Cromwell

In honor of the return of “Empire,” this is the first installment of a mini-series on empires this week.

When you look at a globe and understand just how far India is from the UK, and how much more populous, the notion that the smaller country could rule the larger seems utterly preposterous.  And yet, history doesn’t lie.  How could this happen?

The key to being a successful imperialist is for both the vanquishing and the vanquished party to believe very firmly that the civilization represented by the imperialist is superior.  It also helps if the subject society is politically divided, and the imperialist can play indigenous parties off against each other; that is the reason India fell completely within the British Empire, and China did not.

Empires typically begin as commercial ventures, but end up being justified as an effort to share the benefits of civilization with the natives.  When the subject population no longer believes in the superiority of the imperialists, the empire is doomed.

For my money, The Economist is the best news magazine in the world.  However, it has a clear agenda supporting limited government, free trade, and technological change, so it is suspiciously convenient that a lengthy article in this week’s edition finds that the principal driver of US inequality is not globalization, technological change, and the demise of unions, but increased rent-seeking that should be addressed by a blast of pure capitalism.  If you dig further and ask the right questions, the argument pretty well dissolves into vapor.

The position taken in the article essentially is that the rent-seeking is the product of several phenomena:  too much protection to intellectual property; effective lobbying beyond the resources of most companies; barriers to the entry of professions; and inadequate enforcement of antitrust law, leading to oligopolies. I don’t exactly disagree with the analysis, but it doesn’t explain either stagnant wages or increased inequality, for the following reasons:

1.  Inequality, while a problem, is not the major issue facing the American workforce–the real concern is stagnant wages.  I addressed this in a series of posts last year.

2.  Stagnant wages and increased inequality are issues throughout the West, not just in America.   Are we to believe that substantially different cultures and political systems have all suffered from the same rent-seeking problem?  Isn’t it more plausible to say that the problem is caused by common experiences with globalization and technological change?

3.  Rent-seeking has nothing to do with lost manufacturing jobs and lower wages.  The percentage of manufactured goods made in America, relative to the entire world, is about the same as it was 20 years ago, but the number of jobs supported by those goods is far smaller.  Increases in productivity since the 1970’s have not in any way been matched by increases in wages.  These are undisputed facts.  What do they have to do with rent-seeking?

4.  Where are the higher wages in the protected industries?  In the ordinary course of business, you would expect wages in the businesses protected by “moats” to rise steadily if the problem is rent-seeking.  In the case of tech businesses, they have, but that is due to the structure of those businesses, which employ a relatively small number of highly skilled workers.  Otherwise, the article does not address this issue, and I am not aware of any evidence which suggests that wages for rail and airline workers, for example, are skyrocketing.

5.  Let them be hairdressers!  Removing the barriers to entry in a variety of occupations is probably a good idea, but increasing competition among hairdressers is not going to make much of a dent in either inequality or the stagnant wage problem.  At best, it provides an entrepreneurial opportunity for the unemployed and underemployed; it won’t help the soon-to-be-unemployed Carrier workers very much.

6.  Where is the right-wing “revolution?”  The agenda that is implicit in the article would involve lots of deregulation at the state and local levels, amendments to and more enforcement of existing antitrust statutes, changes to federal intellectual property law, and limits on lobbying that go far beyond overturning Citizens United.  The last is completely impractical, and the rest are not significant parts of the platform of any of the remaining candidates–Cruz would be the closest.

Again, I’m not saying I disagree with this agenda; I would just say that the real sources of the problem are globalization, technological change, and the demise of unions, and nothing proposed in the article is going to help very much.

Douthat portrays Cruz, not as a convinced hard right-wing ideologue from birth, but as a grimly ambitious and charmless man who coldly embraced the GOP counterestablishment only after the regular establishment rejected him.  From everything I have seen and read, this rings true, which is why I said his floor as a potential President was Richard Nixon in a post several months ago.

His dirty tricks on the campaign trail sound familiar, too.  Call him Tricky Ted.

There once was a Texan named Cruz.

Of self-serving drive he’s accused.

It looks like he’s fixin’

To be Richard Nixon.

No wonder his party’s confused.

They may be old, but Mick and Keith have a lot more juice left than Fidel and Raul.

Bernie Sanders wears his idealism on his sleeve, but it stops at the water’s edge; there are times when his views on foreign policy mirror those of Trump and Cruz.  How do we account for that?

I think his fixation with Henry Kissinger provides an answer to that question.

I was too young to be involved with the agitation over the Vietnam War.  Both then and now, I viewed the war as a dreadful policy mistake that was driven by the misconceived idea that all Communist countries in Southeast Asia had consistent interests.  The student opponents of the war, however, took that argument several steps further, and contended that the war was actually immoral, and part of a piece that included interventions to hobble or topple legitimate left-wing governments all over the world.  This line of reasoning conveniently merged the war opponents’ self-interest with the inevitable American desire to moralize, and its logical conclusion was that idealism and the refusal to exercise power abroad were one and the same.

I never bought that part of the argument, but Bernie clearly did, and he never got over it, even though the world is a completely different place than it was in 1970. That is why he talks about Kissinger and the 1950’s coup in Iran rather than Bosnia or Rwanda or Darfur.

 

There once was a Texan named Cruz.

His wife has been much in the news.

He really looked pissed

When a rag said he kissed

Several women.  Here’s hoping he sues.

 

Ted Cruz, chick magnet?  Not bloody likely.

                    Bernie Can’t Fail

How’d you get so old and angry?

You’ve become a really big leftie.

To the bankers you’ve been really nasty.

Bernie can’t fail.

 

First you must deal with Wall Street.

Then the rest of the right you must defeat.

You’ll have the whole country at your feet.

Bernie can’t fail.

 

You went to the voters

To realize your dreams

‘Cause what you need, you get from them.

First, they doubt

But they know what you’re about.

Bernie can’t fail.

 

Bernie can’t fail . . .

 

Parody of “Rudie Can’t Fail” by The Clash.

I love Ireland; it’s a wonderful country.  (The Cromwell for whom this blog was named was not Oliver.)  That said, I’m not much enamored of its creation myth, for the following reasons:

1.  There is a modern, and uncomfortable, analogy to the leaders of the Easter Rising.  Suicide bombers–think about it.

2.  The obvious, and intended, analogy to the crucifixion is obnoxious.  Christ never killed anybody.

3.  Under the circumstances, the execution of the ringleaders by the British was perfectly understandable.   It might have been, and probably was, a political blunder, but with thousands dying every day in Flanders, how would you expect the government to react?

4.  The Easter Rising made the creation of a single unified Republic less, not more, likely in the long run.  The Protestant reaction to what was perceived as an appalling act of treason during wartime was completely predictable.

On a much more positive note, I consider the continuing existence of Northern Ireland to be an unnecessary anachronism, due to the evolution of the Republic into a more secular and multi-cultural country and the fact that both the UK and the Republic are EU members.  I think there is a reasonable chance we will see a united Ireland in my lifetime.  And that will be a good thing.

I couldn’t write about the Easter Rising without including a limerick.

 

The painful creation of Eire.

It’s not all that one could desire.

It started with blood

Soldiers stuck in the mud

And innocents caught in crossfire.

Let’s assume, for purposes of argument, that Trump will have the nomination in hand before he goes to Cleveland.  His tax cut plan is impeccably PBP,  his views on Obamacare have evolved to the point that a Dickensian villain would weep with joy, and his position on illegal immigration deviates from the GOP mainstream mostly in tone, but there is no denying that his opinions on trade, entitlement cuts, and foreign policy are extremely heterodox.

What will the GOP platform look like?  Will the establishment fight to the death over entitlement cuts, or example, or will it surrender temporarily and let Trump be Trump?

The convention will be fascinating even if it isn’t brokered.

The GOP Speaker Paul Ryan.

For a civilized party he’s cryin’.

He thinks Trump is crude

But to stop him is rude.

And so, moderation is dyin’.

         Bombers in Brussels

Bombers in Brussels again.

You know that we’re far from the end.

The battle will rage on and on

Till all of those bastards are gone.

 

Go on with your life as before.

Concede that we’ll have plenty more.

But time will not be on their side.

They’ll run out of places to hide.

 

They can’t win unless we overreact and assist with their recruiting.  The hard thing is to avoid lashing out indiscriminately.  The President, fortunately, is aware of that.  President Trump would be a whole different story. . .

Most pundits assumed the Trump phenomenon would eventually run into a ditch, based on the fate of the fairly similar Pat Buchanan campaign (remember “peasants with pitchforks?”) in 1996.  It hasn’t happened, and here’s why:

1.  The problems created by globalization and technological change are much worse now than they were in 1996.  Chinese imports and Indian call centers were just a blip on the radar during the Buchanan campaign.

2.  Trump isn’t a culture warrior.  His lifestyle prevents him from moralizing about the sixties, which increases his pool of potential voters.

3.  The GOP establishment was discredited by George W. Bush.  No elaboration required.

4.  The white working class Reactionaries have become Republicans.  What is happening now is essentially a hostile takeover of the GOP by people who prefer swaggering government to limited government.   The likelihood of the creation of a third party is increasing by the day.

In a campaign replete with inane ideas, Ted’s support for the gold standard may well win first prize.  It is a bogus solution to a non-existent problem, for the following reasons:

1. The ostensible reasons to use gold are to strengthen the dollar and prevent inflation.  The dollar is extremely strong right now, and inflation is below the Fed’s 2% target.
2.  If you are really concerned about the dollar and inflation, you just raise interest rates.  Relying on the gold standard essentially means that interest rates and the money supply are dictated by random events, not by the needs of the economy.
3.  There is no basis in American history for the conclusion that economic growth was more stable under the gold standard than under the current regime.