Anyway, when it comes to self-analysis, drugs are a one-man birthday party. You don’t get any presents you didn’t bring.
Goo goo g’joob
But the sixties drug culture did produce some great music. Unless you’ve made the mistake of going back and listening to it. What did the Grateful Dead fan say when he ran out of pot? What a shitty band!
Turning on, tuning in, and dropping out unleashed a great wave of personal creativity—macramé plant hangers, posters for rock concerts at the Fillmore Auditorium with psychedelic lettering that was illegible unless you were too stoned to read, the cover art for the White Album, and hippie chick embroidery on jean jackets. These are comparable to the sculpture of Donatello, the illuminated manuscript of the Book of Kells, the painting of Caravaggio, and the couture of Coco Chanel. If you’re on PCP.
So what can the twenty-first century learn from the drug culture of the 1960s? Again, I refer the reader to my second paragraph. While doing some background reading, however, I did come across one helpful hint, which might be especially useful to America’s political class. In 2015 Cambridge University Press published a volume in its Cambridge Essential Histories series called American Hippies, by W. J. Rorabaugh, who quotes the Yale law professor and counterculture advocate Charles Reich, author of the 1970 bestselling panegyric to the 1960s, The Greening of America.
Says Reich, “No one can take himself seriously in bell-bottoms.”
Can the Government Be Run Like a Business?
“Government should be run like a business” is a bromide of long standing among fiscal conservatives, market-oriented libertarians, pragmatic liberals, and other people who think that politics and practicality ought to be a better match.
It should be noted that just because something is called a “bromide” doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. Potassium bromide is an effective sedative and anticonvulsant. It’s no longer prescribed as a medicine, however, because of its high level of toxicity.
But that’s much more than we know about the bromide of running government like a business, which has never been submitted to a meaningful trial.
We did elect a businessman to the presidency in 2016. But there’s considerable evidence that he’s not good at running businesses. Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Plaza Hotel, and Trump Entertainment Resorts all went bankrupt. He is good at branding. But branding a business is different from running one. Besides, “America” was already well established as a brand.
Very few American presidents have had significant business careers before they became president. I’m not counting the management of large plantations by early presidents such as Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Jackson. We have a name for the slave labor business model. It’s called evil.
And I’m not counting show business either. It’s such an oddball enterprise that I’m not sure what lessons are to be learned from it. Okay maybe The Apprentice serves as an inspiration for Trump’s cabinet meetings the way Bedtime for Bonzo served as an inspiration for Reagan’s.
The few presidents we’ve had who were chief executives before they were the chief executive either didn’t try or didn’t get a chance to apply business methods to government matters.
An exception was Warren Harding, editor and publisher of a lucrative Ohio newspaper. Unfortunately Harding’s business method was corruption.
Both presidents Bush did have pre-presidential business careers. Bush 41 had done reasonably well in oil exploration, but not so well that he ever earned the West Texas nickname “Gusher George.”
As co-owner of the Texas Rangers, George W. Bush made over $14 million when the team was sold in 1998. But in 2010 the team was bought by Ray Davis and Bob Simpson for $593 million. Businesswise, Bush 43 seems to have left money on the table.
As president, however, each George faced challenges no CEO ever confronts. There isn’t any MBA case study that prepares you for the Gulf War or 9/11.
And speaking of CEOs, it’s interesting what happened when Donald Rumsfeld (ex-CEO of G. D. Searle pharmaceutical corporation) was handed the management of the Iraq War. The merger and acquisition went well but in the end the stockholders (U.S. occupying troops, Iraqi civilians, victims of ISIS terrorism) weren’t gratified.
In fact, it’s been ninety-two years since we elected a president who was a truly successful businessman. The brilliantly entrepreneurial Herbert Hoover was a mining engineer who became a multimillionaire silver, lead, and zinc magnate. (No wonder Hoover favored “hard money.” Although, personally, I’m not sure I want a zinc-backed U.S. dollar.)
Alas, things did not work out well for “The Herbert”— 1929 stock market crash, Great Depression, etc.
To be fair, Hoover had been in office for less than eight months when economic disaster struck. It wasn’t all his fault. Nonetheless, “Great Depression” is the feeling that comes over anybody who tries to look at the U.S. government as a business.
In the first place, the USG “corporation” is a monopoly. Do not try to start your own government. We settled the question of whether that’s a good idea at Appomattox Court House in 1865.
And we settled it rightly. The former Yugoslavia gives us an example of what happens when a country—even a minor country—splits into lots of little countries.
When it comes to government one is enough. But that still leaves us with a monopoly situation.
Monopolies are infamous for charging high prices in return for shoddy goods and services. USG is true to form. We pay the high prices on April 15 and we see the shoddy goods and services in—to name just two examples—the nation’s infrastructure and our VA hospitals.
But aren’t monopolies also infamous for reaping huge profits? The USG balance sheet is projected to show a loss of $1.08 trillion in 2020 and has been in the red for forty-six of the past fifty years.
USG is a terrible monopolist. Government is like a kid playing a game of Monopoly. The kid has hotels (in government it’s called “eminent domain”) on Boardwalk and Park Place and on all green, yellow, red, and orange properties. The kid owns (by way of the Departments of Transportation and Energy) the railroads and the utilities. And the kid has a “Get Out of Jail Free” card. (Note present and past presidential pardons.) Then what does the kid do? Spills an alphabet soup of federal regulatory agencies on the board; stomps on the top hat, wheelbarrow, race car, and Scottie dog tokens of free enterprise, and takes all the Federal Reserve Bank Monopoly Money and throws it out the playroom window.
No amount of entrepreneurial savvy can fix this game. The playroom’s been a mess since 1776. And no business wizard can spank the kid. The kid is the American public.
“Can government be run like a business?” Yes—a bad one.
Two, Four, Six, Eight Who Do We Appreciate . . . The Electoral College!
As we all learned in our civics class . . . or would have if we hadn’t been staring out the window, napping, or drawing toupees on pictures of President Eisenhower in the textbook . . . in an American presidential election voters actually do not vote for a presidential candidate. They vote for an “elector” who is pledged to vote for that candidate.
As per rules set down in the U.S. Constitution, the president of the United States is elected by an institution called the Electoral College.
The way this works—in simple terms, to keep us awake and not looking for photos of Ike to deface—is that each state gets electors in the Electoral College equal to the state’s number of congressional districts plus two (its number of senators). And the District of Columbia also gets three electors (because back in 1961 the residents of Washington, D.C., complained that they weren’t getting a say about the president even though the whole city is filled with people who won’t shut up about the president).
Thus the Electoral College has 538 electors. The presidential candidate who receives the majority of their votes becomes president.
Choosing
electors in each state is mostly a matter of winner-take-all. The presidential candidate with the most votes in a state gets that state’s votes in the Electoral College. (Maine and Nebraska can split their electors according to who wins in which congressional district—but we’ll let the lobster mongers and corn shuckers worry about that.)
There is such a thing as a “faithless elector,” who doesn’t vote for the candidate to whom he or she is pledged. In the 2016 Electoral College proceedings Colin Powell received three votes and John Kasich, Ron Paul, Faith Spotted Eagle, and Bernie Sanders received one each.
Being a faithless elector is like committing adultery—against the law in some states and not in others. But, as with adultery, arrest and prosecution are rare. And in the history of American presidential elections Electoral College faithlessness has never led to any change in who became president (or, so far as we know, who slept around with Bernie Sanders).
The Electoral College is complex but its effect is simple: it gives the parts of America where people are thin on the ground greater say over who’s president than they’d have if only thick people were counted.
Before we discuss whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, first let’s not discuss the 2016 presidential election.
While it’s true that a certain person—who has insisted on constantly, repeatedly reminding us—won the “popular vote” (or not quite, since she got 48.2 percent), it’s also true that she was, as it were, trumped by another person in the Electoral College, 304 to 227.
But. The two of them knew the rules and campaigned accordingly. If they had been running to gain a majority of the popular vote instead of a majority of the Electoral College vote they would have conducted different campaigns.
Worse campaigns. Campaigns aimed at the lowest common denominator of voters—at the hoi polloi, the masses, the mob. Political thinkers have theorized that mob rule would create a society marked by selfishness, stupidity, instability, and a vicious tendency to scapegoat. Political thinkers can quit theorizing. Behold Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, Reddit, WhatsApp, WhosApp, WheresApp, WhensApp, etc.
The 2016 presidential campaign was ugly but could have been uglier if both candidates had put even more emphasis on vulgar rabble-rousing and vast gatherings of fanatical adherents.
Picture, on the one hand, a gigantic Nuremberg Nerd Rally, camera ready for a lefty Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Hillary. And, on the other, a Red State Square with a parade of ballistic Trumps rolling through it, reviewed by a Trump Politburo atop Trump’s Tomb on Trump Day.
Right, there are two good reasons to keep the Electrical College. It forces our presidential candidates out into the boonies to be dragged from their private jets and comfy campaign buses at all hours and stuffed with starchy waffle mix at Rotary pancake breakfasts, smeared with canned tomato sauce at volunteer fire department spaghetti dinners, queried about local zoning ordinances by yokels in town halls, picketed (or endorsed) by special interests so special that no one has any interest in them, and otherwise made to behave like the small and inconsequential personages that our presidential candidates are.
We may—and we do—elect fools, but at least we elected them out in the open where we can see what they’re doing.
But what’s more important about the Electoral College is that it gives a vote not only to Americans but to America itself. We give weight in our political system to place as well as to people.
The population of Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wyoming combined is less than the population of the San Francisco metropolitan area (and—bonus—doesn’t include a single person who lives in San Francisco).
Under a system of “direct” election by popular vote this would leave 1,058,000 square miles of America with less influence over who becomes president than 14.4 square inches of the iPhone invented by San Francisco native Steve Jobs, and he’s dead.
Steve Jobs liked to pay lip service to the “environment.” So do the people of the San Francisco metropolitan area.
And yet when it comes to allowing that environment to have any voice in national politics . . .
According to the Census Bureau, 62.7 percent of Americans live in urban areas, on only 3.5 percent of the country’s land. They don’t live in the American environment, they live indoors in the American “in-vironment.”
I’m concerned about the safety and well-being of these people. City folks do go outdoors. But they go outdoors only in order to annoy the place—with their overly revealing bathing suits, skimpy shorts in all seasons, rattletrap mountain bikes, smelly hiking boots, unwieldy backpacks, ugly running shoes, overpriced skis, dim bulb surfer slag, and noisy skateboard antics.
This is why city folks are so often painfully sunburned, afflicted with hypothermia, chased by cougars, eaten by bears, medivaced from nature reserves, bitten by snakes, buried in avalanches, attacked by sharks, and hit by cars.
It’s interesting how rarely these things happen to people who work and live outdoors. Perhaps that’s because they’ve been to Electoral College.
Is a Reasonable, Sensible, Moderate Foreign Policy Even Possible?
As I’ve mentioned, I consider myself to be a libertarian—to a reasonable, sensible, moderate degree. That is, I believe in individual freedom, individual dignity, and individual responsibility as long as I get to be an irresponsible undignified freeloader at least every so often.
Anyway, as a person who subscribes to the principles of libertarianism somewhat, I have somewhat of a problem with foreign policy. Libertarian philosophy is based on free individuals. Many of the world’s individuals aren’t free and, in foreign policy terms, none of us are individuals. We’re little bits and pieces of a nation.
Nations can’t be regarded in the same way as individuals. Nations don’t have equal rights before the law because . . . there is no law. (Oh, supposedly, there’s such a thing as “international law,” but really? Nice try, world court in The Hague.)
Foreign policy is ruled by force. Matthew 11:12, “The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away.”
Foreign policy is never an individual enterprise. “I’m going to invade Ukraine” is a harmless statement—at most a plea for help from mental health professionals. “Russia is going to invade Ukraine” is a different kind of statement, especially if it’s made by the Kremlin.
Foreign policy is always a collective enterprise. Even the freest nations bind their citizens into collective enterprises, particularly when it comes to international relations. In fact international relations are worse than actual relations. As Grandfather O’Rourke said to me, “I don’t care if all the kids next door won Nobel Peace Prizes and all your cousins are in jail, family is family.”
Collective enterprise undercuts individual enterprise. Inside a free nation, individual interests are balanced through democracy and rule of law. Therefore individual enterprise can be assumed to be—over the long term, on average, in aggregate—rational.
Collective enterprise can be assumed to be no such thing. The interests of collective enterprises, such as foreign policy, have no balancing mechanism with the interests of other collective enterprises, such as foreigners’ foreign policy.
Collective enterprises may be inert and benign like coral reefs. But even then they’re thoughtless and lack individual freedom and dignity.
When humans are involved, collective enterprises are more often busy and active and fraught with potential for, at best, amoral conduct and, at worst, outright evils such as dictatorship, oligarchy, or mob rule.
The dictators and oligarchs might be, individually, nice enough people. (I have it on good authority that even Bashar al-Assad is personable around the house.) But they will give in to the temptations of their collective power. And collective power, unlike individual freedom, is not constrained by reason. Likewise mob rule is extremely dangerous no ma
tter whether the mob is wearing slogan T-shirts and carrying hand-lettered placards or wearing bedsheets and carrying flaming crosses.
In other words, collective enterprises suck, and foreign policy is one.
This is the problem. What’s the solution? We’ve tried having no foreign policy at all. Pearl Harbor. Isolationism didn’t work. We’ve tried aggressive internationalism. Vietnam. Didn’t work. We’ve tried apologizing for our aggressive internationalism. Obama. Arab Spring. Didn’t work. We’ve tried sanctions. Putin persists. Kim Jong-un endures. Ayatollah Khamenei abides. Didn’t work. And we’ve tried electing a loudmouth commander in chief and having him go CAPS LOCK on Twitter . . .
Probably there’s no such thing as a foreign policy that “works” in the sense of making problems with foreigners go away. It’s like an endless road trip with kids in the backseat of the car. Sooner or later we’re going to have to turn around and say, “Don’t make me come back there!”
So let’s limit the consideration of foreign policy to America’s use of military force. That’s the crux of the matter, the realpolitik equivalent of parents who spank.
Use of military force is definitionally a collective enterprise. And it’s the part of foreign policy that’s much more dangerous than, for example, trade agreements. I’d rather pay lots for high tariff goods at Target than shoot people, not to mention have them shooting back.
One of the clearest thinkers about American use of military force is former national security adviser, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and former secretary of state Colin Powell.
General Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the Gulf War. (Did work.) He proposed eight questions that should be answered “yes” before America uses military force. These became known as the Powell Doctrine.
A Cry from the Far Middle Page 12
