A Black "Next Great Prime Minister"?

When I was asked to contribute a piece to Concordia University's student newspaper The Link on the role my African-Canadian identity played in my participation in Magna International’s The Next Great Prime Minister competition in 2006, I first remembered a passage from Norman Snider’s 1985 book The Changing of the Guard. In one passage, then Liberal Party leadership candidate Jean Chrétien was accosted by two rank-and-file Toronto Liberals—one of Portuguese roots, the other Jamaican—protesting the dismissal of their ethnic communities’ concerns by the party’s head honchos. “[Can you] sit down and assure us,” demanded the Portuguese gentleman, “that we are going to get a piece, a small piece of Canada for everybody?”

According to Mr. Snider, the problem was not the political parties’ prejudice. Leading Liberals in particular would have been delighted to welcome a Greek, Haitian or Vietnamese rising star into the highest echelons of political power. Unfortunately, the pool of ethnic volunteers for such top-tier positions was painfully small and hence largely untapped. The cultural and social cohesion of ethnic groups in Canada makes even their most qualified members reluctant to enter the political arena, lest they lose touch with their origins. “By and large,” wrote Snider, “multiculturalism meant that Canada’s ethnic communities…huddled in on themselves. To date, their bright young men and women had not taken the path out of the neighborhoods and into the corridors of power. […] After all, such a path successfully negotiated would take a man far from his roots, and few seemed willing to attempt it.” This, it seems, is as true today as it was in 1984.

In August 2005, when I first heard of The Next Great Prime Minister from a friend of my mother’s, I jumped at the chance to submit and defend my own proposals for political reform in the marketplace of ideas. I advocated striking down trade barriers between the provinces and reforming our system of government to elect the Prime Minister separately from Parliament. Good ideas, or so I thought at the time; but they had nothing to do with the peculiar concerns of the Black community. Why?

Years of avid reading had taught me how rarely Canada’s political establishment tackles issues of specific concern to ethnic communities. Earlier in The Changing of the Guard, Mr. Snider noted the paternalistic stance the Liberal Party in particular took towards minority groups—“helping them with immigration matters, giving them grants to maintain their distinctive cultures” and so on. Yet beyond this old time religion, little real political clout accrued to ethnic Canadians from their Liberal loyalties. On those rare occasions when political heavy hitters do address minority concerns, they usually do so superficially and clumsily at best. In one of The Next Great Prime Minister’s preliminary rounds, I was asked what needed to be done to stop the wave of killings plaguing Toronto’s black neighborhoods. As a young black man, surely I would instinctively grasp what drives this fratricidal mayhem, right?

Well, actually, wrong. At the time, anyone’s guess was as good as mine. Yet my questioners seemed to assume that as the sole Black finalist—and quite possibly the sole Black contestant—in the competition, I must be their “go-to guy”, their resident expert on all things pertaining to blackness. I will probably never know whether any of my fairer-hued competitors were asked that question.

It bears notice that beyond Toronto’s murder rate, ethnic issues played no role in the debates around which the competition revolved once I advanced to the final round in January 2006. We focused, rather, on matters such as the health care system, the war in Afghanistan, and Iran’s nuclear program. In truth, that was just the way I liked it. I’m not sure that politicians should be focusing their attention on dealing with specific ethnic grievances. In my view, their energies—and our tax dollars—are generally better spent addressing issues that concern all Canadians, regardless of cultural origin.

Since participating in The Next Great Prime Minister, my congratulators have often gushed that I could be the first Black Prime Minister of Canada. I don’t doubt this possibility, and I refuse to rule it out. Yet I believe that the various branches of the African Diaspora have placed too much emphasis on politics as a means of achieving social equality. Historically, the minority groups that made the fastest rise from poverty and persecution to prosperity and power were those who embraced education and built up their own business and professional classes, as well as those who maintained strong, stable families. Those who prefer to dispatch swarms of politicians to the citadels of government in order to dole out fiscal goodies to their communities, while ignoring aberrant rates of school dropouts and absentee fatherhood and a dearth of entrepreneurial ambition, are doomed to be left behind. Without tackling those problems, even electing a million Marlene Jenningses or Yolande Jameses—or Barack Obamas, for that matter—will never bring us to Dr. King’s proverbial Promised Land.

Race & the Republicans

A friend of mine posted an interesting (if not terribly original) New York times editorial by Princeton economics professor Paul Krugman on Facebook recently:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/opinion/02krugman.html?ex=1388638800&en=f88eb7c84f5e06c5&ei=5124&partner=facebook&exprod=facebook

As usual, Mr. Krugman is on to something here--just not as much as he thinks. The race-related issue he didn't address was how true racial equality is achievable when so many blacks and other minorities remain so dependent on government charity. While the good professor, like most liberals, doesn't aim to keep Americans dependent on government for its own sake, reducing that dependency is not a priority for him.

Republicans should make building a maximally self-reliant citizenry part of the centerpiece of their future outreach to nonwhite demographic groups, particularly African-Americans. This may or may not work politically, but it's an infinitely more intellectually and morally respectable position than the politics of racial resentment the GOP has admittedly played since the Nixon years.

As for conservative economics being discredited by the financial crisis, Krugman disregards the massive role government intervention played in creating the crisis. Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac were government-sponsored enterprises, remember? But that's a comment for another day...

Rotten Onion

I'm a huuuuuuuuuuuge fan of The Onion, though I have a way of forgetting to check it more than once every, oh say, three weeks or so. And I'm not the only one who has that problem.

Strange.

Still, I love the website. I especially admire their way of poking fun at politicians and ideologues on both left and right, Democrat and Republican alike. In addition, their satire usually tends to be of a relatively ideologically neutral bent, which I appreciate. However, I just stumbled upon an Onion article poking fun at President Bush that reads more like a typical DailyKos screed than a genuine piece of comedy. Check it out at http://www.theonion.com/content/opinion/im_really_gonna_miss

Which is not to say that I disagree with the piece, necessarily. But does anyone else find this article starkly political in tone, rather than comedic? I don't think couching a political attack in sarcastic tones automatically makes it funny...even if it is true! This strikes me as somewhat out-of-character for The Onion...what say you?

Canadian Politics X

Five years ago, when I first returned home to Canada from college in the United States to enjoy the Christmas holidays, I learned to my great surprise that former Liberal finance minister Paul Martin had taken over from his predecessor Jean Chrétien as Prime Minister of Canada a month previously. About two months later, when I returned home during our week-long holiday between semesters, I learned of the breaking of the infamous “sponsorship scandal”, in which—in a nutshell—hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars were wasted on a campaign to boost the federal government’s visibility and popularity in the province of Quebec. It was then that I realized just how much I had allowed my awareness of recent developments in Canadian politics to lapse during my studies at Princeton. I remember thinking to myself, “Damn—just as I leave to go to school in the States, Canadian politics decide to get interesting for a change!”

Now, having recently graduated from university and returned home for the foreseeable future, I no longer feel I am missing out on the action.

The aforementioned corruption scandal depleted the Liberal Party’s political capital to the point where it eventually lost power, in January 2006, to Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party, which won a plurality of seats in the House of Commons—meaning more seats than any other single party—but not an absolute majority of seats. As a result, Prime Minister Harper has since then headed a “minority government”, in which his party composes the entire executive branch—the Prime Minister and his Cabinet—but is outnumbered in Parliament by the opposition parties, who have always had the power to unite at any time to defeat a piece of the government’s legislation. Under Canada’s British-inspired parliamentary system, this scenario demonstrates that the government has lost the “confidence” of Parliament, in which case the party in power must seek a new mandate from voters via a new election. Seeking to prevent such a turn of events, Harper called a snap election in early September 2008, hoping to win a majority of seats in the House that would ensure his ability to govern without legislative obstruction for another four or five years. Unfortunately, though Harper’s Tories did increase their seat total from 127 seats to 143, they fell short of the 155 seats needed to form a majority of the 308 seats in the House of Commons. Result: yet another minority government, with all the instability and uncertainty that comes with it.

This is where the situation becomes still more interesting. The Canadian political system boasts a so-called “first-past-the-post” system, in which candidates in each electoral district (or “riding” in Canadian parlance) need only win a plurality of popular votes within that district in order to win its seat in Parliament. Moreover, the party that wins the greatest number of seats in Parliament—whether this is an absolute majority of seats or a mere plurality—gets to form the government, composing the entire executive branch and generally driving the government’s agenda. Thanks to the first-past-the-post system, most governing parties in Canada, even when they do win a majority of seats in the House of Commons (which is usually the case), usually fail to win a majority of the popular vote. In other words, political power at the national level is almost always monopolized by a party that commands the support of a minority of Canadian voters.

Yet Canada also possesses a badly balkanized body politic, featuring not only the Liberal and Conservative parties but also the socialist New Democratic Party and the separatist Bloc Québécois (whose goal is the secession of the mostly French-speaking province of Quebec, and which therefore fields candidates only in that province). Each of these peripheral parties commands too little popular support nationwide to ever win enough seats to form the government by itself. However, each party still siphons just enough popular support away from the Liberals and Conservatives to make it extremely difficult for either of those primary parties to ever win an absolute majority of Canada’s popular vote. Moreover, in the country’s current political climate, it appears fiendishly difficult for any one party to even win so much as a majority of parliamentary seats. Canadians, you see, are generally a left-leaning lot, and hence remain wary of giving the Conservatives a majority government. Yet they continue to distrust the corrupt Liberals, whose arrogant sense of entitlement to political power has been legendary for decades, stemming from their having governed Canada for two out of every three years in the twentieth century.

Thanks to this twisted state of affairs, it remains unclear when Canada will see another stable, durable majority government. This poses a problem, for although whichever party wins the most seats in Parliament—even short of a majority—is supposed to form the government, that party will still lack the support of a majority of Canadian voters. In addition, the current Conservative minority government is outnumbered by the Opposition parties, who between them possess a majority of seats in the House and command the support of a majority of voters. Therefore, should those Opposition parties unite in a solid coalition, acting as a single political party, they will then posses a majority of seats in Parliament—and thus will have the right to force the Conservative minority government from power and form their own government.

This, of course, is precisely what took place earlier this week, for the very first time in Canadian history. The leaders of the Opposition Liberal and New Democratic parties and the Bloc Québécois shocked the nation several days ago by announcing their plans to force a vote of no confidence on December 8th to turf the Harper Conservatives from power. These opposition parties have already signed a written agreement to then take power as a unified coalition government. This flies in the face of precedent, for successful no-confidence votes in the House of Commons—which only afflict minority governments—usually result in the dissolution of Parliament and calling of a new election. This time, however, Canada’s Governor-General (who acts as the representative of the Queen of England and thus as the official head of state in Canada’s constitutional monarchy) would be well within her rights to approve the Opposition parties’ request to unseat the ruling Conservatives and form their own government—because that coalition would indeed possess a majority of parliamentary seats.

The Opposition parties’ rationale for staging this daring political power play is twofold. First, Prime Minister Harper, after sounding a conciliatory tone in his victory speech after last October’s election, violated the trust of the Opposition parties by announcing his intention to cut off public funding for election campaigns, thereby threatening to effectively bankrupt his political opponents. Second, Harper has thus far adopted a sort of “wait-and-see” approach to dealing with the ongoing global financial crisis, while the Opposition parties clamor for the passage of a massive stimulus package to boost Canada’s sputtering economy. By snatching the reins of power from Harper’s Tories, Liberal Party leader Stéphane Dion claims, the Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition can act to save the country from a grinding recession.

In reality, however, the Opposition’s case is irrelevant to the central issue around which the current political crisis revolves: the issue of democratic legitimacy. It has been decades since Canada has been governed by a single party that commanded the support of a solid majority of Canadian voters. Now a coalition of parties threatens to take power without having been elected to the position at all. It is disingenuous to argue that they derive legitimacy from their winning a majority of popular votes between them. In this fall’s election, the Liberals, New Democrats and Blocquistes did not campaign as a coalition; rather, each party campaigned strictly on its own behalf, as in all elections past. Otherwise put, those Canadians who cast their vote for the Liberals, for example, did so in the hope and expectation that only that party would form the government; the same goes for those who voted for the NDP or the Bloc Québécois. Not a single Canadian voted to elect a Liberal-NDP-BQ coalition to power, for Canadians were never even given that option.

For all the democratic shortcomings of the Conservatives’ majority-lacking government, at least that party won more popular votes and parliamentary seats than any other. To bring to power a coalition for which not a single person in all of Canada voted, without requiring that coalition to seek a true mandate from the Canadian people, would be to effectively hijack the ship of state. As Winnipegger Reenan Keam told a CTV journalist the other day: “They don’t care what we said. We voted for a Prime Minister, and they’re saying, ‘You know what? That doesn’t matter—we don’t like him’…Then why did we have an election?”

Yet at the moment, the aforementioned hijacking remains a distinct possibility. Canada’s current Governor-General, Michaelle Jean, has cut short a trip overseas to return home to deal with this crisis, yet she has yet to signal publicly how she plans to do so; indeed, she may have yet to even make that decision. Her options at present appear to be threefold. First, and most obviously, she can grant the Opposition’s request and allow them to take power in the wake of next week’s no-confidence vote. Second, she can grant Prime Minister Harper’s likely request and “prorogue” Parliament—in other words, shut the whole circus down temporarily and reopen it next January, whereupon the Conservatives will submit a new annual budget for Parliament’s review. Third, she can react to the looming no-confidence vote in the traditional way—by dissolving Parliament and calling a new election.

The first measure, as already argued above, would be a sort of legalized, bloodless coup d’état. The second would likely only delay the inevitable, since the Opposition coalition, should it survive into the winter, could always topple Harper’s government then. If Harper can effectively use the intervening time to convince a majority of Canadians (many of whom already seem miffed at the Opposition’s shenanigans) of the wrongness of such a move, he might be able to intimidate his opponents into abandoning their planned power grab, on the grounds that Canadians would eventually punish them for it at the polls later on. Yet it is entirely possible that the Opposition parties would simply call Harper’s bluff, betting that they could ride out any storm of public disapproval that ensued, until ordinary Canadians simply turned their attention elsewhere, leaving the coalition government intact. This would not be an unreasonable calculation on their part.

The third measure is, in my view, the only one that would be both feasible and just. I am no more enthused than anyone else at the prospect of facing yet another election campaign, especially so soon after the last, useless, one. Yet if obeying the democratic will of the Canadian people is at all a priority in this situation, then that will must first be ascertained. There is at present no way to be certain how much popular support there is for a Liberal-NDP-Bloc Québécois coalition government, for no such scenario was ever presented to Canadian voters as an option in the last election campaign; indeed, numerous Opposition partisans denied its very possibility at the time. If the Liberals, New Democrats and Blocquistes truly crave a government with democratic legitimacy as they claim, then they should not be averse to making their case directly to the people, this time campaigning for power as a coalition. As Winnipegger John Malek told CTV News recently: “I’d rather vote than be told, ‘Okay, I’m your leader now.’”

Should the Opposition coalition then collectively win a majority of seats under that aegis, let them by all means rise to run the show in Ottawa. To pretend, however, that they currently have a mandate to do so is ludicrous. It may be that every Canadian who voted Liberal, NDP or Bloc on October 14th would vote for a coalition of those parties in a new election; but that is a possibility, not a certainty. I, for one, strongly suspect that more than a few Canadians who balked at casting their vote for Harper’s Conservatives last time around would equally balk at voting for a coalition that includes Quebec separatists, whose goal it is to take Canada’s second-largest province out of Confederation forever.

Ultimately, if a duly elected minority government can be toppled so abruptly by Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, without an election, on the grounds that the governing party failed to win a majority of the popular vote, then clearly minority governments, by their very nature, are so devoid of democratic legitimacy that they should not even be allowed to take office in the first place. Perhaps we could mandate that in the event of an election in which no political party wins a popular or parliamentary majority, there ought to be a second round of voting in which Canadians return to the polls to rectify the situation. In the event that another minority government ensues, the Opposition would be forbidden by law to carry out a vote of no confidence against the governing party, at least for a certain minimum time period. They would be allowed to vote however they like on individual bills, to be sure, and to defeat government bills if need be; but no such defeat could legally cause the dissolution of Parliament and the calling of a new election, or the replacement of the government by an Opposition coalition, until a certain amount of time—perhaps 12 to 18 months, perhaps more—had elapsed.

The only alternative I can see to such a reform would be to institute a system of proportional representation in Canada from the get-go, along with the virtual guarantee of perpetual coalition governments that would come with it. Either measure would be preferable to a system in which an Opposition junta can seize power without the people’s consent.

As far as democratic legitimacy is concerned, there is an even deeper and more significant lesson to be learned from the current conundrum. The issue that underpins this crisis is the parliamentary “confidence” convention. As mentioned earlier, a governing party that fails to pass a key piece of legislation through Parliament is said to have lost the “confidence” of the legislature, and must therefore face a new election campaign. (Other than the annual budget, exactly what constitutes “key” legislation is pretty much left to the Prime Minister to decide.) This particular tradition is meant to enable Parliament to check the power of the executive branch of government. Closer scrutiny, however, exposes it as a poorly-thought-out paradigm that throughout Canadian history has actually had the opposite effect.

To be precise, the confidence convention inadvertently concentrates more power in the hands of the Prime Minister. When the latter knows that the failure to get his bills passed could result in his losing power, he is driven to bend all his energies toward the goal of ramming legislation through the House of Commons at any cost. In recent decades, this has led PM after PM to ensure the support of his own parliamentary caucus by threatening his MPs with expulsion from the party if they fail to toe the official party line. In other words, the executive branch is normally able to effectively dictate policy to the legislature—the exact opposite of the confidence convention’s original intent.

The exception is in the case of a minority government, in which the Opposition parties actually outnumber the governing party’s caucus in the House of Commons. This arrangement makes it much harder for the Prime Minister to bully Parliament; yet it also engenders its own set of problems. As we now know, it enables the Opposition parties to join forces and effectively usurp political power on the misleading grounds that it is they who command the support of a majority of Canadians. This scenario, always a theoretical possibility, has never before occurred because (a) the Liberals governed through most of Canada’s history, usually with a majority, and (b) Canada used to have a three-party system in which the Opposition—usually composed of right-leaning Conservatives and socialist New Democrats—was too ideologically polarized to ever unite to unseat the governing party, even a minority one. On those relatively rare occasions when the Conservatives ran things, the Liberals could usually expect to return to power before very long, and so felt no need to join forces with the NDP to overthrow the Conservatives. Nowadays, with five parties in Parliament—each attracting too little popular support to ensure itself a durable majority—and with an economic crisis providing the Opposition with a convenient casus belli, it’s a different story.

The “confidence” paradigm, then, is fatally flawed in all circumstances. It allows the Prime Minister of a majority government to ruthlessly crush dissent within his own party in order to be able to govern without constantly looking over his shoulder, fearing his caucus may stab him in the back. In times of minority government, it engenders instability and confusion; in extreme cases like this, it can even enable the Opposition parties to conspire to depose the duly elected government of the day, regardless of the democratic will of the people. Ladies and gentlemen, in the real world, this is no way to run a government.

Yet even if the confidence convention actually defeats its own purpose in practice, is it justified in principle at least? I, for one, think not. Exactly what is meant by “the confidence of Parliament” anyway? No legislature in any true democracy is a monolith; in every responsible government, Parliament is composed of at least two separate parties with opposing viewpoints on most issues. Does “confidence” then mean that the governing party cannot function without the approval of every party in Parliament? Obviously not; the minority parties are not called “the Opposition” for nothing. If anything, it is their job to be thorns in the government’s side. How silly it would be for the governing party to have to seek a new mandate from the people on the grounds that it could not convince the opposition parties to endorse its agenda!

Surely, then, maintaining the “confidence” of Parliament does not mean maintaining the confidence of the Opposition—unless “confidence” means merely a faith in the government’s basic managerial competence, rather than an agreement with all of their policy objectives. This, however, is a dubious stipulation at best; in Canadian politics, all opposition parties routinely accuse the government of rank incompetence, among other mortal failings. If “confidence” means “the assent of the governing party”, or even merely “the governing party’s faith in the executive’s administrative competence,” it is largely redundant at best. It is a bizarre political party indeed that willingly follows leaders who do not know how to run a government. And if a party’s leadership is revealed to be so incompetent, then that leadership needs to be sent packing by its own party’s rank and file—not toppled by Parliament in a no-confidence vote. (For more information, see Margaret Thatcher, circa 1990.)

The hell of it is that the very inventors of Westminster-style responsible government have moved on from reliance on the “confidence” principle, in practice if not necessarily in theory. The Brits clearly no longer believe that the defeat of a single government bill, or even several of them, necessarily means that the government has lost the confidence of Parliament and must therefore fall. As a matter of fact, every single British government since the 1970s has seen one or more of its bills slapped down by the House of Commons and survived. And quite frankly, why should they not have?

These British governments—both Labour and Conservative, both majority and minority—survived in part because Parliament recognized that occasional legislative defeats need not force a government to seek a renewal of its entire mandate. It simply does not logically follow that because Parliament rejects one or more particular bills sponsored by the executive branch, the people must therefore no longer trust the Prime Minister and Cabinet to govern competently or honorably. There is no reason why Parliament cannot reject a minority of the government’s bills while still approving most of them and maintaining the aggregate integrity of the government during the term to which it was, after all, democratically elected by the people.

Nor is there any reason why Canada’s Parliament could not do likewise. Yet even if Canada’s teeming political classes ever are truly awakened to the secret absurdity at the heart of responsible government, the chances of their acting on this enlightenment by relaxing their rigid adherence to the principle of parliamentary confidence are slim. First, clinging to the confidence convention gives impatient and domineering politicians in the executive branch of government the pretext they need to bully Parliament into doing their bidding. Second, equally cynical opposition politicians are only too happy to use any defeat of government legislation as a pretext to fell their opponents in a vote of no confidence. In short, the entire edifice of Canadian political power is built on a disingenuous foundation in whose perpetuation too many politicians have a vested interest. The unlikelihood of our ever seeing that foundation shattered in our lifetimes is all the more tragic because the shattering would be so relatively easy and painless.

A New Take on Homer

I just read a fascinating essay on the moral and ethical implications of the works of the ancient Greek poet Homer. You can read it at http://www.artsandopinion.com/2008_v7_n5/stevekowit.htm.

In a nutshell, the author expresses his dismay and disgust at modern interpretations of literary masterpieces from Antiquity such as the Iliad and the Odyssey that completely overlook the fact that many of the protagonists' exploits are morally reprehensible, at least by today's standards. Here, by way of example, is the paragraph I found most striking (if flawed):

Imagine this: four hundred years from now some inspired bard pens a masterful epic poem concerning the exemplary adventures of that great warrior-king, Adolf the Bold, a leader who, in courage, physical beauty and steadfastness of purpose is almost godlike. For several lines the poet describes, in loving detail, how Adolf's army of stalwart heroes triumphantly throw their malignant enemies -- the Semitic, Roma and crippled captives -- into the ovens by the tens of thousands. It is, however, only a quickly passing episode. In the main, Adolf, Sacker of Cities, is kindly if wily, compassionate if remorseless, and altogether steadfast of purpose. Should enchanted readers simply delight in the splendid hexameters, the bard's wonderful psychological portraits and vividly dramatic episodes and not concern themselves with the fate of those unnamed background characters who are simply part of the heroic pageantry of The Hitleriad?

I'm honestly interested in hearing others' thoughts on whether it is even worth bothering to pass the kind of moral judgments on ancient Greek society that Mr. Kowit urges. It is doubtless that Homer reflected the mores of the society and the era in which he lived--a time and place in which the sexual enslavement of women captured in war, as well as general plunder and pillage of enemy territory, etc., were par for the course. Mr. Kowit leaves this issue insufficiently examined. Moreover, his juxtaposition of Hitler and the Holocaust with the barbarism in Homer's epics is flawed, for part of the reason Hitler's atrocities were judged to be crimes against humanity in the court of global public opinion is that such acts had come to be perceived as heinous by most civilized societies at that point. This distinguishes the Nazis' savagery from the acts of Achilles, Agamemnon, Odysseus et. al., who were simply doing what warriors of their age generally did.

Yet to completely whitewash the perfidy of such practices on these grounds smacks of just the kind of relativism I have always deplored.

In the same way that certain practices that prevail in certain cultures are intrinsically reprehensible, no matter what that culture's unique perspective (the ancient Hindu custom of suttee, for instance, or the more modern practice of female genital mutilation), so certain practices are intrinsically despicable, regardless of the dominant mores of the era in which they prevailed. For example, slavery is inherently evil, no ifs, ands or buts about it. Therefore, it must have been every bit as evil several centuries or even millennia ago, when its practice was still widespread around the world, as it is today. Accordingly, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are no longer given a "pass" for their ownership of slaves, despite their other towering contributions to human history and the general cause of liberty. So should a great historical poet like Homer be given a pass for the rapacity and bloodlust he glorified in his epics? More significantly (since I doubt Mr. Kowit's essay has Homer spinning in his grave exactly), should current literary and historical appraisals of Homer's works--especially those taught in academia--include an appreciation of the brutality he extolled?

Adventures in Absurdity, Pt. I

I recently came up with the idea to post a comment here every time I come across an example of silly rhetoric in my perusals of political punditry, particularly in the blogosphere. Perhaps one day I can compile all the entries into a reasonably comprehensive list of nonsense that people ought to avoid in their political commentary, yes?

So here goes. Why not start with a comment reputed made by conservative commentator and former Bush speechwriter David Frum on National Review Online's Media Blog early last September:

"It's often said that some parts of the South (northern Virginia, the research triangle in North Carolina, south Florida) are trending Democratic because migrants from the north are transforming them. If that were true - if the Democratic trend were driven by people's movements - why aren't the places from which the migrants come becoming less Democratic? You know for every action there is supposed to be an equal and opposite reaction [italics mine]..."

Oh, boy.

"For every action there is supposed to be an equal and opposite reaction"? Sure, I know that--in frigging physics! When it comes to politics, of course, it's a different matter entirely. To put it concisely, in what universe does it make sense to take a law of natural science that determines the motion of inanimate objects in space and time and apply it to the elective behavior of sentient, self-aware life forms who possess the power of free will? As far as I know, no such universe exists. The historical and political landscapes, of course, are littered with examples of quite disproportionate reactions--of actions that provoked barely any response whatsoever (such as Italy's 1930s invasion of Ethiopia, to which the West more or less turned a blind eye) and of those that invited much larger reprisals (like Hezbollah's 2006 kidnapping of several Israeli soldiers in the summer of 2006, prompting an extended bombing campaign that devastated much of Lebanon).

As I told Mr. Frum in a direct e-mail response to his comment, that particular Newtonian law of physics may sound clever as hell for the purposes of pithy punditry, but that in no way means that it actually carries logical merit. The hell of it is that it is not even difficult to tell how little sense it makes to apply a law of physics to politics. Yet for some reason, this sorry excuse for a saying keeps popping up in so much of the political discourse I read and hear nowadays. Now it is even being cited as an argument in support of dubious statistical claims, even by a man of Mr. Frum's learning and wisdom. I think my college classmate and good friend Stephan was right: The modern political universe badly needs to take classes in basic logic and good, old-fashioned common sense, especially when it comes to their writing.

Hmmm...can anyone say "talk show "? Now there's a career path. Hell, I could even be like the black Dr. Phil...in politics. Eh? Whaddaya say, folks? Any takers? Come on...you know you can dig it.

Capitalism in the Age of the Bailouts

The events of the cruel autumn of 2008 have made me wonder more than ever whether capitalism may be too important to be left to the capitalists.

Not content with handing Wall Street a $700 billion get-out-of-jail-free card, it seems, Congress is now contemplating drawing America’s bumbling auto industry into Uncle Sam’s warm, loving embrace. Years of mismanagement, engineering mediocrity (at least as far as my gearhead friends are concerned, and I am happy to defer to their infinitely better-informed judgement), and labor union avarice have combined with the recent financial meltdown to bring Detroit’s age-old woes to the boiling point. True to recent, demoralizing form, the managers who have finally run America’s Big Three auto manufacturers into the ground are now going to Uncle Sam on bended knee, fairly begging to be hoisted out of the wreckage—and given a stipend with which to purchase a new ride.

It was perhaps inevitable that the recent Wall Street rescue package, once approved, would spawn countless demands for similar disbursements of public funds to other struggling constituencies. Hard on Detroit’s heels now follow a slew of fiscally foundering city governments also braying for handouts from the federal government. Apparently, those who run these budgetary basket cases can no longer be counted on to take responsibility for their own failures, as grown men and women are normally expected to do. Perhaps worst of all, these stumblebums show not even the slightest shame at having to beg Washington politicians to rescue them from the consequences of their spendthrift ways.

This disgraceful spectacle is most galling coming from the same business class that spent decades lecturing Americans and the world about the inefficiency of government and the supremacy of free markets. Mind you, they were correct on that score, in my view; but in so doing they obviously forgot the timeless admonition to “preach by example”. Businesspeople are often the worst violators of the principles of self-reliance, personal responsibility, and survival-of-the-fittest that underpin the capitalist system at its best. While the current bailout brouhaha is the most egregious recent betrayal of free-market values, even it is only the tip of the iceberg. Corporate elites the world over have almost always been attached to their governments by unpublicized fiscal umbilical cords, ingesting copious amounts of state largesse in the form of subsidies, grants and tax breaks. (This, of course, is not to mention the occasional trade-strangling tariff or quota to protect the tenderest corporate feet from international competition.)

This political-industrial racket flies in the face of a basic home truth: that freedom entails responsibility, and that therefore, if enterprise is to be free, it too must be responsible. More specifically, companies that are unable to compete effectively on their own merits must be allowed to fail, so that more competent merchants can take their places in the market, providing consumers with goods and services of higher quality. When government intervenes to prop up inefficient or obsolescent firms and industries, it wastes taxpayers’ money and risks subjecting consumers to more expensive and/or lower-quality goods and services than they would otherwise be able to purchase. In short, such meddling distorts the market in counterproductive ways.

In the real world, however, these failing firms are unsurprisingly reluctant to join the dinosaurs in the annals of extinction. They are thus willing to go to remarkable lengths to get the state to tilt the playing field substantially in their favor. That this suggests an inability to stand on their own feet in the business world appears not to faze them. Generations of corporate apparatchiks—in industries from steel to utilities to the infamously subsidy-dependent agricultural sector—have maintained, straight-faced, that society benefits from pampering them. The funds they donate to politicians’ election campaign war chests serve to grease the wheels of this corrupt system of corporate welfare. Invariably, taxpayers and consumers—the vast majority of any country’s population—end up shouldering the lion’s share of the resulting burden.

This sordid circus has never been lost on capitalism’s most learned defenders. No less an authority on the free market than the late economist Milton Friedman has noted that the business community simply cannot be counted on to consistently observe the principles of free enterprise in toto. As Friedman wrote in an article in the libertarian Reason magazine thirty years ago: “Business corporations in general are not defenders of free enterprise. On the contrary, they are one of the chief sources of danger…Every businessman is in favor of freedom for everybody else, but when it comes to himself that’s a different question. We have to have that tariff to protect us against competition from abroad. We have to have that special provision in the tax code. We have to have that subsidy.” As Friedman understood, too many businesspeople themselves rely on busybody government to be credible defenders of a system that demands that individuals and businesses pull as much of their own weight as possible.

This is how we end up with a scenario in which auto company executives can fly into Washington on private jets to beg Congress to save them from the consequences of their own managerial ineptitude with taxpayers’ money.

The principal argument advanced in favor of the proposed auto bailout is that the automakers employ far too many workers, and generally take up too much space in the US economy, to be allowed to go bankrupt, especially in the midst of the necrosis the economy seems to be undergoing at present. This begs the question of why the $25 billion that Washington policymakers—primarily Democrats—are contemplating pouring down the Detroit drainpipe cannot be reallocated to the task of helping the automakers’ employees themselves. Of particular use would be programs to help retrain these working stiffs—to build up their skill sets so as to enable to them to qualify for more secure jobs in more viable companies and industries. Now there’s one form of government intervention all of us—small-government conservative and libertarian as well as centrist, liberal or even socialist—should be able to support. I have in mind the kind of government intervention that truly empowers ordinary people, helping them help themselves—one that teaches a man how to fish, thereby feeding him for a lifetime, rather than giving them a fish and feeding him merely for a day.

What seems utterly lost on both Congress and the Big Three themselves is that allowing these firms to go bankrupt needn’t be the end of the world—or even the end of the automakers. As any expert on these matters will tell you, a company that files for bankruptcy does not necessarily cease to exist. A company that is hemorrhaging cash and yet still has valuable tangible assets can use corporate bankruptcy to reorganize its operations, renegotiate its contracts (particularly the $70-an-hour wages and bloated benefits which the Big Three lavish on their workers), restructure its debt and ultimately emerge stronger and more profitable then ever before. Perhaps Congress should do whatever is in its power to facilitate and expedite this process. One key element of that process should be the requirement that most, if not all, of the Detroit automakers’ current management be jettisoned immediately, without debate, delay or negotiation. It is high time that incompetent executives pay the price for ruining the businesses they are hired to run, rather than their hapless workers.

I am far from the first to propose such a scheme. Yet the odds of Congress’ adopting so creative an approach to this crisis seem rather svelte. And the incoming President-elect has yet to announce whether he plans to stand up to the relevant special interests—mainly the union that has bedeviled Detroit for so long, the United Auto Workers—to put the kibosh on this latest boondoggle. Only time (another two months, to be precise) will tell; and indeed, even should Obama wish to send Detroit’s malefactors of great wealth packing, he may not even get the chance, as the Pelosi-Reid Congress may cave in before January 20. I suppose I, and all those who prefer their governments small and minimally intrusive and their individuals and businesses maximally self-reliant, will have to content ourselves with daydreaming about a different New York Daily News front page spread that, alas, may never be printed: OBAMA TO BIG THREE: DROP DEAD!!!