pantom!
Wow!
Thanks muchly for the well-researched, interesting, and highly enlightening post.
Scylla:
You may be surprised to learn that, if I’ve understood you correctly, you share your conservative views with such famous right-wingers as Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky.
Are you really sure you’re conservative – or have you been snacking on those crazy pills again?
You’re welcome.
Somebody noticed! (sniff)
2sense said:
First, thanks for offering a comment. It was getting pretty discouraging that I spent half an afternoon writing those five messages, and no one even commented on them.
But I disagree with you. Yes, everyone gets one vote, but in the end the majority wins, and the minority goes unrepresented. In a market, rich people may get more ‘votes’ than poor people, but the market reacts in proportion. I daresay not too many billionaires eat at McDonalds, but there sure are a lot of McDonalds.
The market is a system of proportional apportionment. And because the poor make up a bigger proportion of the population than do the rich, they get an equal say, even if individually they have fewer ‘votes’.
But even better, the market returns value even to small minority votes. I fly R/C airplanes for fun - something very few people do. I’m in a very small minority of the population. Now, if the government decided what our hobbies should be, and we all got to ‘vote’ for our hobby, with the majority winning, do you think the government would still provide R/C airplanes? Nope. Small minorities still go unrepresented.
Plus, there are many other things that influence government other than votes, and they are even less democratic. Have a look sometime at the proportion of government services that go to rich communities, or to communities that are represented by powerful lobbyists. The rich have their own ways of influencing government in very non-democratic ways.
You can see this effect everywhere you look, when government is involved. Zoning laws that protect rich people’s property at the expense of access for poor people, for example. In our city, you can always tell when the freeway goes near a wealthy community - either the speed limit drops, or the noise barriers get bigger. Why is it that the government funds things like the Metropolitan Opera, while arts programs for poor children go unrecognized? Power and influence has as much or more effect on government as it does on the market, but at least in the market if 1% of the people want something, 1% of the market will cater to them.
Sam:
I was actually going to comment yesterday, but I decided that “Well, at least they can’t say that only liberals are starry-eyed idealists.” wouldn’t do much to further the discussion. 
Having had more time to digest your lengthy essay, I have two comments/questions.
First, I am somewhat baffled on several levels by “Government Destroys the Social Fabric of Society.” I realize that you do not endorse the line of thought, but, well, I’m not at all sure you’ve captured an argument that anyone does endorse, and I think the argument as you’ve presented it flat out sucks. It seems to me that most of social conservatives (in North America, anyways) come at the question from a religious angle to begin with, and not from the conservative ideology as you suggest. It’s more of the sort of “This country was founded on Christian principles, and our society is going to hell in a handbasket because we’ve lost God” line that we hear from the Religious Right. Look, for example, at the 'Bama 10 Commandments hubbub.
The “government destroys the family” line is practically laughable. I don’t necessarily disagree that the changes to family structure you point to have been deleterious to some extent (some have, some haven’t, on balance the shift may well be negative - but that’s another debate), but how could anyone say with a straight face that the government has had anything to do with it?? As you point out yourself, the shift from agrarian to urban society plays a huge role. So does the decrease in family size, the increase in mobility and specialization (little Johnny becomes an aerospace engineer, moves off the farm in Nebraska to California, and just isn’t geographically situated to provide assistance for his arthritic mother), and a host of other things. (Such as the very recent phenomena of requiring a couple years of extremely expensive medical care near the end of one’s life.) Suggesting that the existence of social security and public education play any significant role in the reshaping of family structure is just ludicrous. Well, perhaps public education insofar as it has increased the overall level of education, and that correlates with a drop in birthrate/family size, but jeez, even that’s a stretch. In short, I’d say that government has had sweet fuck all to do with most of the major societal shifts we’ve seen over the past century (perhaps excluding the civil rights movement), and that anyone who thinks it does needs a solid dose of reality splashed in their face. Anyways, I get the impression that social conservatives want the government to intervene to prevent the relentless decay of society before the onset of secular humanism/hollywood debauchery/pot-smoking hippies. That is, they see the degradation of society as being driven by forces outside of government, and they see government action as being the solution - precisely the opposite of the structure you lay out.
Now, there may be some idealistic conservatives who hold the view as you describe it, I concede, but if they exist, they are few in number, and are not the people anyone thinks of when social conservatism is mentioned.
My second major comment is on the economic front, and I think I’ll approach it rather abstractly. A former classmate of mine is a staunch libertarian, and if I may be allowed to oversimplify things a bit, his rationale seemed to be something like this:
Having some passing familiarity with the ideological movement as a whole, I think this is a perfectly fair, if very simple, characterization. And, indeed, it’s one which I can almost endorse. There’s just one problem - namely, what counts as coercion. For my friend, only physical coercion counted. For myself, I cannot see the difference between “Fork over the protection money or Tony here will play baseball with your kneecaps” and “If you don’t work this unpaid overtime shift you’ll be fired” (leaving unsaid that we both know that in this economy you won’t find another job quickly and you won’t be able to afford to feed your two kids). I cannot see how economic coercion is not every bit as coercive as physical coercion is. They work by precisely the same mechanism - force people to do what you want by making the alternative to doing so utterly unacceptable. Admittedly, economic coercion is much more fuzzy than physical - no one thinks that boycotting a company engaged in activities repugnant to you is a bad thing to do, for example, and there’s no sharp line between that and my previous example. Physical coercion is much more sharply delineated - either I am threatening physical harm or I am not. Nonetheless, I maintain that some levels of economic coercion are every bit as despicable as threatening to smash kneecaps is.
While you gush on about the wonders of free markets, their glorious efficiency and perfect fairness, you overlook something else about them. As I pointed out above, in any negotiation, the party who enters with greater resources will, other things being equal, have greater bargaining power, and as a result of this simple fact, in the long run markets completely unregulated will inevitably result in wealth being highly concentrated. And this, I maintain, will result in unacceptable levels of economic coercion. Now if everyone started with a blank slate, we might not be too concerned about this - “Your dire poverty is the result of your own laziness, and you’re just reaping the rewards of your past actions.” However, we don’t start with blank slates. We enter the economy with vast disparities of available resources resulting far more from the lottery of birth than our merit in grade school. Everyone will concede, I trust, that even a bright and hard-working kid born into abject poverty is at disadvantage in the marketplace. Championing the justice of the free market in this regard doesn’t make you an advocate of personal responsibility - it makes you an advocate of punishing the child for the sin of the fathers, unto the third and fourth generation.
For these reasons, I endorse some forms of wealth redistribution, most notably graduated taxation schemes. They compensate for the built-in advantage free markets give to the already wealthy, and they make merit-based upward mobility far more possible than would flatter alternatives. Perfect they may not be, but their absence would be worse.
Finally, Sam, I would like to see a cite that demonstrates that Canadians are paying for our broader safety nets with a lower standard of living. GDP/capita-wise we may have slid relative to the US, I’m not sure (a cite would still be good), but this says relatively little about overall standard of living in absence of distribution information. If Americans make 1000/year more than we do on average, but Bill Gates alone accounts for 900 of that, for example, it doesn’t mean much. (I realize he’s not quite that rich, it’s just an illustration.) Has our median fallen relative to theirs since the onset of our minor bits of socialism? Does this take into account differing crime rates, which have no small entanglement with wealth distribution patterns? Do you have any evidence that this purported slide is the result of taxation levels, as opposed to, say, the fact that our economy is based far more on natural resources than theirs is, or increased levels of US protectionism? Do you even have any evidence that the overall tax burden on the US is lower than it is in Canada if you factor medical expenses into the equation? It just seems to me that even if we are suffering compared to the US, there are a myriad of possible reasons, and the only cause to jump to your particular conclusion is ideological.
All in all, though, a very nice presentation, even though I don’t agree with nearly all of it.
First of all, I said right at the beginning of those message that, for clarity’s sake I was presenting the ‘idealized’ arguments, without consideration for all of the counter-arguments and exceptions. Clearly, there are some.
On to your points:
Well, I accept some of it, to *some[/] effect. Obviously, many factors have caused the shifts in society we’ve seen. But it seems to me fair to say that government has had *some effect. This is basic economics. For example, it seems fairly obvious to me that the existence of public ‘savings’ programs like Social Security have to some extent displaced private savings. And when you have a safety net under you, you take more risks. How many people quit jobs who otherwise wouldn’t, when they know that ultimately they won’t starve because of that decision?
And it IS true that large extended families were in part insurance against poverty in old age. To the extent that the state has taken over the role, this has no doubt had an effect on family cohesion. Now, you could argue over how big that effect is (it might even be trivial), but it’s no stretch of the imagination to accept that some effect exists.
Well, that’s true, but there are plenty of social conservatives who aren’t religious. But certainly, for many religious conservatives they see the church as the center of public life. Charity comes from it, schools are run by it, their social lives center around it, etc.
You need to back that assertion up. Just saying it doesn’t make it so. You can certainly point to many government actions that harm the family. For example, social conservatives would argue that heavy taxation has caused both family members to have to work, which breaks apart the nuclear family. Subsidized daycare acts as an incentive for people to put their children under the care of strangers. These seem to me to be reasonable arguments to make.
“The government has something to do with it”. There. I said it with a straight face. I have refuted the only argument you have offered.
Of course, the big question is how much effect the government has had, and even whether that effect has been a net positive. Feel free to make those arguments.
But WHY did the family decrease in size? To the extent that families are an economic construction, anything that takes over that economic role will have some effect. Let me give you an example: My mother was a single mom with two children. Do you know what we did? We moved in with my grandparents. Today, there would be no need to, because of the increase in social benefits for single mothers. Do you dispute that availability of such programs reduces the need for family involvement?
Certainly there are many forces at play. That does not negate the additional force that government plays. It’s not either-or.
Another assertion offered without proof. And I have plenty of evidence on my side that historically the family HAS played such a role.
Public education has also distanced parents from the education of their children, and institutionalized it. Why do you think many conservatives are moving to home schooling? They see public schools as taking an increasingly large role in their children’s lives.
Again, you say this with great vehemence, but without offering an argument as to why you think this.
It is not the opposite. They see the government as a destructive force, certainly in part because they don’t agree with the values espoused in public schools, and because they see government programs like daycare funding as in essence forcing them to make decisions they don’t like. That’s always been the argument of the people who support vouchers - that by not letting people who wish to home school or send their children to private school get their funds back for public school financing, they are in essence punished for their choices by having to pay for their child’s education twice while others only pay once.
Sam, it’s your assertion that government action has played some significant role in the change in social dynamics and family structure. You need to provide evidence for that conclusion, I don’t need to provide evidence for the null hypothesis. You have not provided evidence - you have told a few just-so stories about about how the existence of social security makes people more likely to abandon grandparents.
However, had I had any idea that you actually subscribed to what you said in that post, I might have included more supporting data. The single greatest change, I think, has been the reduction in family size. Why has family size shrunk? Well, not, I think, due to any government action, unless we’re talking about China. Most demographic studies I’ve read point to access to wealth, family planning resources, and education of women as the key elements in this trend. For example:
Now unless you want to argue that the government has “caused” the decrease in family size by failing to adequately restrict access to birth control, I don’t think you’re going to find any significant causal impact at all.
As to the existence of governmental assistance providing an economic reason for loss of family cohesion, that these are causally related is a bare assertion by you. You have provided no evidence for it. Frankly, I think you’re correct that changes in economic realities have played a large role, but the clear hypothesis that emerges from this is not that the cause is the emergence of the welfare state, but rather that the cause is the overall increase in wealth. If your theory were true, we would predict that the decrease in family size and cohesion should be found most prominently in those who receive or are likely to receive government assistance. If my theory were true, we would predict that the decrease would correlate with socio-economic status. Which prediction do you think is borne out? (I’ve been hunting through census documents looking for precise data on this and not finding tables which compare family size with family income, but I’m quite confident I have a good idea what the data will look like when I eventually find it. Care to wager on the likelihood of the lowest income familes being the smallest?) If your theory were true, we should expect to find a marked drop in family size coinciding (well, trailing by some years) with the introduction of major social programs, with a flatter drop at other times. If mine were true, we should expect to see a steady curve correlating with economic growth. Which view do you think census evidence supports?
Oh, sure, you’re right, it’s not quite a strict either-or proposition, and absent the welfare state, demographics would look a bit different. However, the causitive factor here is wealth. Governmental action here just alters slightly the demographics in which the trends occur insofar as it redistributes wealth a bit. Yes, the government has a slight impact, but it’s not a causal factor in the existence of the trend.
On the question of public education, I think you do have a stronger argument. I’m not quite sure you’ll get a principled conservative argument out of “The government is unnecessarily transforming society by failing to teach our children religious views on the origin of life instead of our best scientific theories, and by refusing to discriminate against those sinful homosexuals” though. That seems to me to be a reactionary religious argument, not a conservative one.
It was no trouble replying to you, Sam Stone. I come here to respond to interesting posts; thanks for providing one. I might comment on the rest of your long offering as well, I am still digesting it. As for the democratic nature of the market, I’m afraid you are reaching.
Um, if you don’t have an equal vote then you don’t have an equal say. Period. You can divide the polity up into whichever abitrary groupings you wish but a balance of power between those groups doesn’t confer equality upon each member of them. If Joe Millionaire gets a million votes and a million poor slobs each get one vote then while the “poor slobs” and the “fatcat” both have an equal say but there is no individual equality. Joe Millionaire still has a disproportionate vote. It seems you have committed the Fallacy of Composition.
As for remote controlled planes, there is no guarantee that the market will deliver them. There are plenty of folks that just can’t afford one and worse, the same goes for a new heart or liver. To say that the market will accomodate any 1% minority is true only in the sense that someone will try to exploit the wishes of that minority. The response isn’t to the need of the minority but instead to the possibility of profit. The market has no responsibility to individuals. Our government, undemocratic and flawed flawed though it is, is responsible to the people in general and not just to shareholders. Even if it strays far from the theory it remains more democratic than market forces.
In sum, showing that our government isn’t the most democratic way to organize human affairs doesn’t confer that title upon the market. Sure those few who have benefited the most from the market can work the system for their selfish ends. But that is no recomendation to remove all restraint upon those who control a disproportionate share of the economic pie. Democratic government is supposed to serve everyone, not just the rich. That’s democracy.
Sam: I read all your posts and they were terrific.
Gorsnak: Excellent points, you really made me think about a few of these tenets more ciritically.
Sam: Excellent counter-points.
Wish I had something original to add to this debate, but several of you are doing a laudable job already.
pantom -
Thank you for your post. I cannot respond to it at the moment, as I will be away from my PC and Internet access for much of this week (as I was for much of the weekend), but I would like to analyze it and respond as appropriate when I have the time.
As well to the many other interesting points raised in this thread.
Just so you know that someone noticed your post.
Regards,
Shodan
Oh gosh. This is way too long for me to respond to. I will simply reply to a minor objection a page back.
I don’t exempt corps from pollution laws. Some pollution is accepatble to maintain growth. This is a trade off we make. However, the major difference is that governments claim the right to speak for everyone at once, and make arbitrary decisions for everyone, at once. Corporations simply handle money on behalf of their investors.
2Sense,
Why do you use the word exploit? Is it your opinion that all businesses exploit their consumer base? If it is I think there is something seriously wrong with your fundamental world view. If I, a hypothetical R/C hobbyist, decides to purchase parts in bulk, assemble them, and then sell the finished product to fellow hobbyists, who is being exploited? If the hobbyist purchases one of my finished products for 10 they have stated explicitly that my product is worth more to them than 10. They have “won” the exchange as far as they are concerned. Likewise, if I have agreed to sell them my product in exchange for $10 then I have obtained something ($10) worth more to me than my finished product. I have “won” the exchange also. Please explain your statement more clearly.
Sam Stone,
I agree with the substance of much of what you’re saying with regard to economic conservatism. Regarding social conservatism, however, it is my understanding that government has played a relatively minor role in the breakdown of the family.
I recently read Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam. The book focuses on the collapse of American community within the last 50 years. We join fewer organizations, donate less money as a percentage of our income, vote less, attend fewer community meetings, entertain friends less, trust people less, etc. Some of the primary causes according to him (and based on time diaries, surveys, polls, and studies repeated throughout those decades) are:
Suburban Sprawl
Suburban sprawl has increased the average working person’s commute by a substantial amount. Men and women today spend a lot more time in their vehicles traveling to and from work. In the past, people would often congregate in town on the same days to shop and be entertained, today shopping plazas have moved to the suburbs as well in order to better capture their target market. In the past you might often see the same people at the grocery store, shoe store, local restaurant, and movies. Now each of these places has it’s own separate small group of people you might interact with frequently (most likely just the store employees). The movement of the people to the 'burbs, the shopping centers along with them, has caused the typical person to travel multiple routes thus increasing net commute time drastically. More commute time equals less time for socializing and civic engagement.
Working women
In the past, women were some of the most engageed people in the planning, hosting, and arranging of social activities and community activism. The large movement of women in the workplace has likewise limited the amount of time that many women have to donate to community involvement and socializing (whether it be dinner parties, church picnics, or whatever).
Financial pressures
Though we are likely to be better off financially now people are more anxious and concerned about their financial well being than before. This concern translates into more time spent over monetary and material concerns. His time opinion polls show that the importance of wealth and material possessions in what is considered “the good life” has increased substantially over the years. This greater degree of focusing on financial stability has, again, reduced the time and motive for community involvement.
Generational changes in values
Much of the decline in the rates of community involvement is attributed to generational change. Elderly people today, who came of age during WWII, as a cohort are much more active in the community than younger cohorts. The problem isn’t that this cohort is no longer civically engaged. Indeed, as much as Putnam can tell, this cohort seems to be engaged as much as it ever was. The problem is that the baby boomers are less civically engaged than the older cohort, and generation x even less so. As the elderly become incapable of high levels of civic engagement due to infirmity or death the overall rate of community involvement declines due to the higher levels of people in younger age cohorts.
Television
According to Putnam, television is likely the largest culprit in the decline of social and community involvement. Television watching is a non social activity. He has shown that television watching per day has increased dramatically since it’s introduction. Increases in time watching television must displace other activities. He cites a study done in Canada between two neighboring towns that were similar in demographic makeup and industry. Due to some geographic features one of the towns was unable to receive television signals for a number of years. The difference in social and community involvement was illustrative. The town that had access to television reported less voters, fewer community meetings, less gatherings among friends among other things. The reason we watch so much television? According to putnam it’s not because TV is so pleasurable, rather it’s because it’s “cost” to us is so low. In fact, according to surveys he cites, TV is less pleasurable than working. TV, according to Putnam, is probably the greatest factor in explaining the decline in civic engagement.
This site captures the gist of much of his arguments in more limited form.
Err, this should read “a relatively minor role in the breakdown of society”
One more thing I forgot to add. Some of Putnam’s primary data sources are available online here. The data availabe on this site are:
Um, duh?
Anyway, turns out this is all moot.
**Grim_Beaker *,
I’m afraid you are jumping to conclusions about my world view. I’m not socialist. The word “exploit” doesn’t always have a negative connotation. It means “to make use of” whether the relationship is mutually beneficial or not. The ambiguity is sometimes useful.
Sam Stone offered the R/C planes example to show that the market would represent small minorities. My point was that the market is only interested in profiting from that minority. It responds to money, not people.
Yeah? So?
A minority has a wish that is valuable to them, and the market responds and gets paid in return.
Is there a problem with the profit motive?
Only if you mistake the results of servicing the needs of money with servicing the needs of people.
The market is (in theory) efficient at allocating capital. This is fine, if efficient capital allocation is the goal.
Sam is implicitly arguing that the market is also comprehensive and fair in allocating capital, when in fact, efficiency usually dictates that it is neither of these.
The usual mistake of those who fetishize market solutions is in forgetting that a market solution simply can’t solve problems where a need for fairness and comprehensiveness is manditory. No matter how inefficient government is, it is still superior to the market for many problems simply because the market cannot solve the entirety of the problem. SS is a good example of this sort of problem.
In fact, I did neither. Did you read my messages? I said that the market was efficient, and that it was ‘just’. Fairness is another issue.
I also took great pains to say that I recognized that the market had flaws, and even had a whole section where I discussed market failures. How often do the advocates of big government around here offer up their own criticisms of government action, rather than just bashing the market? I was being more than fair.
AND, I also said at the beginning that I was presenting an ‘idealized’ viewpoint, for the purpose of making the difference clear and not bogging down the discussion into the usual laundry list of supposed market failures (some of which are accurate, but all of which distract from the conceptual point I was trying to make).
My explicit point was that the market may fail in all kinds of ways, but the problems of large government solutions are so severe that the burden of proof lies with those who would interfere with normal market transactions. This is actually the classically liberal position as well - you must prove a need for interference before you strip away the freedom of people to carry out their normal business.
The difference between conservatives and liberals often boils down to a matter of how they weight the relative efficiencies and liabilities of both sides. There are very few communists left. Bill Clinton himself declared, “The era of big government is over”. The market won. The debates nowadays have more to do with defining the periphery - the claims of market failures on one side, balanced against the claims of government failure on the other.
That’s one reason why it’s so dismaying to see so many liberals on this board, like lissener, reject one side of this dialectic of being composed of pure evil. Conservatives are not greedy corporate exploiters who want to throw Grandma into the street and plunder the poor. We’re people who simply disagree about what is best for society. Where you liberals tend to emphasize social inequity and see government as a tool to redress it, we tend to emphasize the drawbacks that large government action carries with it. You need both sides of an argument to come to a reasonable conclusion.
And if Liberals sometimes err in being too critical of markets, Conservatives sometimes err in being too trusting of them and too critical of government. That’s what happens to opposing sides - they push each other to extremes, just as in a court of law the defense and prosecution take opposite extremes of a case. In the end, you have to hope that if both sides are equally smart and resourceful, and work equally hard at defending their ‘case’, the middle ground will represent a fairly reasonable compromise. That is the essential faith of democracy - that when the body politic passes its collective judgement, the result will be something that works pretty well.
To believe that one side is the holder of universal truth and the other is a bunch of primitive troglodytes is an immature conceit, borne largely of ignorance.