous need to experience sustained criticism and even scorn for refusing to rethink such bad ideas in the face of their self-evident horrific failure.  Teach children to rush at mass murderers?  Encourage more vigilantism?  What has to go wrong in your life that you even could entertain these thoughts, never mind publish it to millions in evident seriousness?

Conservative Distaste For Democracy

I'm watching the twitter feed for the #occupyToronto protest and one of the people in the thick of it (perhaps even an organizer, I don't know) says, to my complete unsurprise:

danspeerin Dan Speerin

Thanks to all those on twitter who have suggested we here at #OccupyToronto should get jobs...I'll bring it up at general assembly

This is a timeless conservative response to protests. At least, protests they view as left wing.  Like most if not all conservative "humour" it relies on mocking the weak for being weak, as bullying is about the only thing conservatives are able to generate humour from.  It's also deeply and disturbingly undemocratic.

The basic notion underlying the sentiment is that those without jobs aren't entitled to complain about anything in society.  Let's leave aside the rank stupidity of hurling "get a job" at people who are in large part protesting because of the rotten economic conditions (and yes, conditions are rotten in Canada, less rotten than the US, but still quite bad) that leave many of them unemployed or underemployed, it really is an open admission that you think society should only be run by those with money. They used to be a lot more open about this:

Those who own the country ought to govern it. - John Jay (a US Founding Father)

I don't think conservatives get called out for their distaste of democracy often enough, but if you read between the lines of many of the things they say, it's right there. It's important to understand why they're often not even interested in engaging with the substance of protester complaints, as they don't accept their fundmental right to complain.

The Emptiness of Conservativism

Often, when criticizing conservativism, we focus on its many glaring real world policy failures.  After all, we are living in a prolonged real world experiment in deregulation, rigged trade, lower and flatter taxation, privatization and well, just leaving everything to the market to solve itself.   The result has been a disaster, not just in America, but in the rest of the industrialized/rich world, and how bad it has been lines up quite well to how completely each country has implemented the modern conservative agenda (basically neoliberalism).

Today I came across PZ Myers linking to a good article talking about Finland's great success in education, a success found in doing basically nothing the neoliberals say will fix education in America.  Pieces like this are not hard to find.  In the heath care debate, liberals point at places like Canada, France, Japan and Australia as having health systems that deliver better results for less money than America's.  On taxation or general matters of equality, we point to, say, Sweden or maybe Japan.  Here in Canada, where we are allowing the tar sands oil reserves to suck us into the resource trap by killing off other sections of the economy, I could easily point to Norway as an example of an oil rich country that manages not to let the oil warp and pervert their entire system and where everyone benefits from the natural bounty left in the ground by sheer providence.

What can conservatives point to?  Where are their great success stories?  Where are the nations living well using conservative policies?  Aside from the Pinochet period in Chile and pre-2008 Ireland, generally the only nation conservatives could point to as containing both success and heavily conservative policy was America itself.  Now, they are reduced to pointing at a place like Texas, which by virtue of creating a higher absolute number of jobs in the past couple years than other US states becomes the metric of "success."

Which really highlights the abject failure that is conservativism.  Texas is your success?  Because it had a slightly less terrible job creation record?  Really, is that the heights of conservative vision?  I think it is.  A world of minimum wage earners bowing and scraping to their betters for fear of being excluded from the job market in an "at-will" and "right to work" labour market, and hoping against hope to defy the odds and be one of the few called to some higher strata of the economy.  A world of hard knocks and a constant awareness that no one will help you up if you fall.  What do we all get in exchange for this?  Even if we take their economic claims at face value, we supposedly get higher aggregate economic growth and maybe a wider variety of consumer goods.  On the one hand you might be laid off any day for any reason without warning or compensation.  On the other hand, you'll have lots of shiny gadgets to play with while you're unemployed.  If you can afford them.

This is something I think could be a fruitful line of attack on conservativism, if any prominent liberals were inclined to actually attack it.  Conservatives can and do debate whether liberal ideas work in reality, but at our best, our vision is just head and shoulders better than theirs.  We propose a world free from deprivation and desperation, free from fear, and most of all a world of dignity for all.  It isn't utopia by any stretch, someone still needs to clean the toilets and take out the trash.  But the people who do that in the liberal vision are treated with respect, like everyone else is.  And if you want to claim that our economic system of high marginal taxes and judicious regulation limits economic growth and reduces consumer choice, that really doesn't seem like so much to give up in exchange. 

Most humans seem to agree.  Every social insurance scheme that I know of, from Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in the US, to their various counterparts in the rest of the rich world are very popular with their populations.  Even America's heavily corporate and right wing media, cut loose from the fairness doctrine for decades now has been unable to convince the public that these programs are bad for them.  At best, they're sometimes able to convince a majority that the programs are unaffordable.   These claims are nonsense, but the tactic highlights the enduring popularity of safety over the vaunted "choice."  People don't really want to make choices where "abject poverty" or "death" are distinct possibilities for choosing wrong.  This is what conservatives offer:  "Come, gamble on your retirement at the Wall Street casino.  You may just strike it rich!  Or you can die in a gutter if you bet wrong."  In fact, we generally treat people willing to gamble at stakes this high as mentally ill.  Despite a population with north of 40% of people calling themselves "conservative" and another 40% who are "moderate" US conservative leaders cannot manage to get majorities on board with the propositions involved in gambling on your healthcare or retirement.

The conservative vision stinks and people know it intuitively.  Even if their ideas worked as they claim, the result would be generally terrible for almost everyone who wasn't filthy rich.  It's time to make this point regularly.