I’ve been thinking about “Liberalism” (as opposed to Lockean “liberalism”) for a while – after all, I need to justify the title of this blog. I am trying to unify the examples of what mostly goes for Liberalism in this day and age, which I’m calling “SkyBox Liberalism” – which is v. different from what I’m promoting.
While the theory percolates, let me explain by example.
In the late 1970’s, I was a graduate student at UC Berkeley. It was good for me, got me almost exactly the job I wanted when I got out, and convinced me that none of my sons will go to mega-public universities as underclassmen.
While I was there, there was a small controversy that I followed. It involved the effort of the student government to evict from the student union one tenant, and to replace it with another. This is to me, the perfect example of SkyBoxing, and I hope that telling the story will help define what I mean.
In the 60’s in Berkeley, there was a movement to create a series of co-ops that would allow student-radicals to both generate jobs outside the hated-but-paying-their-rent capitalist system, and provide a living example that (for all I know) Trotskyite anarcho-syndicalism could triumph in the Belly of the Beast.
Most of these communal businesses failed mercifully quickly, as far as I know (this is all ancient history to me, so if I’m getting part of it wrong, drop a note). By the time I got there, there were two survivors – Leopold’s Records (“Boycott Tower Records, keep Berkeley Free”) and the Missing Link bicycle shop.
Leopold’s was off-campus somewhere near Telegraph, but the bicycle store was a part of the mini-shopping area that was in the ASUC building.
The student government decided that they were going to evict it to make room for a small-electronics (Walkmen, stereo, calculators, etc.) annex to the Student Store. Why??
The small-electronics store could pay as much as $50,000 more in rent every year.
Now this is an appropriately cold-hearted landlord kind of decision to make. But the people making the decision weren’t sweater wearing conservative Young Republicans, driven by their vision of the purity of the market.
They were a bunch of New Left, ethnic-identity, progressive communitarian kind of kids.
Why did they want to make this decision? Because it would mean $50K a year more for their organizing budgets; $50K more in pork they could carve up in the hopes of building their perfect communitarian future.
Now I don’t know about you, but I have a hard time imagining anything more keyed to a progressive communitarian future than a cooperatively owned bicycle store. I mean, how much better does it get? Nonprofit. Cooperatively employee owned. Bicycles, for chrissakes. If you really wanted to educate people in alternatives to the “mass consumerist repressive capitalist paradigm” (I think I got the buzzwords right), wouldn’t that be a good way to do it?
But reality couldn’t stand a chance against the cold need for this elected group to make sure that they and their friends were rewarded.
See it’s not about what you really believe in, in the SkyBox world…it’s about making sure you and your friends can be very comfortable while you think and write and feel very very seriously about it.
I’m not touting bicycles or co-ops right now (although there are things to say for both); it’s the fact that one group put their beliefs into practice in the world, while another made it a point to live comfortably while thinking really hard about making the world a better place.
One of those is a Liberal – the other is doing something else, but is definitely doing it from a SkyBox.

Slow Down Stadium Deal(requires registration)

Where are the Wachs-style questions, or even a little of his righteous indignation? Where, in fact, is the public debate on this issue? Instead, our city leaders seem hellbent to do the deal. On Tuesday, the council introduced a motion to allow the use of public money to help build a stadium so long as the funds were repaid. That motion will be heard next month. Nothing should go forward until every bit of fine print is examined, in public.

Wow.

From Forbes.com: If you give a machine tool away, it will collect dust. If you sell it, it can cure poverty.

The ramshackle facade of Christopher Wilson’s two-room home in the gritty Southside neighborhood of Kingston, Jamaica, doesn’t raise great expectations. But through the rickety wooden gate and beyond the drainage ditch lies a new, freshly plastered extension to his house and woodworking shop.
Wilson, 36, who has a wife and two young children, brings in $800 a month making cabinets, tables and chairs for a furniture store and for neighbors. His business got a big kick six months ago when he bought a used drill press and lathe for $650. It doubled his productivity, which in turn allowed him to purchase the materials for the extension and hire a mason.
Wilson bought the tools, at a 20% discount from their secondhand value, from a nonprofit called Tools for Development. Started 15 years ago by Roy Megarry, 65, the former publisher of Canada’s prestigious Globe & Mail newspaper, Tools for Development has a simple but powerful premise: Make secondhand equipment available to poor entrepreneurs at an affordable price. There are no handouts. The entrepreneur pays for the tools either up front or on credit, with interest rates slightly lower than banks charge.

How do we liberals begin to design programs that look more like this? Tools for South-Central? Calling Ms. Goldberg…

The Blogosphere(tm) is correctly going starkers about this poster. I’ll quote from the target site:

This poster, funded by the Associated Students of San Francisco State University, was posted on campus in April2002. This is perhaps the most grotesque and explicit incarnation of the “blood libel” observed in the free world since the Nazi Holocaust. It was generated on the campus of a public university by students, using public money. The poster included the names of the following organizations: Associated Students, GUPS (General Union of Palestinian Students), MSA (Muslim Student Association) and WIA (unidentified).

res ipsa loquitur…Latin for “the thing speaks for itself”.

And how could I forget her current project, AB2115, which will ban school names which a state board of Political Correctness (sorry, State Board of Education) finds offensive. Last time I checked, California has an education crisis in funding and student performance. Am I remiss in suggesting that the State Board of Education would be better served doing something about crappy schools in Indian communities (as well as all the other communities in the state) before wasting one second in dealing with this?
I once proposed a state board to approve vanity license plates; it would employ all the poor poets and writers, and every applicant would have to justify their plate before the board. At least my proposal was meant as satire.

Jill Stewart has a great column on Jackie Goldberg, the former LAUSD school principal/board member/LA City Council Member/CA Assembly member who has a unique talent for talking about the downtrodden and helping out the Skybox Crowd.
While on the LAUSD Board, she helped start the avalanche that would become the $200 million Belmont debacle (important mitigating point: her role was in proposing a much smaller middle school on the most contaminated 11 acres of the 25 acre site – but the key staff and players who led the march for the absurd effort of the school bureaucracy to become for-profit developers came on board during her watch).
While in the City Council she carried water for the $600 million Trizec/Haan Hollywood/Highland project:

On another local front, Goldberg’s idiotic deal with the Canadian developers TrizecHahn to create the new Egyptian-themed mall and Academy Awards hall at Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue stands as the worst expenditure of city tax dollars in recent years.
Two weeks ago, the L.A. City Council spent an hour commiserating over the money-hemorrhaging project, into which Goldberg, using her strong-arming, backroom style, persuaded the city council to pour $90 million into the parking structure. The money should have gone to more cops for Hollywood, or true redevelopment of its heavily barred storefronts and litter-strewn, filthy sidewalks and streets.

This is exactly the kind of Skybox Crowd project – doing well by purporting to do good – that represents the failure of modern liberalism.
I don’t know if it is just the seductive power of the lobbyists, or the desire of the low-level elected officials and bureaucrats to be “playahs” that leads to the kind of insane belief that the lives of the bulk of the population or the character of their communities will be improved by building these ill-thought-out megaprojects.
And what we see in real estate carries on to social programs as well, as we try and solve problems that are a collection of a number of small factors with one massive, sweeping program or project.
Things are more complex than that, and to effect people’s lives – which is what liberals in government purportedly want to do – we have to come up with solutions that reflect and embrace that complexity.
I’ll suggest that there is a kind of new paradigm emerging – with the open-source “Cathedral and the Bazaar”, with “Emergence : From Chaos to Order”, with Wolfram’s new book, “A New Kind of Science” – that suggests that a collection of smaller decisions, programs, or projects all built around a basic set of rules or goals, may in fact be a more powerful agent of change than a single massive project.
It requires a new kind of humility on the part of the change agents though, and as long as the space is occupied by blowhards like Goldberg, that will be hard to do.

Slate’s article on game theory in the Middle East is pretty good, but I believe Wright underestimates the power of his option #1 (irrational hatred). War is not an auction, and when it has been run as one — most famously in Vietnam by Johnson, Nixon and their hardy band of “incrementalists” — its managers manage to kill more while accomplishing less.
This is a 19th century, Viennese-opera conception of war. I’d suggest going back to Thucydides to see what tribal warfare is all about.

A lot of news coverage on potential Islamicist threats to US targets on July 4 (see this CNN article); something jogged my memory, and it occurred to me:
July 4 is also the date of the famous Battle of Hattin/Tiberias, at which Saladin defeated Guy, King of Jerusalem and his army of Crusaders and effectively ended the Frankish occupation of Palestine.
Since we know Al Queida knows their history, I’d be definitely be in Condition Yellow that day.

Sunday was a gorgeous day here in Los Angeles, clear, windy, just a hint of smoke from the fire up above Santa Clarita.

The SO – who is the “perfect pillion” as well as a pretty good rider herself – and I took the motorcycle out and spent the day with some friends riding through the canyons up there, and on the way I was strongly reminded of why I am a liberal.

First, the clean air.
The population of Southern California has gone up by about 60% since 1970, according to the Southern California Association of Governments. Auto ownership and use has grown faster, probably about 25% more, I’ll estimate, so we’re looking at a 75% increase in vehicle-miles. We’ve probably lost a bunch of manufacturing and refining, but employment is still a whole bunch higher than it was back then.

And I remember summer days in high school when you couldn’’t see the end of my West LA block for the smog. Two-a-days in the pool at school when you spent the day with “aqualung – ”—a chest so sore you couldn’’t raise your voice.

My sons haven’t had those problems (I am aware of the higher incidence of asthma, but there’s a bunch of interesting epidemiology on that). I don’t think their children will, either.

Why?

The damn bureaucrats, and their command-and-control bureaucracy. Personally, I think there are more refined tools available to us in the Information Age … Precision Guided Munitions of regulation, rather than the crude daisy-cutters. But if we don’t regulate, we’ll choke.

Next, the infrastructure.
Our normal ride, up Bouquet Canyon, was closed due to the fire, so we rode up San Francisquito Canyon instead (past “A Place to Shoot”, a pretty decent firing range).

In the canyon you can see the remnants of William Mulholland’’s last great project, the St. Francis Dam, which failed catastrophically in 1928, killing at least 500.

But Southern Californians live on the desert because of the infrastructure that gives us water, protects us from floods, lets us move around, etc. etc. etc.

I know that each of these is the heavy boot of man’s dominion over nature… – but unless we are all willing to live like Gabrielinos, we need it.

And the infrastructure isn’t just physical, but social as well. I have a bachelor’s and a master’s from the University of California, and it is a truism the public university has changed people’s lives.

Finally, charity and hope.
We spent Saturday night at the annual fundraiser for the St. Joseph’s Center in Venice. This hasn’’t been a brilliant year for us financially, but we managed to give some away anyway, and enjoyed the company of a bunch of people who were doing pretty much the same thing.

I’’ve always felt that I was an economic liberal because I enjoyed my nice things less when I had to either worry about someone trying to hit me on the head and take them away, or eat my meal in the window of a restaurant while a starving family stood outside.

Look, I know that the biggest beneficiaries of the welfare programs in the last fifty years have been the people who work for the welfare departments.

I know that we’’ve grown dysfunctional cultures like mold on bad French cheese.

But does it tell you we’’ve accomplished something when the biggest nutritional problem among the very poor is obesity?