Tag Archives: politics

Dueling Mischaracterizations

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David Kennedy, Stanford University Emeritus Professor, responded to The Wall Street Journal‘s Holman Jenkins in Kennedy’s Letters letter in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal. Kennedy said Jenkins mischaracterized his book regarding Franklin Roosevelt’s handling of government during the Great Depression.

Mr Jenkins has me arguing that “Franklin D Roosevelt didn’t end the Depression, he used it to enlarge the federal government.” True enough but too reductive.
Roosevelt didn’t simply “enlarge” the federal government; he right-sized and reformed it for the conditions of modern society. His initiatives rescued and dramatically upgraded capitalism, as witnessed by the unmatched performance of the US economy in the post-World War II decades. The New Deal gave to the exceptionally fortunate “greatest generation” a scaffolding of institutions and practices that reduced risk in sector after sector of American life, brought stability and predictability to millions, nurtured the shared prosperity and consequent trust that ended the Jim Crow era, and positioned the US for world leadership to century’s end and beyond.

Kennedy’s own mischaracterizations begin with his Roosevelt didn’t simply “enlarge” the federal government; he right-sized and reformed it for the conditions of modern society. This is his cynical arrogance of presenting that claim as though it’s received fact rather than the matter of opinion that it so plainly is.

Kennedy’s other serious mischaracterization is his risible claim that Roosevelt’s New Deal created the conditions for US leadership in producing global prosperity and stability. This is a just-as-cynical omission of the simple fact that in the aftermath of WWII and the war’s global destruction of assets and of lives (the latter far beyond the merely killed), during those decades of the Greatest Generation, the US was the only economy in the world that could function. Nearly any “scaffolding” would have put us in the global economic driver seat.

How much better could we and the world have done without Roosevelt’s wage and price controls, still intact today in one form or another (minimum wage laws directly controlling wages, and price controls indirectly in place with Roosevelt-populated Supreme Court rulings like Wickard v Filburn, which made it illegal for farmers to grow for their personal (and so wholly intrastate) consumption without counting it in their interstate commercial production, a ruling that also called a farmer’s strictly intrastate commercial production a part of interstate commerce)?

Roosevelt’s expansion both artificially created jobs for a bloated civil service, it straitjacketed our free market capitalist economics.

So Much for Liberty

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Contempt for ordinary citizens is the order of the day in the United Kingdom, which has fallen and can’t seem to get up.

[T]he [British] government is moving to allow jury trials for “indictable only” offenses such as murder and “either way” offenses with likely sentences of more than three years in prison. Judge-only “swift” courts will hear cases ranging from burglary and theft to sexual assault and stalking. Judges will also sit without a jury in fraud and financial cases deemed too complex for jurors.

This is…disappointing. It’s also a revival of the 350-year-old Bushell’s Case but with the addendum of eliminating the case’s question altogether. Bushell’s Case was a trial of a couple of government-defined religious miscreants during which the presiding judge refused to accept the jury’s acquittal verdict and jailed the ringleader, Edward Bushell, until he voted for the judge-approved verdict. That case was resolved on appeal in favor of Bushell and British commoners generally, extending as the appeal finally ruled habeas corpus to those commoners as well as the nobility.

Now the British government is moving to go beyond that presiding judge’s position and eliminate juries altogether in a vast number of cases. No juries, no verdicts that run counter to the government’s position.

This revival also is a clear expression of the contempt with which British government men and women hold their subjects: commoners are just too grindingly stupid to understand many kinds of cases, and so they must be led away so their Betters can handle them without any pesky commoner interference.

Juries? We ain’t got no juries. We don’t need no juries! We don’t have to show you any stinkin’ juries!

Foolish Social Conservatives

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Some are as foolish as the Republicans’ House Chaos Caucus in their all-or-nothing positions. A case in point is Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and its supporting cohorts. These entities are, quite properly, anti-abortion, but their tactics are, at best, suboptimal.

The activists’ warning was simple: extending subsidies without such limits [no funding for abortions] was a line Republicans must not cross to keep social conservative support in next year’s midterm elections.

Withholding support for Republican candidates in 2026 over their not being anti-abortion enough to suit them will guarantee a Progressive-Democratic Party majority in the House—and those politicians absolutely will not stay with the status quo; they will enthusiastically and loudly expand access to abortion and make all of us taxpayers—including members of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, et al.—pay for those abortions.

Better would be, for the near term, to push a concrete (not merely conceptual) plan for using the putative subsidy funding instead as vouchers for us citizens to use to fund our HSAs and FSAs, with limits on annual contributions to those eliminated. An additional improvement to HSAs in particular would be eliminating the requirement to have a particular kind of health coverage policy (so-called high-deductible policies) in order to have an HSA. Any citizen should be able to set up and fund an HSA regardless of the kind of policy or no policy at all that he has. Allowing unused FSA funds to be rolled over into subsequent years would be a useful step toward rolling FSA accounts into HSAs, eliminating the quasi-duplication.

On Whose Side Are They?

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Via Deputy SecState Christopher Landau:The data are for the Biden administration years of 2022-2024. As Landau pointed out, the money sent to Russia is in blue; the money sent to Ukraine is in orange. This is how much the nations of Europe really care about Ukraine and their own security. The money transfers to the barbarian invader pales the paltry financial and equipment support those nations have been offering Ukraine. Only the UK was sending more aid to Ukraine than to Russia; that has been colored by the UK’s access to North Sea oil and natural gas.

This, despite the hooraw over the US’ apparently fading support for Ukraine.

As usual, right click on the image and select Open Link in New Tab to enlarge the image.

H/t @ralflongwalker

A Brief Thought on Politics and Government

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It’s necessary to keep in mind a fundamental fact of government: government does absolutely nothing; it’s purely a hypothetical construct.

That hypothetical aspect, though, is made concretely extant by the men and women who populate a government and occupy the various positions within it. In our American case, our government is given a framework and the positions within it by our Constitution and the statutes within our Constitution that create specific Departments and Agencies and their structure. Our government—this construction—still does absolutely nothing. It’s the men and women who occupy those positions within our government who do the things vernacularly attributed to “government.”

Politics is what those men and women do. It’s politics that those men and women employ to do things, to enact statutes, execute or rescind regulations, generate legal cases for our government’s courts, and issue court decisions (yes, politics is involved in judges’ and Justices’ development of their decisions, especially at the appellate levels where groups of judges and Justices must agree at least more or less on a ruling).

Those politics center on trading off support or obstruction of this or that position in return for support or obstruction of that or this position. Every politician or court official has something to gain or lose or trade in these tradeoffs. At bottom—because we humans at bottom are venal creatures—these political tradeoffs are as much for personal gain—generally in political power, sometimes for explicit financial—as they are for the nation’s good.

And that’s the danger of politics in government: the men and women who are the real actors, in the name of government, tend to act for their own weal first and the weal of our nation, the weal of us citizens, second.

Against that framework, it’s important to consider the philosophies underlying our two major political parties. In broad strokes, one of the parties holds the position that government can solve most, if not all, of the problems us citizens face, whether as groups of us or individually. This leads to this party moving to constantly expand the role of government in us citizens’ lives.

The other party holds the position that government is necessary because some problems are best worked, or can only be worked, by government, and so statutes should be kept simple and regulations to a minimum. This leads to moves to limit government power and intrusion into our lives.

Thus, one party moves to expand its politicians’ own political power and financial gain, while the other party moves to limit those gains or at least expand them at a much slower rate.

While the two parties tend to converge, they’re not there yet, and elections still have consequences.