It’s immensely annoying to have to write approving things about Instapundit (particularly right after you get Instalanched) – it makes me worry that people will think I’m blog-rolling and whoring for traffic (comments and emails yes, traffic no – it costs money!!). But he blogged something near and dear to my heart today over at MSNBC, and I think that each of you ought to go over and read it now.
Back already?
I know what you’re thinking. You’re a bit titillated that Glenn blogged about oral sex, and otherwise, you’re just going “Yeah, whatever.” The commenters over at TalkLeft sure were.
Well don’t.
Because this is absolutely-damn-important.
I don’t care if you’re a liberal or a conservative. This issue – the increasingly dense spider web of law and administrative regulation that we find ourselves bound in – screws up your hopes.
For conservatives, it’s a gimme. The State enmeshes it’s eeevil tentacles deeper and deeper into your flesh…iaaaa, C’thulu, C’thulu…etc. By definition, conservatives (as opposed to Republicans, who are fine with regulation if it promotes Christian faith or behavior, regulates unseemly sexual behavior, or subsidizes favored businesses) are opposed to this.
But liberals need to be opposed as well. They need to be opposed for a variety of critically important reasons.
First, and foremost, because it makes each of us subject to the arbitrary whim of law enforcement. Remember the notion that law enforcement should be fair? Tough to do when everyone’s a lawbreaker and the officer and agents of the court can pick who they want to stop, and book, and prosecute. I said:
The average speed on the 110 freeway (except during rush hour congestion) is over 80 miles per hour. The speed limit is 55; this means that the enforcing officer can select from a huge population of violators at will. Is he a racist? Then black drivers may get cited. Is she mad at her red-haired ex-husband? Red-haired drivers will get red lights in the mirror.
This kind of law gives incredible unlegislated discretion and power to the enforcers, and makes the average citizen into the average lawbreaker.
But our political system runs on it…
But that’s not all.
Somehow many liberals have become lost in a fog in which legislation is a meaningful substitute for action. I don’t want legislation, I want change, and somehow I’m being handed a bill of goods by my legislators who somehow believe I can’t tell the difference.
I’ve always believed that one of the key problems in our system of government is that we all confuse passing laws with making changes.
As anyone who’s ever managed people knows, there’s a world of difference between sending memos (or policy and procedures documents) and changing employee behavior.
Look, if you’re a liberal – and I hope that at least a couple of the people rewarding this are – when you petition the State to act on an issue, what do you want? Do you want better schools, or a thicker book of regulations and an entire bureaucratic armada to (selectively) enforce them? And in so doing, neither accomplish the goal (which is supposedly why you want something done) and arm the opposition with another host of arguments for why liberalism is ineffective, intrusive, and immoral?
And for both liberals and conservatives, because it attacks legitimacy, that critical web that ties us together into a polity. Reynolds talks about how “ the law loses prestige.” I don’t think that’s a strong enough statement (although he’s a law professor, so maybe it means more to him than to me). Legitimacy is critical, and sadly in short supply these days.
To sum up:
So … pass a law … get a photo op … accomplish nothing. This is worse than just ineffective. It is worse because the presence of this vast body of unenforced law both breeds contempt for the law (decline in legitimacy) and creates a kind of bureaucratic leverage over each of us, as we are caught in a web of selectively enforced laws.
Here’s how statists on both sides really play it… faced with a choice, they’ll pick regulations & bureaucracy every time.
“Do you want better schools, or a thicker book of regulations and an entire bureaucratic armada to (selectively) enforce them?”
The former entails accountability and inconvenience, conflict, and sustained effort. The latter creates jobs for a constituency group that will be beholden long-term, and photo ops that give the appearance of action in the short term.
The goal of most legislators is first and foremost, to keep their donor constituencies on side. This becomes especially key in gerrymandered elections, where your allies are often the only realistic threat. Regulations and bureaucracy accomplishes this goal.
Here’s where you and I may disagree – but this point is important. The conservative critique of liberalism, drawing on the work of liberals like Theodore Lowi and extending into ideas like Public Choice Economics, says that the nature and structure of the liberal political project ensures the failure of attempts to stem the trends you describe… and describes the key mechanisms at work that make it so.
I would say that if a revitalized liberalism matters to you, then like Dante’s hell your only path to paradise may lie in a journey that takes you all the way through that critique.
In a way, the Republicans are in a worse bind. “Compassionate Conservatism” is merely a signal that conservatives may have a solid critique of the liberal project, but do not yet have a clearly articulated set of social alternatives that are accepted across their coalition. I see it emerging, and in fact some aspects of Bush’s program are necessary steps – but we aren’t there yet, the coalition has conflicting goals at its core, and the feeling that Bush needs to be protected for national security reasons will complicate attempts to move forward. Prepare for a lot of muddling through on the Right side of the isle.
A.L.:
“Look, if you’re a liberal – and I hope that at least a couple of the people rewarding this are – when you petition the State to act on an issue, what do you want? Do you want better schools, or a thicker book of regulations and an entire bureaucratic armada to (selectively) enforce them?”
Smarter kids. There’s really very little evidence that improving the schools actually better educates the kids. (Sorry to disabuse people of that notion, but what do you want, an elementary and secondary teacher cadre of Ph.D.s?) How “good” do schools have to get before it dawns on people that the same narrowing of the achievement gap between black and white students that we saw in Elementary and Secondary NAEP scores in the 1980s was also seen in aptitude scores of four-year-olds. Which tells you it’s not what kids find in the schools when they get there that makes a difference, but what they bring with them.
Sorry about the rant. But this is the sort of stuff we should know. It’s the students that matter, not the schools.
I’m holding out for the possibility that the Flynn Effect (that IQ scores are improving by around an sd every couple of decades) will eventually make us all smart enough that we’ll acquire common sense before we pass on. Wouldn’t that be something?
Actually, Scott, I’ll disagree – I don’t want smarter kids, I want more effective and competent kids.
And while I don’t for a second doubt that schools have little to do with the intelligence of the kids who go there, I’d say they have a lot to do with the competence of the kids that come out.
A.L.
I support Tax Loans — so as to create an honest social contract between a gov’t benefit (loan), and the recipient’s repayment (tax + surcharge). The current trends towards more transparency, and against corruption, and measuring results, will eventually make clear the corruption at the heart of democracy: using Other People’s Money for personal benefit. I hope.
This becomes more clear if there is an alternate way to get the same, or similar benefit, using one’s own money. That’s where the Tax Loan comes in. Other ideas welcome.
http://tomgrey.motime.com/1066615881#160449
A.L.,
As a conservative, I think you confuse conservative with libertarian in your definition. I certainly don’t think of government as evil–I think it performs a necessary function, and as long as it stays within the proper bound and scope of its duties, everything is fine. Libertarians better fit the caricature you describe, but it IS a caricature, not an accurate definition, as is your description of Republicans.
A.L.:
But what I’m saying is that the most efficient way to get more effective and competent kids is to focus on what happens to them prior to the age of 3. NAEP isn’t an aptitude test, but an achievement test. If they’re smarter to begin with they’ll almost certainly end up more effective and competent.
Look, I feel awful about dragging comments off topic with my rant about education, so let me see if I can repair the damage I’ve done. Although the law of unintended consequences being what it is, I’ll probably only make things worse. (I also think I overstated and mangled the Flynn Effect concept, but it was just a comment anyway.)
The point about education is this: There are a number of things that a superficial assessment of education would suggest we do to improve things. And it’s certainly true that if we dumped enough resources into the schools we would probably end up improving student achievement, albeit not by nearly as much as people expect. But we’d be far better off focussing those same resources on increasing the average age of expectant mothers at conception, and keeping parents together until children have at least reached age 3. And you probably wouldn’t have to criminalize any behaviors to do it, either. There might be an argument between liberal and conservatives about whether you merely remove sudsidies, or you also employ some early childhood intervention and parent education. But it would be hard to go too far wrong, either way.
And likewise it would seem reasonable that if you slowed the speed of traffic to 55mph you might well reduce the number of accidents. Perhaps the magic number isn’t 55 but 60, or 65. But there’s also probably some utility (including saving a certain number of lives) in being able to get places faster. And furthermore faster speeds also tend to reduce congestion (as some of my transportation policy friends tell me). So there is simply a tradeoff between the utility of faster speeds and the death toll due to accidents on highways. And we might be able to improve auto safety, by employing technology like smart highways for instance, in order to optimize both safety and speed, while also minimizing congestion. But I don’t think there’s any way to avoid the implication that some legislation would we required. It may not be the sort of legislation that criminalizes behavior, though.
By the way, one problem with your analogy (that’s probably fairly minor) is that if cops started ticketing anyone for speeding then all traffic would tend to slow down, as long as people knew about the arrests and they had no obvious pattern that reliably exempted some drivers. So the fact that a cop stops someone who happens to resemble her husband wouldn’t make much difference (to the policy strategy anyway), as long as the other drivers weren’t aware of the pattern and had a reason to believe they were exempted if they looked, for instance, like Howdy Doody. (I have a thing about Howdyesque people.)
The Public Choice problem is that people tend to get more services than their naked preferences would demand. Well, that’s the argument anyway. I think that’s what Joe is saying.
Sam:
The problem is that the American political lexicon is all screwed up. American “conservatives” are far more libertarian than traditional conservatives. And traditional liberals are actually in favor of minimal government. F.A. Hayek would have been horrified if you’d called him a “conservative” rather than a “liberal,” in spite of the fact that he was the ideological father of Reaganomics.
I’m not sure how the American lexicon got turned on its head, but it’s almost necessary to put “liberal” in quotes, when what you mean is “social democratic.” Or consistently use the term “classical liberal” to mean the libertarian-leaning variety. And we all just get lazy.
Lol, you are like pop stars who whinge about all the attention they are getting and their “suffering” private life. Unlike most of them, of course, WoC deserves all the fame you get.