McCain

It has sometimes been noted that John McCain isn't much of a details man. He speaks of al Qaeda and Iran as one, despite the Shi'ite/Sunni divide. (In fact, this is a complex area and there have been attempts at Islamist action across said divide, but that doesn't justify not knowing about it.) He also doesn't seem to care deeply about economics. He seems more or less willing to go along with fusionist orthodoxy ("conservatism") on most things, but he isn't deeply invested in it.

McCain can most sympathetically be understood using Jane Jacobs' distinction between the "guardian syndrome" and the "commercial syndrome" of morality. Outside the US, the right is almost entirely identified with the latter -- the idea of finding value, of innovation and entrepeneurship, of being self-interested but respectful of the rights of others, and not too concerned with how well they do so long as profitable interaction is possible. In the US too, people like Gingrich and Romney seem to perfectly embody the commercial syndrom of morality, as of course do the doctrinaire libertarians.

The anxiety that McCain speaks to arises from the suspicion that too much commercial success undermines the military virtues that the barbarians outside the commercial gates retain. From this perspective, the problem is not the intelligence of our strategy, but the maintenance of those virtues. Understanding our enemies too much or thinking about the ways we might work with semi-adversaries to isolate them is risky, because guardian virtues are undermined when they are understood. If you analyze honour, loyalty or courage, you lose them.

The position McCain represents is just as dialectical as Obama's. After all, it is the achievements of commercial, scientific and liberal civilization that makes America better than those it is fighting, but it is just those achievements that undermine the pre-commercial, pre-scientific and pre-liberal virtues necessary to fight. McCain has had the imagination to see in some strands of environmentalism and goo-goo political reform seeds of a post-modern guardian morality. Although McCainism tends to declaim against "relativism", it's real target is an excessive attachment to objectivity. Ideally, a soldier fights for what is his because it is his, and cheerfully acknowledges the right of his enemy to fight for what is the enemy's.

Obama's Grand Unified Theory

So what does the "race speech" tell us about how Obama thinks? How does it fit in with the unity-mongering and meeting-with-foreign-dictators stuff?

At bottom, I think Obama's basic theoretical framework is in dispute resolution. The worldview is sometimes attributed to his experience as an organizer, but it could also be that of a corporate litigator. He thinks of the world as filled with non-zero-sum games, in which the win-win alternative of making a deal and dividing the surplus isn't taken because each side is gripped with a narrative that makes rationally self-interested compromise difficult or impossible. The intellectual problem is to look at the interests coolly and dispassionately and see where the surplus-maximizing position lies. But the harder problem is to be sensitive enough to how the identity-constituting stories keep both sides from doing that. It's Harvard Negotiation project stuff, but it also works with who he thinks he is.

Obama doesn't particularly claim to come from nowhere or have no loyalties. He is instinctively cosmopolitan, on-the-left and tied to his adopted black American Protestant identity. But I think he recognizes that to advance the interests he is loyal to requires figuring out what other people's loyalties are, "recognize" them and then figure out how to get to the best possible resolution of the bargaining problem they represent.

Obama loves to put things dialectically. In this, the successful politician he most resembles is Tony Blair. His central rhetorical trick is restating positions he is arguing attractively and strongly, but in such a way that they obviously have limitations he hints at transcending. Dreams From My Father is hardly a black nationalist book -- but it engages very sympathetically with black nationalism, not unlike the way in which Audacity of Hope engages sympathetically but critically with fusionist conservatism. In Dreams, black nationalism is twinned not with white racism, but with the white romantic liberalism of the family he grew up with. The good thing about that liberalism is that it tries to transcend tribalism -- the bad part is that tribalism is too central to the human condition to be transcended. In fact, much of what is most admirable about liberalism comes from the folkways of Northern European Protestants -- not that there's anything wrong with that.

Obama thinks he solves the dilemma by making the same move Rawls made in Political Liberalism towards incompletely theorized common ground across more comprehensive narratives. The master discourse though is narrative negotiation, not procedural justice.

Interestingly, I think McCain also represents a reaction to the dilemma of a universalist liberalism rooted in particularist traditions it is unable to defend. But he responds differently.

Pithier Version for Canadians: Obama isn't Trudeau. He's Mulroney.

That's One Big Tent

Charles Murray, of all people, thinks Obama's speech on race was the best of any American politician ever.

The Pithlord agrees.

Sympathy for the Devil, Part II: The Case for the Reverend Jeremiah Wright

The only way to make this case is in the geekiest possible manner.

Let A represent the existence of the Reverend.
Let p represent the probability of serious bodily harm to a white person walking in the streets of South Chicago for one hour.
(p,A)<(p,~A)

If we look at matters purely from the point-of-view of white America, the basic problem black America presents is not politicization. It's lumpenization. If Reverend Wright takes a gangbanger and makes him a church-going married guy who thinks the US government planned AIDS, white America is better off. (Black America is too, of course, but I'm trying to be hard headed here.)

I get off the "conservative" bus whenever I hear complaints about identity politics. There just isn't any other kind of politics. If an issue of public policy does not seriously intersect with identity, then it isn't a political issue. If there is any merit to democracy at all, it is that it provides a framework in which identity groups can be mobilized and then compromise.

(It isn't directly relevant to this post, but where I get off the "progressive" bus is when I hear complaints about how heinous it is that groups they are opposed to engage in identity politics. Dude, if the Cree can do it, then the white Baptists can do it.)

Identity politics can either be responsible or irresponsible. There is always a bit of a dilemma here, of course. If an identity politician is too responsible, then he or she may no longer be able to represent and mobilize the base. If an identity politician isn't responsible enough, then he or she won't be able to get concessions for said base.

What is the art of statecraft? Finding ways to make the incentives to be responsible better than the incentives to be irresponsible.

Ding! Dong! The Pragmatic-and-Functional (sic.) Approach is Dead

Future generations of lawyers will never know how to distinguish the merely unreasonable statutory decision from the patently unreasonable one, since the Supreme Court just abolished the distinction. Thank God.

The Court also made it a little easier to fire non-unionized public sector employees. Some of the stupidity of the Lamer era is finally being dismantled.

Sympathy for the Devil: The Case for Hillary

Like most of my gender and class, I don't care for Hillary Rodham Clinton. I consider myself immune to his rhetorical charms, but Obama can write, and even after 8 years will be quite young, so I can imagine reading his memoirs a decade from now will wile away a lot of time. More importantly, since we cannot really know how politicians will behave in office, elections are most useful to shape their incentives. If Obama wins, it will suggest that supporting imperial adventures is not always good for your career, and that will mean fewer such adventures in the future (whether or not Obama himself will be inclined towards them). Plus, the Clintons are evil.

I hope and trust that the Superdelegates* will be impressed by the above logic, and do the right thing. But I have to admit that financial portfolio theory counts against me. BHO's sigmas are higher. He could do way better than HRC could, but he could also do worse. If a portfolio manager is given the choice between two assets with the same expected value, but with differing variance, and chooses the one with the greater variance, he/she/it is guilty of breach of fiduciary duty. So the Superdelegates should, if the polls continue to show what they do today, pick the castrating she-devel over the Muslim nationalist Manchurian candidates.

Admittedly, if they do, and she wins the general election, I will have to suffer at least twelve years of being profoundly irritated by the American head of state, causing me to avoid television and spend more time with my family. So give generously.

*I am a bit baffled by the word "superdelegates." This is the USA. Surely, all delegates are super!

Eliminate the RRSP contribution limit

Kokkarinen makes the case. I'm not a big fan of those who think we are on the wrong side of the Laffer curve in general. Lower taxes will usually mean lower revenues. But sooner or later, everyone wants to consume their income, so the additional deficits we might have now if we changed from a system with capped RRSPs to a system without them will have no real effect on the government's financial position. Eventually, the money shielded from taxes plus its returns will be taxed. And since the money will probably get a better interest rate than the government pays on bonds, the fisc will be better off, as will everyone else.

620 Connaught Ltd. -- Good Result, Bad Reasoning

It is often said that the Canadian Constitution has nothing in it to protect property rights. But it is not quite so. There are constitutional restrictions on the ability of both levels of government to impose taxes, and these prohibitions indirectly protect property rights.

The provinces can only impose taxes if they are "direct" and "in the province." The federal government can employ "any mode or method of taxation"; however, the constitution still requires that taxes be set out in a money bill that originates in the House of Commons. Imposing a tax can't be a delegated power to be administered by some government official -- it must be done by Parliament itself. The Victorians who set up this thing thought these restrictions a big deal, since they go back to the English Bill of Rights and the final routing of the papists. "No taxation without representation" resounded in every Anglo place. And even if the restrictions on taking property through taxes are essentially procedural, they still do create a certain requirement of transparency.

However, these restrictions only work if the courts police the boundary of the concept of "taxation". There are no similar procedural restrictions on governments imposing fines or fees or user charges or pricing government property and services or taking property. So if these other ways of getting assets from private hands to the public treasury are not restricted in some way, the requirements for taxation cease to have meaning.

In principle, the courts recognize that non-taxation revenue measures have to be constitutionally scrutinized. Unfortunately, in its latest foray, the SCC gives way too much leeway to the man.

The case involved liquor licensing fees in Jasper National Park. If you want to sell booze in the Park, you have to get a licence, and pay $75 per year plus 3% of the value of sales from spirits and wines and 2% of the value of sales from beer. (The Pithlord complains parenthetically about the populist favouritism to beer drinkers.) Rothstein J. says that this is all OK, and not a tax, so long as the costs of operating the park far exceed the revenues generated.

That seems like the wrong test to me. If this were really about regulatory fees, the issue shouldn't be the cost of the parks as a whole, but the incremental costs of serving alcohol in them. The Feds don't seem to have had any evidence of these, so we get a lot of handwaving about "leeway", which is a bad way of enforcing the constitution.

There might have been a better way to look at this case. All the talk about "regulatory schemes" is a bit off topic, since the Feds' role here is not as regulator but landlord. It owns the park, and is really charging commercial rent. In the absence of monopoly power, the government can't get more out of its contracts than a private owner would anyway. In a sense, any captive audience is subject to monopoly power to some extent (which is why beer costs so much in airports), but since the returns to that monopoly situation will inevitably be extracted by someone (either the licensee or the government), there isn't any reason for the courts to get involved.

If the issue is recast as one of the Feds use of its property, though, it would provide some protection to licensees from regulatory increases in fees if those fees are inconsistent with the original license agreement. The State-as-sovereign can, of course, extract money from people in excess of what it can bargain for, but when it does it starts to look like a tax. So a narrower basis for decision would have been better.

The more significant problem with the decision is that, as written, it applies even to those fees that government charges for actual regulation, which is inevitably monopolistic. The lack of any need for a real link between the fees and the costs created by the party they are imposed is disturbing.

Is John McCain a "Natural Born Citizen" of the United States?

The Republican nominee was born to American parents in the Panama Canal zone. Does that make him a "natural born citizen" of the United States, as their constitution requires the President to be. (In Canada, of course, we have never had a Canadian-born head of state. The first Canadian-born PM was over almost thirty years after Confederation, and the first Canadian-born Governor General nearly a century after.)

Anyone thinking of doing a comprehensive analysis of the point is going to have trouble competing with Larry Solum's here.

One reason NAFTA isn't going to have real environmental or labour standards

CTV says the Obama campaign has contacted the Canadian embassy to tell them not to worry about their protectionist rhetoric for the Ohio primary. Obama and the Canadian government both deny it, although apparently there was some sort of chat.

The Pithlord is not in a position to shed light on such backroom dealings. However, I do know that serious environmental and labour standards in NAFTA are not going to fly. Among the reasons is that most environmental and labour law in Canada is within provincial jurisdiction and, unlike in the US, there is no way for the Feds to require provinces to meet international commitments. This is the result of a Privy Council decision that made all my profs at U of T gnash their teeth, but nonetheless remains the law.

SCC on International Law: Is there anything new here?

Two posts down, I highlight the Supreme Court of Canada's statement that "the Charter should be presumed to provide at least as great a level of protection [of a right] as is found in the international human rights documents Canada has ratified."

One possible response is that there is nothing new here. Canadian courts have never had a problem with citing those of other countries (or international tribunals) as persuasive authority. In fact, it wasn't that long ago when a lawyer would be a bit apologetic about using a Canadian case at law, possibly explaining that the "English courts do not seem to have considered this question, my lord." Even American cases are allowed, if possibly seen as a sign of desperation.

Still, I am not aware of any other example of holding that international or comparative law is presumptively binding. And yet I don't know how else to interpret what they said in the Bill 29 case. Indeed, the ILO seems more authoritative than past decisions of the Supreme Court itself.

Against National Self-Determination

In the wake of Kosovo's unilateral declaration of indepence, I get into an argument with libertarian Brian Moore about the merits of a "right of national self-determination."

Most Important Sentence from the Supreme Court of Canada in 2007

As Dickson C.J. observed in the Alberta Reference, at p. 349 [in dissent-PL], the Charter should be presumed to provide at least as great a level of protection as is found in the international human rights documents that Canada has ratified.

Hoo boy.

Tested. And failed.

In addition to race-baiting (or, more kindly, majoritarian ethnic identity politics) and possession of ovaries, what is Hillary Clinton's argument for why she should be the Democratic nominee for President?

Experience. Record. But what is the record?

Brad DeLong (2003) speaks from his experience in the Clinton I administration. Interestingly, he thinks his view is that of everyone else involved in Hillary Clinton's only independent executive policy-making initiative:

My two cents' worth--and I think it is the two cents' worth of everybody who worked for the Clinton Administration health care reform effort of 1993-1994--is that Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life. Heading up health-care reform was the only major administrative job she has ever tried to do. And she was a complete flop at it. She had neither the grasp of policy substance, the managerial skills, nor the political smarts to do the job she was then given. And she wasn't smart enough to realize that she was in over her head and had to get out of the Health Care Czar role quickly.

So when senior members of the economic team said that key senators like Daniel Patrick Moynihan would have this-and-that objection, she told them they were disloyal. When junior members of the economic team told her that the Congressional Budget Office would say such-and-such, she told them (wrongly) that her conversations with CBO head Robert Reischauer had already fixed that. When long-time senior hill staffers told her that she was making a dreadful mistake by fighting with rather than reaching out to John Breaux and Jim Cooper, she told them that they did not understand the wave of popular political support the bill would generate. And when substantive objections were raised to the plan by analysts calculating the moral hazard and adverse selection pressures it would put on the nation's health-care system...

Hillary Rodham Clinton has already flopped as a senior administrative official in the executive branch--the equivalent of an Undersecretary. Perhaps she will make a good senator. But there is no reason to think that she would be anything but an abysmal president.

A Democratic Convention Scenario

Let's suppose Obama wins the most delegates in the primaries/cacuses (excluding Michigan and Florida). But the margin is small enough that Clinton wins with superdelegates (Democratic office holders who automatically get to go to the Convention). How legitimate does a Clinton win look to Obama's constituencies? How likely is it that the Democrats can still win in November in those circumstances?

For extra credit,

Does it matter if Clinton wins most of the votes?

Does Clinton pretty much have to make Obama the VP candidate then? Would he take it?

We Need to Stay in Afghanistan

The Manley Panel's report is pretty sensible. If Canada were to leave Kandahar, we would wrong those who trusted us, undermine our international reputation and provide a victory for al Qaeda and the Taliban. So we should stay. If we can guilt other NATO countries into helping out, great. But if we can't, we have our duty.

My own view is that every day the Taliban is out of power is a day when the world is safer than it was in September 2001. And it is also a day when Afghanistan has some hope of progress.

Manley's criticisms of the Harper government for allowing its centralized media strategy to undermine public confidence in the war is well-taken.

Here's hoping Manley can turn Canadian public opinion around somewhat.

Science: Sociology and Epistemology

Somebody said -- and it is true -- that the key to long-run academic success is to create a research program. Being brilliant and insightful won't do it, unless you give your graduate students something to do.

That seems to be true of all academic disciplines, whether scientific, social scientific, or whatever.

One puzzle for those of us who tend to think that science reveals the truth about the world is why it should do so. It is just another social practice, after all. You constantly run into Popperians on the Internet, but philosophers of science will tell you the positivist project of finding some extra-scientific criterion for why science works hit a dead end.

Could it be that any research project will eventually, through some collective Bayesian process, either die out or become a science? Is that crazy?

What's Wrong With Fiscal Stimulus?

"Fiscal stimulus" is all the rage in the United States, as the possibility of a recession in a presidential election year looms. But it's a bad idea.

A deficit will boost aggreggate demand and a surplus reduce it, all other things being equal. But all other things aren't equal. The Federal Reserve has the ablity to raise or lower interest rates, and if it is following its own policies concerning an acceptable rate of inflation, a higher deficit will just induce it to raise interest rates. This will mean a fall in private investment without any corresponding stimulus.

Since it takes longer for fiscal policy makers to react to changes in the cycle than monetary policy makers, the general view of macro types is that counter-cyclical policy (reducing inflation in times of boom, boosting output in downturns) should be left to central banks, and not governments.

Moreover, over the longer haul, McCain, for all his acknowledged ignorance of economics, is right that getting spending under control is the most important thing. To spend a dollar, we need to take more than a dollar in private wealth, whether the spending is paid for by taxes or borrowing. So higher spending means lower growth. Obviously, that doesn't mean the government should spend nothing at all, but it does imply that keeping the government as small as possible is good for the economy.

Update: Greg Mankiw, not surprisingly, makes the point more cogently here. So did Paul Krugman, back in the day.

George Grant on Sixties Southern Resistance: "Last Ditch Stand of a Local Culture"

It's worth noting that Canada's own favourite paleoconservative, George Grant, occasionally expressed sympathy for the South's resistance to racial integration. From Lament for a Nation:

The classes that opposed Roosevelt were spent forces by 1965. The leaders of the new capitalism supported Johnson. Goldwater's cry for limited government seemed as antediluvian to the leaders of the corporations as Diefenbaker's nationalism seemed to the same elements in Canada. Johnson was supported not only by such obvious groups as Negroes and labour but also by the new managerial bourgeoisie of the suburbs. The farmers, who were supposed to be the last bastion of individualism, were not slow in voting for the continuation of subsidies. Four of Goldwater's five states were in the South. This was the last ditch stand of a local culture. But it is doomed to disappear as much as an indigenous French Canada.

Zero Sum Watch

Quoth Andrew Sullivan:

I'm really chuffed about McCain. But his squeaker in South Carolina makes it both more likely that he will be the nominee and less likely that he will unite the GOP enthusiastically behind him. He may have to put Huckabee on the ticket at this rate, which will make him uncomfortable and the economic right apoplectic. A very narrow and divisive McCain victory wouldn't be as bad for the GOP as a narrow and divisive Romney victory, but it's not great news either.
Similarly, the longer the Democratic race goes on, the likelier it appears that Clinton could well win the nomination in a way almost designed to maximally divide and demoralize her own party - and raise her own national negatives to stratospheric levels. It would mean a Clinton candidacy in the fall that had actively alienated independents and repelled Republicans, while undermining a key source of Democratic support - African-Americans.

If both parties commit slow suicide, does either win in the end?

Umm, yes. In a two party system, someone wins in the end.

Actually, I think the primary race will be worse for the Democrats, although it may not be bad enough to overcome the Republicans' natural disadvantages of being identified with an unpopular war and incumbency in an economic downturn. McCain is disliked for not being tribal enough -- he has shown himself quite willing to make his party look bad to make himself look good. But he's basically sound on the issues from a Republican point-of-veiw, and hard-core partisans are bound to come back to him.

On the other hand, if Ms. Clinton wins a divisive fight, it can't be good for the Dems. Obama seems to have united the constituencies of Gary Hart and Jesse Jackson against the constituency of Walter Mondale, augmented by the Hispanic demographic boom. I don't think the latter two groups are a sufficient national coalition. And people hate being on the receiving end of the Clintons' political skills. In the last two weeks, she's managed to piss off blacks and Reagan Democrats.