Global warming and the New York Times

Let’s frame the issue properly.

A small band of mostly European and American advocates, bureaucrats, politicians, and scientists proclaim that, because of their boundless greed, the industrial nations are destroying the earth.  To prevent the death and dislocation of millions, we must embark on a revolutionary transformation which will cost, by one estimate, $100 trillion.  Everything, from our economic system to the food we eat, must change.  Further, it must happen now.  There’s no time for discussion or politics.  To wait is to invite an ever worse disaster.

Now, you are the owners, editors, and writers of the NYT.  Your job is to maintain the paper’s reputation as the place of record, disseminating “all the news that’s fit to print.”  Your civic duty is to act as the public’s watchdog, challenging those in positions of power to account for their policies and behavior.

On both accounts, one would expect the NYT to throw every available resource at the factual claims and political demands of the privileged group described above:  the global warming elites.  Documents would be minutely parsed, footnotes double-checked.  Investigative reporters would sniff for conflict of interest.

Pointed questions would be asked.  Who are these people, making such colossal demands on the rest of us?  How are they accountable?  What is their agenda?  What are their public relations tactics?  Who pays their salaries?  How can their assertions be tested?  How reliable are their predictive models?  Why do they insist on bypassing critical discussion and the give-and-take of democratic decision-making?

None of this happened.  Driven by its own elitist fantasies, the paper chose to become a mouthpiece of climate advocacy.

Global warming politics collapsed from its own contradictions last December at the climate summit in Copenhagen.  Since then, blogging amateurs have undermined large tracts of the science behind global warming, and called attention to the conflicts of interest of the maximum leader of climate politics, IPCC chief R. J. Pachauri.

Regarding these developments, the public’s watchdog maintained a sullen silence.  Since the fiasco at Copenhagen, it has devoted more space to the writing on Sarah Palin’s hands than to the disintegration of the once-formidable clout of the climate elites.

I posted about this yesterday.  Today the NYT briefly awoke from hibernation and published a story on the charges surrounding Pachauri.  It is worth reading as an example of journalism at its slimiest.

The author is Elizabeth Rosenthal, who trained as a medical doctor in New York Hospital’s emergency unit.  That qualifies her to deal with broken bones and trauma, less so with the uncertainties of climate science.  The headline, “Skeptics Find Fault With UN Climate Panel,” sets the squishy tone for everything that follows.

Is there fault to be assigned to Pachauri and the IPCC?  Well, “climate skeptics, right-leaning politicians, and” – one can hear Rosenthal gulping – “even some mainstream scientists” say so.  Most of those witnesses sound disreputable.  No sane person would listen to “right-leaning politicians.”

So is Pachauri at fault?

Well, some of the accusations lodged against him have turned out to be “half truths.”  How do we know this?  Because Pachauri assured Rosenthal that, while a lot of his activities may smack of conflict of interest, he makes no money on them.  “My conscience is clear,” he added during a “lengthy telephone interview” – which, to all appearances, was the only original research conducted by the public’s watchdog.

What’s the fuss, then?  Pachauri seems in the clear – at least, his conscience is.  His accusers are rightwingers.  Where’s the problem?

Well, a scientist from the University of Colorado finds “obvious and egregious problems.”  He’s not a rightwinger, so far as we are told.  What are these problems?  We are not told those, either – but we do hear from Pachauri again, who blames it all on “lies” and “distortions.”  “These guys want me to resign, but I won’t,” he proclaims.

So is that good or bad?

Well, someone called Hal Harvey tells Rosenthal, “Anyone who is qualified to chair the IPCC will have interests in academics, science, politics or business” – meh, who can say what conflict of interest is anymore?  He goes on to note that some US Government agencies tolerate conflict of interest to obtain expert advice.  So it’s okay.  Except that most agencies don’t, Rosenthal recalls.  So it’s confusing.

Now, who is Hal Harvey?  He’s the chief executive of Climateworks, “an international philanthropic network dedicated to achieving low-carbon prosperity.”  Hal Harvey runs a pressure group.  His biography makes him out to be a creature of the foundations:  William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Energy Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and so on and on – a man who has never held a productive job in his life, but who wants to help the world achieve “low-carbon prosperity.”

Why was Hal Harvey interviewed?  Unclear.  Why the professor from Colorado?  Unexplained.  Their names just pop up, then they spout contradictory opinions.

As for the IPCC, it has been “sullied” by “accusations of errors . . . most originating from two right-leaning British papers, The Sunday Telegraph and The Times of London.”  But why should one be sullied by an accusation from a rightwinger?  Are the accusations true?  Rosenthal doesn’t venture to guess.  And why that “most” – would this be because the Guardian, that ultimate not-rightwinger newspaper, has launched a few accusations of its own?

So where do we stand on the fault-finding?

Well, Pachauri admits that an energy institute he runs owns stock in oil companies.  That is really faulty, right?  Except Pachauri is Indian.  He comes from a poor country, and has to make ends meet.

“We have to generate our own resources from our work,” he said. “This is an institute that has pulled itself up by its bootstraps.”

So it’s like the American dream, only for an Indian functionary of the United Nations.  What’s the problem here?

After all the back and forth, at the hind end of the story, the Colorado guy complains, “This has become so polarized.”

There you have it.  The public’s watchdog has interviewed the IPCC head and two random people, conducted no research on the facts of the matter and omitted quite a few, repeatedly noted the rightwingness of Pachauri’s critics, skimmed lightly over the actual issues at stake, then blamed the whole thing – indirectly, though someone else’s words – on polarization.

I have posted before, with no regrets, on the coming death of news.  This article demontrates that in many ways, for many subjects, the news is dead already.

Climategate and the ideology of news

The debate about global warming was about science only in the sense that the Spanish Inquisition was about God:  in both cases, an unimpeachable authority was invoked to justify measures a majority of people found unpleasant and unnecessary.  In reality, climate rage was the latest issue seized on by rationalist politicians, who believe that a golden elite, made up mostly of themselves, must act as good shepherds to the ignorant mob, made up mostly of the rest of us.

The political edifice of global warming begins with “nongovernmental organizations”:  pressure groups like the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace.  It embraces large bureaucracies in wealthy Western nations, and crests at the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  People in charge of each of these institutions believe they know truth, and we, the rabble, should just hear and obey.

For me, the science of global warming was settled by Bjorn Lomborg’s magnificent The Skeptical Environmentalist.  Since reading it, I haven’t worried that floods of biblical proportions might swamp my ankles – but on this blog I did note, on occasion, the bizarre, inquisitional behavior of the climate rationalists.  Top of the charts was IPCC chair R. J. Pachauri, who in a burst of originality compared Lomborg’s ideas to Hitler’s.

Global warming as a pretext for rationalist politics died a messy death at the climate summit in Copenhagen.  The wounds were largely self-inflicted.  At the most basic level, the advocacy elites tripped on a paradox:  they deployed moral principles which nauseated them, to save a way of life they despised.  An agenda of revolutionary proportions could not be sustained by a politics of cultural despair.

The recent collapse of the “science” of global warming will surprise no one who has been paying attention.

Climategate shone a light on scientists who treated data like poker chips and embodied the inquisitional spirit at its fiercest.  It also revealed the appalling sloppiness of climate  models. Doomsday predictions of the IPCC’s are now known to rest on little more than assertions by pressure groups.  Temperature data from countries like China and Australia appears bogus or cherry-picked.

Pachauri’s “green” money-making schemes have been exposed; his tenure as head of the IPCC is about to end ingloriously.  In the UK, the scientist-bureaucrat in charge of the Climate Research Unit has already stood down.

This is big news, yet the news media is nowhere to be found.  Talented and tenacious amateurs, working online, first surfaced the problems with climate science:  my favorites are Anthony Watts of Watts Up With That and Richard North of EU Referendum, but there are many others.  They kept pulling at the threads sticking out of the sacred documents of global warming, until the whole thing unravelled.

Anyone could have done that.  The putative watchdogs of the news business chose not to.  In fact, from motives that beg an explanation, the news media became a handmaiden to the most brain-dead elements of the global warming faith.  When climate politics collapsed at Copenhagen, journalists soldiered on with scary stories about melting Arctic ice.  When the corrupted science of the IPCC and CRU was revealed by bloggers, they maintained a surly but determined silence.

Rejectionism overwhelmingly typified the response of the US media.  In the UK, a competitive press began to sniff a delightful scandal, and in time took the story over from the bloggers.  The Telegraph pounded Pachauri’s conflicts of interest, while the Times repeated, to a wider audience, tales of bad science at the IPCC.  Even the Guardian, which is to global warming what the Ossevatore Romano is to the Vatican, jumped into the pool, exposing the CRU’s shell game with data from China.

By contrast, a search of WaPo reporting over the last month – while the scandals were brewing – turned up a total of three articles on the subject, two of them from the Associated Press.  They present a muted and contradictory picture:  some experts say this, others say that.  The single WaPo-authored report headlines a Pachauri plea that “Error shouldn’t derail global warming efforts in India.”  The IPCC chief, we are assured, “promised a more robust reseach system in the future.”

The NYT covered the Climategate revelations somewhat better than the WaPo, and frequently reports on climate-related legislation and regulation.  Over the last month, however, the newspaper has gone dark on both the politics and the science of global warming.  All I could find in a search of the site was a single article urging us to give up meat “to save the planet.”

Why the silence of the media lambs?  Mark Steyn has been among the first to call global warming “a massive journalistic failure.”  Here Steyn cites Matt Ridley of the Spectator:

It was amateur bloggers who scented the exaggerations, distortions and corruptions in the climate establishment; whereas newspaper reporters, even after the scandal broke, played poodle to their sources.

But it wasn’t just a matter of playing poodle.  Big journalism treated the cardinals of the climate church with unwonted deference because the two groups are rationalist to the core.   Both share an exalted vision of their own place in society, and a low opinion of the mental capacities of American public.

The ideology of news holds that journalists must, Prometheus-like, bring the light of truth to the public, which otherwise would run amuck in animal desires.  No story has ever fit this mold better than global warming, with its tragic plot of hubris and destruction, esoteric language, and constant appeals to “science” and scientists.

Thus Andrew Freedman of the WaPo explains his duty to his readers:

But where skeptics see a media conspiracy to ignore cooling, I see an effort to accurately communicate climate science to the public. Of course there is a “possibility” that the earth is cooling, but virtually every peer reviewed climate study has shown the opposite to be true.

Freedman isn’t a scientist of any sort, but an “environmental columnist.”  His qualifications to “accurately communicate climate science to the  public” are on a par with the public’s.  The story is from January 7, months after Climategate had, at a minimum, thrown doubt on the validity of using “peer review” as the last bastion of defense for climate advocacy.

A January 28 news report in the WaPo proclaims our “harsh winter” to be “a sign of unusually disruptive climate change,” and conflates this assertion with the public’s loss of confidence in global warming.

This winter’s extreme weather — with heavy snowfall in some places and unusually low temperatures — is in fact a sign of how climate change disrupts long-standing patterns, according to a new report by the National Wildlife Federation.

It comes at a time when, despite a wealth of scientific evidence, the American public is increasingly skeptical that climate change is happening at all.

The NWF is, of course, a pressure group.  It is unlikely to say, “Don’t worry, cold weather disproves our living faith.”  Its report wasn’t peer reviewed and consisted mostly of puffball science.  WaPo chose to cover the story for reasons unrelated to its intrinsic scientific merit.

Finally, one Chris Mooney published an opinion piece in the WaPo, which rejected the turf-warrior image projected by the CRU scientists in the Climategate emails.

The central lesson of Climategate is not that climate science is corrupt. The leaked e-mails do nothing to disprove the scientific consensus on global warming. Instead, the controversy highlights that in a world of blogs, cable news and talk radio, scientists are poorly equipped to communicate their knowledge and, especially, to respond when science comes under attack.

The public is ignorant but powerful.  Scientists own truth, but communicate it poorly.  Enter the heroic journalist.  The two elites – science and journalism – fuse into a single voice, loud as thunder, wise as God, beyond questioning by blogs and talk radio.  (Mooney, feudally described as a “Knight fellow in science journalism” is the co-author of “Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future.”)

Global warming politics were about taking control away from ordinary people and giving it to a brilliant elite.  Journalism was about limiting the information available to ordinary people to whatever was thought suitable by another brilliant elite.  Both elites relied on authority rather than experience, and preferred the inquisitional style to an honest discussion of possibilities.

Both misread the eagerness of the public to be re-educated by their betters.  And both, I fearlessly predict, will melt away long before the Arctic ice cap.

Postcards from the apocalypse

Around 10:30 Friday morning, the snow began to fall.  All the official and media voices immediately started shrieking.

It tickles me to watch TV shows like NCIS and the old Stargate series, which depict US government personnel as obsessive about avoiding “panic” in the population.  “Do you really want to reveal the alien invasion?  People can’t handle it,” they say solemnly.  Or, “If we tell the media about the dirty bomb which will incinerate the city of Washington, people will run around waving their arms and bumping into each other before they get incinerated.”

In reality, it’s our public servants who panic.  Even before the first snowflake hit the ground, NOAA was running around and waving its arms, crying that conditions were going to be “EXTREMELY DANGEROUS AND LIFE THREATENING.”  The weather service warned about downed powerlines and intimated that anyone leaving his home would fry like bacon.  The governor of Maryland, bless his soul, called this “the biggest snow in Maryland history” – surpassing, at least in his fevered mind, even the Ice Ages.

The WaPo weather blog held a contest on whether to call the blizzard of 2010 Snowmaggedon or the Snowcalypse.  (By presidential decree, it’s Snowmageddon.)

Two feet of snow later, the population remains calm.  The stuff – I’ve long noticed – has that effect on people.  Rain makes us recall our worst moments, so that we walk in it, shoulders hunched, growling at the world.  Snow is attended by a sacred silence which purifies the heart of malice.  Even in two feet of whiteness, we look up and at each other, and invariably smile.

For the instrument of doomsday, Robert Frost foolishly – he was a poet, after all – chose fire.  Still, he understood the redemptive power of the light  side of the force:

I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

An insurgent from the long tail

Scott Sumner is a middle-aged economics professor at Bentley who, by his own admission, has labored in obscurity his entire career.  The ideas and methods he promotes are out of fashion.  He has published sparingly, and recently professional journals have been returning his articles unpublished and unrefereed.

Scott Sumner is an economics writer who has attracted over a million readers, 10,000 of whom have engaged him in writing.  His ideas and methods have sparked a wide-ranging debate about economic policy in the current crisis, which drew in, pro and con, many luminaries of his profession – including his holiness Paul Krugman, supreme pontiff of economics at the NYT.

Two concepts will help explain the contradiction, which was first remarked on by Adam at Cloud Culture.

The first is the power law distribution, with its spike of success and long tail of increasing marginality:  the shape of every complex human activity.

A handful of famous economists stand at the head of the chart.  They have won all the prizes, control all the resources, and make The Official Method a requisite for status and prestige.  Sumner, like most of his peers, is a dweller of the long tail.  His public doubts about The Official Method mean he will be shuffled ever farther downstream from the elite at the head, get fewer chances to publish, and receive scant recognition.

The second concept is the shared stories people carry inside their heads to help orchestrate group behavior.

Part of the story in the economics profession is that the top people are the keepers of The Official Method and dispensers of jobs, tenure, podium time at conferences, space in the journals.  Another bit is that one must publish to exist.  Sumner, however, is a blogger – he has managed not only to exist but to thrive from the long tail, in utter disregard of his profession’s gatekeepers and master narrative.

As often transpires with such cases, Sumner’s insurgency has turned the shared story on its head.  Famous economists are now praising him and responding to him – even Krugman has deigned to criticize.  His unorthodox ideas make him stand out from the crowd and garner attention.  His marginality allows him to grasp that what matters isn’t The Official Method, but “persuasion.”

So that’s the goal of my blog, to constantly use theoretical arguments, empirical data, clever metaphors, and historical analogies that make people see the current situation in a new way.  Whatever works, as long as it is not dishonest.

Sumner embodies the breath-taking new possibilities of the digital age:  a successful assault on authority conducted from a remote outpost of the long tail.  Additional examples of such insurgencies can easily be found.

The carefully constructed story of global warming politics has been toppled by online actors like Anthony Watts of What’s Up With That – the US news media, because of its own belief structures, refused to touch the story.  Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez, a nobody, every day demolishes some aspect of the story propagated for 50 years by the puppet media of the ruthless Castro regime.

In France, where the story inside the head of the political class is not unlike that of the old aristocracy, a grandee of the ruling party has actually claimed that “the internet is a danger to democracy.”

As for Sumner, he is an obscure professor of economics, but a famous economics blogger.  In his chosen career, he stands far out in the long tail.  In his online niche, he rides the head of the power curve.

The question is:  what has changed?  Reflecting on the curious rise of Scott Sumner, Adam foresees a moment when information will break loose of the professional story, becoming intelligible and available to the interested amateur.

Scholars have always formed communities of interest one way or another.  In Sumner’s post I felt I saw a glimpse of the future, of the character of the new communities that scholars will form as more of them embrace the cloud as a place to conduct their discussions in an open and public manner.

Maybe so.  I confess to far less certainty on the matter.  I return to the question:  what has changed?  The Castro brothers are still in charge, and Yoani Sanchez was pummeled by political thugs just a few weeks ago.  A French minister called out the cops on an online commenter who had offended her.  The mafia running China has hacked Google and maintains an “internet police.”

Sumner has gained an audience, but what changed because of that?  The authority figures of economics may feel a little less authoritative, a tad less comfortable, but Sumner himself wonders how “as you become better known, you don’t seem to have any more influence than before.”

He has indeed broken loose of the professional story – but it’s his profession, and he thinks (though without visible regret) that he’s paying a price for his online success.

In the real world I am not nearly as successful as it may appear from my blog.  I got turned down by the AEA convention.  In 2008 and 2009 I sent papers on the economic crisis out to journals like the JMCB and the JPE, journals that I have published at in the past.  But now for the first time in my life the articles come back without even being sent out to a referee. [. . .]

Regrets?  I’m pretty fatalistic about things.  I suppose it wasn’t a smart career move to spend so much time on the blog.  If I had ignored my commenters I could have had my manuscript revised by now.  But I think everything happens for a reason.

The relationship between new media, long-tail insurgencies, and the shared stories which make sense of information is, to me, still to be explained.  Maybe nothing changes in what Sumner calls “the real world.”  Maybe something does change:  maybe, a lot.  I can make a case for all three outcomes.

“Five years from now,” Adam, the optimist, writes, “I wonder if he’ll still think it was bad for his career.  When someone becomes prominent enough in new media, it tends to work out well for them eventually, even if only indirectly.”

Adam is thinking of people like Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, who in “real life” is a law professor whose book became a best-seller because of his fame as the Blogfather.  Fair enough.  The answer, I agree, will become clear five years from now:  whether Sumner has taken his insurgency to the market for a well-deserved reward, or stopped blogging long since.

Scott Sumner

My problem with causation

The older I get, the more doubts I have about causation.  Honestly, I have no idea how I got here.  My past is a series of wonderful accidents.  The future, mine and everyone’s, is an impenetrable mystery.  The only certainty is surprise.

Scientists and philosophers have relied on two methods to infer a relationship of cause and effect:  induction and deduction.  Both are riddled with problems.

Induction assumes we can make a prediction from past events:  because X smiles warmly, treats me with kindness, and is solicitous of my wellbeing, I imagine he feels affection for me – he’s a friend.  But long ago Hume demonstrated the logical flaw in this assumption, which Karl Popper called, appropriately enough, the problem of induction.

Past regularities, it turns out, lack the force of necessity.  The most ancient repetition may not repeat again.  My friend X may be an excellent con artist.

In Fooled by Randomness, N. N. Taleb tells the story of how the problem of induction ceases to be a philosophical puzzle and collides with reality – with life.  His world is peopled by “fools of randomness” who gamble on some regularity and “blow up” when they smack into a surprise.

On a large scale, such events are necessarily rare but devastating.  I suspect they occur far more frequently on a smaller scale.  We make bets on the past repeating itself, and are shocked when a random future arrives.  We drive to a familiar address that has been demolished; we find our favorite movie star suddenly a bore; we reach for a lover who is no longer there.

The other method, deduction, assumes we can predict consequences by means of logical analysis.  But logic is a machine which needs fuel to get anywhere; in Hans Reichenbach’s term, it is “empty.”  Logic can transfer propositions believed to be true along a chain of analysis, but it can’t produce truth.  The fuel of logic – the propositions on which it must run – must be distilled from observation and induction.

Hume’s problem of induction thus defeats deduction as well.

The question may well be asked whether morality can survive without causation – whether our actions lose their moral agency if their effects are unknown.  But I don’t see why this should follow.  The world of my doubts isn’t demoralized, just massively uncertain.

I am a cause in the world as well as an effect, moving in time with billions of other persons, alive and dead, each also a cause and an effect:  a fantastically complex matrix of interactions which includes my internal states – my desires and moral beliefs – no less than those of others.  How this works has best been explained by Alicia Juarrero, who calls it “dynamic systems theory.”  It is, on principle, unpredictable.

Only a consequentialist, who believes an action can be judged only by its effects, will be troubled by this.  But consequentialism requires pre-existing moral rules to judge the consequences:  it’s fatally flawed as theory of moral judgment in any case.

Morality isn’t about consequences, because these are often unknown or unintended.  Morality is about traditions of right and wrong behavior forged and tested in the tangled matrix of causation, and so to a significant degree selected by the community, over the centuries, as the necessary pillars of its way of life.

I can be moral and ignorant of consequences.  I can be moral and uncertain.  In truth, only fools and prigs would expect anything else.

My doubts, then, are not the seeds of some doctrine of radical skepticism.  I preach nothing new.  Every decision, whether moral or prudential, always carried a load of uncertainty – mine, for reasons that are themselves uncertain, has just grown heavier with time.

Living within our means: we, the people

For the federal government, with its $1.6 trillion next-year debt, to assume the moral authority of champion of private debtors is beyond bizarre.  The reverse is also true.  If the American people truly wish to reduce the federal debt, we must begin by putting our own houses in order.  Much of the public debt today comes from “bailing out” the leaky financial vessels of private persons and companies.

Avoiding personal debt is pretty simple.  We don’t buy what we can’t afford.   That doesn’t mean rejecting debt – but it does mean never borrowing what we know we can’t repay.  Nor need we avoid all risk in money matters – but risks should be taken with eyes wide open and a willingness to accept loss, if the dice roll that way.  To demand a bail-out from a personal decision is to trade our birthright for a mess of potage.

This isn’t cruel or heartless.  It’s adulthood:  it’s moral agency.  Exceptions can be made for those who truly deserve them.  For the rest of us, healthy in body and mind, there’s the world of choices and consequences.  This is the drama of human life – the fact that we sometimes win and sometimes lose – sometimes fairly, sometimes not – that all we have complete control over, in the end, is character:  the face with which we greet triumph and disaster.

Americans are often accused of consumerism, of the love of things.  That is said to be a root cause of our debt problem.  Now in my travels across the world I have yet to discover a nonconsumerist nation; and I note in passing that many of the same people who blame us for materialism also mock our long hours of work and puritanical ways.  Yet there’s a kernel of truth in the accusation.

In what we call a recession, we remain an exceedingly wealthy people – and wealth tempts character to surrender value for pleasure.  Here the moral dimension of the problem of debt rises above other considerations, and the question becomes one of internal states rather than cash in the bank account.  The same transaction can be honest or corrupt, depending on my relation to it.

If I purchase an object – say, a car – I stand on one moral plane; if the object is purchasing me, I stand on quite another.  Because no one else can read my heart, I alone know where I stand.  I alone know the point at which, in Emerson’s words, “things are in the saddle, and ride mankind.”

Morality is simply a means to manage the lust for pleasure and the love of things, on behalf of our larger aims in life.  This is also a requirement of political freedom.  If we can’t govern our private desires, we will be unable to govern our public affairs.  If we owe our souls to the banks, and the banks owe theirs to the government, the democratic polarities get reversed – public officials will become our masters when they should be our servants.

I’m finishing Walter Isaacson’s life of Benjamin Franklin, and it’s been a revelation how frequently Franklin uttered the words “frugality,” “industry,” and “prudence” over the span of his long life.  Franklin preached but also lived these qualities.  In a light-hearted way, he exemplified them.  When young, he craved financial independence, and would beg off drinking bouts at the tavern to save his money.  Later in life, he worked longer hours than his competitors, to steal a march on them.

Yet he was the most public-minded American who ever lived, and he was never driven by greed or consumerism.  At the age of 42, having achieved a middling prosperity, Franklin retired to concentrate on his science experiments.

For him, maintaining his personal independence was another aspect of his belief in democracy and freedom from oppressive rulers.  By living within his means, he escaped dependency on the means of others.

The same principles apply to us today.  The central question isn’t about debt or consumerism, but about self-reliance.  Debt can be incurred and paid back.  Goods and pleasures can be purchased with no harm.  But a fundamental dependency for money of one citizen on another – or of the electorate on the government – is like a progressive, debilitating illness to a republic.

It’s a personal choice, a moral choice:  and under the present circumstances, it will come to each of us.  We can live within our means, or we can watch our freedoms and institutions lose their purpose, atrophy, and die.

Living within our means: the government

The great political questions before us are in reality moral decisions.  Freedom will expand or retreat depending on individual self-reliance and public-mindedness.  The problem of debt – a subset of the struggle for freedom – can only be solved when a majority of the American people chooses to live within its means.

Public debt can be easily explained:  we, as citizens, have insisted on services and benefits for which we are unwilling to pay.  Our elected officials then borrow the difference.  A vicious cycle begins:  once started, the benefits become addictive, while the debt becomes unsustainable.  The state government of California is the most appalling example of this type of moral infantilism.

The federal government, however, with the support of public opinion, has been working hard to catch up to the California dreamland.  As the Economist observes, this process isn’t an invention of the left, or the Democratic Party, or the current administration:

Mr. Bush met no significant opposition from his fellow Republicans to his spending binge.  It was clear that, when it came to their own benefits, suburban Americans wanted government on their side.

Following the expenditure of astronomical sums by the last two administrations on the occasion of the financial crisis, two things transpired.  First, the federal debt became visibly unsustainable:  a mountain of despair that, if allowed to stand, will crush our children’s lives.  Second, and in consequence, popular opinion has moved – for the moment – away from its past addiction to benefits, toward a deep unease about their costs, both in money and in loss of freedom to an unrestrained Leviathan.

Just how unrestrained can be seen in the new budget proposal sent by the president to Congress:  feeding Leviathan will cost the American people $3.8 trillion next year, which is mind-boggling enough, but $1.6 trillion of that must be borrowed.  Some 42 percent of the government of the United States has broken loose from taxation, and perches far above our reach on that magic mountain of red ink.

So the federal debt has become a pressing political problem.  Its solution can also be easily explained:  we must make choices.  Taxes can and will be raised – by $1.9 trillion, according to this source – but raising taxes will soon reach a point of diminishing returns.  Americans aren’t entirely foolish.  They will quit working if the alternative is to work for the taxman.

We can’t tax our way out of the problem.  Instead, we must do without.  We must forsake some of the benefits and services we crave.  This, of course, is more easily said than done – which is precisely why the debt problem is a moral rather than a policy dilemma.  Success will depend on character, not cleverness.

Budget choices flow from ideology and party spirit.  I wish to preserve the safety net, you the nation’s security.  I favor my partisan friends, as you do yours.  This is natural and inescapable.  The moral failure has come with the frequent deadlocks:  in those cases, we have refused to choose.  Everyone got everything.  If funds were lacking, the government borrowed the difference.

That day is over.  The resolution of legislative deadlock must be, as our Founders intended, that neither side gets funded.  We must learn to do without.

The assertion of civic morality means that if our representatives earmark or otherwise feather their own districts with federal funds, we who elect them must discern the underlying selfishness, the moral depravity of conducting politics on the pleasure principle – and punish them at the polls.

The way the choice is made matters, too.  Like binge drinkers handing the keys of the car to a designated driver, Congress wants to hand off tough budget-cutting choices to a panel of wise guardians, which will make “nonpartisan” recommendations.  This too is moral infantilism.  We elect our representatives to make just that kind of difficult decision.

If they don’t feel up to the job, then shame on them – and shame on us for electing them.

Because if the federal debt is at bottom a moral problem, the choices it presents are political.  As the current budget moves through Congress, our representatives in both houses will have to decide whether or not to bring down that mountain of unfreedom towering over our children.  Those of us in the electorate will watch and decide whether to re-elect politicians who sided with the monster, Leviathan, against the future.

In the end – as with all moral questions – the choice will come down to each of us, individually, when we assume the mantle of sovereignty next November and cast our vote.

At Davos, gas-like beings grow nervous

Looks like we’re upsetting the galactic elites as well as our own educated classes.  All that noise.  All those elections.  All that “instability.”  According to the ineffable Tom Friedman, “We’re making people nervous.”  And by “people” he means the cosmic forces composed of pure energy which, once a year, assume bodily shape at Davos, Switzerland.

Friedman is so exasperated, poor man.  Here is President Obama, trying so hard to cut the deficit – as he told us himself, in his “eloquent” State of the Union speech – and there those beastly Republicans, ready to rip the very fabric of the universe asunder to score political points.

Our two-party political system is broken just when everything needs major repair, not minor repair,” said K.R. Sridhar, the founder of Bloom Energy, a fuel cell company in Silicon Valley, who is attending the forum. “I am talking about health care, infrastructure, education, energy. We are the ones who need a Marshall Plan now.” [. . .]

The sad and frustrating thing is, we are so close to being unstuck. If there were just six or eight Republican senators. . . ready to meet Obama somewhere in the middle on deficit reduction, energy, health care and banking reform, I believe that in the wake of the Massachusetts wake-up call the president would indeed meet them in that middle ground to forge not just incremental compromises, but substantial ones on these key issues. But so far, the Republicans are having a good year politically by just being the Party of No.

If only we did away with elections, democracy, political parties, public opinion – if only we obeyed, zombie-like, Friedman and his noncorporeal galactic overlords – why, then they would tell us what is truly important to our meager lives – like, say, “infrastructure.”

But we are not worthy. . .

The peasants are revolting

The cover story of last week’s Economist was “The backlash against big government.”  In fact, this theme is taken up only by a brief editorial, which mostly talks up the uses of big government and the risks of cutting its size.

The lead article deals instead with the return of a monster:  Leviathan, the economy-swallowing regulatory state.  This rough beast has been on a feeding frenzy for some time, taking advantage of the citizenry’s reasonable fears about terror attacks and less reasonable expectations of living without economic insecurity.

Former President Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” was a euphemism for an expansive government.  His administration tightened central control over schools and corporate governance, passed a costly – and unpaid-for – increase in medical benefits, and added 7,000 pages of federal regulations.  For the political force that ostensibly represented limited government, this amounted to ideological surrender.

When a perfect storm hit the financial markets following the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2009, there was nobody left to argue the costs of becoming fodder to Leviathan.  Federal expenditures sky-rocketed far beyond the reach of tax revenues:  the latter will no doubt increase, diminishing the economic power of the citizen while doing little to reduce the monstrous deficit.

The rout of the Jeffersonian ideal of a small, bounded federal government has been complete.

On reading the Economist story, it becomes clear that the only backlash against Leviathan is happening in the US – and here, only outside the charmed circle of our political and media elites.  The Europeans, always comfortable with a bloated, schoolmasterly state, have seized on the financial crisis to do what comes natural to them.

Nicolas Sarkozy, who passes for a conservative in French politics, happily proclaimed “the return of the state, the end of the ideology of public powerlessness.”  Gordon Brown, once a leader of the market-friendly New Labor, has in the words of the Economist “embarked on an Old Labor spending binge.”

In the US, the ideological demoralization begun during the Bush years has since spread further and deeper, leading to a wholesale loss of faith in the free citizen and the private sector by those public figures who once espoused their cause.  Alan Greenspan apologized for having promoted free markets.  Thomas Friedman, who not long ago preached a “golden straightjacket” for government, now openly admires China’s brutal and oppressive regime.

President Obama, in his inaugural, proclaimed the end of the childish dream of individualism, then embarked on a political program that meant, in essence, to transform the US into a Europe-style social democracy – a kind of Bigger Belgium.  He faced an opposition which lacked all conviction, and seemed – politically, intellectually – incapable of contesting the triumph of Leviathan.

Then something happened:  the “backlash” headlined, but not much dwelt on, by the Economist article.  After the stimulus package passed, President Obama’s agenda has stalled utterly.  Elections and polls reveal an electorate profoundly distrustful of his proposals, and of big government generally.

What changed?  The received wisdom is “voter anger.”  President Obama, for one, believes “People are angry and they’re frustrated.”  The same angry people who elected him, he claims, now have turned against his agenda.  I have touched on this angry-voter thesis before: it doesn’t agree with what I see or hear, and it makes little sense.

Activists may shout angrily for the cameras, but the ordinary American – my friends and neighbors – will rarely stir in anger, and almost never about things political.  It takes an extraordinary event like Pearl Harbor or 9/11 to tick off the American people.

David Brooks, the NYT’s tame conservative, is closer to the truth when he writes, “Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year.”  He offers the usual policy-wonk examples:  global warming, abortion, gun control.  The “educated classes”are for, the public against.  This is accurate so far as it goes, but of marginal significance.

Those with access to the public sphere – the political and media elites – have either cheered and promoted the progress of Leviathan, or made mumbling demoralized noises.  Brooks, a mumbler who embraced the Obama candidacy, chooses to call these the “educated classes,” among which he correctly counts himself.

Fine.  But who are the ignorant peasants suddenly standing in the way of the educated classes, pitchforks in hand, unashamed of their disdain for top-down decision-making and social engineering?  It appears to be the people.  They are not demoralized, but they do understand, with far stronger conviction than their betters, the way of life they wish to follow.

The American people remain stubbornly individualistic, self-reliant, and Jeffersonian to the core.  They elected President Obama not to be lectured about their childishness but to fix the mess in Washington.  They have turned against his proposals because they don’t wish to see their country, with its exceptional virtues, transformed into a run-of-the-mill example of elite power.

I sense no anger but much determination.  The educated classes, on the other hand, are now divided between those, like Brooks himself, aghast at this development, and those enraged at the intolerable pretensions of the peasant mob.

In the long run, we are all immoralists

John Maynard Keynes, patron saint of the government stimulus, called himself an “immoralist.”  He felt indifferent between right and wrong.  Also, he never had children.  When he made his famous statement, “In the long run, we are all dead,” Keynes spoke as one with no stake in the happiness of the human race, once he had departed from it.

Which is something we should keep in mind while reflecting on the chart below, showing the trend lines for federal spending and revenues through the year 2040, from The Economist’s article on “The backlash against big government.”

Morality concerns the impact of our actions on others.  It has no timeframe, no expiration date.  If I care in the least for my family, and friends, and the people in my community, I will organize my actions so that I can pursue my ends without destroying theirs.  I won’t borrow what I can’t repay; I won’t sneak away when the bill comes due, even to the grave.

If, however, I’m an immoralist, in the style of Keynes and the current policy of the US government, and the whole despicable generation of Baby Boomers, I will happily crush my children’s lives so that I may enjoy mine to the fullest.

The worst thing about that chart?  I feel complicit in it.  We are all immoralists now.