Unifying the insurgency
W. James Antle III
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
I opposed the Iraq war, though regrettably I did hedge in the month before the invasion.
2. Have you changed your position?
Yes—even as an opponent of the war, I was too trusting of the hawks' arguments concerning weapons of mass destruction and Saddam's propensity for anti-American terrorism. My basic views on the inadvisability of democratic nation-building, however, remain unchanged.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
The only thing unifying the insurgency is the continued American presence. An orderly withdrawal, while no panacea, would cause the insurgency to divide against itself and allow Iraq's ethno-religious factions to chart their own course.
W. James Antle III is a senior writer for The American Conservative.
Scrap the current constitution
Ronald Bailey
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
Yes.
2. Have you changed your position?
Not yet—but the history of the last three years in Iraq has greatly deepened my appreciation of the Federal government's abilty to screw up anything. It might have been different as I outlined in my August 2005 column "Iraq 2007."
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
Train sufficient Iraqi forces to secure the country's borders and scrap the current constitution and encourage a transition to a loose confederation of democratically self-governing Sunni, Kurdish and Shi'a regions and then get out. I offered a similar plan in my January 2005 "Free Kurdistan!"
Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent.
Let the Shiite Crescent bloom
Tim Cavanaugh
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
No, which is not the same as saying I don't believe the United States is engaged in a serious, multi-dimensional struggle against radical Islam, and that intelligent use of violence is an important tool in that fight. (I don't know whether we still need to draw this distinction, but I haven't forgotten being called a traitor and fifth columnist for suggesting the invasion of Iraq was ill-advised.)
2. Have you changed your position?
Somewhat, but like Rhett Butler, I won't join a cause until it's truly lost. The occupation has gone better than any prudent person had a right to expect, and the failure of so many hawks to understand this shows how unserious they were all along. What made the invasion a mistake was not any particular fact on the ground in Iraq, but the three-year, day-by-day demonstration it has given our country's enemies (Iran most notably) of the precise limits of American power and resolve. The lessons our real enemies learn from this will come back to haunt us; that's why some guy way back in the 1900s said something about speaking softly and carrying a big stick.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
Let the Shiite Crescent bloom: We've already spent thousands of lives and half a trillion dollars inadvertently nurturing it, so we might at least get the incremental benefit of having a deadly rival to the Salafists who are even more determined than the Shiites to destroy our civilization. (Just so, we should have let the Iranians finish kicking Saddam's ass in the 1980s.) That means accepting the current Mullahfied Iraqi government and leaving it to brutalize the Sunnis at will. This might offend our sense of decency, but if we stay in the country, the same historical forces that drove the British, the Turks, and all other visitors to back the Sunnis over the Shiites will drive us down the same road.
Tim Cavanaugh is Reason's web editor.
Declare victory
Brian Doherty
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
No.
2. Have you changed your position?
No.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
With a democratically elected Iraqi government in place and Saddam's (nonexistent) threat of WMDs gone, declare victory and pull out troops with all dispatch.
Brian Doherty is a senior editor of Reason magazine and author of This is Burning Man (Little, Brown).
Consider a division
David Friedman
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
No. I thought it was probably a mistake, although I did not have enough information to be certain.
2. Have you changed your position?
I am now more confident it was a mistake.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
The U.S. should leave, if possible in a way that permits the Iraqis to make arrangements that do not result in large numbers of people being killed. That might involve a de jure, or at least de facto, division of the country.
I am not an expert on Iraq, and it is hard to know for certain whose account of the situation to believe. But those are my best guesses.
David Friedman is a professor of law at Santa Clara University and the author of many books, including The Machinery of Freedom: A guide to radical capitalism and the new novel A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq (Plume).
Remember a pressing engagement
Wendy McElroy
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
I opposed the invasion on both principled and practical grounds
2. Have you changed your position?
My opposition has deepened as the war has exceeded my worst fears in duration, blatant economic motives, political incompetence and military brutality.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
Get out right now. Declare victory, declare defeat, remember a pressing engagement back home… it doesn't matter what reason is given. Get out immediately.
Wendy McElroy is the editor of ifeminists.net, a weekly columnist for FOX News, and the author of several books on anarchism and on feminism. She maintains a daily blog at www.wendymcelroy.com.
Recruits, inspiration, targets
John Mueller
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
I opposed it, as my 2003 commentary in Reason will indicate. One comment about the link between a war in Iraq and terrorism from that: "it seems likely that an attack will supply them with new recruits, inspire them to even more effort, and provide them with inviting new targets in the foreign military and civilian forces that occupy a defeated, chaotic Iraq."
2. Have you changed your position?
Hardly. The main issue now is whether the war has become the greatest debacle in American foreign policy history or only the second greatest, after Vietnam.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
A considerable number, maybe a vast majority, of the insurgents are fighting because the country has been invaded and occupied. Since the American presence is the cause of their participation in the insurgency, their incentive to fight would accordingly vanish if the United States pulled out. It's an experiment well worth conducting.
John Mueller is a professor of political science at Ohio State University. His most recent book is The Remnants of War. His next, nearing completion, is currently titled, Devils and Duct Tape: Terrorism and the Dynamics of Threat Exaggeration.
No Monday-morning quarterbacking
Charles Murray
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
Yes.
2. Have you changed your position?
No. I'm as critical a Monday-morning quarterback as anyone else, but I think the administration's rationale for invading Iraq was correct, and an American president who had not invaded, given the information he had for making the decision, would have been irresponsible.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
Damned if I know.
Charles Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
Six months or sooner
William A. Niskanen
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
No.
2. Have you changed your position?
No.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
Announce that all U.S. troops will leave Iraq within six months of a request from the Iraqi government. Leave earlier if necessary to avoid involvement in an Iraqi civil war.
William A. Niskanen is chairman of the Cato Institute
Fashion a tolerable compromise
Tom G. Palmer
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
No, I opposed it. I listened to the case, but I was not convinced by the administration's arguments or evidence.
2. Have you changed your position?
No, I have not, I think it was a mistake. But it is also a mistake that was made and so the question is not only what to have done, but what to do now.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
The US government should be clear that the US will withdraw all of its troops after a reasonable period of time to allow the Iraqi government to fashion a tolerable domestic political compromise among those who are willing to tolerate each other and to defeat enough of the terrorists to give the process some chance of success.
Tom G. Palmer is a senior fellow of the Cato Institute and a founder of the Lamp of Liberty, an Arabic-language libertarian website.
No, no, go
Charles V. Peña
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
No.
2. Have you changed your position?
No.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
Exit promptly; no later than the end of the year.
Charles V. Peña is a senior fellow at the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy and the author of Winning the Un-War: A New Strategy for the War on Terrorism.
Maintain a sustainable troop level
Jonathan Rauch
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
On the fence. Leaned in favor but uneasily.
2. Have you changed your position?
Retrospectively, the invasion was a mistake. If I knew then what I know now, I'd have opposed it. But then, if he knew then what we know now, Bush would not have proposed it.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
I'm with Nick Gillespie. Ebbing public support makes the operation unsustainable at current troop levels; pulling out entirely could cause a (heightened) civil war. Little choice but to reduce forces in a phased withdrawal. I think something like 40,000 or 50,000 troops could be sustained indefinitely (at least if there's apparent political progress in Iraq), which buys some time.
Jonathan Rauch is a senior writer for National Journal and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution.
Win
Glenn Reynolds
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
Yes.
2. Have you changed your position?
No. Sanctions were failing and Saddam was a threat, making any other action in the region impossible.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
Win.
Glenn Reynolds runs the blog Instapundit and is the author of An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths
Fascists and fascism
Louis Rossetto
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
Yes, both the one that didn't happen in 1991 and the one that did in 2003. But Iraq is not the war, it is a battle. The war is The Long War against Islamic fascism.
2. Have you changed your position?
If anything, I believe even more strongly in actively combating Islamic fascism throughout the Global Village. Everyday is Groundhog Day for the anti-war movement, which is stuck re-protesting Vietnam — while we are confronted by a uniquely 21st century challenge: a networked fascist movement of super-empowered individuals trying to undo 50K years of social evolution. Waiting to get hit by an NBC weapon is not an option. Dhimmitude for me or my children is not peace. Righteous forward defense is a necessity.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
The US should persevere militarily until we defeat the fascists in Iraq, as we did in Afghanistan, as we must everywhere. The US's biggest failure has not been on the battlefield — where we are relentlessly reducing our enemies — but in waging media war against the Islamists and their fellow travelers on the Left, and in rallying the American people, who are confused, and perhaps angered, that once again we are being called upon to save the world.
Louis Rossetto is the founder of Wired magazine
Three-state solution
Jacob Sullum
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
No.
2. Have you changed your position?
No.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
Get out as quickly as possible without leaving behind utter chaos. The best hope for stability may be to let Iraq split into three countries, or three autonomous sections with a weak central government.
Jacob Sullum is a senior editor of Reason and a syndicated columnist.
Retire the Rusmfeld-Cheney gang
Jon Basil Utley
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
No, I strongly opposed it. My column "Seven (revised Eight) Lies about Iraq" was a key piece for four years.
2. Have you changed your position?
I did not change. Everything happened as we feared, with all options now being bad.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
Retire the Rusmfeld-Cheney Gang and their staffs; those who were wrong mainly now want to justify past mistakes. Use knowledgeable State and Defense Middle East experts to implement a new policy. Work with Europeans for a common front and policy. Renounce permanent military bases in Iraq. Demand dismantlement of settlements on the West Bank and work with peace parties in Israel for an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. This would regain for America our lost legitimacy.
Jon Basil Utley, a longtime commentator at Voice of America who writes regularly about foreign policy, is associate publisher of The American Conservative.
A little smugger
Jesse Walker
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
No.
2. Have you changed your position?
No, but I've probably gotten a little smugger about it.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
Get out in the least damaging manner possible. That will probably entail splitting the country in three.
Managing Editor Jesse Walker is the author of Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America (NYU Press).
Don't put me in charge
Matt Welch
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
No. Nor did I oppose it.
2. Have you changed your position?
Slightly. What kept me from opposing the war outright was:
1) I thought it very likely the Saddam Hussein regime had WMDs, and that the West would never have a mechanism for real weapons inspections without the credible threat of military intervention;
2) I thought there was far more international/legal justification for bombing Iraq than there ever was for bombing Kosovo (an action which, at the time, I supported);
3) Saddam's totalitarian reign was one whose end I would not weep for.
In short, I supported the bluff (though not, of course, the exact way it was made), and then hoped we wouldn't call it. Which isn't very intellectually defensible, but there you go.
What has changed about my position (as opposed to the changes in presumed facts) is that I'm even more worried than I was in spring 2003 (which was a lot) that cranky interventionism (or Jacksonian Wilsonianism, as I don't like to call it), is a terrible approach to foreign policy, because it extends our resources, enlarges the target on our back, feeds into the anti-American pathology that comes when we and only we flex the only Power that matters, and leads to the corruption that inevitably accompanies an expansion of power. Which is to say, the stuff I thought might go bad has gone far worse than I feared.
All that said, I have reserved space in my brain for the possibility that in the long view, this will have turned out to be a daring and revolutionarily pro-demcratic (if hugely flawed) act.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
I have no earthly idea. Maybe the most sensible thing to do is the most radical — separate the warring parties both physically and geographically. That is to say, stop trying to prop up the arguably untenable fiction that a multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian, post-colonial, mid-FUBAR country can become the 21st century Switzerland, and instead hasten the business of dividing the pie up into three (or whatever) countries. This would probably set a terrible precedent, but it's hard to see how it can be much worse than the one we've established now.
Matt Welch, a former assistant editor of Reason, is assistant editorial page editor at the Los Angeles Times, and propietor of mattwelch.com.
Non-invasive individuals
Robert Anton Wilson
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
No. I loathe invasions and occupations and all violence against non-invasive individuals.
2. Have you changed your position?
Yes. I oppose the invasion even more vehemently, since Bush has used it as an excuse to destroy the last few tattered remnants of the Bill of Rights.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
Stop killing people, bring the troops home, and rebuild Katrina damage. (But they never listen to me.)
Robert Anton Wilson is the coauthor of Illuminatus!. His latest book is Email To the Universe.
Buttress, counterbalance, prevent
Michael Young
1. Did you support the invasion of Iraq?
Yes, I did. Saddam's fall was too appealing a prospect not to.
2. Have you changed your position?
No. I regret that the U.S. mismanaged the aftermath, breaking the momentum to turn Iraq into a stable, acceptably pluralist system. This will have negative repercussions for democracy in the region. But I find that an American withdrawal today would be disastrous for the Iraqis.
3. What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?
It should maintain its military presence, even if that means modifying it in such a way as to avoid the semblance of military occupation. It should plan to stick around for the long term, regardless of domestic pressures. And it should oversee a genuine, consensual process of national dialogue and stabilization in Iraq, not a self-defeating handing over of power to security forces that are, in reality, cover for sectarian militias. This continued American presence is essential—to buttress democratic forces elsewhere in the region, to counterbalance Iran's growing power, and to prevent the outbeak of civil war in Iraq.
Reason contributing editor Michael Young edits the opinion page of the Beirut Daily Star
The post Iraq Progress Report appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Can government be improved?" asks the subtitle of this book. "Yes," say the 14 authors, if the government would only implement the standard reform from the public-administration literature: hire "the best and the brightest" and give them the knowledge and authority to do their jobs. Hence, Deregulating the Public Service is about removing restrictions on public servants' authority that presumably prevent them from doing a better job.
As with Al Gore's National Performance Review, the unacknowledged perspective of this book is that of a government manager. Most men and women who serve in public-service positions have a focused perspective on the mission of their agency, are genuinely committed to that mission, and are personally honest and industrious. This outlook leads most government managers and public-administration scholars to conclude that government performance could best be improved by reducing the restrictions on government managers.
Maybe so, but analysts should reflect more seriously on the reasons why most proposals to reduce such regulations are rejected and why the scope and detail of these regulations continue to increase. The beginning of wisdom on these issues is to recognize that most regulations, like most other conditions perceived to be wasteful, are there because someone in authority wants them.
Legislators and elected executives monitor agencies by several criteria, with preferences not just for an agency's primary output but also for how that output is produced. Regulations are the basic means by which politicians implement their various preferences. Government officials, for example, want to distribute employment, contracts, and grants by area, size of business, race, or some other politically meaningful criterion. Personnel rules reflect a preference to avoid the appearance of favoritism, ethics rules to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest, transparency rules to avoid the appearance of ex parte deals. While many regulations seem inefficient to government managers (and others) who are most concerned about the primary output of an agency, they may not be wasteful in terms of a broader set of political preferences.
The best way to make a case against such stifling regulations, then, is to provide politicians and the public with information about regulatory costs in terms of increased spending or lower output. Unfortunately, this book, like all too much of the public-administration literature, provides little significant analysis or evidence on that key issue.
Paul Volcker and William Winter, for example, call for "nurturing the pride and competence of men and women willing to devote themselves to careers in public service" by higher pay, fewer political appointments, and less regulation. Gerald Garvey and John DiIulio contribute a thoughtful article on the sources of public-service regulation without making an adequate case that such regulation has been excessive. James Q. Wilson criticizes both the Reinventing Government and the National Performance Review programs for not providing a theory about what government should do and for failing to address the incentives of government managers.
John Burke concludes that government performance would improve if we all trusted government more, a thesis that seems to have gotten the equation precisely backward. Constance Horner and Steven Kelman suggest strategies for reducing personnel and procurement regulation. Richard Nathan makes a case for a strong executive leadership, and Neal Peirce documents the effects of strong leadership in Florida and Philadelphia. Mark Moore and Mark Alan Hughes, respectively, discuss the regulation of police and mass transit.
Melvin Dubnick contributes a thoughtful article on the three major challenges to the classical bureaucratic paradigm: the minimalists (Niskanen et al.), the reinventors (Osborne and Gore), and the deregulators (the authors in this collection). Dubnick concludes that the minimalists have the most sophisticated theory, the reinventors the most popular appeal, and the deregulators the most practical suggestions. Among them, Donald Kettl wins the prize for the most obtuse conclusion: "Reenergizing politics so that it drives the interdependent networks toward a new definition of the public interest is the ultimate key to relegitimizing government."
As the above summary suggests, this is not a very interesting or coherent collection. That is too bad, because several important patterns in public service need to be properly explained. Inefficiency in government is rather like bad weather; everyone talks about it, but no one does anything about it. Almost every federal administration has sponsored an efficiency commission, announced its findings with great fanfare, and then quietly walked away from most of the recommendations.
The Clinton administration has dutifully completed the first two stages of this process, but what will happen next remains unclear. It may be telling, however, that soon after the publication of the National Performance Review, the official responsible for monitoring its enactment was reassigned. The vacancy has not yet been filled. Clinton seems to have decided that he has already made his mark on deficit reduction and efficiency in government.
My vision of purgatory is being forced to read the whole corpus of public-administration literature. Unless you face this same grim prospect and want to get ahead on such a joyless chore, there is little reason to read this book.
William A. Niskanen is chairman of the Cato Institute.
The post Deregulatory Drivel appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>James Q. Wilson describes his book on bureaucracy as "primarily descriptive: it is an effort to depict the essential features of bureaucratic life in the government agencies of the United States." A distinguished political scientist, Wilson seems to have read every study of the performance of individual bureaus. The detail is fascinating. A reader learns that the state prison system in Texas was once very good, that the Tennessee Valley Authority has had a dismal environmental record, that the FBI is a reluctant participant in the drug war, that the behavior of the FTC has depended a great deal on the person selected as chairman, and much more. This material is very well written, and the many referenced case studies are proper grist for the academic mill called public administration.
Wilson's objectives, however, are more ambitious than those of a journalist. The book's subtitle is "What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It." Wilson addresses the "Why?" question inductively—in his phrase, "from the bottom up"—by trying to form the building blocks of a theory of bureaucratic behavior from the incentives and constraints faced in specific agencies. His primary building blocks are two-by-two typologies describing the outside interests faced by the bureau and the ability of these interests to monitor the bureau. These typologies and Wilson's other building blocks are useful in explaining differences in behavior among bureaus, but only if it is obvious ex ante that a given bureau is in a particular category.
On several issues, Wilson has drawn the wrong inferences. From the observation that the behavior of bureaucrats does not appear to depend much on their political beliefs, Wilson concludes that beliefs do not matter. But bureaucrats are both self-selected and survivors, not a random sample of those with a given political ideology; there is still a strong case for each new administration to screen senior appointees for their beliefs. Wilson attributes the inefficiency of American bureaus to the separation of powers in our political system without any evidence that foreign bureaus reporting to parliamentary or authoritarian governments are any more efficient.
The main problem with Wilson's approach, however, is that it has not yet been subjected to Occam's razor: He offers almost as many explanations as facts. Moreover, this approach does not provide much insight into why governments choose bureaus (rather than contractors) to supply services or how to improve the performance of bureaus.
Wilson is generally skeptical of "economic" theories of bureaucratic behavior, an attitude expressed in a peculiar comment that bureaucrats may have more complex preferences than businessmen. In several asides, he criticizes my own early writing on this subject. My sense is that Wilson has missed the point. Conventional economics attempts to explain the behavior of private markets, not firms. A great deal of firm-specific information is necessary to explain the behavior of particular firms; that is one reason why forecasting stock prices is so difficult. Similarly, the several economic theories of bureaucratic behavior are attempts to explain the unusual "market" relation between governments and bureaus, not the behavior of particular bureaus.
Wilson is correct that a substantial amount of bureau-specific information is necessary to explain the performance of specific bureaus, and this book provides a very valuable guide to the type of information that we should seek for this purpose. Wilson's book merits attention as a complement to, not as a substitute for, the continued development and testing of a "top-down" theory of bureaucracy based on the unique characteristics of bureaus and their government customers.
William A. Niskanen is chairman of the Cato Institute.
The post Gettting Down to Details appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Alan Blinder's lively polemic makes the case for economic policies based on a "profound respect for the virtues of free markets with profound concern for those the market leaves behind." He argues, I believe correctly, that many economic policies could be substantially improved before addressing the more difficult issues where there is some trade-off between free markets and measures to help the poor and disabled.
The strongest sections of Hard Heads, Soft Hearts, and maybe the most surprising to a lay audience, bear on issues on which there is broad agreement among economists—the inadvisability of such policies as wage-price controls, minimum wages, price and entry regulations, and rent control, for example. In addition to discussing these, Blinder summarizes the conventional arguments for free trade and effectively responds to the arguments for protection in the name of national security, infant industries, unemployment, the Japan issue, and the new arguments for "strategic" trade policy.
A fine chapter on environmental policy makes the case for substituting marketable permits for the current web of command-and-control regulations. A marketable permit is a right to emit a specific amount of a specific pollutant in a given area and period. The sum of these permits would be limited to that necessary to achieve the ambient environmental quality desired in each area. The opportunity to buy and sell these permits would allow each plant to choose its level of pollution and the most efficient means to achieve this level. Changing to such a system would permit both lower costs and a cleaner environment.
In a clever development of Murphy's Law, Blinder recognizes, however, that "economists have the least influence on policy where they know the most and are most agreed; they have the most influence on policy where they know the least and disagree most vehemently." And his explanations of this perverse condition are on the right track.
Politicians often reject the near-unanimous advice of economists on these issues, because they are more responsive to concentrated benefits than to diffused costs. Politicians are more enamored of the extreme positions within economics, because they seem to offer a "free lunch": for example, the promise of simplistic Keynesianism that an increase in government spending could have a "multiplier" effect on national output; Art Laffer's conjecture that a general reduction in tax rates might increase total tax revenues; the rational-expectations argument that inflation can be reduced without a reduction in employment and output; and so forth.
Blinder recognizes that this version of Murphy's Law can be broken, citing as examples the loosening of price and entry regulations governing communications, commercial transportation, and banking beginning in the late 1970s, and the Tax Reform Act of 1986. He also has some useful suggestions for making it safe for politicians to support good economic policy. His general proposal is to package policy proposals—in some cases to compensate concentrated losers, in other cases to force special interests to compete against each other.
A note about the 1986 tax act: While most economists, including Blinder, consider it an improvement over the prior tax code, I do not share this enthusiasm. Much of the reduction in individual tax rates was financed by increasing the effective tax rates on new corporate investment. Blinder's evaluation of this act is not very hard-headed, and he does not understand the consequences of this change on the distribution of wealth in the United States. The business provisions of the 1981 tax legislation in effect redistributed wealth from the owners of the existing capital stock to American labor, yet these provisions were generally opposed by liberals. The 1986 business provisions had the opposite distributional effect but were broadly supported by liberals. Thus, in this instance, Blinder and his liberal economist colleagues are neither hard-headed nor soft-hearted.
The weakest chapters of Blinder's book bear on macroeconomic policies, the issues on which there is also the least consensus among economists. Blinder states that his book ignores most issues for which there is a trade-off among desirable conditions. But he then plunges into a confused argument that American economic policy exaggerates the perils of inflation and underestimates the virtues of low unemployment. The costs of a stable positive inflation rate are probably quite low, but most economists believe that there is no long-run trade-off between inflation and unemployment. In contrast, Blinder appears to believe that we could achieve a higher long-run level of output and employment by measures that would increase the inflation rate.
Blinder regards himself as a Keynesian, and he is predictably caustic about monetarism, "rational expectations," and supply-side economics. However, his own concept of Keynesian economics is quite strange. He describes the characteristic Keynesian prescription for unemployment as "speed up growth in the money supply to push interest rates down and spur aggregate demand." This seems more like the views of some monetarists who argue that a change in money growth has significant temporary real effects, whether or not they are anticipated.
Discretionary monetary policy may be more effective, and more feasible, than discretionary tax and spending (fiscal) policies, but it seems odd to describe this prescription as Keynesian, a position that is usually associated with the use of discretionary fiscal policy to stabilize total demand. Moreover, Blinder's characterizations of the competing macroeconomic perspectives are artificial. Monetarists are described as advocating constant money growth without regard to changes in velocity. Rational expectations is described as an elegant theory without empirical content. Blinder dismisses supply-side economics without acknowledging its important contribution to understanding the effects of the budget and the tax code's details.
Armed with 20-20 hindsight, Blinder is contemptuous of the Reagan fiscal policy, arguing that "the colossal budget and trade deficits…were the predictable consequences of that change in policy." Maybe so, but no one predicted these effects in 1981. Blinder attributes the Reagan fiscal policy to supply-sider Art Laffer's "flight of fancy," but no administration budget projection or economist ever claimed that the general tax acts approved in 1981 would increase revenue. As with any administration, the Reagan administration was subject to some illusions, experienced both good and bad luck, and made some mistakes.
Blinder claims that his views are opinionated but not partisan. As a senior advisor to the Reagan administration, however, I cannot accept his characterization of Reaganomics—"the worst of both worlds: a soft head and a hard heart"—as anything but partisan.
Blinder is smart, witty, a good writer, an effective polemicist, a principled Democrat, and a fine economist. This book should convince anyone that the next Democratic administration should appoint Blinder as a senior adviser—for microeconomics.
William A. Niskanen, the author of Reaganomics: An Insider's Account of the Policies and the People (Oxford University Press), served on the Council of Economic Advisers from 1981 to 1985.
The post Senior Advisor but Hold the Macro appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>…as the decade in which we all grew older. This is about the only memory we will all share; the rest will depend on who watched what on video. Since the arts and political discourse, not to mention the educational system, are reduced by and large to entertainment, aimed chiefly to make people feel good, we have regressed toward the Middle Ages—that is, back to a radical division between a small educated class obsessed with ideology and a huge majority who are not only ignorant but have such a tenuous grip on reality that they believe the stars foretell their day and are bewitched by actresses who lecture about their experiences as prostitutes in ancient Egypt. All of which is bad news for shared memories of history. Perhaps the collapse of share prices and the promised economic downturn will be remembered as the beginning of a return to civilization. Less busy shopping, people may find time to think, read, locate America on the map, study history—amusements that cost very little.
In the meantime, some will remember the '80s for clean living inspired by AIDS; for Chernobyl, which demonstrated that it doesn't matter who drops the Bomb on whom, the wind will take it around to everybody; and for the Reagan-Gorbachev treaty, influenced by the growing realization that air currents are the ultimate deterrents.
Stephen Vizinczey is the author of In Praise of Older Women and Truth and Lies in Literature. A chapter from his novel An Innocent Millionaire appeared in the May 1987 REASON.
…for the paradoxical combination of the collapse of the socialist idea throughout the communist and Third worlds and even among Western intellectuals and the discrediting of free-market ideals in the West. In the '80s, the true historical function of the Chinese Marxist revolution became clear—destruction of the millennia-old feudal impediments to capitalist development. The decision in the Soviet Union genuinely to compete economically with the West and with the surging capitalist economies of the Far East forced radical economic liberalization and rehabilitation of the previously forgotten Russian economist Adamsky Smithovich. (Twenty years later, the Lenin Peace Prize was awarded posthumously to the great Russian atheist, materialist, and antifascist Ayn Rand.) And the last "Marxist" intellectual who maintained that Marx favored either a centrally planned economy or a forced egalitarianism was expelled from the American Society of Socialists.
In the '80s, due to the convincing rhetoric of Ronald Reagan, almost all Americans came to understand that free enterprise meant massive federal debt, payrolls, and taxes; social and economic stagnation; and the triumph of the aristocracy of pull. Believing in neither the old socialism nor the new free enterprise, the electorate turned increasingly to prayer—and overwhelmingly elected the ticket of Jackson and Robertson.
Eric Mack teaches philosophy at Tulane University.
…for the near-complete breakdown of civility and the libertarian impulse within the conservative movement. What had once been a genteel and thoughtful amalgam of traditionalist and libertarian elements became—in the hands of the manipulators surrounding the president and in the rhetoric and pamphleteering of the operators who took for granted their benediction from what they imagine is their God—a bitter and vicious thing. Conservatism, in power in the White House and at many of the significant agencies, demonstrated a sanctimoniousness and self-satisfied arrogance that resembled the behavior of liberalism rampant in earlier years.
Libertarianism demonstrated that as a political force it is to all extents meaningless except when somebody can bankroll a presidential or other race: such was the case in 1980. By 1984 the Libertarian Party ticket made about as much headway as the Vegetarian. As a confluence of ideas, libertarianism showed some energy in the '80s, though the American tendency to ride with the red-hot conservatives or the retrograde liberals or the primitive populists showed how insubstantially had libertarianism dented the public consciousness.
Ollie North and Eddie Murphy became '80s heroes, which just about says it all.
Contributing Editor David Brudnoy is a radio talk show host and film critic in Boston.
Before we had a chance to breathe a collective sigh of relief after a decade of polyester, discos, and unabashed promiscuity, the '80s lifestyle was upon us. The first hint of our future arrived in the Preppie Handbook—the hottest item to hit college campuses since marijuana. The book espoused a preference for pearls (real ones, of course) over plastic baubles, cotton (read pricey) over nylon, leather furniture over crushed velvet. Fully loaded Buicks gave way to back-to-basics Mercedes and BMWs. "They cost a little more, but it's the quality that counts." Yeah, right.
The tacky 70s gave birth to the beautiful '80s and, in turn, to a demand for high-quality goods—preferably the kind that appreciate in value. Framed posters of wildlife flooded thrift stores and yard sales, while the desire for high art you could cart home in the back of the Volvo helped the new art superstars flourish. To create the appropriate surroundings for our newly found taste, a new breed of architecture superstars designed everything right down to the teapot on our commercial ranges. Bye, bye, Lady Kenmore.
The '80s will certainly be remembered for this rebirth of materialism, and we will remember just how much it cost. But if you ever have doubts about whether it was all worth it, just pull out a snapshot of yourself from 1975 and remind yourself of the words of the immortal Billy (Nando's Place) Crystal: "It's better to look good than to feel good."
Laura Main is REASON's art director.
…for sense and nonsense. Nearly the whole world grew to recognize that markets foster prosperity. Pockets of political or tyrannical resistance were circumscribed. Tax rates mostly fell. Yet in the same decade, the welfare state entrenched itself where enterprise has brought wealth. Amassed public debt acted as somewhat of a check on new social transfers but didn't threaten the core middle-class entitlements that weight down the West. Only economic calamity looms as a caller of that intergenerational loan, and thanks to wonders of trade and commerce that largely escaped establishment eyes, such a calamity may not be just around the corner.
Arms were ever more a preoccupation of the nation-states, although here again the fiscal cinch was felt. A dissolving of post–World War II arrangements seemed finally in order, but the question of will to contest Soviet Leninism was unresolved throughout much of the free world. Here at home, technology and expanded means made life inexorably better for most, though it became gruesomely worse for individuals (and their offspring) who had made unfortunate choices about personal conduct and family responsibilities. The decade leaves libertarians with a particular challenge to work with cultural conservatives to repair that rending of our society's fabric.
Tim W. Ferguson is editorial features editor for the Wall Street Journal.
…for the creation of the U.S. troy ounce gold bullion coin and the silver ounce coin. First, in the greatest sense of "remembered," the bullion coins will be unearthed by archaeologists thousands of years from now, and they will figure out what "MCMLXXXVI" means.
Second, politicized paper money systems are inherently unstable, and we have seen recently that floating international exchange rates disrupt both capital and goods markets, so there is a good chance a new world monetary system will evolve, based on a tangible monetary base. If this occurs, of course, the troy ounce gold bullion coins are most likely, in my opinion, to form the new monetary base—and the "units of account" will be troy ounces of gold. So the '80s will be remembered in the next century and thereafter as the beginning of the new international gold standard monetary system, transcending government-issued paper units.
Contributing Editor Joe Cobb is senior economist for the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress.
We don't know yet. When I came to the United States in the fall of 1962 "the '50s" were still heavily in progress. "The '60s" began, I would say, in 1965. "The '70s" began (let's say) with the fall of Saigon. In retrospect the '70s were a decade of increasing conservatism (election of Mrs. Thatcher and Ronald Reagan). I guess "the '80s" began in 1985, say with Reagan's second term. So far the decade has been characterized by a declining dollar and a renewed detente. Both, I suspect, will prove to be unreliable indicators. The events that in retrospect will define "the '80s" have not yet occurred and, on January 21, 1988, are not foreseeable. No doubt they will surprise us all.
Contributing Editor Tom Bethell is a media fellow at the Hoover Institution.
…for condoms…Just Say No…answering machines…aerobics, health clubs, triathalons, hard bodies, sweat…Oliver North…Safe Sex…yuppies…Madonna and Sean Penn…the Challenger exploding against a very blue sky…Tammy Bakker's eyelashes.…Mary Beth Whitehead, test tube babies, women giving birth to their own grandchildren…John Lennon's death…the first black Miss America and the first to quit…frozen yogurt…"getting the government off our backs"…cheap airline tickets…Steven Spielberg and George Lucas…Charles and Diana, Fergie and Andrew…Michael Jackson's Thriller…AIDS…"I Want Your Sex"…Cuisinarts, microwaves…Ivan Boesky…nouvelle food, Thai food, diner food, sushi, blackened everything…crack…VCRs, CDs, PCs…homosexuals, intravenous drug users, Haitians…Nutrasweet…Band Aid, Live Aid, USA for Africa…Libya, Grenada, Chernobyl…MTV…Talking Heads, Springsteen, U-2, rap…Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Cory Aquino…Esprit…the crash of '87…Gary Hart, Donna Rice…"The Cosby Show," "Family Ties," "Miami Vice," "Dynasty"…Rock Hudson…Men Who Won't Eat Quiche and the Women Who Love Them.
Assistant Managing Editor Lucy Braun likes lists.
…for being a time of private versus public interest for most Americans—a time of Reaganism, when rollbacks of programs such as AFDC, student loans, and funding for the handicapped coexisted with rollbacks of tax rates for corporations and wealthy individuals. It spawned yuppies, who, though few in number, were as important symbols of the times as hippies were of theirs.
College students listed making a lot of money as their primary goal. The energy for social change came not from the left but from the right. Yet even with an enormously popular president who was more hospitable than any recent president to the right wing's fundamentalist agenda, and with the power of televangelism, the progressive attitudinal changes of the '60s and early '70s were too entrenched to tolerate major changes in the laws affecting matters ranging from school prayer and gay rights to censorship and abortion. Moreover, due to the belated acknowledgment by the administration of the serious implications of AIDS, condoms finally came out of the closet.
As a sociopolitical decade, the '80s have ended. A reemphasis on public concerns and a more progressive political agenda will almost certainly follow.
Christie Hefner is president of Playboy Enterprises. An interview with her appeared in REASON's June 1986 issue.
…for dramatic reductions in the top marginal tax rates on personal income, not just in the United States but around the world. Ten years ago who would have dreamed that by 1988 the top rate here would have fallen from 70 to 28 percent? In 1971 I attended a conference at Columbia University that featured Milton Friedman. He was asked which government interventions he would like to see eliminated or reformed first. One was the income tax. Friedman said he would drop tax rates and make sure that the highest rate was no more than double the lowest. His wish came true: 28 is less than twice 15.
These low tax rates have a good shot at being permanent. Economists are concluding—and governments are slowly learning—that high rates reduce the tax base so much that they lead to lower revenues. And academic economists who write on optimal taxation, even those with a strong egalitarian bent, are concluding that the top rate should be somewhere between 20 and 40 percent.
Economics columnist David R. Henderson is a regular contributor to Fortune.
…for failure. The '80s were a typical Republican decade—benign, comfortable, and nonradical. They were pleasant years for most of us, with a popular two-term president who…er, presided over relative peace and prosperity, kept the social engineers at bay, and avoided wrenching social upheavals. For those reasons, the '80s seem misleadingly "good."
But Reagan's '80s, like Eisenhower's very similar '50s, will be seen in retrospect as a time of lost opportunity. Early in Reagan's first term, he might have repealed large portions of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society—as Margaret Thatcher rolled back socialism in Great Britain—but he didn't really try. (Similarly, Eisenhower might have been able to repeal the New Deal—but he didn't try either, leaving Social Security to fester through the decades.) Oh, Reagan said some fine things, and he managed to reduce our income taxes, but he could have done so much more had he dared.
America is a revolutionary country. In 1787, Thomas Jefferson, commenting on Shays' Rebellion, said: "God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.…[W]hat country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time that this people preserve the spirit of resistance?…The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
The '80s were ripe for a genuine restoration of individual liberty, but Reagan blew it. And I guess we blew it too.
Contributing Editor Warren Salomon is an attorney and tax specialist in Miami.
…for the personal computer revolution. From an installed base of 365,000 in 1979, the number of personal computers in the United States—in homes, in schools, and in the workplace—soared to 15 million in 1988. By 1990, that number is expected to grow to more than 26 million.
It was during the '80s that we started to become a computer-literate society and truly entered the Information Age. The implications extend far, from how we speak to what we teach our children. Back in '79, I don't think I ever had a casual conversation that contained the words modem or megabyte. But recently, in a long-distance phone call to an old friend, we spent a good 10 minutes going over the relative virtues of the Apple Macintosh and the IBM PC, as if we were discussing the latest car models.
The personal computer has made some of our lives easier, some harder, and others just more confused in adjusting to the new ways. It has transformed our society unlike any invention since the television. With television, we became a nation of vidiots. We are now, irrevocably, a nation of hackers.
Former Managing Editor Eric Marti, who computerized REASON, is a student at Stanford Business School.
…for the greatest mirage in libertarian/conservative political history. Never have so many right-thinking men and women been promised so much and received so little. President Ronald Reagan, whatever his good intentions, did not, in the end, rise much above rhetoric. The less-(government)-is-more crowd who helped put him in office got to see little in the way of genuine privatization, decreased federal spending, or meaningful reduction in government manipulation of the economy.
His tough-on-communism supporters, who had thrilled to the sound of his "Evil Empire" theme, were to witness, with few exceptions, a shameful substitution of empty words for action—from his feeble response to the downing of the KAL airliner; to a human rights policy so hypocritical it permitted a Ukrainian seaman named Medvid to lose his desperate bid for freedom and be delivered to almost certain death, allowed the State Department to condone the massacre of Tibetan demonstrators by Red Chinese troops, and made excuses for the man in charge of ravaging Afghanistan; to the ultimate obscenity of his lovefest with the current head of a totalitarian regime that has no modern rivals in systematized persecution of dissenters, institutionalized slave labor, mass murder, and world conquest.
Erika Holzer is a novelist and lawyer who lives in Bedford, New York.
…demographically, as a milestone for the so-called baby boomers: the first decade during which their own generation almost entirely constituted the work force, as that of their parents had completely retired from it by 1990.
…politically, as a time during which libertarian ideas could no longer be pooh-poohed away by the self-ordained intelligentsia: although often disguised as conservatism, individualism no longer garnered big laughs at cocktail parties.
…economically, as the salad days for small investors: the first time during which the proletariat was able to participate in the financial markets in a big way, thanks largely to computer technology.
…musically, as the era during which rock & roll was liberated from the numbing excesses of '70s pop and disco: New Wave minimalism returned drums, bass, and synthesizers to the background tracks—where they belong.
…personally, as the decade during which I became less melancholy about choosing the social sciences instead of a more lucrative major: perhaps something involving animal mutilation or generally accepted accounting principles.
Stephen G. Barone is a children's psychologist and free-lance writer.
On the geopolitical stage, the decade will be fondly remembered as the beginning of the end for totalitarian communism, an ugly political leftover from a century that began in a mindless orgy of bloodshed and ignorance. For the first time, in Afghanistan, an indigenous people was able to resist and defeat a Communist invasion. And, again for the first time, a nation began to dismantle its own Communist system as a failed experiment: the implications of China's turn away from Communism in all but name can hardly be overstated, as the billion-strong people begin to take their place with the Asian economic powerhouses of Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea.
Secondly, the '80s will be remembered for an explosion of scientific knowledge and technology such as the world has never before seen, led by computerization, biotechnology, and advances in medicine that could hardly be imagined a mere decade before. This trend, coupled with the turn toward capitalism and freedom in the Far East, could set the stage for a 21st century more enlightened and progressive than any the human species has ever experienced.
Contributing Editor Timothy Condon is a tax attorney.
…as a time of growing pessimism and uncertainty. The election of Ronald Reagan held out the great promise of putting the American dream back on track after our traumatic defeat in Vietnam. But the left will not let America forget its defeat. We must never be permitted to believe that our effort to save South Vietnam from communism was in any way justified.
In addition, the AIDS plague, growing illiteracy, disintegrating education, huge deficits, high consumer debt, our problems in Central America, our military disaster in Beirut, terrorism, hostage taking, space accidents, the farm depression, spy scandals, and the drug problem have just about convinced Americans that they are no longer the architects of their own future.
If it hadn't been for breathtaking advances in technology produced by capitalism, by entrepreneurs, and by the spirit of innovation, there would have been nothing visible to offset the climate of negativism. But glittering shopping malls, high-tech cars, jet travel, and Disney World cannot make up for spiritual misery.
The '80s will also be remembered for the revival of fundamentalist religious faith, a return to biblical principles by many Americans, the growth of home schooling, and the emergence of a new Calvinist intelligentsia within the heterogeneous conservative mix. These trends promise to upset many applecarts and make the '90s intellectually exciting.
Contributing Editor Samuel L. Blumenfeld is author of The New Illiterates.
…for the growth and growing success of free-market institutions the world over. Hayek's Road to Serfdom (1944) stoked the fire and his Intellectuals and Socialism (1949) set the strategic agenda. Interalia, he enthused three people: Leonard Read, Antony Fisher, and F.A. "Baldy" Harper. Read started the Foundation for Economic Education (1946), Fisher the Institute of Economic Affairs (1957), and Harper the Institute for Humane Studies (1961). All three shared a deep concern for freedom; all took different tacks; all are heroes.
Read's FEE was the layman's high school for liberty. Fisher's IEA concentrated on Hayek's nonpejorative "secondhand dealers in ideas," such as teachers and journalists. And Harper's IHS set out to preserve and later expand the remnant of market scholars.
By the end of the '70s the success of IEA had led Fisher to become a full-time entrepreneur of pro-market think tanks. He today lists over 40 institutes in over 20 countries that he has helped through the Atlas Economic Research Foundation.
Three main trends stand out in the '80s. First is a solid growth in those institutes already in existence. Second is a surge of new institutes at the national level in the United States and abroad. And third is a still-developing wave of regional or state-wide institutes.
Suddenly in the '80s it's fashionable and feasible to promote free markets.
John Blundell is executive vice president of the Institute for Humane Studies.
If decades were neighborhoods, the '80s would be a place you wouldn't want your daughter to live, a low, mean cross between Disneyland and Port Said. It was a time of debt, deficits, and deceit—deceit of self and deceit of others. Politically, it was the decade of Ronald Reagan, Gary Hart, and the Continuing Resolution; religiously, the decade of Jim and Tammy Bakker; culturally, the decade of Steven Spielberg. Altogether, it was a decade of irresponsibility, amnesiac about the past and uncaring about the future.
The '80s offered the illusion of protracted adolescence for the predominant baby boom generation. As a group we flat-out refused to grow up. Everyone watched Spielberg movies about childish heroes in a childish world. We did not want to be reminded of adulthood by adult themes, so even the movies that came closest to speaking to those themes, like Breaking Away or Karate Kid, had to be disguised as stories about teenagers. Little wonder we refused to pay our bills. Bills and credit ratings are adult concerns.
The good news about the '80s is that the decade ended in 1987. This was merciful—the '20s dragged on until 1929.
The stock market crashed. The arms-for-hostages scandal exposed Reagan as an amiable old fool. Jim and Tammy were turned out of their PTL playland. Gary Hart's adolescent ideas, not to mention his lies and infidelities, were no longer a turn-on. Suddenly, in 1987, movies were made about adults. Fatal Attraction and Moonstruck told us that we were growing up, Broadcast News that we were waking once again to ideas.
Yet the '80s, like the Roaring '20s, will live better in recollection than they did in life, and they will seem more prosperous. A decade of false prosperity and false youth will seem high-spirited as we look back from the poorhouse. Casey Stengal gave us a phrase we remembered and repeated in the '80s: "It's not over till it's over." Now it's over.
Contributing Editor James Dale Davidson is chairman of the National Taxpayers Union and coauthor of Blood in the Streets.
…for the most serious efforts in this century to reduce the role of the state. Some of these efforts are still nascent, such as in the Soviet Union. Some were partial but more dramatic, such as in China and New Zealand. Some were broader but with limited success, such as in Britain, France, and the United States. These developments reflect the combined effects of a change in the ideological bounds and the accumulating evidence that government direction of the economy reduces both individual liberty and economic growth.
All of these developments, however, are vulnerable. Although Marxism has lost broad appeal, it is still the official credo in many nations. Freedom will continue to be threatened internally by innocent people who promote government "solutions" to most any perceived problem and appeal to others motivated by envy. A demonstrated record of government failure, as in education, will be used as a rationale to increase state control. Some problems that are the result of government programs, such as the rapid increase in the price of medical services, will be used as the rationale for new programs.
The future, however, will be different because of the developments of the '80s. Political history, like biological evolution, is path dependent. The '80s may be only a temporary pause in the relative growth of the state, or this decade could be a turning point in the direction of increased freedom. As always, historical change is the result of human action, not of some inexorable process for either good or evil.
William Niskanen is chairman of the Cato Institute.
…for being better than the '70s—a lot better. Especially if you were a teenager in the '70s.
Assistant Editor Virginia I. Postrel doesn't consider herself a baby boomer.
In the '80s, AIDS provided the major ammunition for a smug religious counterrevolution, cutting a bloody swath through all civil liberties, not just sexual ones, as civil libertarians had to concentrate on a fight against calls for concentration camps. By vetoing bills to establish tax credits for AIDS research (as in 1987 in California), the right kept AIDS research firmly in the hands of government. Promising lines of research that would have saved tens of thousands of lives were delayed or squelched.
Citizens of the '80s were concerned only about money and threw their votes in with the religious right in the vain hope that their taxes would be lowered. As Sunday closing laws returned, as many counties banned liquor, and as local theater owners were arrested for reviving Carnal Knowledge, few saw that the cause was their failure to fight for civil liberties for "fags" and "druggies." Even most libertarians failed to speak out. Libertarian soft-pedaling of civil liberties allowed AIDS to help calcify political debate in the old liberal-conservative terms, thus helping finish the transition of the libertarian movement from obscurity to total eclipse.
Former REASON Spotlight columnist John Dentinger is a Los Angeles free-lance writer.
…for trade with Mars. The Reagan administration's strategy to increase the deficit to force down domestic spending had an unintended consequence. Congressmen, feeling the heat as the standard pork barrel projects got squeezed (or at least their expected rate of increase got squeezed), found a substitute. Highly publicized deficits in merchandise trade provided them a new growth industry in xenophobic pork. With fewer new federal dollars for hometown projects, congressmen learned to zap foreign competitors of hometown manufactured goods. The new pork barrel of the '80s has something for every district, from roses and sugar to textiles and computer chips. And with politicians all over the world looking to boost their case for hometown protectionism, the whole world taken together is running an amazing combined trade deficit in the '80s (some say around $100 billion a year). Either trade with Mars accounts for the difference or somebody has been cooking the books. So the '80s may be remembered for worldwide howling about worldwide trade deficits that together couldn't possibly be, but were anyway, and helped entrepreneurial politicians get reelected.
Greg Rehmke is the Reason Foundation's educational programs director.
…for the desperate entrenchment of those whose worldview was stamped by a New Deal media and whose testosterone level was verified in World War II, struggling against offspring who bought Playboy, smoked marijuana, broke the speed limit, opposed a war, abandoned slide rules, made heroes out of the rogue North and the rake Hart, and cheated on their taxes.
Young adults of the "Great" Depression are thoughtfully retiring or dying, though income taxes, an intrusive international reputation, bureaucracies, Social Security, and the debt they created and consigned to their children linger on, creating penury and contempt. Their experiment feeble and failing, they and their sycophants struggle to institutionalize their subliminal political/philosophical dictionary unto perpetuity in a vain but ineluctable grasp for historical immortality.
The decade saw real economic power fall into the bewildered hands of those inseminated by James Dean, carried by Bob Dylan, delivered by J.F.K., spanked by Ho Chi Minh, nursed by Sergeant Pepper, weaned by G. Gordon Liddy, and toilet-trained by Letterman and Spielberg. "In the Mood" was relegated to nostalgic camp and "Won't Get Fooled Again" elevated to classic status.
Former REASON Spotlight columnist Patrick Cox is a regular contributor to USA Today.
…for a resurgence of skepticism about what government can do.
…for the major contribution of the Reagan presidency—appointment to the federal bench of numerous judges who understand economics and the need to protect individual rights, including property rights.
…internationally, for inauguration of the Gorbachev era, involving potentially massive internal reforms and steps to improve Soviet-American relations. And for another memorable aspect of the '80s—the Soviets' being effectively held to a stalemate by the freedom fighters in Afghanistan.
…for yuppies and dinks (double-income, no kids) and the baby boom entrepreneur, who came of age and helped signal the trend toward opposition to government intervention in economic activity and personal conduct.
…for the Kasparov-Karpov matches, with the emergence of Gary Kasparov as the best-known chess champion since Bobby Fischer.
…for the emergence of "foodies" and the chef as superstar, accompanied by a renewed focus on quality, freshness, and originality and by an increased popularity of ethnic cuisine ranging from Cajun to Caribbean to "California."
…for many excellent wine vintages and high-quality wine making in France, California, Australia, and Italy—1982 may be remembered as the vintage of the century for Bordeaux, and the 1985 red Burgundies will be difficult to surpass in the rest of this century.
…finally, for the growing importance of the Pacific Rim and the city of Los Angeles as a financial and business center…and for the Reason Foundation's move to Los Angeles in 1986 and the resultant expansion in Los Angeles of free-market ideas.
Senior Editor Manuel S. Klausner, a Los Angeles attorney, was one of the partners who published REASON from 1971 to 1978.
Yes, what will they be remembered for? History has not been kind to Republican eras of prosperity. The Roaring '20s are still seen as little more than a prelude to the Depression—an age of flapper frivolities and fatuous presidents. The '50s are The Silent Decade, when we were all terrified into conformity by The Bomb and a somnambulant President Eisenhower.
Few remember the '20s and '50s as periods of astonishing economic progress, when America leapt ahead of the world in prosperity. Liberal historians prefer the grim heroics of the '30s, the outlandish excesses of the '60s, or—failing all else—the countercultural triumphs of the Watergate '70s. And so it may seem almost foreordained that the '80s will eventually be written off as just another Republican interlude when "greed" and "passivity" temporarily triumphed over "morality" and "social consciousness."
Yet history retains the capacity to surprise, and 1988 may become what historian Lewis Namier called 1848, the "Year of Revolutions" in Europe—"the turning point at which history didn't turn." I suspect the Republicans will win the presidency in 1988 and it will suddenly become clear to everyone that, rather than being a fluke or an interlude, the '80s actually marked the beginning of a long historical period in which Americans finally gave up the collectivist fantasies of the early 20th century and became a mature, responsible, permanently growing nation.
Contributing Editor William Tucker is writing a book on the family.
…for confirming the cynics, who despair of the intractability of the polity. But there are some nuances of difference.
At the level of national defense, the decade has seen nuclear deterrence take a great battering—first from the freeze movement, later from the arms control movement, which now includes such improbables as Ronald Reagan, George Shultz, and Paul Nitze. Maybe Reagan will be remembered as the hardliner-gone-soft who began by describing the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" and ended by saying they have changed. Carter began his presidency as a dove and, after Afghanistan, ended it a hawk. Reagan began as a hawk and, after meeting Gorbachev, is ending his term a dove. Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative was one of the interesting ideas of the '80s but seems likely to remain that—an idea being researched.
The decade began with great hope for progress in economic deregulation and translating the intellectual ascendancy of free-marketeers into greater economic freedom. It ends with some small progress—in taxation, transportation, oil. But the interventionists are ominously strong in their pressures to reregulate airlines and railroads and are using Black Monday and Ivan Boesky to justify newly intrusive controls of capital markets. And hysteria over the trade deficit continues to propel destructive protectionist moves in Congress, despite high employment.
The end of the '80s may see a long overdue recession or a revival of inflation to double digits. And since there is probably a one-in-four chance that the depression doomsters are right about dangerously excessive debt, there's a possibility the '80s will be remembered for laying the ground for a 1935–45–style period of grand interventionism, a new New Deal.
Contributing Editor Peter Samuel is a Washington-based journalist.
…as the decade that gave us Ronald Reagan, safe sex, freedom fighters, market meltdowns, shot shuttles, people power, antiapartheid activists, supply siders, and Classic Coke.
Also between now and 1991, it is possible that the New Wave will recede, the New Age will die of old age, and New Ideas will become a thing of the past. We can only hope.
Editorial intern James Taranto is too young to remember the '60s and considers himself fortunate.
…for a revival of democracy and capitalism, for privatization, deregulation, and reduced tax penalties for increasing output and income. It has been very much the era of Thatcher and Reagan, with flattering emulation worldwide. There were deep, radical reductions of marginal tax rates in Colombia, Bolivia, Jamaica, Mauritius, Botswana, Ciskei, Indonesia, Israel, Singapore, the Philippines, Turkey, New Zealand, China, and (for a few years) even India. All of these economies, like those of the United States and the United Kingdom, soon outperformed their neighbors. By 1988 there were also timid gestures toward marginal tax relief in Sweden, Norway, Australia, France, Canada, and Japan, soon to be followed by Greece, Austria, Ireland, and the Netherlands. Will any of this be remembered? Not by the academic elite, who never understood what was going on, but by taxpayers in the affected countries. A backlash is likely, since there are powerful financial and political interests in reregulation, in protection of sleepy managers from foreign rivalry or domestic takeovers, and in a tax and welfare system that punishes success and rewards failure.
Contributing Editor Alan Reynolds is the chief economist for Polyconomics Inc.
What will be remembered about the '80s depends upon who does the remembering. For lawyers like me who make a living defending media interest as well as others who cherish a free and independent press, the '80s will not be recalled with fondness.
Juries delivered verdicts against the media whenever they got a chance. The media lost 89 percent of libel cases that went to trial, the more prominent of which included a multimillion-dollar judgment by a Las Vegas jury for hometown entertainer Wayne Newton against NBC and a similar verdict by a Chicago jury for a major tobacco company against the local CBS affiliate.
Judges joined in. After displaying an open hostility to the media while on the U.S. Court of Appeals, Antonin Scalia was elevated to the Supreme Court, which this year reversed long-standing precedent and held that high school newspapers are not entitled to protection of the First Amendment against government censorship.
Politicians were no better. When Rupert Murdoch's Boston Herald offended Massachusetts Senators Kennedy and Kerry, they conspired behind closed doors with liberal and conservative legislators from both parties to pass, without debate, a bill that required Murdoch to sell the paper or lose his Boston television station.
Defense of the media has always had more than its share of summer soldiers and sunshine patriots. In the '80s the struggle continued without them.
Contributing Editor Michael McMenamin is a trial lawyer in Cleveland.
…as the epic when America overcame entropy and socialism succumbed to it. The United States used supply-side economics and high technology to launch a record economic boom despite a near depression among our trading partners in Europe and the Third World. While Europe followed big-government industrial policy for high technology and job preservation, it lost nearly 2 percent of its employment and fell ever farther behind in the key technologies of the information age. Shaking the tin cup of socialism at every global conclave, the Third World sounded its own death rattle. Meanwhile, U.S. and Asian capitalism converged in one thriving Pacific economy based on human liberty and creativity in the information age.
But who rescinded the Second Law? We did. The crowning symbol of this era of unleashed innovation and progress was the simultaneous invention of the desktop supercomputer and the high-temperature superconductor. Together with the rising yield of bioengineering, these breakthroughs promise at long last an eventual escape from dependence on raw materials and other territorial forms of wealth that suffer decay and exhaustion in a world of thermodynamic decline. The Second Law will fall before the capitalist law of reason: knowledge grows as it is used. Remember, you read it here first.
George Gilder is the author of Wealth and Poverty and, most recently, of Microcosm.
…for the failure of politics to solve human problems. President Jimmy Carter inaugurated the decade by demonstrating the ineffectiveness of the liberal welfare state; President Ronald Reagan concluded the decade with his conservative revolution in disarray.
…as the time when the public sector openly institutionalized envy and greed. Agricultural subsidies expanded five-fold as farmers shamelessly demanded more. Social Security became a sacred cow. And agencies like the Small Business Administration and Economic Development Administration, widely recognized as special interest groups, survived every attack.
…for the loss of communism's credibility. In Poland, a labor union and a church together challenged the state. China dismantled its farm collectives, the Soviet Union amended its laws to encourage foreign investment, and Vietnam loosened its rigid economic controls.
…for the atmosphere of hope abroad, as countries like the Philippines and Korea moved toward democracy and even the Soviet Union adopted policies of glasnost and perestroika. And for the feeling of despair at home, as such traditional values as honesty, monogamy, and charity declined, AIDS became an epidemic, the drug war was lost, and the secular world's answers became increasingly inadequate.
Contributing Editor Doug Bandow is a syndicated columnist and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.
Jeopardy contestants, Trivial Pursuit devotees, and the learned may remember Gary Hart, Ivan Boesky, and Raisa Gorbachev some years hence. But for the rest of us, alas, the '80s—the newsworthy stuff of the '80s—will reduce to a couple of well-worn epithets. Ah, yes, the '80s—the era of yuppies and Black Monday on the stock market. After all, the '20s conjure up images of flappers and the other big crash; the '30s notoriously bring to mind the Depression, Hitler, and a notion that the New Deal came along about that time; the '50s is all Mom and apple pie punctuated by the Beatniks. The '60s was a very busy decade, so we remember fully four things about it—the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam war, student political hullabaloo, and hippies. And the '70s—well now, the '70s were pretty unremarkable, unless we count Watergate, inflation, and Billy Carter.
If what I remember about those earlier eras is any guide to how most of us will remember the '80s, then yuppies and the stock market crash seem like good candidates. But if we move away from the Big Stuff of the nightly news and People magazine, the '80s will come into clearer focus. I will remember the '80s for the birth of my daughter and for all the little trials, tribulations, and personal encounters that are what life is really all about. I mean, consider, for example, my grandma, now 95. She remembers her neighbor, Peach Seeds, in more detail than she recalls the death of President McKinley. While our particulars will vary, I suspect that is the sort of thing most of us will remember about the '80s.
Book Review Editor Lynn Scarlett is also the Reason Foundations research director.
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]]>David Stockman's much-discussed book is a modern version of the David and Goliath story. As in the story passed to us in the Book of Samuel, David takes on Goliath by himself. In Stockman's version in The Triumph of Politics, however, Goliath wins the encounter and David is banished (forever?) from the royal court. The ancient story in which David wins has inspired generations of the faithful, even if it is not a guide for prudent conduct. The modern story in which Goliath wins is less inspirational but more instructive.
Stockman's portrait of David is not flattering but is not really very important. At each successive stage of his odyssey from future farmer to campus radical to divinity student to congressional aide to congressman to budget director to investment banker, he turned his back on the "rabbi" who had guided him through the prior stage. David ultimately repudiated everything that had been important to him—the Christianity of his parents, the Marxism of his college professors, Pat Moynihan's realism, John Anderson's independence, the visions of Jack Kemp and Phil Gramm, and the wisdom of Ronald Reagan. Like many bright, energetic people, he was impatient with and sometimes disrespectful of those who attained their position by other qualities, such as loyalty. He leaves the impression of a tattler, a snitch.
According to Stockman, David had only a naive grasp of both economics and politics. His economics ranged from confused to conventional. Early on, he was fascinated with the Laffer curve that was supposed to illustrate that increasing tax revenues could accompany declining tax rates. But then he came to believe that "a tax cut will increase revenues only if you start in a zero inflation world." This is merely confused. There was never any basis for believing that a general reduction in tax rates would increase total revenues, regardless of the inflation rate, and no administration economist or budget projection ever made that claim. In fact, however, the reduction in the highest income-tax rates and in the tax rate on capital gains appeared to increase revenues, again independent of the inflation rate.
David also grossly and consistently overestimated the short-term economic effects of the deficit. On this issue, his views, however wrong, were broadly shared. He first argued that the deficits would increase inflation. After inflation dropped sharply in early 1982, he shifted his argument to the effect on interest rates. After interest rates also dropped sharply in late 1982, he shifted his argument again. Adopting the strange reverse-Keynesian position of Wall Street, he then argued that the deficit would prevent a recovery. In the spring of 1983, after the recovery was under way, he argued that the deficit would abort the recovery. After the recovery proved to be unusually strong, David's arsenal of apocalyptic conjectures about the economic effects of the deficit were exhausted, and he went into internal hibernation until the administration was again willing to address the budget deficit after the 1984 election. There is ample reason to be concerned about the deficit, but the failure of the apocalypse to arrive on schedule undermined his credibility.
David's political vision was also clouded. He began work as the budget director with a belief that a small group of "anti-statist conservatives" could reverse the momentum of the welfare state. After recognizing that this was not possible, he concluded that it was wrong to try. Both of these judgments, I believe, are wrong. The Reagan administration achieved a substantial defense buildup, a reduction in tax rates, some deregulation, and a substantial reduction in inflation because there was a substantial consensus for each of these elements of its economic program. It was less clear whether there was any consensus for reducing domestic spending, because it had not been tried and Reagan had not tested the political response to such cuts in the 1980 campaign. Some cuts were achieved in 1981, but less than enough to offset the defense increase and the tax cut. The limits on the consensus for domestic budget cuts, however, would not have been recognized unless the administration had proposed more-substantial changes.
Now that Stockman is older and wiser and richer, he concludes that "there is no room [in this process] for scribblers, dreamers, ideologues, and passionate young men." What a sad comment. Some other David, however, will continue to be an important part of this process, by articulating some other vision, by pushing the system, by testing the limits on the consensus of Congress.
He also concludes that his own failure to slay Goliath by one blow "proved that the American electorate wants a moderate social democracy." There is no reason, however, why the "settled consensus of professional politicians" has any relation to the preferences of the electorate as long as a large part of government spending is financed by borrowing. Does anyone seriously contend that the electorate would support a 40 percent increase in personal and corporate taxes to pay for the current activities of the federal government?
Most other reviewers of Stockman's book have focused on the David story and rendered a negative verdict. That is understandable but unfortunate. Understandable because David's comments about most of the people with whom he worked for years seem like bad manners; understandable because the reviewers share some envy that Stockman received a $2.3 million advance for his book without so much as an outline. Unfortunate, because Stockman's portrait of Goliath is as unflattering as his portrait of David but much more important. It is awkward for the establishment media, which had cultivated Stockman as an internal critic of the administration, now to acknowledge that he has some very critical insights about the American political process.
Among those that he still seems to be sorting out are the following:
• The politics of campaigns, which avoids hard choices, undermines the potential to address hard choices after the elections.
• A large part of the welfare state was created under Republican presidents and is protected by Republicans in Congress.
• Majority rule can lead to outcomes that are wholly inconsistent.
• The process of correcting errors in the government is very slow and uncertain.
• A lot of people in the Reagan administration had no commitment to Reagan's policy agenda.
• Congress is an extraordinarily parochial body with a very short time horizon.
• A good many people in high government positions are not very swift.
• A large part of the federal budget involves transfers to people who are not poor.
There are not many people around Washington who share David's outrage about this process.
My major reservation about Stockman's portrait of Goliath is his conclusion that most people must really support Goliath after all. That Goliath survived David's slingshot, however, is not sufficient evidence of much public support. In politics as in war, one should be careful about attributing virtues to the victors. From my perspective, David's outrage was more attractive and more productive than his concluding rationalization.
William Niskanen, a former member of Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers, is now chairman of the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.
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]]>At the busiest intersection in the central city, where the traffic is too complex to manage by programmed signals, a traffic cop performs his duties. Most of the time, the traffic cop does his job so well that he is nearly invisible; drivers accept his necessary role, follow his signals, and are only vaguely aware of him as they pass. On occasion, some traffic cop will perform his duties with such style and grace that drivers notice and appreciate his skills. Some reporter may even take his picture and write an article about him and his family. His style, however, is ancillary to his duties; it is a nice personal touch, but not essential. On occasion, some traffic cop will not perform his duties very well. At such times, for a very short period, congestion will increase and there may be an accident. In a slightly longer period, traffic will flow around this intersection. If this problem develops again in the evening rush, the traffic cop will probably be replaced and reassigned to some less important duty such as the vice squad. The traffic cops who regularly man this position perform a valuable, limited function that is widely, if somewhat vaguely, appreciated by the local community.
As a rule, the urban traffic "system" works very well. Most drivers arrive at their expected destination within a few minutes of their expected time. Some accidents occur, but most do not substantially reduce traffic flow, and a pattern of accidents usually induces some corrective action. The cars, highways, and traffic-management technology are continuously maintained and improved. Over time, traffic volume and average speed continue to increase and the accident rate continues to decline. Every driver has some complaints, usually about the behavior of other drivers, but there are few obvious changes in the urban traffic system on which there would be a consensus.
HEADING UP TRAFFIC Who directs or heads the urban traffic system? "Nobody" is the simple answer. No one person directs any combination of the many functions involved in maintaining the flow of urban traffic. The many people involved do not derive the authority for their own actions from any one person. "Everybody" is the more complex answer. Every person makes his own decisions to serve his own interests—subject to the available technology, the legal system, and the necessary interactions forced by the inherent limitations of space and time.
The traffic cop at the busiest intersection probably has a more important role in the urban traffic system than any other one person, but he affects only a small part of the total traffic. No one would seriously contend that he is the "leader" of the urban traffic system. No one has ever even imagined that he is the leader of the urban community. No one, except maybe his children, would ever expect the traffic cop to provide moral leadership. The urban community has every reason to expect the traffic cop to do his limited job well, without burdening him with expectations about a role that is inconsistent with the nature of the urban traffic system and is beyond the capability of mere mortals.
The president of the United States is a traffic cop. He directs the flow of traffic through the Oval Office, the busiest intersection of the federal government. This is an important, limited role. The president has a more important role than that of the urban traffic cop because some very dangerous cargoes move through his intersection. Selection of the president is more important because it is more difficult to replace the incumbent for poor performance.
Some presidents, such as Coolidge, perform their role so well that they are almost invisible; other politicians and officials accept his necessary role, follow his signals, and are only vaguely aware of him as they pass. Some presidents, such as Kennedy, perform their role with such style that academics and Sunday supplement writers fail to notice whether his performance is satisfactory. Some presidents, such as Nixon, do not perform their duties very well. For a short period, some important decisions will be delayed and some mistakes will be made on other important decisions. In the slightly longer period, more of the political traffic will flow around the Oval Office. If this problem persists, the incumbent president is replaced and reassigned to write his memoirs.
The president as a traffic cop is a very different role from the president as the head of the federal government, the leader of the nation, and a moral example to the world. The president as a traffic cop, however, is both more realistic and less dangerous than the contemporary image of this role. The urban traffic system is a better model of the federal government than the hierarchy suggested by the organization charts. The political traffic system involves thousands of people choosing their own routes toward their private ends. Most of this traffic flows over routes that do not pass through the president's intersection. The many politicians and officials derive the authority for their decisions, not from the president, but from the Constitution and legislation.
Most of the decisions made within the federal political system are not significantly affected by the party or the personality of the president. Most decisions would be unchanged if a signature machine, following programmed rules, were substituted for a person as the president. In complex conditions, a good president, like a good traffic cop, can make better decisions than can be programmed, but a bad president can make worse decisions. A president has about the same relative influence as a university president. No one has any illusions that a university president actually runs a university.
Where did the contemporary image of the president as a director, leader, and moral teacher arise? The president is not even the head of the federal government; his only constitutional responsibilities are to be chief executive and commander of the armed forces. Members of Congress and the judiciary do not work for the president. There is no single head, or final arbiter, of the federal government.
The contemporary view that the president is the leader of the nation is even more absurd. Our complex national community is not a hierarchy. The federal government is not the superior institution in the nation, and its chief traffic cop has no claim to be its leader.
The view that the president should provide moral guidance to the world is the most absurd. The process of selecting politicians does not reinforce moral character, and there is some evidence that this is a subordinate trait of the most successful politicians. The US federal government, in any case, does not have a world mission; this government was established to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity" (my emphasis).
Contemporary political writers have not served us very well. They have assumed, like medieval theologians, that the appearance of order proves the existence of a director. They have confused political science with political biography. The president has a difficult, important, limited role. We should not burden him with expectations that he will perform a role that is beyond human capabilities, a role that is both unnecessary and inconsistent with the character of American institutions. If we maintain these unrealistic expectations, every president will be perceived to be a failure, and some, by trying to do too much, will fail in the important role they could perform.
One gains a better sense of the nature of the federal government and the American community from the great paintings of Pieter Bruegel than from contemporary political writing. "The Carrying of the Cross" and "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" are full of life and a sense of order, but one looks with difficulty to find the central heroic figure.
Chief economist for a major US corporation, Mr. Niskanen is the author of Representative Government and Bureaucracy and was featured in a REASON interview (November 1978).
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