Really, Pretty Centrist

I am a self-described moderate but people who know me say I can sound “pretty liberal.”

But a core of regressives in our state legislature as well as in the U.S Congress make moderates and even true conservatives sound liberal.

In truth, I get exasperated with a tendency by some liberals to sound as though they are always trying to absolve groups and individuals of personal accountability.

An example is a story last week on New Republic by Dana Goldstein entitled, Inexcusable Absences about some truancy laws that hold parents accountable.

My concern as I read the recent DOJ report on the police department in Ferguson, Missouri, is that as a society we have an obsession now with institutional accountability.  That blinds us to an even more significant underlying problems in neighborhoods and homes.

In fact, there is ample evidence that even the problems of some individuals within institutions can be traced back to the homes and neighborhoods where they were raised.

But if you get “bleeding heart” beginning of Goldstein’s story, she makes several very valid data-driven points about how we can institutionally deal better deal with truancy institutionally, but few to enlighten societal interventions at home.

Okay, am I sounding moderate enough now?

I may have dismissed the article too soon had I not read Goldstein’s phenomenal book recently entitled The Teacher Wars, a well-written and documented overview of 175 years of American education.

It was particularly enlightening when read, as I did, in tandem with the just published revision of The Libertarian Mind written by David Boaz.  There is actually more agreement than people who only judge them by their titles might think.

This country was founded by liberals and libertarians who did not see those outlooks as incompatible.

The Teacher Wars illustrates just how old, tired and ineffective the polices are that are now being rehashed by regressives elected to high office across the country.  The far right still fails to grasp that we are not all born equal.

The book also illustrates how misguided teacher unions have been to shield unengaged teachers from consequences.

The Libertarian Mind brought to mind a friend I see on occasion frequenting a restaurant in our neighborhood.  Get him started and he will spend all the time you have and more explaining how the federal government is to blame for the collapses that brought about the Great Recession.

He has a point but fails to grasp that it is the free market that fails to incorporate the full cost of its actions into a fully sustainable cycle, instead pushing what are called negative externalities off onto society.

Taking responsibility for consequences is also a theme in The Libertarian Mind whose adherents would probably agree with the right of Michael Brown’s parents to sue the Ferguson Police Department as a rightful consequence.

But it is much more complex when consequences are enforced on poor parenting or neglectful neighbors and landlords or on personal behavior regardless of circumstances.

This is also an area today’s liberals avoid, seeming instead to absolve consequences by viewing personal responsibility through the lens of victims of circumstance such as objecting to work requirements for safety net benefits even though those were required when the nets were first erected, ironically by liberals.

Everything seems to revolve around that pesky little issue of free will.  Libertarians seem to reject any other influence and liberals often seem to sweep away free will altogether.

The sticky wicket seems to be what is blameworthy.

But none of us has been held entirely responsible for each of our actions so criminalizing poor or inadequate parenting may not ensure personal accountability either and certainly doesn’t seem fair or consistent with any of the world’s spiritual cultures.

Consequentialism and Communitarianism, are to me at the opposite ends of a spectrum, one seeming to view the world only through individual responsibility and the other viewing responsibility as a result of community interactions rather than personal behavior.

So there too, I find myself clinging as a centrist, though as I get older liberals probably see me as “pretty conservative” and my more conservative friends see me as “pretty liberal.”

The Priority Place-based Trait Across the Political Spectrum

A fascinating new study asked thousands of people who are ideological liberals, moderates and conservatives to rank the attributes and traits important to judging a city or town or area in which to live.

The results confirmed why two North Carolina cities such as Durham and Raleigh, even though they are separated by only two other towns, continue to diverge culturally because they appeal to different groups of people.

But to me, it boils down to what a reporter for a large city daily newspaper once remarked to me, “one of these towns just as well be Tulsa and the other Kuala Lumpur.”  In other words, their difference was like night and day!

However, what was interesting from this survey is that “clean air and water” rank not just first out of 47 attributes for liberals but also second for moderates and third for conservatives and libertarians. (click on the image and scroll down to the second chart.)

More often than not, the challenge is to “connect the dots” for people when it comes to things that threaten clean air and water.  People see a roadside billboard and may or may not even notice the inherent blight it creates, but if they could see or equate it with the fact that, in order for the billboard to be seen, the destruction of trees and vegetation that clean our air and water is necessary, and in addition, soil erosion and stream pollution will be direct results, we would most likely want to become truly billboard-free.

Billboards have continued to pollute roadsides long after all but 8% of the population has ceased to find them useful even over the course of an entire year because that industry is not only very effective at political rent-seeking through heavy contributions to political campaigns and arm-twisting of elected officials, but also because the billboard industry is effective at shaping the pro or against debate as positioning them as the underdog.

In reality, the debate is actually over defense of clean air and water and freedom from blight, values held by more than 7 out of 10 North Carolinians today and even protected by a constitutional amendment in the early 1970s.

I’ve witnessed first hand recently that support instead for an increasingly obsolete and increasingly destructive mode of advertising in the current North Carolina General Assembly such as roadside billboards is more a signal that elected officials, appointees and even some administrators seem far more responsive to special interests than public opinions.

I am not sure if moderates, like me, were studied but psychological research noted in this post by Dr. Brittany Liu at the University of California Irvine shows that conservatives are drawn to cognitive coherence while liberals are better able to handle cognitive complexity.

As a moderate myself, I relate to fact that moderates are probably more mixed.  I was immediately drawn to Durham more than two decades ago by its diversity and authenticity, but I am often puzzled when we seem to take fragmentation to new levels such as the incoherent way we’ve approached urban forestry and way finding signs along roadways which by its very nature must be coherent to mean anything.

Yet remarkably, even though three or four individuals tried their best to undermine it and still refuse to embrace it, Durham is one of the few communities where diverse groups across the community are able to work together to distill an overarching brand to communicate the personality, values and traits distinctive to the community to external audiences.

Regardless of who is elected or re-elected President of the United States, I am persuaded by this post by Dr. Ravi Iyer, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southern California VIMLab, that we have more in common across the political spectrum than we are led to believe.

We just need to pay more attention to our common values and less to labels.

Choices and Entitlement

The sentiment has been expressed before in many variations but none better than how it was phrased by CBS Television Studios’ writer Sarah Byrd (credited in part to supervising producer Adam Targum) for an episode of CSI: New York two weeks ago in lines delivered by Det. Mac Taylor played by actor Gary Sinise:

“The events of our lives shape us. But it’s our choices that define us.”

That, and in my personal experience, an awful lot of luck.

As Wall Street Journal conservative columnist and humorist Joe Queenan once wrote for another publication referring to his own upbringing in poverty - “It is a pathologically enduring, immutable condition.  Not a lifestyle choice.”

When some of the first government social safety nets emerged during the Great Depression in the mid-1930s, they were accompanied by volunteer and work requirements to ensure dignity, self-reliance and self-respect.

With common roots in Chicago’s Hull House, the vaunted welfare program of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) was launched in 1936 and is structured even today around a recipient volunteer program.

But for the entire 400 years since colonization of this continent began, we as a society have worried, as phrased by business professor and ethics researcher Dr. Jonathan Haidt in his book The Righteous Mind, that people might “rely upon the safety net for more than an occasional lifesaving bounce.”

Who knows how much better safety net programs would be today if partisan hostility had not stripped funding out of the government programs that enabled associated oversight of conditional volunteer and “pay it forward” programs.  The Mormon welfare program is as successful as it is because of the more than 870,000 of associated volunteer-days on welfare farms and in storehouses and distribution centers.

Mormon officials report that individual recipients typically receive aid for three to six months while they volunteer, but my experience growing up in that culture tells me there is a small percentage of recipients, some multi-generational, who, just as is seen in government programs, never seem to be able to fully escape the vicious cycle of poverty described by Queenan.

Entitlement is no more common among the poor than it is with people who are educated or middle class or rich or in parasitic, rent-seeking corporations such as billboard companies.  A classic example appeared in a news story last week from Raleigh, which is near Durham, where I live.  A person quoted in the story questioned, while noting she had a PhD, why she should have to refrain from interrupting her boss and I suspect other forms of social and business etiquette?

It seems that both liberals and conservatives are too caught up in playing offense and defense over the condition of entitlement and other issues and have been for more than 20 years.

While more willing to join moderates in compromise, liberals have been far too dismissive of concerns raised by economists and sociologists, both White and African-American, about the troubling by-products of safety net programs, many of which these experts helped devise.

These included The Rediscovery of Character: Private Virtue and Public Policy by the late Dr. James Q. Wilson, The Moral Quandary of the Black Community by Dr. Glenn C. Lowry, now at Brown University or The Content of Our Character by Dr. Shelby Steele, now a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, all penned between 1985 and 1990.

As noted by researchers at the non-partisan Center for Evidence-Based Policy and the Brookings Institution in a Washington Post op-ed last April written by Daniel Stid a partner in The Bridgespan Group, since 1990 rigorous government evaluations of 10 overarching social programs using randomized trials found “9 out of 10 yielded weak or no positive effects.”

Gridlock, primarily forced by conservatives, has made a more nimble and entrepreneurial approach impossible; although to his credit, President Obama has found ways to fuel program innovations anyway, often by end-running the bureaucratic process.

Economic conservatives, having abandoned half of their “intellectual ammunition,” to paraphrase New York Times columnist David Brooks, have forgotten a founding principle of that movement that it is “best to reform steadily but cautiously” and turned instead to fiscal strangulation and a social mobility Dance of Death.

As Thomson Reuters Digital editor Chrystia Freeland wrote in yesterday’s New York Times in an article entitled The Self Destruction of the 1 Percent, adapted from her book published last week entitled Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else, today’s conservatives seem to be following the playbook of Venetians at the turn of 13th century.

And that didn’t turn out too well.

A Moderate’s Short Walk Down Libertarianism

The routine walk I take with Mugsy, my English Bulldog, winds its way downhill and south from our home and back through Rockwood Park, a wonderful but very small Durham City Park stretching northeast from Nana’s Restaurant and behind the Thai Café along both sides of Third Fork Creek.

For at least three or more decades, ultra-conservative libertarians have argued against public parkland such as this not because they believe we shouldn't have parkland but because they think it shouldn’t be owned and maintained by the public.

There are many things for which to commend Rockwood Park, including the stands of wonderful towering hardwood trees, the sidewalk that loops around the entire Park including three very cool bridges, great playground equipment for young children, restrooms, a water fountain, two outdoor grills, a picnic shelter, a basketball court and convenient dispensers in case you forgot or ran out of bags with which to pick up after your dog.

However, libertarians would point to some obvious government neglect, including the fact that the recent repaving of the street leading into the park stopped 30 feet short of paving the small unkept and potholed parking lot where the street dead ends into the park or why the picnic shelter has a giant hole in the roof and the grills are rusted out as are most of the trash receptacles and why the turf, which would be excellent for games of all kinds, has been allowed to degrade into nothing but weeds.

Almost everyone values public space of this kind, but libertarians argue that it would be better provided and better maintained by the free market. I can see how the spontaneous, self-organizing, learn-by- results nature of the free marketplace might eventually come to value open space and that pricing could ultimately make sure that it was better maintained.

But as a moderate, I wonder just how long that would take and how much devastation would be created before the individual decisions in the marketplace would come close to resulting in a park like this let alone a consistent system of parks and the added value they create for neighborhoods and the community as a whole?

Is pricing in the marketplace really that practical as a solution for creating and maintaining open space? At the same time, I wonder why the park isn't better maintained by the public sector using tax revenue, which in essence is a form of what clinical economists term corrective pricing, as a means to provide quality-of-life amenities that are unrealistic for individual homeowners, neighborhoods and small groups of citizens to provide.

Libertarianism is an interesting theory, but not as an overarching  solution. But those who genuinely think that way and believe in their principles may have a point. Starving government is obviously not the solution but few can deny that our government obviously needs to be held more accountable.

A Proposal To Eliminate Poverty Without Spending One Dime More Than We Do Now

“Poverty is a consequence” was the opening statement at a luncheon presentation yesterday by Dr. Michael Munger, a former libertarian candidate for Governor of North Carolina and director of Duke University’s joint Philosophy, Politics and Economics Program with the University of North Carolina.

Munger’s speech was the perfect bookend to one by Gene Nichol last fall at the same weekly luncheon.

Americans ranked “Helping poor people” the second highest area where they believe we need more government spending and Dr. Munger presented some interesting information that may explain why, in the same opinion poll, Americans also want less spent on welfare:

• In constant 2007 dollars those with the lowest 20% in terms of income in this country today have double the income they had when I was born in 1948.

• The line currently below which people are considered poor is $11,200. What some term our “welfare state” current spends $16,480 per poor person. Of course a good chunk of that feeds the bureaucracy and never makes it to poor people.

• The $550 billion the US government spends on means-tested programs to reduce poverty (excluding Medicaid spending for nursing home residents) is enough, if distributed quarterly each year directly to poor people, to eliminate poverty altogether.

• Currently aid distribution through various programs collectively reduces the poverty rate less than 1% while perpetuating a huge bureaucracy, lobbyists and political capital.

Dr. Munger believes we could do more, much more and touched on some solutions. He noted that part of the problem is that capitalism is arbitrary and cited some including what trickle-down-guru David Stockman terms today’s disemboweled, off-shored economy on Main Street.

He seems to agree with George Washington’s farewell-speech caution (co-authored by Alexander Hamilton) about the dangers inherent in self-perpetuating political parties given as he departed from office after his second term as the nation’s first President.

Dr. Munger is a proponent of tax reform to close loopholes. He seemed to agree that poverty is a problem of wealth and distribution, not rich vs. poor. He pointed out examples showing that the rich had merely worked the political system to their advantage and he was much tougher on elected officials for playing the politics that permits it.

Dr. Munger touched on our collective reluctance as a society to “trust” poor people to do the right thing if the funds to eliminate poverty were distributed directly.

I couldn’t help but think, as he concluded, that Dr. Munger may agree with an assessment David Brooks wrote so eloquently in The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, published just two months ago:

“…freedom should not be the ultimate end of politics. The ultimate focus of political activity is the character of the society. Political, religious, and social institutions influence the unconscious choice architecture undergirding behavior. They can create settings that nurture virtuous choices or they can create settings that undermine them…

…You can pump money into poor areas, but without cultures that foster self-control, you won’t get social mobility….Everything came down to character, and that meant everything came down to relationships, because relationships are the seedbeds of character.

The reason life and politics are so hard is that relationships are the most important, but also the most difficult, things to understand….character and culture really shape behavior, and… government could, in limited ways shape culture and character.

…government should not run people’s lives. That only weakens the responsibility and virtue of the citizens. But government could influence the setting in which lives are lived. Government could, to some extent, nurture settings that serve as nurseries for fraternal relationships. It could influence the spirit of the citizenry…

…The social fabric is based on the idea that effort leads to reward. But very often, government rewards people who have not put in the effort. It does this with good intentions…and it does it with venal intentions…By separating effort from reward, they pollute the atmosphere. They send the message the system is rigged and society is corrupt.

…Aristotle wrote that legislators habituate citizens. Whether they mean to or not, legislators encourage certain ways of living and discourage other ways.

Statecraft is inevitably soulcraft.”

Tea Partier Reveal Makes Perfect Case For Health Insurance Reform!

Okay, I get it now. Supporters of tea party candidate for U.S. Senate in Kentucky have clarified that he only opposes “victimless crimes” like riding a motorcycle without a helmet.

Uhhh Really!

How on earth can anyone believe that there will be no victims when someone is killed riding without a helmet…?

• Can they really think his or her family isn’t victimized by the rider’s untimely and unnecessary death? No hidden social security disability or other publicly funded services will be drained?

• Can they guarantee that no one else as a passenger or in other vehicles is hurt during the accident involving a reckless driver without a helmet?

• Can they guarantee that everyone who doesn’t wear a helmet is still smart enough to carry health insurance?

• And even if rider has insurance, can they can guarantee that a fatality won’t arbitrarily drive up everyone else’s health and vehicle insurance rates?

• Or if they do or don’t have insurance can it be guaranteed that absolutely no hidden public costs will be expended on emergency response, hospital emergency rooms, investigating officers, claims adjusters or clean up after the fatality?

I get it that by nature people resist being required to do something even when it is a no-brainer (pardon the expression) but this guy just made the case for both helmet laws and healthcare insurance reform.

We all value our freedom…but freedom comes with responsibilities especially when others may even remotely be forced to pick up the costs for our actions.

Wearing a stupid helmet and carrying insurance isn’t a surrender of freedom…it is doing the minimum to mitigate actions for which someone else or the public-at-large may be forced to pick up hidden costs.

No one lives in a vacuum, not ultra conservatives, not libertarians, not tea partiers, not even Republicans. No one!