Who cares about what it means to be 'conservative'?

[Sam_Stone]

@elucidator

Don’t want to play nice? Ok dokey.

So, I’m a dupe for thinking that maybe Mr. Keynes and Mr. Krugman may know what they are talking about? I seem to be in abundant good company there, since Keynesian economics are rather well accepted in the community of economic academics. Am I wrong about that? And, of course, Krugman got that silly little prize…

Wait a minute - the argument that you made in response to me was that economics itself was something that couldn’t provide certainty and that couldn’t be used to justify a political philosophy. Too much room for uncertainty and interpretaton and all that.

If you really believe that, then you can’t appeal to ANY economic authority. But you appeal to economic authority all the time - when it suits you. You just did it again by referencing Mr. Krugman’s Nobel. But I can give you a list of five Nobel Prize winners right now who objected to the stimulus. Do I win? Or is it suddenly invalid to submit an appeal to authority - when it trumps your own appeal to authority?

You imply hypocrisy of the left (Gosh, where have I heard that before…?) in general and me in particular for refusing (so you claim) irrefutable economic fact. But in the same breath you express contempt for economic science as it stands, with Keynes very much in the orthodox canon.

You need to read more economists other than Paul Krugman if you think a fiscal stimulus to pull a country out of recession is economic orthodoxy. Even Keynes didn’t believe that, in the end.

The economic consensus on Keynes has wavered back and forth. In the 80’s and 90’s Keynes was very much out of the orthodoxy of economics. His predictions regarding the relationship between employment and inflation utterly failed, as did many of his other predictions. Those of the monetarists and Austrians were much closer, and the ground began to shift away from Keynes - at least as far as his notions of fiscal stimulus and deficits being needed to maintain full employment are concerned. He has enjoyed a resuscitation in the last few years because monetary policy is pretty much out of bullets, so fiscal stimulus was seen as being the only game in town. That caused Keynes’ ideas to be revisited, but I can tell you there are many, many economists who are wholly skeptical of the whole thing.

Well, which is it, Sam? Is the economics that agrees with your philosophy somehow kosher, and the rest is not?

How convenient indeed, Mr. Kettle.

I am completely open to economic analysis that refutes my own political beliefs. Paul Krugman’s Op-Ed political rants do not rise to that level. Krugman is an excellent economist in his sphere of trade theory, for which he won the Nobel. He is also a hardcore partisan, and he is not a macroeconomist.

I’m not biased about this. I treat the op-eds of Larry Kudlow, Bruce Bartlett, and other right-wing economists who spend most of their time in the political sphere with skepticism as well. Economists aren’t immune to partisanship.

Look, Sam, I’m not even saying you’re wrong. I’m suggesting that you may have overestimated the significance of all this. You present this data as though its final, authoritative proof, case closed, nothing more to see here.

I presented an argument. I backed it up with data. Tons of it. Your response in this ‘debate’ was to basically say, “I don’t think you’re right, and you’re too certain of your facts.” That is not a debate.

Again, I find it interesting that I seem to be unique in that I’m supposed to rebut my own arguments. Somehow, it’s a crime to present a point of view and defend it. I’m supposed to couch my own arguments in qualifiers and provide opposing points of view. Is there anyone else in Great Debates this is expected from? If jshore writes a post citing the data to defend global warming, is he also supposed to post the arguments of the deniers, and then announce that really, the issue is nuanced and statistical and can’t be proved and he might be wrong, because certainty is bad and other people have different points of view?

And yet, in other venues, the debates continue. Even though such absolute and irrefutable proof exists, the fools don’t listen. Why is that, Sam?

“And yet, the debates around global warming continue. Why is that, elucidator? How can you be so sure, when other people disagree with you?”

Would you EVER accept such a lame argument?

Such a breakthrough as this, you’d think it would be trumpeted to the skies. Is it the liberal media, suppressing the truth? Why haven’t such men as Krugman and others simply thrown themselves upon your mercy, blubbering for your forgiveness? Are they all stubborn fools, or might it be they have good and sound reasons?

The debate is over, the issue is settled with incontrovertible proof, and few seem to have noticed. How very odd.

This has become a complete waste of time. When come back, bring a real debate. With facts. If you can. If you can’t, or won’t, then maybe you should reconsider the next time you’re thinking about dropping a drive-by snark in a Great Debates thread. Or open a pit thread. Those are always fun, and you don’t actually have to defend your point of view there if you don’t want to.

[SherwoodAnderson]

This thread seems to be dying, but I’m going to post the second part of my reply to Sam Stone and then make my exit. Like stated, I won’t spend much more time on this right now…

@Sam_Stone

I disagree with the notion that there’s a tendency for free markets to accumulate and centralize wealth. Look at the internet: If anything, the control of giant companies like Microsoft seems to be waning because of the intensely competitive atmosphere. Internet Explorer is losing market share dramatically to browsers like Chrome and Firefox. Windows is under attack from several other operating systems, etc.

To the larger point of whether capitalist markets tends to centralize and institutionalize wealth or not, I guess it’s a pretty steep challenge for us to settle that issue here. And it’s obviously an issue on which reasonable people can honestly disagree - so I think I’ll pass on taking it any further for now.

I’ll make some narrower responses, howevever, about Microsoft & the internet.

First, you seem to conflate Microsofts operating system Windows competing for market share with OsX and Linux with the advent of the internet; Why?

I would argue that the OS market has historically been and still mostly is an example of a very poorly functioning market. It is functioning poorly because a key value in the commodity is compability (software and hardware) which allows dominant players (i.e. here Microsoft) to lock in customers and enjoy what has been in effect a monopoly. This is basically still the case! Windows costs premium bucks; Linux is free. Windows market share is 80+ percent; Linux market share is maybe 1 percent (for workstations and home computers). Windows has for sure lately lost some market share, mostly to OsX, but not much. So I’m not sure where we’re supposed to go with the OS market as an example…

Again about the internet I am not sure if I understand you correctly, but you seem to be asserting equivalence between changes brought on by the arrival of the Internet and the work of free capitalist markets. I think you have to make a clearer case for me to accept that. I don’t see any selfevident equivalency between the internet and free markets - as they have been defined and understood until now. I see some overlap but mostly a pretty muddled case with a lot of unspoken assumptions.

The Internet is certainly a transformative event in human civilization, rewriting the rules for existing economies but - as previously stated - most of the technology (TCP/IP, DNS, World Wide Web) that were necessary preconditions for the present internet were funded and invented on government and supragovernenment levels and not by private corporations.

In the same way I also think you have to make a case rather than asserting (as you do downpost) that the evolution of the internet that followed is a clearcut case of free market capitalism at work.

If you look at the case of wikipedia for example (IMHO the most stellar example of the transformative potential of the internet) it is actually the case that it offers it’s users a service - the access to the agregated knowledge of all users - at no price at all, and that the quality of the service is contingent upon all users contibuting work for free. How does that fit with a traditional capitalist market scenario of buyers, sellers, competition and pricing?

Looking at many other internet success-stories in it’s formative days you will find similar scenarios: craigslist started out as some guy offering a useful service for free, the business model came far later. Making money on a free market was not the incentive that led to the innovation of the service.

So I’d still say you have at best a mixed bag here.

@Sam_Stone

I have a good plan for a good health care compromise that I think is far superior to the Democrat’s version. I’ll post that in a subsequent message.

I’d like to hear it! New thread?

@Sam_Stone

I don’t quite agree with that. I think there’s a lot of traction among the public to be gained from an opposition to ‘old style democratic socialism’, because I see Democrats rejuvenating a lot of that.

Like I said, I agree that there is some short term political benefit to be had by using well-known, established messages like painting democrats as “socialists”. Personally I think it mostly plays to the republican base, i.e. tea party people (and those are not the people the republican party needs to speak to).

Because really, what do socialism have in common with modern Democratic policy? The “socialdemocratic” parties in other parts of the world is mostly “socialistic” in name only; In reality they are “progressive”. The Marxist heritage is dead; the acceptance and embrace of market capitalism is pretty much universal.

Socialism is not progressive taxation (then the united states would be socialist now), it’s not the welfare state or universal health care, it’s certainly not cap & trade. Rather socialism is the belief in the goal of collective ownership of the means of production and distribution of goods. That’s a position with no advocates.

@Sam_Stone

As I said, there are actually a lot of new ideas on the conservative side of aisle - they’re just having a hard time being heard because the old power structure still exists. Economists like Kevin Murphy, Greg Mankiw, and Tyler Cowen have all sorts of radical new ideas and are certainly have more affinity for Republicans than Democrats. A lot of younger Republicans are breaking away from the ideas of the ‘old guard’. If you read National Review, you can see a lot of this struggle playing out in its pages. New voices like Ross Douthat and Andy McCarthy are trying to move the party in a new direction. Jonah Goldberg is moving more towards a Libertarian position, following in Bill Buckley’s footsteps. The fracturing of the Republican party has actually made organizations like Cato and AEI more influential, and they have a lot of radical ideas.

I recall some discussions on the corner after the elections concerning the “reformists” like Douhat contra the “traditionalists”; advocates of the latter position asserted that “conservative” values were more or less universal values
with timeless relevance, with Goldberg acting mediator… I’d say the “traditionalists” won out in the corner, but my memory is foggy, i’d have to read up

From reading McCarthys stuff mostly as posts on the corner, my impression was that he mostly writes about foreign policy / national security issues (from a pretty uncompromising “neocon” perspective; i.e. in line with Bush policy and Joe Bolton). And also quite a lot about the judiciary, and then takes the originalist (?) view, which obviously plays to values voters. If he wrote extensively on economic policy over there I missed it or forgot. From what I remember reading i’d pin him as a pretty strong “national security” and “value” conservative judging from that, but admittedly I would guess you know more on where he’s at on the whole policy spectra.

I like reading Jonahs stuff, feels like he’s the defacto leader of the pack in there, and really a pretty smart guy. Too bad he has chosen to make his name (and money!) with the up-is-downish LibFascism schtick. That stuff comes accross as slightly unserious in a fox news / ann coulter way to me, even though i would expect Goldbergs book to be on quite another intellectual level (than fox or coulter) if i took the time to read it.

Anyhow, if you’d like to refer me to some resources to read up on new “reformist” ideas, I’d be very grateful!

@Sam_Stone

I was involved with the internet from the very earliest days. While it’s true that Arpanet was funded by the government (and NSFNet and a few other pieces of basic infrastructure), there’s a very limited amount of credit the government shoudl get for the internet as it exists today. The internet in its vast complexity is almost entirely a function of bottom-up evolution and market forces. The fact that in its earliest days it was a communication backbone between research centers is almost completely irrelevant.

As an analogy, it is kind of like saying that the government should get the credit or the modern PC, because NASA funded some microchip research forty years ago.

Well if you’d go for some parts government and institutional innovation, some parts market forces, and some parts bottom-up evolution (a.k.a. people doing stuff for free and for fun) I’d have no problem with that.

Arguing that government and supragovernment (like CERN) deserves no credit although most core technologies and innovations were funded by government and supragovernment seems disingenious and unwarranted.

What kind of internet would we have today without TCP/IP; without the world wide web? I can’t accept a simple assertion that those technical breakthroughs were irrelevant, nor the way in which they came into being. In fact the internet we have today would not be possible without them. That’s like arguing that the impact of the car on modern society owes nothing to the invention of the wheel, only to Henry Ford. Without the wheel no T-Ford.

Neither do I accept that the origins of the internet network itself is irrelevant. It is actually incumbent on you to show that an alternate scenario where the internet arose in another fashion (f.e. through market forces in private enterprise) is plausible.

So back to my original narrower point: I believe an ad-campaign drawing analogies between the internet and libertarian / free market policies would be a mixed bag in effectiveness (as an ad campaign), i.e. because the natural response would be to point out the origins of the internet in government and institutional research and funding.

@Sam_Stone

The major difference is that Republican initiatives should always be focused on moving power closer to the people. Local initiatives, decentralized control, smaller educational institutions, etc. Democrats are all about consolidating power in Washington, and doling it out to their special interests such as large unions and the NEA. All under the thumb of Washington.

Free information. Individual empowerment. Dynamism. Embracing change. Allowing society to move forward organically, from the bottom up. Local control. Reduction in the power of central authority. That’s a winning direction.

This reminds me quite a lot of where most european right-of-center political parties are policywise (maybe the canadian right as well?). Drop the values voters and a more pragmatic type of small government libertarianism.