Pruning Back an Ideological "Re-Definition" of Socialism

Should language lose its integrity for ideological purposes? On Fox News in the wake of the passage of Obamacare, Brit Hume and Newt Gingrich, a former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, both (re)defined socialism as “government control of private property.” Their rendering falls short, however. According to the Random House Dictionary (via Dictionary.com), socialism is “a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole” (italics added). Whereas government regulation of privately-owned means of production and distribution involves some of the control being in the hands of the community as a whole through its government, socialism includes the vesting of both ownership and control with the government. 
Hume and Gingrich doubtless believed that words can be redefined to suit ideological objectives. Public discourse is difficult enough in a democracy. The dialogue "across the aisle" becomes more difficult when one or both sides decide that language can (and even should!) be subordinated to ideology to the extent that dictionary definitions (and common usages) are presumed to be changeable simply by applying a new meaning to the words on the public airwaves or speeches. Ideologically akin people will doubtlessly follow along, and soon the word has a meaning that contradicts the dictionary definition.  
Going further, to intentionally scare people by redefining a word in such a way that the word appears worse than it actually is nothing short of misleading manipulation. Even in such a case, not even the opposing partisans alert the people through the media or speeches that X means Y rather than Z according to dictionary definitions. No one stands up for language, so ideology can have its way and prey on words.
If government control via regulation is not convenient to the business sector and its advocates, what about government ownership without control! As per the definition of socialism, government ownership without formal control does not constitute socialist enterprise. Ownership and control can indeed be separated. Bearle and Means, in their classic treatise, The Modern Corporation and Private Property, point to the separation in modern large corporations, wherein stockholders as a group are the owners and control is maintained by managers. Theoretically, a government could own a company that is controlled by its management. Perhaps public policy would be served by the ownership alone, or the managers could have taken de facto control away from the government officials.
Therefore, the definition of socialism is more delimited than typically thought. To be sure, the meaning of words can change naturally, but such shifts are gradual as per changing times and thus uses, rather than sudden, as from being artificially interlarded for short-term political use. In the case of socialism, the term has historically applied to an entire economic system, such as those of the U.S.S. R. and China before capitalism made such inroads. A person would not say that healthcare is socialism, or even that taxes are socialistic. In Arizona, the dominant ideology has viewed taxes as theft.
With the fall of the command-and-control economic systems of the U.S.S.R. and China, socialism has come to be increasingly applied to governments owning and controlling particular enterprises rather than every means of production and distribution. Hence a capitalist economic system can contain socialist enterprises. For example, the Green Bay Packers’ football team in Wisconsin has been socialist because the citizens of the Green Bay together have owned the team. The community need not transfer ownership formally to a government for an enterprise to be socialistic. So too has the China National Tobacco Corp. 
In short, socialism can be distinguished from government regulation of privately-owned economic enterprise. Conflating the two by effectively redefining the word, socialism, muddies the public discourse and sows confusion, neither of which is helpful to viable republic. Furthermore, socialism can be applied to particular enterprises as well as to an entire economy whose means of production and distribution are owned and controlled by the community as a whole (often through its government). The application to particular enterprises does not reduce socialism to control alone. 

Including Voter Judgments on Broad Policies in Elections: An Expansion of Active Popular Sovereignty

Days after the 2018 Congressional elections in the U.S., the Minority Leader and soon-to-be Speaker of the House of Representatives, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, declared, “Healthcare was on the ballot and healthcare won.”[1] As the new Democratic-controlled House worked on a budget the next Spring, Pelosi was still insisting that healthcare was what that election was about. Perhaps she based her statement on exit polls in which most voters claimed that they had voted chiefly the basis of candidate positions on healthcare. This does mean, however, that the voters voted on healthcare, for as only a choice of candidates could be made, the voters were left with inferring or even hoping that the favored candidate would act on, or at least stay with, his or her position on the issue. I contend that the next leap in the theory and practice of representative democracy could be to no longer keep an electorate, the popular sovereign, limited to selecting among candidates.

I don’t believe that the American voters, as a group—perhaps just of the minority of eligible voters who cast votes—do very well in assessing candidates and making a judgment. According to CNN, “Who the candidate is, really, plays an absolutely critical role in the presidential decision.”[2] Did the voters who had voted for Richard Nixon have even a clue regarding who the man really was (i.e., a criminal)? Did the voters who voted for Don Trump know enough about his personality to make a good judgement? I am not qualified to assess the mental health of those men. I doubt that voters who have very limited, even superficial information on a candidate via the media, and perhaps a bit more information, albeit mostly on policy, from listening to a full speech, can viably include whom the candidates really are in the voting judgment. Not even U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s sharing of a bad economic experience during her childhood tells us much about whom she is underneath. At the time, an editor at CNN referred to the personal sharing as a glimpse into Warren herself and what was motivating her to run for the federal presidency. “At root,” the editor continues, “people usually vote for president based on a belief that the person they are choosing ‘gets’ them in some fundamental way.”[3] Can we assume that Warren identified with, or had compassion for, poor people several decades after her family’s economic plight? Time and a drastically changed financial situation can both change a person. It was possible that the emotional sharing on prime-time television before a live audience could have been impacted by the nature of this medium of delivery (i.e., by enabling acting). After all, “that retelling of [Warren’s] childhood [was] a staple of Warren’s stump speech,” which, by the way, the vast majority of the presidential electorate will not have heard by election day. So to just get nominated by a major party, a candidate, at least in the 2020 campaign season, had “to be able to perform when the bright lights come on and everyone is watching.”[4] What an audience gets from a candidate under the bright lights is likely to be superficial from the standpoint of whom the person really is.

From the Nixon-Kennedy debates in 1960, even Nixon’s pale, sweaty face was not enough for the audience to conclude much about the man himself. Could all of his crimes in office have been predicted? That his “checker’s speech” was generally deemed to clear him of corruption in voters’ eyes suggests that even in the face of a candidate’s checkered past, the American electorate (and the media) was naïve. Is it asking too much to suppose that voters watching the Trump-Clinton debates in 2016 could have suspected how Trump would behave personally while in office (putting aside the question of corruption)? I think so.

So why has the American electorate been limited to selecting candidates, giving them the power to go back on policies that they have advocated during a campaign? In other words, if the electorate has not known the candidates (e.g. what makes them tick), it seems foolish for elections to rely so much on voters selecting candidates, who, because they are unknowns underneath, cannot really be relied on to follow through on their campaign platforms.

Because popular sovereignty, the authority of a people as a whole, supersedes a government’s sovereign in a representative democracy, the people should be able to expand their active use of their sovereignty over that of their government by including their judgments on major public policies, or “issues,” in voting.  For example, the voting electorate could say yea or nay on whether Medicare should be expanded to all as a single-payer system, and whether health insurance should be entirely private. Hopefully the American electorate would not be schizophrenic in answering yes on both!  Whereas the private health-insurance industry may have an inordinate influence on elected legislators due to lobbying and campaign contributions, even on policies in which a clear conflict of interest exists, an electorate could restore its primary influence by expanding ballots to include decisions on broad policies, which the elected representatives would then implement. Should Congress and the president implement a tax cut (the details to be worked out by the officeholders)? Should taxes be raised or spending cut, or both, to reduce budget deficits? Congress and the president would still have substantial power (i.e., discretion) in implementing such broad policies. The American electorate could even have re-elected George W. Bush in 2004 and voted to end the war in Iraq. The president would have had to abide by the vote on his prize issue.  So the expansion in the exercise of popular sovereignty would need the protection of law—most properly a constitutional amendment.

The reduced reliance on voters assessing candidates and judging between them would be beneficial in itself, given the difficulties in knowing the candidates themselves, and the expansion in the electorate’s sovereignty would re-prioritize the electorate over its representatives tasked with implementing broad policy directives. I would even say that American voters would be better at making broad policy judgments than picking candidates. I submit that American democracy has been designed to counter or even block what an electorate is best at, while funneling all of its influence through what it is worse at!

Especially in cases in which the electorate is large, the proportion of which that really knows the candidates is small. Hence the Electoral College in the U.S., where the electorates of the states elect a small number of electors to vote for president. Unfortunately, that has not worked since the beginning, as parties took over the College. The Anti-federalist stance that most governance should be done at the state level where the districts are smaller than at the federal level was justified by the belief that voters in a small district tend to know the candidates better than do voters in a very large district. The U.S. went on to become a very large district, with over 310 million people by 2015. How many of those people could possibly have the real story on Hilary Clinton or Don Trump?

By the twentieth century, even the state level could have been considered to be too big, yet no state adopted a federal system made up of what Europeans call regions or provinces. Interestingly, the E.U.’s principle of subsidiarity pushes decisions to the state or local level if feasible; the people are literally closer to their state governments that that of the E.U. The states in both empire-scale unions could improve democracy by federalizing themselves. Meanwhile, federal elections in both unions could be widened both conceptually and in practice to include judgments on policies, which voters are able to make, so as to take the pressure off the importance of selecting the better candidate. The percentage of eligible voters might even increase if voting on policies is found to be more interesting than just voting on candidates. If I am correct, the office-holders have been allowed to have too much power at the expense of their respective electorates, which have had too little, whether unwittingly, voluntarily, or beguiled/pressured by their own agents.

See Essays on the E.U. Political Economy and Essays on Two Federal Empires. Both are available at Amazon.

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[1] Kimberly Leonard, “Nancy Pelosi: ‘Healthcare was on the ballot and healthcare won,” The Washington Examiner, November 7, 2018.

[2] Chris Cillizza (CNN’s Editor-at-large), “Elizabeth Warren Just Had Her Best Moment of the 2020 Campaign,” CNN.com, March 19, 2019 (accessed same day).

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

Saudi Arabia Going After Dissenters Abroad: On the Egregiousness of Concentrated Power

After having been selected by his father as the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia “authorized a secret campaign to silence dissenters—which included the surveillance, kidnapping, detention and torture  of Saudi citizen—over a year before the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, according to American officials” with access to the classified reports.[1] The killers of Khashoggi had been involved in at least 12 other such operations starting in 2017. The sheer egregiousness of the operation under the crown prince says something about not only dictatorship, but also the nature of power itself.

According to the American officials, “(s)ome of the operations involved forcibly repatriating Saudis from other Arab countries and detaining and abusing prisoners in palaces belonging the crown prince and his father, King Salman.”[2] Although Saudi law forbids torture as it is considered an abuse of power, and confessions made under duress are inadmissible in Saudi courts, dictators can easily ignore the force of law as if it were just a moral imperative. Furthermore, Saudi officials acknowledged after Khashoggi’s murder “that Saudi intelligence service had a standing order to bring dissidents home.”[3] Hence the torture and murders involved international relations, a fact that points to not only the extent of the crown prince’s use of power to go after dissent, but also the sheer brazenness and even the underlying mentality.

Extending the reach to include Saudis in other countries points to the egregious extent to which the crown prince went to stifle dissent. “Saudi Arabia has a history of going after dissidents and other Saudi citizens abroad, but the crackdown escalated sharply after Prince Mohammed was elevated to crown prince in 2017, a period when he was moving quickly to consolidate power. Since then, Saudi security forces have detained dozens of clerics, intellectuals and activists who were perceived to pose a threat, as well as people who had posted critical or sarcastic comments about the government on Twitter.”[4] That writing a critical or even sarcastic comment on a blog or on Twitter could justify being kidnapped in another country and killed there or brought back to Saudi Arabia points back to a dictator’s attitude toward power—that a person cannot have too much of it, and thus that any external (or even internal!) constraint is to be regarded as not only pliable, but easily pushed aside altogether.

When a Saudi group linked to the crown prince killed and dismembered with a bone saw inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey’s government was using surveillance video and audio recordings to uncover the crime.” According to Bruce Riedel a former CIA analyst, “the team’s sloppiness showed that it was used to operating freely inside the kingdom and not under the watchful eye of an adversary’s intelligence service.”[5] The brazenness may suggest that as condensed in a dictator, power warps the mind’s perspective. 
By analogy, gravity warps time and space. As the mass of power increases, perhaps past a threshold point, the normal perception and judgment of having gone too far may be skewed by the power itself. Perhaps similar to additions, the high from the intense pleasure from having a lot of power occasions the warping of perception and judgement regarding one’s own power and the illusion that complete control over other people, hence with zero dissent politically, is achievable. Other operative mental defense-mechanisms doubtlessly include denial. If so, then checks on substantial power being held by political officials (as well as religious, educational, and business officials) are grounded in what having a lot of power does to the human mind. Put another way, a limit exists as to how much power is compatible with human biology.

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[1] Mark Mazzetti, “Saudi Prince Ran Brutal Campaign to Stifle Dissent,” The New York Times, March 18, 2019.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

Political Power and Jesus' Way: A Dictator Comes to Value the Kingdom of God

Religion and political power can be dangerous if combined and aimed at people deemed to be apostate or heretical. In calling for the Crusades, our Roman Catholic popes put their political power behind the theocratic and political goal of taking back Jerusalem “for Christ.” Those popes and the kings and soldiers who went to war with the Muslims there wittingly or unwittingly violated Jesus’s preachment to love rather than fight enemies. Christianity and political power have not mixed well, historically. The U.S. Constitution forbids the federal government and, presumably, the states, to establish or sponsor a religion or even favor one. Theocracies, such as those in the Calvinist colonies in New England (except for Rhode Island, which allowed freedom of religion), would be excluded as a political form for the Union as well as its member-states. Rather than meaning “sub-unit” or “province” as in Normandy in the E.U. state of France, the American Continental Congress has applied “state” in the generic sense of a polity with a yet-to-be-determined political system. Hence while the Articles of Confederation were in force, before the U.S. Constitution, the states could legally form theocracies. The film, The President (2014), is fictional, but this doesn’t stop its portrayal of a toppled president in hiding from looking realistic, given the cases of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The character arc of the president while he is in hiding, or “on the run,” captures a generally unknown way in which Jesus’ preaching on how to enter the unknown Kingdom of God can apply to political power in a good way. This is not to advocate theocracy, however. Rather, individuals who wield power, whether in government or business, can come to see the very nature of power differently and gain new insight into the Kingdom of God preached by Jesus.

The full essay is at "The President."

It’s Only Fair

Astonishingly, organizations can violate their own mission statement without any manager or non-supervisory employee being aware of the violation. This can happen even when the people in an organization really do take their mission seriously. At Goodwill, the mission is to end poverty, a laudable goal. It follows explicitly (i.e., according to a sign in the stores) that “every customer has an equal opportunity to purchase any item for sale.” Although the sign bases this point on the fact that the goods “come from public donation,” I submit that ending poverty by giving the poor access to relatively low-priced merchandise is hampered if some customers are permitted to fill their carts with on-sale (i.e., color of week) items when the doors open. Certainly allowing those resale-minded customers to deprive other customers of a selection of items on sale (especially clothing, which even homeless people need) is not fair.

According to the sign, possible violations include any employee or volunteer of a store being able to purchase items in the store whether for themselves or others. “Nor may merchandise be reserved or set aside for anyone.” To be sure, recognition is also given to the possibility that a customer might think that the organization is not being fair. When I interviewed a store manager about whether allowing customers who resell items on sale in “garage sales” conveniently misconstrued as businesses to buy in such bulk that effectively deprives other customers, whose use for the clothing is for personal use, she dodged the question itself but took my point implicitly by admitted that she knew of no way in which the practice could be thwarted. I told her I had a few ideas, but she was not interested in them. I topld her I am a business ethicist and would be writing on this case. Patronizingly, she quipped, “Have fun writing your paper!” In retrospect, I wish I had replied, “Have fun managing!” How interested would the organization’s management be? I wondered at the time.

Goodwill could indeed have stepped in to prevent the obviously unfair practice of certain customers, who actually compete with each other in going around—as part of their re-selling businesses—to different Goodwill stores to swoop up as many shirts or pants on sale. 

A "garage sale" of a reseller open for business at her personal residence. Beyond the cars is the Goodwill store at which I had observed the opening of a major, half-off, sale on shoes and clothing (and misc) just a week earlier. Some of the athletic shoes, which sold for $7 without any negotiation (a sign that a reseller is hosting the "garage sale"), I had seen in a cart full of such shoes at the beginning of the sale at the Goodwill store. 

The personal-use customers can have little chance, or practical opportunity, to get an item on sale because Goodwill allows customers even at the opening of a sale to fill their carts entire of one kind of item (e.g., athletic shoes). Even if a wife/mother is buying athletic shoes for her husband and teenage kids, a whole cartful is suspicious. I witnessed a woman head immediately to the shoe section when the doors open and quickly throw as many athletic shoes in her card as she could before other customers had a chance to take advantage of the sale. Clearly, the monopolistic character of the woman’s behavior and that her commercial interests could eclipse the personal-use interest of other customers who would do without as a result not only reek of unfairness, but also violate the “equal opportunity to purchase any item in the store.”

A reseller had her cart full just seven minutes after the Goodwill store opened with a sale that would practically guarantee that the reselling would be lucrative. The number of men's shorts alone in this cart points to something beyond personal use. The resellers do not pay taxes on their profits because the sales, primped as "garage sales," are easy not to report. Legally, the income from genuine garage sales is taxable.

Meanwhile, Goodwill looks the other way undoubtedly because more revenue and less risk of having items unable to be sold are obtained when the re-sellers buy in bulk. In other words, the lack of recognition of the tilted status quo and of ideas on how to restore balance may not be accidents. A false premise that the status quo must be balanced, or that the status quo does not justify effort to achieve balance may also be in the mix. A policy could be put into effect that limits the number of same-classification items on sale that can be purchased by each customer.

Already I can think of ways in which the commercial customers could get around this limitation, for profit-seekers hate limits, whether internal or external. They could bring along family and friends to divide up the quickly stashed merchandise. They could fill their respective carts when the doors open and carefully stash their carts so to be able to make multiple trips to different cashiers.

At some point, however, store employees and even managers can be relied on to help enforce the policy by being on the lookout for such tricks. A customer’s claim that she needs a cartful of sneakers in order to try them on to find one that fits can be easily rebuffed. Only six items are allowed in the fitting rooms anyway. Such games and how to deconstruct them could be incorporated into training. It is not difficult, for example, to see people quickly filling their respective carts with one or two item-classifications shortly after the doors open. The store manager with whom I spoke had no problem in identifying the re-sellers who buy in bulk. Her hands’ off, laissez faire attitude was problematic as it did not fit with the organization’s mission to reduce poverty in a fair way, which in turn requires equal access to the merchandise. Hiding behind the relatively effortless status quo, as if it were intractable or even as fair as possible, evinces a willingness to live with an unfairness that could otherwise be reduced even if it cannot be eliminated. Not having any ideas when imperfect measures could make a dent evinces an unwillingness to think too far from the status quo (i.e., outside the box).

See "A Lack of Good Will at Goodwill."

See also Cases of Unethical Business: A Malignant Mentality of Mendacity, available at Amazon. 

Holding the U.S. Debt-Ceiling Hostage: A Case of Political Expediency over Statesmanship

In April of 2011, S & P lowered expectations on U.S. Government debt from “stable” to “negative.”  Astonishing, the $14.2 trillion U.S. debt was still rated as AAA. The shift in expectations did not trigger higher borrowing costs because the market presumed that a political deal lowering the deficit would be facilitated by the warning-call. At the same time, Congress and the U.S. president were grappling with the need to extend the federal debt ceiling. The federal government was projected at the time to reach its borrowing limit by May 16, 2011, though the Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, said he could use accounting options to push the date back to July 8. He assured the public that Republicans in Congress had told President Obama that they would go along with a higher limit. “I want to make it perfectly clear that Congress will raise the debt ceiling,” the Geithner said.  He also said the Republican leaders had assured the president that they “couldn’t play around with the government’s credit rating. They recognize it, and they told the president that.”[1] Such a recognition and statement by the Republican leadership, if true, would evince statesmanship over political expediency, for Republican lawmakers could have leveraged their votes on raising the ceiling to get more in negotiations on the budget. This would be particularly notable considering that appropriations to keep the U.S. Government's non-essential operations going were pawns in a Congressional-presidential power-struggle during the Trump administration. 

However, Rep. Paul Ryan, chair of the U.S. House Budget Committee and later to become Speaking of the House, said that while it was true that nobody wanted the U.S. Treasury to default, “(w)e want cuts in spending accompanying a raising of the debt ceiling. And that is what we have been telling the White House.” A spokesperson for Obama said a debt ceiling vote could not be contingent on upcoming negotiations over the budget.  So, in effect, the matter of default on the U.S. debt was being used for leverage in negotiations rather than held as untouchable.  It is no wonder S & P lowered its expectations concerning the ability of U.S. Government officials to avoid default by failing to raise the federal debt limit. Had the lower expectations been assumed to be a wake-up call for federal lawmakers and the executive, S & P would have been naive.

To say that no one wants default but then to hold it ransom is disingenuous and duplicitous. It is as if to say, “I don’t want to do it but I have to,” when in fact the deed does not have to do it. We see such statements from corporate managers and customer service employees. “Unfortunately, that can’t be done”—weakness that seeks to dominate typically takes assumes the passive voice as if to hide—when in fact the person or especially his boss could. Company policies are in actuality guidelines. Sadly, customers typically enable the false rigidity by taking it at face value rather than questioning it by going above the employee or even manager. 

Rep. Ryan could have resisted the temptation to gain greater advantage on the budget by holding the debt ceiling hostage. Even if he made the statement to cover himself with his political base in Janesville, Wisconsin, he bore responsibility for giving the appearance of putting partisan advantage over statesmanship.  

Given the encroaching nature of expediency whether for power or profit (or both), even verbal statements can get the ball rolling even for other political parties. Soon the government's duty to act in the public interest becomes a mere byproduct, as if by accident rather than primary intention. Given human nature, political expediency and the desire to make even more money are inherently antithetical to any self-enforced limitation. Hence in government, we can say that statesmanship involves voluntarily giving force to a self-imposed constraint or limitation. 

1, “Geithner Confident Congress Will Raise Borrowing Limit,” USA Today, April 18, 2011, p. 6A.

On the Economic Justification of American Society and Federalism: The Oxymoron of Congress Mapping the Human Brain

In his 2013 State of the Union Address, President Obama cited brain research as an example of how the government could and in fact should literally “invest in the best ideas.”[1] He cited the $140 return to the economy from every dollar that had been invested to map the human genome, and added that funding the Brain Activity Map would be a job-creating investment in science and innovation. In terms of comparative economic advantage, he said, enlarging the “knowledge economy” would be a good strategy for maintaining a formidable standard of living. As laudatory as more knowledge of the human brain is, Obama's perspective suffers from economic reductionism and a lack of political basis.
Economic reductionism means that everything reduces finally to its economic impact. Mapping the genome may have good economic returns, but the impact in terms of human fulfillment is arguably much more beneficial and thus important. Finding the gene that causes baldness, for instance, would surely have an economic benefit for some, but the non-economic benefits to bald men would be much more important. More importantly, to the extent that mapping the genome has led to new treatments for illness, especially those that are fatal, the primary benefits have surely not been economic in nature. An old person who can live ten more years rather than one does not leap for joy because of the the additional retirement income. Because this is obvious, Obama's economic basis can now be seen as artificial or skewed at best even it it was politically and economically prudent for him to point to economic returns as they would have been particularly of interest to the companies that made campaign and other, less direct, economic contributions to the Wall Street president. Unfortunately, people reading or hearing his speech could have gotten the idea that the reduction to the economic effect is fitting rather than distorting. A government, after all, should look after the public good, which is not only economic. Of course, it has been by lip service to the general welfare that U.S. presidents have tried to justify federal spending in virtually any area, hence robbing the state governments of more and more sovereignty. 
That the federal government had any constitutional basis to be funding a map of the brain's activity is a question the federal president seems not to have considered. To be sure, balancing spending for the general welfare with the enumerated (i.e., limited) powers of the federal government is a difficult task unless the general-welfare spending is assumed to pertain only to the enumerated (i.e., listed) powers of that government. It makes no sense to say that government's powers are limited and yet spending can pertain to any domain, even preempting state spending. So by logic alone, it stands to reason that the spending clause must have been intended to furnish Congress with the authority to fund its enumerated powers.
Put another way for the faint of heart, if a positive economic return to the economy is the litmus test, then the federal government could intercede in so many areas that the state governments could eventually become little more than local governments. The crucial political benefit of federalism, wherein the state governments have the power to act as a check against encroaching or tyrannical federal power so the only check is not on the state governments by the federal government, is lost if federal lawmakers and the executive can amass virtually unlimited power for the U.S. Government (and themselves in the process!) especially if done at the expense of the states. 

A Congressional rendering of how the human brain might be mapped.      Source; nytimes.

Admittedly, a person could look at the U.S. Constitution and point out the spending clause, whereby the Congress has the authority to spend funds “for the general welfare.” in itself, the clause contains no limitation, and the general welfare is indeed wide in scope. Scientific advancement, it could be argued, is surely in line with advancing the general welfare of the people. Virtually any purpose, even those purposes in which the effect on the general welfare is merely a byproduct, could fit within the clause. To restrict the clause could foreseeably hold back the general welfare from what it would otherwise be. 
Turning to the enumerated powers of Congress, the commercial implications from mapping the brain's activity might seem to fit within the interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution. After all, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in Wickard v. Filmore (1942) that even a farmer in Iowa who grows wheat for his family's own consumption can be subject to regulation. Even if his activity "be local and though it may not be regarded as commerce, it may still, whatever its nature, be reached by Congress if it exerts a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce and this irrespective of whether such effect is what might at some earlier time have been defined as 'direct' or 'indirect."[2] The majority opinion reasons that the harvests of wheat for private consumption, if aggregated, would have a significant effect on the interstate wheat commerce. Even an indirect effect on the interstate wheat market can justify even the growing of wheat for private consumption being subject to the interstate commerce clause, and thus federal power. So it is no accident that the federal executive publicly justified the federal funding to map the brain's activity by characterizing such a map as "a job-creating investment in science and innovation." Obama may have engaged in warped economic reductionism in order to gain more power for his government. He and the federal court before him both distorted logic for the sake of additional power going to the federal government.
The institutional and personal conflicts of interest should be obvious. Since that ruling, the reach of the commerce clause has expanded. Even something that is not itself commerce can be federally regulated as commerce. This flawed logic should be enough of a red-flag to tell us that something went deeply wrong in the federal court's reasoning where federal power was at stake or could be expanded. 
In regard to funding the mapping of the brain's activity, commerce of the completed map could indeed extend beyond state lines (i.e., be interstate commerce), but to argue that the regulating of interstate commerce extends to investing in manufacturing of the product itself conflates spending with regulating, which is to set rules. 
President Obama could be challenged for his presumption that the federal government is the definitive level of government for virtually any matter of public policy to be enacted into law. He could have quoted from Alexander Hamilton, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and the first U.S. Treasury Secretary,  who had wanted the states to be mere districts implementing federal policy. Of course, he also wanted the U.S. president to be in office for life.
Before Obama was the federal executive, I asked Sandra Day O’Conner, a former justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, why the Court had allowed the Congress to encroach so onto state matters. "It takes a majority," she said (meaning of justices). Then she observed that Congress was “acting like a state legislature.” This remarkable insight would prompt me years later to wonder whether Obama himself was conflating the federal and state levels. He may not have fully realized the distinctiveness of federal government on the empire scale from governance on the state, or kingdom, level. Whereas an empire-scale government of a federation must take into account differences in culture, political and moral ideology, economy, and even religion that exist from state to state, a state government need not as a state can be homogeneous rather than diverse within. The British, who had once had an empire to manage, suppose their state in the E.U. is diverse. I submit that the E.U. itself is much more diverse from state to state, and so taking into account such differences is an appreciable aspect of E.U. governance but not of that of a state, even the United Kingdom (or California in the U.S.). Yes, Virginia, such a comparison is valid.
I submit that President Obama did not sufficiently heed the vital differences between the federal and the state governments. Nor have majorities of justices sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court. Viewing things from the perspective of the federal government, and even having its interests at heart, it is possible to interpret general welfare and the commerce clause so broadly as to warp logic and yet not even notice this or the eventual cost (to use an economic term!) to the Union itself (i.e., impairing its federal system). Economic reductionism can be placed in service, resulting in bloated federal power and a warping of priorities (i.e., financial as the definitive litmus test for everything, including the public good). Of course, big business feels right at home in such a society--societal norms and values reflective of those of business. Meanwhile, the warped system feeds on itself, without being noticed and becoming even more warped in the process. For all of the reliance on the general welfare, who exactly is looking out for it as regards the impact on it from the federal system of government and the economic reductionism? 

See related: Institutional Conflicts of Interest, Essays on Two Federal Empires, and British Colonies Forge an American Empire, available at Amazon.

1. John Markoff, “Obama Seeking to Boost Study of Human Brain,” The New York Times, February 17, 2013.
2. Wickard, 317 U.S. at 125.

Beyond Collectivism and Individualism: Freedom from Fear

In his speech on April 13, 2011 on reducing the U.S. Government deficits, President Obama identified two strains that had run through the country’s political history and thus informed the American political culture. “More than citizens of any other country” he said, “we are rugged individualists, a self-reliant people with a healthy skepticism of too much government. But there has always been another thread running throughout our history – a belief that we are all connected; and that there are some things we can only do together, as a nation.  We believe, in the words of our first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, that through government, we should do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves.”[1]  These two strains can be identified as individualism and collectivism, respectively. I contend that collectivism enables both individual and collective security. Individual security is oriented to a person’s survival and collective security is exemplified by national defense. 

In his speech, the president explicitly placed individual security within the collectivist strain. “Part of this American belief that we are all connected also expresses itself in a conviction that each one of us deserves some basic measure of security.  We recognize that no matter how responsibly we live our lives, hard times or bad luck, a crippling illness or a layoff, may strike any one of us.  ‘There but for the grace of God go I,’ we say to ourselves, and so we contribute to programs like Medicare and Social Security, which guarantee us health care and a measure of basic income after a lifetime of hard work; unemployment insurance, which protects us against unexpected job loss; and Medicaid, which provides care for millions of seniors in nursing homes, poor children, and those with disabilities.”  That is, limits to rugged individualism exist, whether in the state of nature or in an interdependent economy, and collectivized programs can bridge the gap on an individualized basis such that individuals can continue to enjoy liberty. The individualist/collectivist dichotomy is thus not so clearly dichotomist.

According to Obama, societal connectedness with others, something limited to the family or clan in the state of nature, implies the societal duty of individuals with economic surplus to contribute to the survival needs of other individuals, especially those who cannot fend for themselves. Individuals pay taxes and individuals receive sustenance benefits—the collectivism seems in actuality to mean systemic.

I have noticed that rich Europeans tend to acknowledge both that they too may someday be in need of such benefits, and that, under the principle of solidarity, a duty exists to pay higher taxes than otherwise so other people may survive rather than perish. As the American president pointed out in his speech, hard luck can befall each of us; no one is immune from calamity and ruin. Europeans seem to get this; American’s don’t.

Europeans also seem to recognize a basic psychological ease of mind exists in knowing that even in the worst-case scenario, a safety net exists. Even if a rich or middle-income American never needs to draw on Social Security and Medicare in retirement, whether due to age or disability/illness, the psychological security afforded by this recognition through life is surely worth something to the individual. Such a person (i.e., with economic surplus year to year) can justify on self-interest alone paying more in taxes to feel even this subtle peace-of-mind (i.e, individual security) through life. In other words, the narrow breed of self-interest (i.e., selfishness) that exists in American culture as a common trait among individuals is not even in the individual’s own interest. Such individualism is thus faulty.

I have not come across many rich Americans who recognize that they too may need such services (ignoring the stock market crashes of 1873, 1929 and others); such people thus view sustenance-oriented taxes as paying for lazy people to play or do drugs. Should such people therefore die? As disgusted as I am with the American inner-city “ghetto” mentality that potential employers justifiably eschew, I believe that to say people with such entrenched mentalities should therefore die for want of sustenance violates human rights, which are not conditional. Too many Americans may be guilty of an entrenched selfishness whose greed knows no bounds even at high levels of wealth. The selfishness that sees narrowly only that earning or amassing more wealth is possible at any level is utterly blind to the foundational peace of mind that comes with having confidence that a safety net even for oneself exists.

Together, callousness toward others less fortunate and selfishness concerning wealth are, I submit, just as ugly as a “fuck society, the rules don’t apply to me” ghetto mentality. A bad odor surrounds both even if some noses are immune to their own smell. In contrast, imagine a society in which the fear stemming from a recognition that survival itself is conditional even out of the state of nature, in “advanced” societies, is absent. The psychological effects even from the removal of such a subtle, subterranean fear, can be significant. My dad used to refer to “quality of life” as being an important attribute of reaching an old age. Yet the importance of obviating a sustenance-conditional fear in a person’s quality of life even when the quality is otherwise good tends to be missed by most Americans in their prime. The Titanic can’t sink!

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[1] Barak Obama, “Text of Obama Speech on Deficit,” The Wall Street Journal, April 13, 2011.

The Euroskeptic Ideology: Inherently Exogenous to the E.U.

At the root of the matter of Britain's secession from the Union, I submit, is a starkly Euro-skeptic, or Anti-federalist, ideology that viewed the E.U. as a network to which the sovereign state of Britain belongs, as PM David Cameron said before the secession referendum. Unfortunately, this view ran up against the reality of the E.U.'s federal system in which the federal level too had some sovereignty. Even the mechanism of qualified majority voting involves a loss of sovereignty for the state governments. The discordance can be heard in a speech given by William Hague of the British government at the end of May in 2013 in which he advocated that state legislatures should be able to block E.U. laws proposed by the European Commission.[1] At the time, a state legislature could use a “yellow card” to object to a proposal that could presumably be better legislated and enforced at the state level. Hague wanted a “red card” option that a state legislature could use to block legislation. This proposal reflects the Nullification Acts passed by the government of South Carolina in the early 1830s, which prompted the U.S. to resist strongly as the union itself could have unraveled. Aside from the exogenous ideology itself in the E.U., two problems with Hague’s proposal can be identified. I contend that the problems stem from, and thus can point to, the underlying ideology that is inherently at odds with modern federalism, in which dual-sovereignty is a prominent attribute.

Should the state legislatures dominate the EU's legislature?  The British state government says yes. Would the Union wither and die?  (Source: mapperywordpress.com)

Presumably, such a card from just one of the 27 state legislatures could block a proposal. It would be difficult to imagine virtually any law surviving at the E.U. level. Why then have the E.U. at all then? If every state can pick and choose among federal laws, what force would any federal law have on the state level, given that only the enforcement would only be in states in favor of the law? Without any binding force on the states, the federal level cannot act as a check on abuses of power at the state level. This function of federalism would be limited to the states checking the federal government. 

Secondly, Hague was assuming that the European Parliament was not democratic at all, whereas the state legislatures were fully so. However, the members of the European Parliament are directly elected by EU citizens. The representatives represent those constituents rather than states (or state governments). Perhaps the direct representation, which leaves out the state government officials, is why Hague proposed to have the state legislatures essentially replace the European Parliament. To be sure, the legislative districts at the state level are smaller and thus more democratic in this respect, but this point does not render federal legislative bodies like the European Parliament and the U.S. House of Representatives non-democratic. In fact, giving the E.U. voters a direct say at the federal level through their respective representatives is a necessary feature of modern federalism because in it the federal level has at least some sovereignty that does not reduce to that of the states. Put another way, Europeans in the E.U.. are citizens both of their states and the E.U. Accordingly, the people have a right to be represented in both governmental systems--that of the states and the Union. 

1. “William Hague Demands Right to Show ‘Red Card’ to European Union,” The Huffington Post, May 31, 2013.

President Obama's Proposal to Rescue States: Unattended Problems in American Federalism and Human Sustenance

In 2011, President Obama proposed "to ride to the rescue of states" that had borrowed billions of dollars from the federal government to continue to pay unemployment benefits during the economic downturn. His plan was to "give the states a two-year breather before automatic tax increases would hit employers, and before states would have to start paying interest on the loans." Many of the states had begun the recession with "too little money in their unemployment trust funds'" Those states "quickly ran through what little they had as unemployment rose and remained stubbornly high month after month. With their own trust funds depleted, 30 states borrowed $42 billion from the federal government to continue paying unemployment benefits." These states were facing an estimated $1.3 billion in interest payments to Washington due in the fall of 2011. The President’s proposal also included raising the minimum taxable wage base from $7,000 to $15,000 in 2014. "The rate of the federal portion of the unemployment taxes would then be lowered, so the proposal would not raise federal taxes on states that do not owe the federal government money. But it would speed the rate at which states that do owe money repay the federal government, and allow states to collect more unemployment taxes to rebuild their trust funds if they do not lower their tax rates." By February, 2011, eighteen states had already raised their minimum taxable wage base to $15,000 or more, according to the National Association of State Workforce Agencies. Iris Lav, an adviser at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said that the unemployment system was “a constellation of problems" that needed to be solved." She added that the near-term problem was the economy, and "both the interest payments and the principal repayments are [were] cutting into employers, and it [made] great sense to postpone them." The larger question was how to "get states to solvency.”[1]

Analysis of the proposal:

The proposal itself makes sense from the standpoint of getting thirty states out of a tight fix at the time. The debate on whether taxes should go up in 2011 or 2014 was less important than attention to the larger structural fault-lines, which are only hinted at in the President's proposal to ease up on States in debt at the time due to their participation in the unemployment compensation system. To be sure, it is important to note that having extended the length of unemployment-compensation's term to cover the length of the recession following the financial crisis of 2008 required either higher taxes or more debt. Both Reagan's and (George W) Bush's tax cuts had not paid for themselves, so a tax cut, especially during the severe recession, would not have covered the bill. What is good for people and companies facing high tax bills is not necessarily in the public good, and thus good public policy. Even so, I want to stress the larger structural fault-lines that are implicit in the President's proposal, for subterranean tensions rarely reach the surface of a society's consciousness. 

First, under the proposal, the "rescue" was to be limited to the states' respective debt from paying unemployment compensation; neither the Federal Reserve nor the U.S. Government would have been able to come to the rescue of the states concerning their entire deficits and debt. In fact, due to the "crowding out" tax effect, the more that the U.S. Government takes in, the less the state governments can politically raise taxes to cover their respective deficits and debts. Moreover, implicit in the notion of coming to the rescue of is the dependence or lower position of the rescued. In a viable federal system, neither the federal government nor state governments is subservient to the other, for otherwise both could not serve in the systematic role as a check on power. 
Perhaps the "cooperation," or intermixing, of the two government systems (that of the states and that of the federation) in the unemployment system is problematic because it gives the U.S. Government a way to dominate the states. According to Jacobs and Karst, “It is the preservation of the balance between the central authority and the constituent states that is the essence of federalism.” Yet, “[i]n the American federal structure the central authority is stronger."[2] Rescuing thirty states attests to the overweening power of the federal head, and thus the imbalance that is so problematic in the long term to a federal system of checks and balances.[3] 
Ken Wheare claimed in his text, Federal Government, that maintaining at least one autonomous domain for the states is sufficient for a viable federal system of dual-sovereignty. I disagree; a state with one power and otherwise "surrounded" by a federal government with many is not de facto semi-sovereign even if so de jure. In his text, Wheare's statement is utterly inconsistent with his other contention that the two systems of government in a federal system must be able to act as a check on each other. Balance is simply not possible if the state governments have only one or even a few areas of sovereignty whereas the federal government has many and can even pre-empt states from legislating in an area in which the federal legislature has no intent to play an active role legislatively!
To the extent that President Obama's proposal was debated in terms of rescuing the thirty states and whether to raise taxes in 2011 or 2014, the discourse failed the opportunity to include the broader questions pertaining to what is necessary to preserve the American federal system; the superficial debate meant blindly sitting by once again while the political consolidation of a diverse continent proceeded full throttle ahead to a "one size fits all" federation.  The building pressure from the unaccommodated natural diversities would go on, likely to explode one day. 

Second, the fitness of the unemployment-compensation system itself, being limited to helping the unemployed for discreet periods often shorter than a recession, is not touched on in the proposal. For instance, the X-weeks limit of compensation as the program's default could have been addressed, as it treats "convenient" things like food, rent and utilities as though they were optional commodities that could be skipped after the Xth week on unemployment-compensation. In short, the matter of necessities being conditional warranted debate because of the underlying assumption that the very survival of a human being is (or should be) conditional. Doubtless it is in Hobbes' state of nature, but even he accepts a right of self-preservation even under a Leviathan. In other words, the natural urge to preserve oneself is not conditional, so a conditional government program covering basics is not natural or in sync with human beings.  
Relying exclusively on business to bring an economy to full employment is problematic in that that goal has rarely been achieved anywhere without government to pick up the slack. From the standpoint of survival as a human right, laissez-faire economics is thus insufficient. To be sure, the recognition of survival as a human right, as is the case in the E.U., requires higher taxes than are necessary in simply treating survival as a conditional matter. This broader debate and thus the broader fault-line are typically ignored as Americans debate incremental or temporary changes in legislative or executive proposals bearing on public policy.

1. Michael Cooper and Sheryl Stolberg, "Obama Plans to Rescue States with Debt Burdens," The New York Times, February 8, 2011.
2. Jacobs, Francis G. and Kenneth L. Karst, “The 'Federal' Legal Order: The U.S.A. And Europe Compared A Juridical Perspective,” in Integration Through Law: Europe and the American Federal Experience, Mauro Cappelletti, Monica Seccombe, and Joseph Weiler, eds., Vol. 1, Methods, Tools and Institutions. Bk. 1, “A Political, Legal and Economic Overview” (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1986), pp. 169-244, p. 171.
3. Skip Worden, Essays on Two Federal Systems: Comparing the E.U. and U.S., and American and European Federalism: A Critique of Rick Perry's "Fed Up!"