DECLARATIVE:

Why America Is Both Democracy and Republic: Jay Cost speaks with Ben Klutsey about America’s identity as a democratic republic and the value of building consensus (BEN KLUTSEY, JAN 26, 2024, Discourse)

KLUTSEY: Now, going back to the earlier part of this conversation: When I asked you about who this book is for, you mentioned the critics on the left. The question here is, Is the Constitution too old and anachronistic? It gets a lot of criticisms from those on the left who seek changes to advance justice from their perspective. I think we’re getting a lot of criticisms from the right as well. You have the emergence of the post-liberals, who seek to abandon some aspects of our tradition.

Ultimately, I wanted to ask you to reflect a little bit on that critique about whether the Constitution is too old and anachronistic. Basically, what do the authors of the 1619 Project get right about the critiques of the Constitution?

COST: Yes, that is a good question. I do think that when people complain about the age of the Constitution, they’re being selective in their complaints. There are lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of things that are very old that they like. A good example of this is how many critics of the Constitution are operating from within the university system. The university system is a holdover from the medieval—they have professorships. That’s a holdover from medieval guilds.

I think to say that something is bad because it’s old or outdated, in and of itself, is specious reasoning. I don’t think anybody wants to play that game because, sooner or later, there’s going to be something old that they really like. Likewise, the idea of a jury of your peers: Everybody likes a jury of your peers. Nobody’s got a problem with a jury of your peers. The phrase “a jury of your peers” traces back to Magna Carta, which is quite a bit older than the Constitution, right? So just identifying the age of the Constitution as inherently being problematic, I think, is specious reasoning.

I do think, with respect to the 1619 Project, I do think that there is a tendency among conservatives … The post-liberal right, let’s put a pin in them for a minute. I’ll get back to them in a minute. I think that there is a tendency among conservatives to turn the Constitution into a kind of American version of the Ten Commandments, issued on high from God Almighty and is fundamentally flawless and things like that.

I think it is important to acknowledge—and not just to give lip service to it, but to really acknowledge the failures of the founding generation, and in particular the failures of men of the midpoint in the Enlightenment in their definition of civil society as having been too narrow. I think that is one thing that the 1619 Project gets correct, which is that there was an exceedingly narrow definition of civil society.

Now, by the standards of the age, the United States of America had a shockingly small-d democratic civil society because land was cheap. Landowners being able to participate in politics meant a very, very broad franchise, much broader than England, which at the time was broader than anything else in Europe.

Nevertheless, the rhetoric that Jefferson lays out in the Declaration of Independence is a sweeping call for universalism. The country was fundamentally founded on universal principles of human freedom. And self-determination as well—because that’s really what the Declaration is saying, right? It’s that people, being born naturally free, have a right to self-determination. That was something they knew, and that was something they did not follow through on because it was inconvenient to their economic interests. At the end of the day, it was inconvenient to their economic interests. They just crossed their fingers and hoped that the problem would melt away.

That critique, I think, is a very fair one. I’ll give you an example of this. If you go to James Madison—there’s been complaints about the change at James Madison’s Montpelier. But if you go and see it, what they’ve really done is they’ve really brought in the story of the enslaved community on the grounds. I think that’s a very important thing for people to understand: that James Madison, who was really the architect of our system of ordered liberty, was ordering that liberty among people who were not free, and he was enjoying their labor.

We need to keep that close in mind when we’re thinking about these men and to appreciate that they made mistakes. However, just because they made mistakes, this is not the fruit of the poison tree. That’s not how these things work. They’re men. Like all human beings, they have flaws, and they were men of their age, and their age had flaws. But they still had good ideas.

I think ultimately what we need to do is, we need to evaluate their ideas. We need to take what they say at face value and then consider the wisdom of what they say. We don’t accept what they say dogmatically because they’re the Founders. Likewise, we don’t reject what they say because they came from an age where human bondage was still an acceptable thing.

Instead, the spirit in which I think that we should take them is the one that I tried to take them in the book: is that these are Enlightenment men, very well educated, with a thorough grounding in the history of Western civilization, and were faced in it with a very big problem and put together a very brilliant system of government that, in my opinion, has held the test of time.

I would argue we don’t follow the Constitution because James Madison told us to. It’s that we follow the Constitution because James Madison and the other Founders put together a series of arguments that make sense, that it’s a sensible system and it’s a defensible system. The genius of the system is not that it’s old. The genius of the system is that it’s genius. It’s just brilliant.

And it really is. If you were to think about it as somebody who’s not an American, even as a critic of the Constitution, just as a historical—even if we were to decide like, “OK, well, we’re done with the Constitution”—it’s remarkable. The United States of America was the first country in the world to figure out a sustainable way in which a broad population could govern itself without an external monarch or nobility or something like that, and they actually pulled it off. It’s remarkable.

The French tried the same thing a decade later: turned into a disaster. It really wasn’t repeated in a meaningful way until really the 20th century in many respects. You just have to hand it to them for that, if for nothing else: that clearly, they were onto something.

Properly understood, the universal application of laws is the republican guarantor of rights. So long as you and I are bound equally our rights are realized.

THIS IS THE WAY:

Ford At The Wire (John Osbourne, 11/06/1976, New Republic)

The road trip that was to take the President through Virginia, the Carolinas, California, Washington state and Oregon and back to the capital by way of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas and New York was phony because the conventional rallies and other events that occurred along the way were props for something else. The something else was a series of 30-minute television interviews for which the White House campaign adjunct, the President Ford Committee, had bought air time in states that Mr. Ford would have to carry if he was to have a chance of election. The interviews were supplemented with shorter TV and radio “spots” in a massive electronic blitz that would close the evening before the election with a half-hour on each of the three national networks. Taped shots of the President on the hustings, with his family and with accompanying dignitaries, padded out the first of the 30-minute interviews. They were conducted by Joe Garagiola, a retired baseball player turned sportscaster who traveled with the President. He would have done the work for free if his union had not required him to charge the PFC a minimum fee of $360 for each interview. Garagiola was regarded with considerable scorn by professional journalists, but they missed the point. The point was that, in the first Garagiola-Ford interviews the true Jerry Ford came across as he’d never come across from interviews with orthodox and certified journalists. The explanation begins with the fact that Joe Garagiola in his televised self proved to be a slightly modified Archie Bunker. He boasted of his ignorance of complex issues and invited the President to explain them in terms that ignoramuses like Joe could understand. Mr. Ford obliged, in terms that didn’t explain anything but satisfied his pal Joe. Watching the President and Joe together on the screen, manifestly and perfectly at ease with each other, one realized that Gerald Ford really is Archie Bunker, slightly modified, and that he was depending for election upon the nation’s Bunkers in their numerous variations.

Nikki should re-run this playbook with someone like W or Liz Cheney as her co-host.

YEAH, BUT THE GOAL ISN’T PRODUCTIVITY…:

No, office mandates don’t help companies make more money, study finds (Danielle Abril, January 24, 2024, Washington Post)

“We will not get back to the time when as many people will be happy working from the office the way they were before the pandemic,” said Mark Ma, co-author of the study and associate professor at the Katz Graduate School of Business. Additionally, mandates make workers less happy, therefore less productive and more likely to look for a new job, he said.

The study analyzed a sample of Standard & Poor’s 500 firms to explore the effects of office mandates, including average change in quarterly results and company stock price. Those results were compared with changes at companies without office mandates. The outcome showed the mandates made no difference. Firms with mandates did not experience financial boosts compared with those without. The sample covered 457 firms and 4,455 quarterly observations between June 2019 and January 2023.

Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that over the past year, as more companies have debuted or doubled down on mandates, the number of people working from the office hasn’t changed much. About 78 percent of workers ages 16 and older worked entirely on-site in December 2023, down from 81 percent a year earlier. Of course, some professions like tech workers, who often have more flexible work schedules, have much lower averages, with only 34 percent working entirely on-site last month compared with 38 percent last year.

“There are compliance issues universally,” said Prithwiraj Choudhury, a Harvard Business School professor who studies remote work. “Some companies are issuing veiled threats about promotions and salary increases … which is unfortunate because this is your talent pool, your most valuable resource.”

…it’s just to pretend managers matter.

NOT EVERYONE IS AS LUCKY AS IBERIA AND CHILE:

Will Milei Make Argentina Great Again? (BRYAN CAPLAN, JAN 18, 2024, Bet on It)

As far as “emergency” measures go, Milei’s labor deregulation is notably mild: It lengthens new workers’ probationary period from three to eight months, cuts severance pay, and threatens dismissal for protesting workers who block traffic. But so far, these proposals have provoked the strongest pushback. The CGT, Argentina’s leading labor union, insists that the “only purpose” of these “ferocious” and “regressive” measures is to “hamstring union activity, punish workers and benefit business interests.”[viii] An Argentinian court almost instantly suspended Milei’s emergency labor deregulations, though perhaps he’ll win on appeal. The privatizations will be more significant if they happen, but since he declined to put them in his emergency decree, they’ll have to pass both houses of Argentina’s legislature.

What is the most likely scenario for Argentina? The monetary and fiscal stabilization is very likely to work. Argentina has faced far worse crises before: The hyperinflations of the 70s to the 90s multiplied prices 100 billion times. That’s like turning a billion dollars into a penny. Yet Argentinians ultimately overcame all these problems and more using the orthodox medicines of monetary restraint and fiscal responsibility. Since even politicians who ideologically opposed these treatments ultimately endured their short-run costs, it is a safe bet that a libertarian economics professor will do the same.

Turning Argentina, just a cut above Venezuela and Cuba in economic freedom, into a bastion of free-market policies is far less likely. Milei’s party, La Libertad Avanza, has a tiny share of the seats in both houses of the legislature, and all of his allied parties are clearly less libertarian. While Argentina did have much more pro-market policies in the 90s, this was part of the global anti-socialist wave after the Soviet collapse.[ix] Admirers of the neighboring Chilean economy may note that Milei is much more ideologically committed to free-market policies than Pinochet ever was. Like many politicians, he is acting on the adage, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” But Milei plainly has far less power to remake his country than the Chilean dictator.

MAGA MAN:

The New Deal’s Dark Underbelly: David Beito has penned one of the most damning scholarly histories of FDR to date (Marcus Witcher, 1/23/24, Law & Liberty)

The Roosevelt consensus among historians, to the extent that it ever existed, has been unraveling for some time. Free market critics such as Robert Higgs, Burt Folsom, Jim Powell, Thomas Fleming, and Amity Shlaes have rightly condemned Roosevelt’s response to the Great Depression and his inclination to use the coercive power of the state to impose his policy prescriptions—often with undesirable results and unintended consequences. But there is also an emerging group of historians on the left—Richard Rothstein, Ira Katznelson, Linda Gordon, and Richard Reeves, among others—who criticize FDR for reinforcing the white male breadwinner home, for creating organizations such as the Federal Housing Administration that helped segregate America through redlining, for not supporting anti-lynching legislation, for not ensuring that the New Deal programs benefited minorities on a more equal basis, and for the internment of Japanese Americans. Even David Kennedy’s comprehensive history of the period is critical of Roosevelt on some margins.

Although some historians have criticized FDR, most of the historiography of Roosevelt gives him a pass on the abuse of civil liberties during his administrations and hails him as a champion of democracy often citing his soaring rhetoric and the Four Freedoms. In reality, as Beito demonstrates, Roosevelt’s liberalism did not lead him to care about Americans’ civil liberties and he violated the Bill of Rights time and time again while in office. […]

Roosevelt was not a passive and reactive participant in these events and his racist views of Japanese people influenced his later policies. In 1925, FDR wrote that “anyone who has travelled in the Far East knows that the mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results.” In 1935, he insisted to a delegation that aggression “was in the blood” of Japan’s leaders. In 1936, when visiting Hawaii and thinking about the interactions between Japanese sailors and Japanese Americans on the islands, the president insisted that “every Japanese citizen or non-citizen on the Island of Oahu who meets these Japanese ships or has any connection with their officers or men should be secretly but definitely identified and his or her name placed on a special list of those who would be the first to be placed in a concentration camp.”

After Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt ignored information that did not confirm his negative view of Japanese Americans and instead “sought out, and then amplified beyond all proportion, statements or anecdotes that conveyed, at least in his own mind, a more negative impression.” For instance, Roosevelt received one report from his secret intelligence unit that insisted that Japanese Americans were no “more disloyal than any other racial group in the United States with whom we went to war.” In another report, FDR ignored its conclusion that at least ninety percent of Japanese Americans “were completely loyal to the United States.”

THERE ARE NO PEAKS:

How Malthus Got It Wrong (David R. Henderson, 1/11/24, Defining Ideas)

Simon, in his book The Ultimate Resource, posited that it was precisely the growth in population that had led to the increased supply of resources. How so? Because, argued Simon, with more people, there were more minds, and with more minds, there were more minds solving problems. That’s what led to his book’s title. People, he argued, were the ultimate scarce resource.

In “Natural Resources,” published in David R. Henderson, ed., The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, Princeton University economists Sue Anne Batey Blackman and William J. Baumol lay out three ways in which “the effective stocks of a natural resource can be increased.” First, a technological innovation can reduce the amount of waste. They give the example of reducing the amount of iron ore lost in mining or smelting. They also note that improvements in technology can help force more oil out of wells that have been abandoned. Second, they write, there is some substitutability over a wide range of resources. They give the example of insulation, which allowed homeowners and tenants to use less oil. This doesn’t mean that oil became more plentiful, of course. But it does mean that the available supply of oil was stretched so that the awful thing people feared—running out of oil—didn’t happen. The final way they note of increasing resources is to recycle. While some products really should not be recycled because the resource costs of doing so exceed the savings, other resources, like aluminum, can be profitably recycled.

In their article, Blackman and Baumol give some striking data on five minerals: tin, copper, iron ore, lead, and zinc. They show world reserves in 1950, world production between 1950 and 2000, and reserves in 2000. If we were running out of those resources, all of the reserves should have been smaller in 2000 than in 1950. In fact, all were larger. The case of iron ore is the most striking. In 1950, there were 19 billion metric tons. Between 1950 and 2000, 37.6 billion metric tons of iron ore were produced, which was more than the number of tons to begin with. By 2000, world reserves were 140 billion metric tons, over seven times as many as in 1950!

Earlier similar data caused Julian Simon to conclude that the real constraint on resource availability was not resources but people.

TAX WHAT YOU DON’T WANT:

Clean Energy Subsidies vs. A Carbon Tax (Jeffrey Miron, 1/22/24, Cato)

The existing scientific consensus implies that carbon and other GHC emissions (henceforth, “emissions”) constitute an externality, meaning an effect of one person’s actions on other economic actors, in ways not mediated through prices. Air pollution from cars and factories, fertilizer runoff from farms, and loud noises from highways and airports are standard examples.

In the presence of externalities, free markets produce too much of the externality‐​generating good, and government can in principle improve economic efficiency.

The standard approach is a tax that raises the good’s price, which lowers its production and thus the externality. Measured economic output goes down, but true economic output—measured output minus the externality—goes up.

…AND CHEAPER…

Are 3D-Printed Homes the Future of Housing? (Kristi Waterworth, Jan. 19, 2024, US NEWS)

Because companies like Alquist 3D are working on ways to build 3D-printed homes with materials that are on hand locally, these homes can also have very small carbon footprints. One of Alquist 3D’s ultimate goals is to design homes that are not only carbon neutral but carbon negative – they literally remove carbon from the atmosphere.

The other way that 3D-printed homes will ultimately become more affordable for homeowners is by simply being more energy efficient. Concrete homes have traditionally had high insulation values, but by customizing the wall formulas, local construction experts can make walls that respond better to local needs.

“Moving to using 3D printing to create homes can significantly help reduce energy usage because designs can be optimized to balance different features,” says Soydan Ozcan, sustainable manufacturing and materials scientist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. “For instance, we can create homes with walls that are structurally sound but that minimize heat loss.”

In the future, Ozcan says, a collaborative team from the Oak Ridge laboratory and the University of Maine will be introducing smart-wall features that can improve energy efficiency in response to a change in the environment.

FROM ANOTHER RIVER TO ANOTHER SEA:

The Culmination of Modi’s Hindu Nationalism (The Editors, Jan 22, 2024, World Politics Review)

The opening of the temple, and Modi’s instrumentalization of it, marks the unofficial start of Modi’s campaign for a third term in office, with general elections expected to be called in the spring. It is also the latest illustration of the mutually beneficial ties between Modi and India’s Hindu nationalist movement, which he and his party have utilized to gain political power and amplified via his government’s policies and rhetoric.

The illiberalism associated with Modi’s brand of Hindu nationalism is at this point well-documented—at least abroad. Within India, press freedoms are shrinking, with a growing number of journalists, particularly those who cover religion and communal violence, facing punitive action, including criminal cases as well as threats of violence and harassment.

Still, despite how well India’s democratic backsliding over the past 10 years has been documented, Modi has yet to pay any real price for it in global affairs. India’s Western partners continue to court him, prioritizing competition with China over calling out the erosion of India’s liberal democracy. Even India’s ties with Muslim-majority nations, particularly the Gulf states but also in Southeast Asia, have not suffered under Modi, despite the increasing discrimination and violence faced by India’s Muslim population.

A GOOD DIRECTOR COULD HAVE MADE A GREAT MOVIE:

The Boys in the Boat: the real history behind George Clooney’s underdog sports movie (Jonny Wilkes, January 12, 2024, History Today)

A former rower himself, Ulbrickson pushed the University of Washington rowing crews extremely hard in training sessions, which took places as frequently as six days a week. He would chop and change the boat lineups, in search of the perfect team of eight, which caused a lot of consternation and uncertainty among the young students.

Yet he had an enviable pool of talent to pick from, and sage advice from expert boat builder George Pocock. The junior varsity crew, Husky, was soon outstripping the seniors.

They improved so much, in fact, that Ulbrickson made the controversial decision to enter his juniors into Olympic qualifying, to the chagrin of the traditionalists in the rowing world.

Rowing enjoyed immense popularity in the US at the time. Thousands attended each regatta, with many spectators standing on special observation trains that ran along the riverbank to ensure not a stroke would be missed. Newspapers hailed the Husky team who became known as the ‘boys in the boat’ – working-class kids taking on teams from elite East Coast schools – and covered their successes with relish, describing their motion as a “symphony of swinging blades”.

In 1936, they dominated the national collegiate rowing championships in Poughkeepsie, New York, and raced to victory at the Olympic trials in Princeton, New Jersey, becoming the first crew from Washington to represent the US at the games.