compromise

A better kind of patriotism

PNRJ core principles, current events, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jul 5 JDN 2459037

Yesterday was the Fourth of July, but a lot of us haven’t felt much like celebrating. When things are this bad—pandemic, economic crisis, corrupt government, police brutality, riots, and so on—it can be hard to find much pride in our country.

Perhaps this is why Republicans tend to describe themselves as more patriotic than Democrats. Republicans have always held our country to a far lower standard (indeed, do they hold it to any standard at all!?) and so they can be proud of it even in its darkest times.

Indeed, in some sense national pride in general is a weird concept: We weren’t even alive when our nation was founded, and even today there are hundreds of millions of people in our nation, so most of what it does has nothing to do with us. But human beings are tribal: We feel a deep need to align ourselves with groups larger than ourselves. In the current era, nations fill much of that role (though certainly not all of it, as we form many other types of groups as well). We identify so strongly with our nation that our pride or shame in it becomes pride or shame in ourselves.

As the toppling of statues extends beyond Confederate leaders (obviously those statues should come down! Would Great Britain put up statues of Napoleon?) and Christopher Columbus (who was recognized as a monster in his own time!) to more ambiguous cases like Ulysses Grant, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, or even utterly nonsensical ones like Matthias Baldwin, one does begin to get the sense that the left wing doesn’t just hate racism; some of them really do seem to hate America.

Don’t get me wrong: The list of America’s sins is long and weighty. From the very beginning the United States was built by forcing out Native populations and importing African slaves. The persistent inequality between racial groups today suggests that reparations for these crimes may still be necessary.

But I think it is a mistake to look at a statue of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson and see only a slaveowner. They were slaveowners, certainly—and we shouldn’t sweep that under the rug. Perhaps it is wrong to idolize anyone, because our heroes never live up to our expectations and great men are almost always bad men. Even Martin Luther King was a sexual predator and Mahatma Gandhi abused his wife. Then again, people seem to need heroes: Without something to aspire to, some sense of pride in who they are, people rapidly become directionless or even hopeless.

While there is much to be appalled by in Washington or Jefferson, there is also much to admire. Indeed, specifically what we are celebrating on Independence Day strikes me as something particularly noteworthy, something truly worthy of the phrase “American exceptionalism”.

For most of human history, every major nation formed organically. Many were ruled by hereditary dynasties that extended to time immemorial. Others were aware that they had experienced coups and revolutions, but all of these were about the interests of one king (or prince, or duke) versus another. The Greek philosophers had debated what the best sort of government would be, but never could agree on anything; insofar as they did agree, they seemed to prefer benevolent autocracy. Even where democracies existed, they too had formed organically, and in practice rarely had suffrage beyond upper-class men. Nations had laws, but these laws were subordinate to the men who made and enforced them; one king’s sacred duty was another’s heinous crime.

Then came the Founding Fathers. After fighting their way out of the grip of the British Empire, they could easily have formed their own new monarchy and declared their own King George—and there were many who wanted to do this. They could have kept things running basically the same way they always had.

But they didn’t. Instead, they gathered together a group of experts and leaders from the revolution, all to ask the question: “What is the best way to run a country?” Of course there were many different ideas about the answer. A long series of impassioned arguments and bitter conflicts ensued. Different sides cited historians and philosophers back and forth at each other, often using the same source to entirely opposite conclusions. Great compromises were made that neither side was happy with (like the Three-Fifths Compromise and the Connecticut Compromise).

When all the dust cleared and all the signatures were collected, the result was a document that all involved knew was imperfect and incomplete—but nevertheless represented a remarkable leap forward for the very concept of what it means to govern a nation. However painfully and awkwardly, they came to some kind of agreement as to what was the best way to run a country—and then they made that country.

It’s difficult to overstate what a watershed moment this was in human history. With a few exceptions—mostly small communities—every other government on earth had been created to serve the interests of its rulers, with barely even a passing thought toward what would be ethical or in the best interests of the citizens. Of course some self-interest crept in even to the US Constitution, and in some ways we’ve been trying to fix that ever since. But even asking what sort of government would be best for the people was something deeply radical.

Today the hypocrisy of a slaveowner writing “all men are created equal” is jarring to us; but at the time the shock was not that he would own slaves, but that he would even give lip service to universal human equality. It seems bizarre to us that someone could announce “inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and then only grant voting rights to landowning White men—but to his contemporaries, the odd thing was citing philosophers (specifically John Locke) in your plan for a new government.

Indeed, perhaps the most radical thing of all about the Constitution of the United States is that they knew it was imperfect. The Founding Fathers built into the very text of the document a procedure for amending and improving it. And since then we have amended it 27 times (though to be fair the first 10 were more like “You know what? We should actually state clearly that people have free speech rather than assuming courts will automatically protect that.”)

Every nation has a founding myth that lionizes its founders. And certainly many, if not most, Americans believe a version of this myth that is as much fable as fact. But even the historical truth with all of its hypocrises has plenty to be proud of.

Though we may not have had any control over how our nation was founded, we do have a role in deciding its future. If we feel nothing but pride in our nation, we will not do enough to mend and rectify its flaws. If we feel nothing but shame in our nation, we will not do enough to preserve and improve its strengths.

Thus, this Independence Day, I remind you to be ambivalent: There is much to be ashamed of, but also much to be proud of.

On compromise: The kind of politics that can be bipartisan—and the kind that can’t

PNRJ current events, public policy , , , , , , , , ,

Dec 29 JDN 2458847

The “polarization” of our current government has been much maligned. And there is some truth to this: The ideological gap between Democrats and Republicans in Congress is larger than it has been in a century. There have been many calls by self-proclaimed “centrists” for a return to “bipartisanship”.

But there is nothing centrist about compromising with fascists. If one party wants to destroy democracy and the other wants to save it, a true centrist would vote entirely with the pro-democracy party.

There is a kind of politics that can be bipartisan, that can bear reasonable compromise. Most economic policy is of this kind. If one side wants a tax of 40% and the other wants 20%, it’s quite reasonable to set the tax at 30%. If one side wants a large tariff and the other no tariff, it’s quite reasonable to make a small tariff. It could still be wrong—I’d tend to say that the 40% tax with no tariff is the right way to go—but it won’t be unjust. We can in fact “agree to disagree” in such cases. There really is a reasonable intermediate view between the extremes.

But there is also a kind of politics that can’t be bipartisan, in which compromise is inherently unjust. Most social policy is of this kind. If one side wants to let women vote and the other doesn’t, you can’t compromise by letting half of women vote. Women deserve the right to vote, period. All of them. In some sense letting half of women vote would be an improvement over none at all, but it’s obviously not an acceptable policy. The only just thing to do is to keep fighting until all women can vote.

This isn’t a question of importance per se.

Climate change is probably the single most important thing going on in the world this century, but it is actually something we can reasonably compromise about. It isn’t obvious where exactly the emission targets should be set to balance environmental sustainability with economic growth, and reasonable people can disagree about how to draw that line. (It is not reasonable to deny that climate change is important and refuse to take any action at all—which, sadly, is what the Republicans have been doing lately.) Thousands of innocent people have already been killed by Trump’s nonsensical deregulation of air pollution—but in fact it’s a quite difficult problem to decide exactly how pollution should be regulated.

Conversely, voter suppression has a small, if any, effect on our actual outcomes. In a country of 320 million people, even tens of thousands of votes rarely make a difference, and the (Constitutional) Electoral College does far greater damage to the principle of “one person, one vote” than voter suppression ever could. But voter suppression is fundamentally, inherently anti-democractic. When you try to suppress votes, you declare yourself an enemy of the free world.

There has always been disagreement about both kinds of issues; that hasn’t changed. The fundamental rights of women, racial minorities, and LGBT people have always been politically contentious, when—qua fundamental rights—they should never have been. But at least as far as I could tell, we seemed to be making progress on all these fronts. The left wing was dragging the right wing, kicking and screaming if necessary, toward a more just society.

Then came President Donald Trump.

The Trump administration, at least more than any administration I can remember, has been reversing social progress, taking hardline far-right positions on the kind of issues that we can’t compromise about. Locking up children at the border. Undermining judicial due process. Suppressing voter participation. These are attacks upon the foundations of a free society. We can’t “agree to disagree” on them.

Indeed, Trump’s economic policy has been surprisingly ambivalent; while he cuts taxes on the rich like a standard Republican, his trade war is much more of a leftist idea. It’s not so much that he’s willing to compromise as that he’s utterly inconsistent, but at least he’s not a consistent extremist on these issues.

That is what makes Trump an anomaly. The Republicans have gradually become more extreme over time, but it was Trump who carried them over a threshold, where they stopped retarding social progress and began actively reversing it. Removing Trump himself will not remove the problem—but nor would it be an empty gesture. He is a real part of the problem, and removing him might just give us the chance to make the deeper changes that need to be made.

The House agrees. Unfortunately, I doubt the Senate will.

The TPP sounds… okay, I guess?

PNRJ development economics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457308 EDT 12:56

So, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement has been signed. This upsets a lot of people, from the far-left who say it gives corporations power over democracy to the far-right who say it makes Obama into a dictator. But more mainstream organizations have also come out against it, particularly from the center-left or “radical center”, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Medecins Sans Frontieres.

Bernie Sanders was opposed to it from the beginning, and now Hillary Clinton is opposed as well—though given her long track record of support for trade agreements it’s unclear whether this opposition is sincere, or simply reflects the way that Sanders has shifted our Overton Window to the left. Many Republicans also opposed the deal, and they’re already calling it “Obamatrade”. (Apparently they didn’t learn their lesson from Obamacare, because it’s been wildly successful, and in about a generation people are going to say “Obamacare” in the same breath as “Medicare” and “the New Deal”, and sticking Obama’s name onto it is going to lionize him.)

In my previous post I explained why I am, like the vast majority of economists, strongly in favor of free trade. So you might think that I would support the TPP, and would want to criticize all these people who are coming out against it as naive protectionists.

But in fact, I feel deeply ambivalent about the TPP, and I’m not alone in that among economists. Indeed I feel a bit proud to say that my view on the agreement is almost exactly aligned with that of Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman. (Krugman is always one of the world’s best economists, but I’d say he should be especially trusted on issues of international trade—because that was the subject of his Nobel-winning research.) The original leaked version looked pretty awful, and not knowing exactly what’s in it worried me, but the more I hear tobacco and pharmaceutical companies complain about it, the more I like the sound of it.

First of all, let me say that I’m still very angry they haven’t released the full text. We have a right to know what our laws are, as a basic principle of democracy. If we are going to be bound by this agreement, we have a right to know what it says. This is non-negotiable. To be bound by laws you haven’t been told about is literally—and let me be clear on the full force I intend by that word, literally—Kafkaesque. Kafka’s The Trial is all about what happens when the government can punish you for disobeying a law they never told you exists.

In the leaked draft version, the TPP would have been the largest handout of corporate welfare in world history. By placing the so-called “intellectual property” of corporations above basic human rights, it amounted to throwing several entire Third World countries under the bus in order to increase the profits of a handful of megacorporations. It would have expanded “investor-state dispute resolution authority” into an unprecedented level of power for multinational corporations to influence the decisions of national governments—what the President of the Capital Institute called “trading away our sovereignty”.

My fear was that the TPP would just be a redone and expanded version of the TRIPS accord, the “Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights” (somehow that’s “TRIPS”), which expanded the monopoly power of “intellectual property” corporations, including the music industry, the film industry, and worst of all the pharmaceutical industry. The expansion of patent powers reduced the availability of drugs, including life-saving drugs, to some of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. There is supposed to be a system of flexibility provisions that allow exceptions to intellectual property laws in the service of public health, but in practice these are difficult to implement and many Third World governments don’t know how to use them. Based on UNCTAD estimates, Thomas Pogge found that TRIPS and related trade agreements amount to a transfer of wealth from the Third World to the First World on the order of $700 billion per year. (I’m also a bit confused by the WTO’s assertion that “For patents, [TRIPS] allows governments to make exceptions to patent holders’ rights such as in national emergencies, anti-competitive practices, […]”; aren’t patents by definition anti-competitive practices? We’ll protect your monopoly, as long as you don’t try to have a monopoly?) If TPP makes these already too-strong provisions stronger, millions of people could be denied medicines they need—which is why Medecins San Frontieres is among the organizations opposing the agreement.

Yet, in principle free trade is a good idea, and it’s definitely a good thing to remove the ridiculous tariffs we still have on Japanese cars. Of course, Ford Motor Company is complaining about the additional competition, but that’s a good sign—corporations complaining about extra competition is exactly the sort of response a good trade agreement would provoke. (Also, “razor-thin profit margins”? I think not; car manufacturing is near the very top of capital-intensive industries with high barriers to entry, and Ford Motor Company has a gross profit margin of 16% and net income margin of 5%. So, that 2.5% you might have to cut prices because you no longer get the tariff support… well, you could just take it out of your profits, and I don’t see why we should feel bad if you have to do that.)

It still angers me that they won’t tell us exactly what’s in the deal, but some of the things they have told us are actually quite encouraging. The New York Times has a summary that suggests lukewarm approval on their part.

The TPP opens up Internet traffic, creating international regulations that prohibit the censorship of cross-border data. (With that in mind, I’m a bit baffled that the EFF is so strongly opposed; isn’t free data exchange your raison d’etre?) China hasn’t signed on, and this might well be why—they’d love to sell us products without tariffs, but they aren’t prepared to stop censoring the Internet in order to do that.

It lowers barriers on the cross-border exchange of services (as opposed to only goods). Many services really can’t be traded much across borders (think restaurant meals and haircuts), and in practice this mostly means finance, which is a mixed bag to be sure; but in general I think allowing services to compete across borders is a good ideas.

The TPP also places limitations on government-owned enterprises, though not very strict ones (probably because we in the US aren’t likely to give up the US Postal Service or the Federal Reserve anytime soon). Basically this is designed to prevent the sort of mass state expropriation that has destroyed the economies of several authoritarian socialist countries, like Cuba and Venezuela. It’s unlikely they would be strong enough to stop more legitimate nationalizations of industry or applications of eminent domain, since Japan, Canada, and probably even the US would have been unwilling to sign onto such an agreement.

The leaked draft of the TPP would have given extremely strong protections to drug patents, but the fact that pharmaceutical companies are angry about it says to me that the strongest of these provisions must not have made it in. It sounds like patents are being made stronger but shorter, which like most compromises makes both sides mad.

Best of all, it includes some regulations on human rights, labor standards, and environmental policies, which is something that has been sorely lacking in previous trade agreements. While the details are still sketchy (Have I mentioned how angry I am that they won’t release the full text?) it is claimed that the agreement includes a system of tariff penalties that can be implemented against countries that oppress LGBT people and other marginalized groups. Because Brunei, Malaysia, and Singapore currently criminalize homosexuality, they would already be in noncompliance from the moment they sign the treaty, and would be subject to these penalties until they change their laws. If this is true, it actually sounds like a step toward the “human rights tariff” that I would like to see implemented worldwide.

In general, the TPP sounds like a mess, a jumble of awkward compromises that does some good things and some bad things, and doesn’t really satisfy anyone. In other words, it sounds like policy.