Positive Liberty in the Time of the Great Asshole Flowering

Liberty is an important political concept. Political theorists typically divide liberty into two kinds, positive and negative liberty. Negative liberty entails freedom from coercion, freedoms not to be interfered with, freedom from excessive governmental regulation. This is clearly an important idea as any list of human rights--such as the French Declaration of the Rights of Man or the Declaration of Independence--asserts. But positive liberty is a more peculiar concept for it denotes the concept of freedom to act, freedom to do, freedom to be someone. But for every 'thou shalt not' there are ten thousand 'thou shalts'. Therefore, positive liberties--liberties to act and to do and be are seen as incapable of being brought under a single rubric or, if they are, are not the proper sphere for governmental action. Indeed, positive liberty is here the realm of the personal, the private, and the economic man. Liberals have typically focused on negative liberties to the exclusion of positive liberty for the reason that a concept of positive liberty is associated with a particular view of the purpose of man, of his ends and function, and his non-public work as a private citizen. With respect to the final end of man we should note that this conception--let's call it a 'comprehensive doctrine'--is the business of personal choice and of religious designation, in other words, a part of the private sphere of life and not of the public sphere of rights. On the other hand, positive liberty can refer to the economic sphere and, in this sense, the realm of economic freedom has long been understood to be the "private" realm. (Perhaps this is because the right hand of government is not supposed to know what the other hand is up to because, after all, the invisible hand is supposed to be working things out in everybody's interest. Just a thought)

But a theory of positive liberty is an important feature of a republican theory of virtue for it describes the conditions needed for citizens to actually be citizens and not mere serfs or dependents upon the state. But the public character of positive liberty shouldn't be that hard to identify. I'd like to say that positive liberty is to be understood as that active use of human capacities which assists in the furtherance of autonomy and freedom from servitude. This is not to say that a fully actualized human being is a social atom, cut off from his fellows, but rather it is to say that positive liberty is actualized in those human beings who have developed their skills and capacities so as to become contributing members of society and, in so contributing, are able to procure their own freedom from servitude. When a person has developed the capacities to become a member of a profession of some kind, they thereby have positive liberty in the requisite sense. This is because they thereby possess the active basis of political equality in the sense that they actually contribute through their labor to society, have a stake in its decisions, and really care about its structure. This is more than the passive possession of negative rights, a mere empty formal possession of "rights", for it puts the individual in a relationship of active concern for the direction of the society in the sense of a stakeholder rather than a mere ward.

If we think of our own society--American society--as one dedicated to the furtherance of the cause of freedom, then we must not merely understand that freedom in the negative sense as providing a resistance-less social playing field in which the free market can do whatever it will. Rather, we must understand that freedom entails positive liberty as well--of the valid interest of individuals in cultivating their positive freedom. This may entail governmental curtailing of the free market where it denies, as a matter of structural necessity, the widescale development of positive freedom in the citizenry. Where jobs are constantly being shed in the name of market efficiencies, one must look and see whether such job losses are a matter of choice or of necessity. The market technicians and servants of Capital have decided lately that positive liberty is not very important. Rather, they appear to have decided that real positive liberty can be substituted with apparent wealth rather than real virtue. Given the entrenchment of the consumer mentality, the expanded ability of citizen-consumers to buy goods is just as good as if they were able to provide for themselves through meaningful labor. The carefully orchestrated boom in the housing market persuaded many citizens that they were positively free. Their wealth increased and they enjoyed a higher standard of living for a time.

But we should notice that this newfound wealth is evaporating with the collapse of the subprime housing markets. And, in the total collapse of such wealth, will the citizenry have been made more or less free in the relevant sense? Arguably, the average citzen will be less free because he will have enjoyed an artificially high standard of living without cultivating the relevant virtues of postive liberty. Here wealth accrued to individuals without their actually doing anything to get that wealth and, in the mean time, turned a blind eye to the direction of the society as a whole. Rather, they played a game of 'don't ask, don't tell'--if you don't ask more of me, I won't tell on your corrupt and impossible housing scam in the offing, the deficit spending on a hopeless war in Iraq, the fact that I don't have any health care, and so on. And now--now that the great asshole flower of the Bush administration has been allowed to bloom--we are left impovershed as a society: our dollar tanking, our citizenry reeling under the weight of debts, our jobs offshored and oversea'd, our infrastructure ever more dependent upon petroleum--all of this at a time when the spectre of Peak oil is beginning to emerge.

What we need is a culture that honors work--productive, useful, socially beneficial work--and that penalizes corrupt, scamming, derivative work. But look, we might just yet witness that age come to be. The age of the sunburnt, Jeffersonian pauper is yet to arrive!

Incomprehensible Hubris

As I was sitting down to my lunch today, I watched a C-Span press briefing with Senate Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R, KY). McConnell was discussing the recent appropriation for Iraq War spending--totaling some 28 billion dollars which would last through April, 2008. He was quite happy about this and emphasized that General Petraeus's plan "is working" and that the Senate Majority should just keep pouring money into it. But he wasn't all that happy about the Democratic Majority for he then segued into discussing the underwhelming performance of the Majority over 2007. He claimed that they "just hadn't done anything". By this he meant to imply that the democrats were ineffective and therefore didn't deserve to be in power; conversely, since the Republicans are effective at getting legislation passed (or, rather, acting as gatekeepers of "passable" legislation), they deserve to be in power.

We ought to notice that indeed Mitch and the Senate Republicans have been tremendously effective in preventing the democrats from doing anything--that they have acted in an obstructionist manner so as to prevent them from doing anything. The evidence speaks for itself. Consider, for instance, the attempt on the part of the Senate majority to give Habeas Corpus rights to the detainees at Guatanamo Bay and elsewhere in our far-flung secret dungeons. Yep, wouldn't you know it, Ol' Mitch had a hand in filibustering that one. Or, for that matter, consider the entire record of minority filibusters over the whole 2007 Senate Session. Again and again, the Minority has blocked transparency reforms, ethics resolutions, clean energy resolutions, minimum wage increases, motions to get out of the Iraq War, etc., etc., etc.

So, Mitch's points about the lackluster performance of the Democrats in Congress over 2007 can be understood in this way:

What he argued was that:
1. Very little substantial legislation was passed by the Senate in 2007.
2. If the democratic majority had been effective, much substantial legislation would have been passed.
3. Therefore, the democratic majority are ineffective.

And, what he implied is:
4. The effectiveness of the Republicans is measured by how well they thwart the Democrat's legislative agenda.
5. Very little substantial legislation was passed by the Senate in 2007.
6. Therefore, the Republican majority has been effective in 2007 at thwarting the Democratic's progressive agenda.

From this:
7. It follows that the Republican Majority is effective. (6, simplification)
8. The Republican Minority is effective and the Democratic Majority is ineffective.
9. Only "effective" politicians should be in power. (implied premise)
10. Therefore, the Republicans should be in power.

But, look, some suprising results follow from this.
Suppose we add the following true statement:
11. The Democrats were voted into a Majority in the House and the Senate in 2007 because they promised to make substantial changes to the way the Republicans were running Congress: to deal with Iraq, to get clean energy passed, to raise the minimum wage, and so on (i.e., "substantial legislation").

We also know that in our system of electoral politics:
12. The public will is expressed by their voting preferences.

We can see that:
13. The Republican Minority has been effective at blocking the will of the American Public in the 2007 Congress. (by 6, 11,12)

14. To thwart the will of the Public in democratic politics is, de facto, antidemocratic. (by definition)

15. To act in a way that is antidemocratic requires good justification. (principle of public reason)

16. Conversely, to act in antidemocratic fashion without good justification is an illegitimate usurpation of power, manifestly opposed to the design of democratic, consitutional Republics.

17. The Republican filibusters of 2007 are without good justification. (self-evident if you'd look at the reasons given by the filibusterers in the 2007th Congress).

18. Therefore, the Republican Minority has acted in an antidemocratic fashion without good justification and they have thwarted the democratically elected Majority in their efforts to express the Public Will.

19. Those who act in their official, public capacities without justification against the public will ought not to be allowed to remain in office as stewards of the public will. (a standard, uncontroversial legal concept broadly obtaining in democratic societies)

20. Therefore, the Republican Minority (including esp. Mitch McConnell) ought to be removed from public office. (by 1-19, QED)

The American voter will have the opportunity to decide in 2008 yet again: well-justified democratic reason OR obstructionist, self-seeking, incomprehensible, arrogant, antidemocratic hubris.

You decide.

Nuking the Economy

Article by Paul Craig Roberts (Assistant Treasury Secretary in the Reagan Administration) reporting the real extent of job losses to the economy over the last five years.

Branching Complexities

Barrels of Rotting Anchovies, Jacobins, and the Guillotine

The complexities and severity of the mortgage crisis are only recently coming to light. Here is a SF Chronicle article (via Stryder.com), uncovering the potential criminal liability of banks and loan officers who knowingly foisted sketchy loans upon suckas who thought they could outsmart the market and make a killing by an easy flip. The liability lies, in part, with the banks who didn't do the requisite background checks, knowingly issuing bogus loans only to repackage them in bundles and sell them off as mortgage backed securities ("Barrels of Rotting Anchovies"--thanks Jim Kunstler for the colorful term) to hedge funds and international banks. At least this is the story as I understand it.

What amazes me is the brazenness of Henry Paulson's plan to "freeze" the interest rates for 5 years--a gesture that, as with all things Bush, bear the appearance of populism but really serve the interests of the wealthy elites. Paul Krugman's NY times article of today explains this in detail, as does the Chronicle article.

When one reads about this scandal, one begins to wonder what will be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Some basic statistics will confirm how bad things are getting for the average American worker. The savings rate is below zero--he's borrowing just to make ends meet. Real inflation remains completely underreported as gasoline and food prices have been removed from the books ( a Clinton era Fed manoeuver) as well as the new "chain CPI" (Bernanke era) model which allows substitutions (think the price of the caloric equivalent of Hi-C for OJ). The price of health care grows at 10 or 11% a year, year in and year out. Worker wages have barely kept up even with the underreported inflation. The dollar has been tanking relative to other currencies. Our federal budget deficit has been growing exponentially, soon to eclipse the possibility of getting out from under the mountain of debt that we have accumulated. We are bogged down in a war that the taxpayers and their children are asked to pay for directly into the hands of Blackwater USA, Halliburton, and the rest of the corrupt players in the Iraq conflict. The minimum wage has been frozen for 10 or more years and the recent move to raise it barely even keeps up with inflation. Over the last 20 years--from the time of Bush I to Bush II, the average CEO pay has grown from 107 times the average worker's wage to about 500 times the average worker's wage.

Yes, it is times like these that test men's souls. They must decide, I suppose, whether they will continue to allow themselves to be rolled over and fucked or whether they'll pull out the guillotine and start taking off heads. Oh, whether it is nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune or take up arms.... Well, these are the questions we'll need to answer, I suppose.