Frank’s Case Book

One of the problems with Liberals is that they often look for tyranny in all the wrong places, and are blind to real conspicuous threats to liberty that come with a smile. While I disagree, there is some value of the Liberals clamoring  to extend full Constitutional criminal rights to terrorists at war with us when captured on the battlefield. It is certainly of value to question the limits of enhanced interrogation techniques. Conservatives would like to return the favor to Liberals. We remind them that if the US were to experience tyranny it would likely not be of the jacked-booted variety. Such a despotism would not wrap us in chains, but a warm blanket from which escape would be difficult. Many have pointed out that French scholar Alexis de Tocqueville described this after his visit to the United States in the early nineteenth century. I repeat his words here, this week in the shadow of health care reform, because of their uncanny accuracy and eloquence.

I want to imagine with what new features despotism could be produced in the world: I see an innumerable crowd of like and equal men who revolve on themselves without repose, procuring the small and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. .  .  .

Above these an immense tutelary power is elevated, which alone takes charge of assuring their enjoyments and watching over their fate. It is absolute, detailed, regular, far-seeing, and mild. It would resemble paternal power if, like that, it had for its object to prepare men for manhood; but on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them fixed irrevocably in childhood; it likes citizens to enjoy themselves provided that they think only of enjoying themselves. It willingly works for their happiness; but it wants to be the unique agent and sole arbiter of that; it provides for their security, foresees and secures their needs, facilitates their pleasures, conducts their principal affairs, directs their industry, regulates their estates, divides their inheritances; can it not take away from them entirely the trouble of thinking and the pain of living?

So it is that every day it renders the employment of free will less useful and more rare; it confines the action of the will in a smaller space and little by little steals the very use of it from each citizen. .  .  .

Thus, after taking each individual by turns in its powerful hands and kneading him as it likes, the sovereign extends its arms over society as a whole; it covers its surface with a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls cannot clear a way to surpass the crowd; it does not break wills but it softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which government is the shepherd. .  .  .

I have always believed that this sort of regulated, mild, and peaceful servitude, whose picture I have just painted, could be combined better than one imagines with some of the external forms of freedom, and that it would not be impossible for it to be established in the very shadow of the sovereignty of the people.

“He is a hypocrite who professes what he does not believe; not he who does not practice all he wishes or approves.’’ — William Hazlitt.

“Hypocrisy is the homage which vice pays to virtue.’’ — François de la Rochefoucauld.

During a plenary session at  a large scientific conference I attended last year in Boston, Dr. Berrien Moore, a member of the International Panel on Climate Change, gave a thoughtful presentation on the dire consequences of global climate change. His well-received presentation suggested that unless there were radical reductions in future carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, the world would experience grave environmental consequences. It is not clear how many others were conscious of the irony of the situation. We were all at a conference having flown hundreds or thousands of miles from many parts of the world fretting about the consequences of modern society’s large carbon footprint. If we all took the thesis of the presentation seriously, why were we all flying many miles to attend a conference that might have been held virtually?

Now, I fully appreciate the benefits and importance of face-to-face contact at scientific meetings, but should not those who appreciate and understand the impact of climate change be the first, buy their example, to adjust their lifestyles as a witness to the importance placed onminimizing the impact of man on the environment. The fact that we ignored this implicit hypocrisy does not make the case for concern about global climate change any less or any more valid. Hypocrisy, however, corrodes credibility. If former Vice-President Al Gore can refer to the passage of the cap-and-trade bill as a “moral imperative’’ and Nobel prize-winning economist can describe opposition to the bill as “treason against the planet,’’ it seems little to ask that we save the fuel by conducting a conference virtually.

This distinction between personal behavior and public pronouncements was also conspicuous this week as Governor Mark Sanford admitted ignoring his marital pledges and jetting off to Argentina to spend time with a mistress. Sanford had publicly argued in favor of traditional family values, but clearly has difficulty in meeting these aspirations. It thus afforded an opportunity, for those who prefer a world where traditional family values are given less weight an opportunity, to ridicule Sanford. Given some of Sanford’s peculiar post-scandal behavior, it is hard to imagine a character easier to ridicule.

Pointing out the hypocrisy of advocates represents a convenient way to avoid dealing with very real issues. The high carbon footprint of those who argue for limiting carbon missions does not make the threat to the climate any more or less severe. The inability of those who argue in favor of traditional family values meet their own aspirations does not make the attenuation of these values any less socially destabilizing. Indeed, when people harp excessively on the hypocrisy of others, it is reasonable to suspect that they are motivated less by aversion to hypocrisy than the opportunity to score political points. Perhaps a better measure of consistency would be if those who fundamentally agree with an advocate of a certain position are first to criticize deviations. For example, do environmentalists take to task those of their own who live high carbon footprints, or are traditionalists quick to criticize those of their own who do not live up to their aspirations?

In Mark Sanford’s home state of South Carolina, 13 of 27 Republican Senators are calling for Sanford resignation. However, at a meeting of those who take the possibility of global warming seriously, there was nary a concern for the carbon footprint of the meeting. The latter, at least seems a bit too convenient.

Every time I hear  the mantra about the disappearing  middle class, I want to ask if percentage of households in the middle three quintiles has changed. I am sure, many on Left out of ideological reflex would assure me that it has. Of course, the middle three quintiles of any distribution of income, or grades, or heights, by definition, will always contain 60%  of the sample.

Mathematically literate people of any ideology quickly recognize this truth about the fraction of people in the middle quintile. Nonetheless, there many people who are genuinely concerned by the the observation that median household income seems to have stagnated. But this statistic is misleading, because it does not account for the changing nature of households. Households have shrunk in size. Steve Conover has shown that the income per worker has gone up. It is just that the  number of workers per household has decreased offsetting this increase. Household, rather than individuals incomes say less about the economy and more about the way people have chosen to live their lives. Perhaps as individual income increase, people are free to opt to live in smaller households.

If you look at the distribution of income per earner as a function of time as shown below:

it appears that the middle class has just been happily pushed into higher income brackets.

Despite these statistics, many people genuinely feel that the economy has changed negatively for the “middle class” over the last few decades. I suspect that the source of this anxiety is associated with two important factors as opposed to the actual income distribution.

(1) It is very difficult to maintain a “middle-class” lifestyle with a job that is low skill. A retail worker like a shoe salesman or a low-skill factory worker used to be middle class. Low skill workers now have to compete with automation or low skill workers of other countries. The fraction of the US economy that is manufacturing is the same that it used to be, but manufacturing is now being performed by fewer and fewer more productive workers. Much like agriculture that dominated the economy  in the 1800s’s, fewer and fewer people are required to produce more and more. This is as it should be. Our standard of living would be far lower if we as a country were so unproductive that low skill jobs were typical and people in them were middle income. The goal is arrange for as many people as possible to be prepared for high-skill jobs.

(2) Middle class is not what it used to be. Middle class Americans live in larger homes than their parents, have air conditioning when their parents did not, eat out more often than their parents did, and go on vacation more frequently. This does not even count the gadgets such as cell phones, computers, and large flat panel televisions that were not even available to the wealthy a generation ago. Our expectations are higher than those of our parents.

The real danger is that this anxiety will lead to government policies that reduce the dynamism of the economy in the name of security and make the progress we have already achieved less possible to sustain.