Just not by irrelevant criteria for faculty appointments. Those being chosen to teach at Columbia University will obviously be wildly credentialed—this is not an institution where the unqualified will ever be able to teach. To imply otherwise would be an insult to Alma Mater. However, this policy recognizes that factors other than skills, research and ideas should play a gate-keeping role for the ideas that leave this school; otherwise the policy would have no purpose.  After all, the academics hired will be those who have already proven themselves in academia, and hardly targets for a campaign to broaden opportunity. Overall, it sends a message that we should set a direction for the results of our inquiries before we even begin. Thankfully, this message is mixed. Columbia’s oldest college requires its students to study both the scientific method and the writings of Locke, Hegel and Mill. I learned here that in a free exchange of ideas the truth shines out on its own, regardless of its bearer. Indeed, some in the College Republicans have questioned whether ideological rather than racial diversity should be the target of our policies if we want a better discourse—after all, a person’s race is no indicator of their ideas.

This type of policy adds administrative weight to a style of thinking that requires us to interrogate every problem from the standpoint of our gender, race, ethnicity and sexuality. Such weight should come only from persuasion and free acceptance of academics, never policy. Furthermore, regulating hiring only covers Columbia in more bureaucratic red tape, making it harder for our school to change as time goes on.

I am sure there are readers who think that I am grasping for rationalizations in opposition to a policy that I would have opposed no matter what. It is true that I usually have an individualistic outlook that is hostile to issues of collective identity, and that some cynically accuse ideologies that favor individualism as masks for racist or classist power grabs. But my worries do not come from either simple conservatism or whiny opposition. It is true that I am sensitive to the issue because I am a Republican. But my sensitivity stems from the fact that the philosophies that have been coming dangerously close to ossifying into orthodoxies seem to be actively hostile to the way I think. And it is policies that lend administrative power to a momentarily dominant stream of thought that push what are otherwise exciting and iconoclastic ideas towards being orthodoxies. It is the feeling of being on the wrong side of this orthodoxy that makes me more aware than some of my peers of the dangers of setting rules for who gets to teach.

I do not oppose the initiative yet—though if I were President Bollinger I would have used the money for other things, such as a student body that is ranked the most stressed in the country. The policy may work well. It is possible that my worries are nothing but partisan paranoia. Regardless, this is a moment for discussion. Is there any way to keep placing a value on the disinterested pursuit of knowledge? How to we use our influence for the good? Is there a tradeoff?

What’s interesting to me is the idea that there is a real difference between a law imposed by a government one does not think is immediately concerned with one’s own interest, and the same law imposed by your own, local representatives. Ultimately, this is the difference between the experience of a benign government and the experience of democracy–it is about our own personal chance to consent to the laws that are made. The assurance that, despite being far away, the government cares about us and represents members of our own nation, is not enough. Anything short of local rule is, to a degree, undemocratic. This is where, I think, there is room for an individual state to enact a statist health care system but there is no such room for Congress to do so. 26 different states sued to prevent the law from being enacted–26! They do not want the Affordable Care Act there, and to impose it from above seems to me to be wrong. The states that want it for themselves (like lefty Mass.) can impose it on themselves. But should we do something that is less than democratic in the name of efficiency? In a capitalist economy, much of efficiency comes from greater freedom, but in government that’s not always the case. There’s a tradeoff here, as has been understood from Aristotle to Machiavelli to  Stalin, between democracy and efficiency in a complex world. In left-wing defenses of the ACA (and the vast, unelected bureaucracy that regulates every aspect of our lives from education to medicine to food and finance), I’d like to see this tradeoff more explicitly discussed.

And now to Anderson:

“In the end most colonists had no problem distinguishing between what their assemblies had once freely granted and identical contributions now levied by Parliament. It was, of course, more an emotional than an economic matter. However it might vanish, a dollar out of one’s pocket will never be more than a dollar gone. But the feeling that comes from handing it to a friend will always differ from the sensation one gets from surrendering it to a mugger.”

What I’m writing now, I don’t think, is not in the genre of explanation—trying to explain to the educated, progressive class what the heck is going on in Alabama. I’d like to illustrate some Republican themes I’ve been developing, using the campaign as an illustrative example.

The problem of post-war politics has been mass-organization, the distribution of our prosperity. After seething in the industrialized cities of Europe, the clashing political philosophies of the 19^th century had reached the apogee of their fury and power in a half-century of self-immolation. There is a general weariness, even now. A passionate idealist can, realistic, go nowhere in politics now. The spirit of the age is bureaucracy.

This is reflected in the offices that mark the working lives of all classes, the bureaucratized government services that regulate our food, health, immigration, travel, schools and retirement. It is wonderfully smooth, this modern devolution of power. And what’s more, we like it. The best expressions of angst that the generation above ours can muster are movies like the Big Lebowski and Office Space—the routine sigh of the morning alarm clock warning us to get to work. Descendents of Bartelby the Scrivener, they represent the fact that life and thought just haven’t developed that far since then On the broad view, the western world has finally got its habits together. The people became wary of passion, and it’s their will that it should be so.

This bureaucratized world is a threat to those with Republican ideals. The increased bureaucracy that effectively controls the everyday population is unelected, their jobs unknown and their deeds uncensored. Many Washington insiders barely know the names of the people that run the offices and are in power to make decisions, to come up with campaigns, to decide who gets benefits. Who makes the decisions about the minutiae that are the most important part of citizens ordinary experience with the law? Sometimes lobbyists. Sometimes interns. Sometimes an assistant who caught a glimpse of a number that wasn’t right, or an academic that sat on an advisory panel once. Or wrote a report.

I see three major axes of problems with this. The first is that big government is inefficient, for lack of incentive to perform well, knowledge of the specific task at hand, and accountability. The incentive problem is well-known: you come to different conclusions when your own money is on the line. The people writing bills on business, agriculture in Chicago and Iowa have bachelors’ political science and history degrees and are experts in Florida and New Hampshire. And if one of these appointed directors decides to start using the power of the federal government to make policy that the majority doesn’t like (for instance, anti-obesity policies), they are insulated from political pressure.

The second line of attack is that this is absolutely incommensurate with any degree of political freedom. We have created a class of second-rate “smart kid in the grade”es who aren’t brilliant enough to go into academia, are too liberal in their skills to go into computers or medicine, not ambitious enough to go into finance. In short, They are affluent suburbanites from Washington and the state capitols. They believe themselves to be public servants. They are modern day mandarins, credentialed by their SAT scores and law degrees. They are the constitution of our state.

But the people wish for a benevolent, ever-so-mildly progressive rule, so what’s the problem? Laws, individual moral codes, customs and ways of life interact in incredibly complex ways, and what bothers me most is that we are confronted with a situation where individual political virtue is not an ideal any longer.

The lone ranger who comes from little, sets up a shop or rises up the corporate chain, works and saves to send her children to the best schools would never suffer foreign occupation, domestic corruption or tyranny. She works hard because it is the right thing to do. She’s bright, independent, creative—a risk taker. Capable of building a community, she builds it with her own to hands, and takes a leadership role in her social life. She’s the person who would come up with the bold new philosophical idea, invent the new ipod. Genius is bred by skill in decision making. This is the same decision making that is used in informed, rational political debate, where the fiery exchanges of point and counter point are only made more important because you’re aware of the power of your own vote and the ultimate importance of a decision that is not appealable past your own will.

When we’re not making the major decisions about our own lives and lifestyles, it is much harder to raise a generation that values these things. It’s easier, it’s safer to look for what’s nice and easy. In a world where all you have to do is file and stand online while someone else decides about your medical care, your food, how much your nation imports or produces, who’s right in a matter of scandal, there seems little reason to raise our daughters and sons to be those lone rangers. School at least feels free, because of institutions like PTA’s and (some) local discussion and accountability.

That’s frightening, and there are two possible ways to handle it. The first is to reignite the in-your-face adventurousness of old capitalism. Famously red in tooth and claw, the victor claims the spoils, the game is open to all, and skill determines victory. There is something holy about success, the blessings of hard work. The overall ethic to be restored on this model is “reap what thou hast sown”—only then will Americans begin to sow a future as bright as the past. This is the appeal of a Mitt Romney nomination. The Romneys, after all, are the poster children of the success of the lone ranger businessman. The entire party, with endless discussions of Joseph Schumpeter and Bain Capital, can repackage and push the incentive structure known as the gospel of success. This can be called the aggressive approach: the response to the new world order that ensures that your own values and paradigms have a guiding place in it—even if this place has to be intentionally fought for.

The Rick Santorum reaction pulls back from the sterilized offices that decide our fate and focus on empowering social units closer to the individual: the family, the local church. What we can control now that modernity has absolutely gotten away with our government. There’s an implicity plea: do all the tinkering you want, o bureaucrat. Just don’t touch me from your faraway office. Don’t change who I am. If everything else is up to you, at least let my family stay the way it was.  Of course, in the particular social spheres in which this is being articulated, this gives rise to some attitudes I generally disagree with. But that doesn’t change the fact at all that this is what they seem to be saying. This is the passive approach. Instead of trying to reaasert the old values within the new system, this one draws boundaries, throws up walls, circles the wagons and prays that the new system doesn’t change it too much.

Bureaucracy has won. No one except the most dogmatic of libertarians believes that American society would function better in human terms by getting rid of the FDA, that we should have no laws about environments, that some of these regulatory agencies should not be there. In this world, it is our job to maintain the bureaucracy so that it doesn’t meaningfully affect the context of freedom as we experience it. This requires us to work out new theoretical foundations, new expressions of what freedom means in the 21^st century. The importance of preserving the individual’s choices and their own communal and familiar sphere against government intervention to the Republican ideal is pointed, and needn’t be lost if Santorum is defeated. And I sincerely hope that the values of capitalism become the discussion, once again, as well. I hoped this articulated the major Republican problem as I see it, and two ways that those with our ideas have attempted solutions.

If, in the 17th and 18th centuries, Britain banned shipping and burned ports instead of simply attacking pirates, there would not be a world economy today.

I oppose H.R. 3261: Stop Online Piracy Act because the ultimate point of copyright law, according to our constitution, is pragmatic: we’d like to incentivize creativity as far as possible. This bill would go no further in terms of incentivizing creativity (and would do the opposite by drastically restricting the size of the market) and would do infinitely more harm than good. Everyone agrees that there is some benefit to be had by exposing more people to new ideas and by allowing free cross-cooperation. The risk to that value more than outweighs any benefit, if there is even any, by the severe punishment of those who aid violators of copyright.

A vote for this bill is an audacious repudiation of your job as a representative of a people that hates this legislation, and will virtually ensure that no one under the age of 30 will vote for you again.

Sincerely yours,
Jesse Eiseman

Scholarships/tuition as a system of taxation widens opportunity rather than redistributing wealth. Everyone but the most die-hard leftists should be happy.

There’s been somewhat of a backlash recently against the belief that it’s right for everyone to go to college, and until this line of thinking occurred to me I was sympathetic. And it’s true to the extent that higher education is useless and expensive. But it should get less expensive for the lower class (though not free on a massive scale, that’s asking for bubble, toil and trouble)–private universities should massively expand scholarships in the name of a capitalist ethic. Though I accept the general critique: scholarships should probably be given more towards science, technology, engineering and mathematics than towards humanities majors (especially in a university like ours, where STEM majors have to read Plato and Rawls, too, and therefore get a decent lesson in how to be a voter in a liberal democracy).

This seems like a reasonable position, certainly for a Republican. It shows a regard for efficient economics and a disregard for European culture. What’s not to love?

The problem is that I really do believe in local government. I don’t think that the rules that govern people’s lives should be promulgated from on high in Brussels by nameless, faceless, unelected bureaucrats. I think that people can govern themselves more effectively locally and that it minimizes the problem of minority voters (that the minority is, in a sense, being ruled against their will), when the Dutch get to rule themselves (shrinking the minority from the entire population of the Netherlands to Geert Wilders’ hair).

This raises an even bigger problem. Europe’s situation right now boils down to this: stay in a loose confederation and fail miserably to pay your debts, raise taxes or maintain a single currency. Or put greater power in a central government in the hope of keeping the entire disparate group of states together. In other words, join or die. It’s eerily similar to the situation that we faced in the 1780s, and I don’t like that my instinctive theoretical position would put me for the Articles of Confederation. The Constitution worked really well. It’s a brilliant document. But would I really have voted for increased centralization in the name of efficiency (my King’s College pedigree notwithstanding)?

It’s interesting that I get to analyze this thought experiment through with a real case (Europe). The only direction I can think of taking this so I can preserve my small government, liberty-loving values and my in-the-moment support of the United States of (Europe, America) is this: when government restricts freedom it should be as small as possible. But that’s not all that government does. Government also makes loans and creates currency. Neither of those violates anyone’s individual, negative liberties. Both provide very, very necessary services that would not arise as efficiently otherwise. (EconNerd Alert: I do not care that you have a model where money arises endogenously. I live in the real world, and it doesn’t.) In that case, it’s possible that government has a right (duty?) to be organized on a large scale.

But obviously, the EU does more than just create currency. It regulates trade, agriculture and business in ways that have huge effects on the day to day life of the average European. And it is exceedingly rare (note: I’m covering myself. I mean never.) that Europeans outside of politics get to vote on the details of these laws. What’s more, the Euro needs fiscal discipline to survive. That means that people like Draghi and Merkel are going to be able to dictate to the Greek and Italian peoples when they’re allowed to borrow and on what they’re allowed to spend. And you’d better believe that retirement age is coming up in those meetings. These are all things that should be determined as close to home as possible in varied ways in different countries, so that people get to tailor their laws to their lives, and so as few as possible are coerced by the state to follow laws they voted against.

Maybe the original referenda to constitute the Euro…but that’s Hobbesian nonsense, and it’s too far removed from the day to day logic of freedom to come close to resembling democracy.

Maybe a two-speed Europe, where culture differences are low enough so that conflict like this doesn’t arise, forcing one side to rule the other? That’s the solution in the USA, where states rights should effectively lead to a socialist periphery and a liberal center, so that one side doesn’t force socialist institutions on vast swaths of people who don’t want it. Until we elect a president who….never mind. But that still represents centralization, and the French and Germans aren’t really close enough to calm my doubts. And it would be abandoning the south to inflation and economic disaster.

So I’m torn.

He talks about a series of studies that show that overconfidence in CEOs can be disastrous, that the most awarded CEOs often underperform, and that they often become deluded about their own abilities. Fine—he also quotes research that says the stock market punishes these firms, a victory for the Efficient Markets Hypothesis if there ever was one. What caught my eye, though, was a stray line that mentioned that because of overconfidence effects, CEOs tend to take stupider, riskier decisions with their own money than they do when they’re playing with other people’s money.

Since I’m reading a book about decision theory, I decided to think this piece of data through. It seems  to contradict a founding staple of classically liberal thought: that people make smarter decisions when the risks are higher for them, and that the reason government is so inefficient is because they’re playing with other people’s money. Is it possible that government spending could actually be more efficient than private investing, because bureaucrats are insulated from personal responsibility? (Yes, I’ve read Hannah Arendt. I’m well aware that bureaucracy’s void where individual responsibility should be causes ethical problems. This is a hypothetical.)

The first possibility I thought about had to do with the distinction between wealthy and middle class investors. It doesn’t seem to be correct, and if it is, then the leftist case for soaking the rich gets stronger. I haven’t really thought it through yet—though I would instinctively say that the effects are dominated by the myriad other determinants of risk-taking behavior and government inefficiencies.

On reflection, however, it occurs to me that this is an obvious observation, and that it brings out one of my favorite things about American culture. Of course the government is more conservative as an investor than the average CEO (it’s also wildly inefficient, since risk can be efficient, too). The mistake was assuming that we want all of the investment in the country to go to things that are safe and likely to succeed. We don’t.

It is risk, the risk of failure and the possibility of a major breakthrough, that keeps our economy progressing. It is the risk that Mark Zuckerberg took dropping out of school, or that our ancestors took crossing the ocean to get here (don’t get me on the PC stuff. All of our ancestors crossed oceans to get here—we’re not in Mozambique.) The reason we need a robust private sector is to allow us to take risks, because the government sure as hell shouldn’t. Some of those risks will flower, most won’t, and people will lose money. But only from risk-taking can good things happen.

This is also the thinking that forms the foundation of our concept of freedom of speech, religion and conscience.  We don’t know who is right about the great questions. It could very well be the minority, the one, loner, crazy voice. If we could prove that there was no value to his speech, there’d be less of a reason to let him be heard. But we can’t. The state of uncertainty and the possibility of massive reward (eternal truth) put us in a position where we should invest societal resources (living with the crazy, actually listening to other points of view) on the off chance that we’re hearing the words of the next Jesus, Socrates or Joan of Arc.

But if risk-taking is such a social good, shouldn’t we insulate risk-takers from their mistakes so to encourage more investment? Obviously not (though that would be an interesting justification for bank bailouts—we don’t want them to stop trying to make the markets safer through clever diversification. We’d just rather it worked.). The threat of punishment is what prevents recklessness and drives money towards investments that we actually believe are being made by visionaries and not cranks. But this is where personal responsibility enters the nexus of decision making. It is easy to make a moral argument about personal responsibility here, but it comes from my a priori belief in humanity. I genuinely don’t see that it comes up endogenously to this discussion.

My final hypothesis: I think Democrats have an inherent dislike of risk. Risk, they might say, disproportionally hurts those who cannot afford to fail. It also hurts those against whom the deck is rigged (black, immigrant, poor, gay, female, etc.) But the unfairness of risk is not the only argument against, and it can be solved by policies directly targeted at the problem rather than at the market. In general, though, the world would be a nicer place if we could engineer it to in allow no risk, or only very small ones. Our experts can. Why shouldn’t we?

The Republican is not so risk averse. We’re an optimistic bunch: the market is a game, and every American has a world to gain. I would respond to the Democrat: Because risk drives investment, investment funds innovation, innovation creates progress, and we have a duty to the next generation and to ourselves to keep the great engine of progress running along.

“America or China?”

“America, as the ideals of freedom, human rights, democracy, and private entrepreneurship, at least for me, still stand stronger and more important as opposed to marvelous Chinese achievements of economic growth, discipline, and stability.”

-Srdja Popovic, activist who helped bring down Milosevic and provided a practical and pragmatic inspiration for the Arab Spring.

It’s our ideal of freedom they respect abroad. Let’s not dilute that with a Leviathan state and a cynical foreign policy. We are still a light unto the nations.