ParisTampaBlog

Now I’ve never forgotten what President Reagan’s said while visiting Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate on June 12, 1987. His words on that occasion, were, as many of you also will remember, “MR. GORBACHEV, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL”

Now lately I’ve been reading with great enjoyment and appreciation the Western writer, Louis Lamour. (He would prefer, of course, that I just say writer, because writer was what he was.) And while following a link from his internet web site I met up with this cartoon drawing:

Do you suppose that with his words at the Gate the President was returning Gorby’s call? He must have found encouragement if not inspiration in the Lamour novel he was reading when Gorby was calling him.

And I’m sure that any of Lamour’s Western heroes would have all said pretty much the same thing and this may very well have been what pushed Reagan to say what he did.

Peoples, countries, states are often asking themselves, “What is to be done?” Certainly since the time of Vladimir Lenin’s question, Что делать, and probably long before. If the problems are acute enough (or the leaders of the revolt unscrupulous enough) the answer is/may be revolution, as in French, Russian, and earlier English (1649 and 1688).

In more recent times the answer is a “spring” or political liberalization, coming at the end of a winter (of authoritarian rule), as in the Prague or Arab springs, and to a much lesser extent, the Beijing, Beirut, Seoul, and any number of others, most recently, as in spring time in Rangoon (Yangon) with the freeing of Aung San Suu Kyi.

Now what about us, America as in the United States of, still for many the “exceptional” land? We certainly have our problems. And in the past we too have gone the way of “revolution” looking for solutions.

At least we called it a revolution, although when we look closely at the time we don’t see the heads rolling, and in spite of George Washington’s harsh 77-78 winter at Valley Forge  (and it could get extremely cold in the new land) what happened in those years was more like telling Dad, in very strong words, where to get off.

Today, however, we seem unable to even confront, let alone solve our problems, in particular those concerned with two of our government’s principal functions, health care and education. We do OK with our defense spending, and we did develop the atomic bomb and we did and on the moon.

In regard to our principal problems there is the evident inability of our elected representatives, including the president himself, to take action, any kind of action, and thereby govern, and do what they/he are supposed to be doing.

Instead our elected representatives spend their time squabbling among themselves, directing whatever energies they do possess, not to solving problems, but to being reelected to office.

Furthermore these same ‘do nothing’ elected officials continue to grow the responsibilities of the Federal government, by in large in the form of national defense and entitlement spending, (which together along with interest payments on our debt, comprise nearly 70 % of our national budget) while being clearly unable to finance the additional expenditures without surpassing our debt limits, that meaning, of course, without growing the debt burden on our children and grandchildren.

Finally while the elected officials are not governing other things are getting out of control. The financial sector, for one, of the economy is growing by leaps and bounds, seemingly outside of the influence of government altogether.

Simon Johnson, in an Atlantic article of May, 2009, “The Quiet Coup,” writes of this  growth:

From 1973 to 1985, the financial sector never earned more than 16 percent of domestic corporate profits. In 1986, that figure reached 19 percent. In the 1990s, it oscillated between 21 percent and 30 percent, higher than it had ever been in the postwar period. This decade, it reached 41 percent. [And pay in this sector rose no less dramatically.]

Now the financial sector shouldn’t be calling the shots in the overall economy, but it is. Our financial house is a loose canon, and so far anyway, out of anyone’s, let alone the government’s, control. No longer is it the farm, or Detroit, but rather Wall Street that is driving the country’s economic health, up or down. Lately mostly down.

While the Federal government may have been able to sensibly regulate first agriculture and then the manufacturing sector of the economy it now seems clueless in regard to the regulation of our financial houses. With the result that extreme risk taking with harmful consequences for the economy overall goes on mostly unchecked.

The problems I’m describing are not explicitly the issues of the various groups clamoring to be heard, principally now two, the Tea Partiers and the Occupy Wall Streeters, there being a number of the latter.

But in my opinion these and other groups are out there making noises only because of such things as the failure of our elected officials to act responsibly, the out of control national debt, and the lopsided influence of the single financial sector on the economy as a whole.

So back to my original question, what to do? New faces in government? There is probably little chance that the elections of 2012 will give us leaders able to make the tough choices, such as, to reduce the growth of unfunded mandates and entitlements, or to increase taxes and thereby federal revenues, both of these actions being at the present time third rail choices for any office holder wanting to hold onto that office.

So again, what to do. As I say we’re no longer able, as much as we’d like to, to make heads roll, such no longer being the way of liberal democracy. In fact it does seem more and more to many of us as though there is nothing to be done.

I’m certainly not alone to recognize our problems, —principally government’s evident inability to govern and a financial sector out of anyone’s control. Two recent articles, one by Tyler Cowen in the American Interest, The Inequality that matters, and the other by D. W. MacKenzie in the Mises Daily, No, Melissa, There Isn’t a Santa Claus, come to the very same conclusion, that the solution to our problems will not, in fact can not come from government bureaucrats or elected officials.

Tyler Cowen writes about the undue influence of the banking sector:

What about controlling bank risk-taking directly with tight government oversight? That is not practical. There are more ways for banks to take risks than even knowledgeable regulators can possibly control; …it is naive to think that underpaid, undertrained regulators can keep up with financial traders, especially when the latter stand to earn billions by circumventing the intent of regulations while remaining within the letter of the law.

We probably don’t have any solution to the hazards created by our financial sector, not because plutocrats are preventing our political system from adopting appropriate remedies, but because we don’t know what those remedies are.

Then, MacKenzie on the cluelessness of bureaucrats:

It is true that Congress often seems ineffective in dealing with modern affairs, but this is what we should expect. The contemporary American government intervenes into nearly every aspect of our lives. How can any senator or congressman comprehend all of the interests at stake in all of the matters that the government tries to regulate?

We live in an extraordinarily complex society. There are literally millions of businesses in America, and a larger number of households. These organizations deal in countless products and services, each of which is produced in complicated ways.

Legislators have staffs to help manage their affairs, but the fact of the matter is that modern economies are complex beyond the comprehension of any staff or committee. Consequently, legislatures that try to manage a modern economy in detail become ineffective talking shops, and must defer to [and] reliance on bureaucrats is a necessary part of government, but hardly desirable….”

Now it could be that our problems will remain without solutions. Certainly it won’t be the first time that a people allows the country’s infrastructure to collapse around it while demanding only bread and circuses and other such for themselves, in our case, while attending national football and national professional basketball events.

But, and it may be that things will get better in time, although not necessarily for us. The dinosaurs didn’t survive but we came along, and, according to most observers, we were/are a more marvelous creature than the dinosaur.

And the hundreds of American Indian tribes, because unable then, as we at present, to join together and take the proper actions for survival, did not last much beyond the coming of Columbus, their hundred fold and more civilizations disappearing into unrecognizable groups of survivors somehow existing on the reservation but no longer alive as they once were.

So things change and those involved in the changes don’t see the changes coming. Just as the Russians never saw the end of the Soviet Union until it was ended. Maybe we are just as far now from seeing our own “end,” this stemming in good part, I believe, from our failure to bring about change ourselves, before change just happens to us, because it will.

Holding on to what one has, not upsetting the applecart, maintaining the status quo, being reelected, all that sort of thing trumps there being any real action, such as that of Alexander when he cut through the Gordian Knot with a single bold stroke of his sword.

Do we have such a stroke of the sword available to us? Might something yet be done? I find a hint of possible actions in the two articles by Cowen and MacKenzie referred to above.

For MacKenzie, as well as for the Mises Institute, there is a savior, and that is the free enterprise system. In brief, this needs to grow while government needs to contract. In his own words:

There is no reason to believe that our current system of politicized crony capitalism will ever improve. There is no reason to believe that we will ever attain, or even agree on, social justice. We should believe in the free enterprise system, not simply because of faith in any ideal, but because theory and evidence indicate that this system works best.

Cowen takes his reasoning a step further. Government can not be a principal part of the solution because the best and the brightest of our young people are not entering government service but rather are going into the financial sector.

Might it not follow from his observation that the financial sector replace the government in selected roles, certainly that of the redistribution of federal tax revenues to those in need, a job that government has failed to do without going into unsustainable borrowing with the burgeoning deficit.

Cowen writes:

In so-called normal times, the finance sector attracts a big chunk of the smartest, most hard-working and most talented individuals. That represents a huge human capital opportunity cost to society and the economy at large.

Would a way out of this situation, an elimination of this cost, be that we turn over our problems to the free enterprise system, to private efforts to find solutions? No longer lose as now, for example, the most hard-working and most talented individuals to an irresponsible financial sector? And no longer going ahead with but bits and pieces of a solution, as now, when we allow a few private foundations and private educational institutions to replace government programs, but totally?

Would not the best and brightest of our young people (for if there are solutions they have to come from them) flock to be a part of this effort, not a moon or Mars landing, but an attempt to create, not rocket science, but autonomous and private structures capable of delivering effective and affordable health care and education to the American people?

So my answers? Take power away from the elected officials who in any case are not doing the job, and have them become at best referees in the game, whose principal players will all be within the private sector, financial or otherwise.

For only when people have ample opportunity to use their talents, and no less important only when they are able to see the results of their work, will things change for the better. In our present government that is not happening. That such does happen has always been the strength of free enterprise. Why would we interfere with that?

On his New York Review Blog  the poet Charles Simic writes, “My own inordinate interest in what the lunatics are up to in every corner of our planet has to do with my childhood. When I was three years old in Belgrade, German bombs started falling on my head. By the time I was seven, I was accustomed to seeing dead people lying in the street, or hung from telephone poles, or thrown into ditches with their throats cut. Like any child growing up in an occupied city during wartime, I didn’t think much about it.”

In other words Simic was conditioned to the world’s lunacy from early childhood. And in fact isn’t “what the lunatics are up to in every corner of our planet” what the tv evening news is mostly about, the anchors conditioning us to accept the world’s lunacy by giving us the news of the day with straight faces as if the events and happenings they are describing were normal — actually with sorrowful faces if they happen to be one of the three, Brian Williams, Scott Pelley, or Diane Sawyer? Do the three of them just happen to be sorrowful people, or is it their long exposure to the news that has made them so?

So who are the lunatics in Charles’s phrase, “What the lunatics are up to?” Well, as a start, how about the following individuals whom I take from a Wiki list of some 200 or so of the world’s leaders. (I’m sure that my short list of lunatics is not complete and I invite you to add to it.)

Because of what’s happening, and happening yet once again in Egypt’s Tahrir Square, I begin my list with the de facto ruler of Egypt, the Chairman of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, who, while generously permitting Mubarak to be pushed out stayed in himself, and whose men are right now confronting the thousands of Egyptian women, protesting the abusive treatment of one of their own right there in the Square.

Then there are the leaders of any number of failed and corrupt states, a few of the most notable and contemptible being Russia’s Putin, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko, the Congo’s Joseph Kabila, Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir, Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. Lunatics all of them.

Then there are a number of odd couples, Pakistan’s Asif Ali Zardari and General Ashfaq Kayani, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ali Khamenei, and most recently in the newly independent Iraq, the warring couple, the Shite Muslim President Nouri al-Maliki and the Sunni Muslim leader Tariq al-Hashimi.

On my list of “lunatics” I would also place Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Algeria’s Abdelaziz Bouteflika, and Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez, mostly for what they don’t do. These three have the power to make things better for their own people, and for the region, and for the world, but they are blinded by their mistaken beliefs and errors of judgement.

A list of the world’s lunatics might include any number of others, not necessarily leaders of States, —the Republican presidential candidates, for example, and certainly the new leaders of North Korea who will probably be behind the dauphin Kim Jong-un’s every move.

And especially my list would include those most responsible for the failure of the European Central Bank to act responsibly and end the crisis of the Euro.

I’m not sure what the poet, Charles Simic, meant by the word lunatic. What I mean is that the individuals behind the tv news that we are battered with daily are mad to the extent that they are not able to see the world through any eyes but their own.

Isn’t that a kind of madness when one can’t get outside of oneself, put oneself in the place of another? These men seem unable to do so. As I say that I realize there are no women on my list. Is lunacy a male sickness? In regard to what’s happened in the world up until now it would seem that way.

How else could Bashar al-Assad, for example, see, and not see as everyone else sees, the slaughter by his soldiers of 100 defecting soldiers, civilians and antigovernment activists over the last three days in northwestern Syria? How else could Benjamin Netanyahu not see that new settlements, and much else on both sides of the dispute, would have to cease if Palestinians and Israelis were ever to live together in peace?

In Simic’s own words, “What devotees of sadomasochism do to their bodies is nothing compared to the torments that those addicted to the news and political commentary inflict on their minds almost every hour of the day.”

I take the following from the Harvard Magazine of Januaary-February, 2012.

My “pick” of Fred Shapiro’s pick of  choice Harvard words:

We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.
—Louis D. Brandeis, LL.B. 1877, quoted in Labor, October 14, 1941

There may be said to be two classes of people in the world: those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not.
—Robert Benchley, A.B. 1912, Of All Things (1921)

Nobody dies from lack of sex. It’s lack of love we die from.
—Margaret Atwood, A.M. ’62, Litt.D. ’04, The Handmaid’s Tale (1986)

I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce, and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry, and Porcelaine.
—John Adams, A.B. 1755, LL.D. 1781, Letter to Abigail Adams, May 12, 1780

In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.
—Gertrude Stein, A.B. 1898, The Geographical History of America (1936)

When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.
—J. Robert Oppenheimer ’25, S.D. ’47, quoted in In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: USAEC Transcript of Hearing Before Personnel Security Board (1954)

Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., A.B. 1861, LL.B. 1866, LL.D. 1895, Compañía General de Tabacos de Filipinas v. Collector of Internal Revenue (dissenting opinion), 1927

Go to where the silence is and say something.
—Amy Goodman ’84, on accepting an award for coverage of the 1991 massacre of Timorese by Indonesian troops, quoted in the Columbia Journalism Review, March/April 1994

What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.
—George Santayana, A.B. 1886, Ph.D. 1889, The Life of Reason (1905)

A democracy—that is, a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people.
—Theodore Parker, Divinity School 1836, speech at Anti-Slavery Convention, Boston, May 29, 1850

Read this today in a Times op-ed piece by Brian Greene, Waiting for the Higgs Particle:

“Higgs thus suggested a rewriting of the very definition of nothingness, filling otherwise empty space with a substance capable of bestowing upon particles their mass.”

Haven’t we heard something like this before? —Wasn’t it the carpenter Joseph’s son who suggested a rewriting of the very definition of nothingness, at least that of our lives up until then, and in so doing didn’t he fill the otherwise empty spaces where we were living with a spirituality or holy ghost whose presence would bestow upon us our “mass” or substance?