Max Singer, Modernity, and Self-Government (2021)
The New Wealth of Nations
Symposium on Max Singer’s History of the Future; Hudson Institute, May 20, 2021
Max Singer’s History of the Future comes as a shock on the tenth anniversary of its publication. During those years, expectations of future progress have dimmed, and visions of decline and dystopia have risen in their place.
One cause of the shift is that standards of objective inquiry and reasoned argument, which are essential to progress, have come under sustained assault in politics, journalism, and the universities. They are being subverted by techniques of partisan narrative and by the primitive doctrine that truth is a function of group or personal identity.
Now Max comes back to us with an account of inexorable human progress set forth with precisely those virtues now dismissed as weaknesses: logic, learning, concreteness, earnest consideration of alternative and opposing views, and lack of partisanship and rhetorical excess. It is a shock of the invigorating kind, like a cold morning shower.
. . . .
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Think Tanks and Institutional Reform (2017)
Think Tanks and Institutional Reform
Bradley Prize Remarks, April 6, 2017
These remarks were delivered on receiving one of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation’s four “Bradley Prizes” for 2017. Information about the Bradley Prizes is posted here; a video of the 2017 prize ceremony is posted here.
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The Method in Trump’s Tumult (2017)
The Method in Trump’s Tumult
The Wall Street Journal; February 11, 2017
Say this for Donald Trump: He does not shrink from controversy.
As the president’s cabinet nominees came under Senate questioning, several expressed clear disagreements with their new boss. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis presented Russia as a threat; Secretary of State Rex Tillerson urged action on climate change; budget nominee Mick Mulvaney stood firm for entitlement reform.
Pundits have used these differences to portray a new administration born in disarray. Yet perhaps we are witnessing something else.
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Capital for the Masses (2014)
Capital for the Masses
Wall Street Journal, April 7, 2014
Capital in the 21st Century, by French economist Thomas Piketty—its title inviting comparison with Karl Marx’s Das Kapital—has electrified the intellectual left in the U.S. since its English publication in March. The book is bold, brilliant and perfectly aligned to the current obsession with economic inequality.
Mr. Piketty argues that, in modern market economies, private returns on capital investment are systematically higher than the rate of growth of income and output, and that the difference explains the increase in inequality. A fortunate few derive their income from capital: Some are celebrity capitalists like Warren Buffett or Bill Gates but most are mere business executives who extract enormous salaries from corporate earnings. Capital returns enable them to accumulate wealth at far higher rates than the mass of men whose wages grow no faster than the economy or their own productivity.
Mr. Piketty believes that capital divergence is natural and inexorable and that the only effective corrective is highly progressive taxes on investment income and wealth, preferably on a global basis to forestall capital flight to low-tax jurisdictions.
Capital is a serious work that merits careful consideration and vigorous debate. Indeed the book’s rhapsodic reception is already instructive in an unintended way. For the left that is now extolling Capital long ago lost interest in capital ownership, and in recent years ferociously opposed policies for democratizing capital advanced by the right.
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The Silence of the Liberals (2013)
The Silence of the Liberals
The Weekly Standard, December 23, 2013
Obamacare may or may not survive its inauspicious beginnings. It has become dangerously unpopular and accident-prone and faces a minefield of difficulties. Still, the Obama administration has a plausible strategy: to titrate the program’s numerous taxes, subsidies, mandates, and restrictions so as to forestall immediate legislative or electoral reversal, thereby entrenching its basic structure for tightening as future circumstances permit.
But the drama has made one thing clear: Obamacare will never achieve its promise of affordable health care for all paid for with improved efficiencies in health insurance and medical care. The initial troubles and compromises have revealed that the program improves “access” mainly by herding millions of people and firms into insurance they do not want or need. A great many will simply refuse, having little to fear for the time being, with the result that government expenditures will be far higher than projected. It is equally clear that the variety and quality of medical care will be seriously restricted for all concerned.
Collaterally, Obamacare is introducing a new form of government—improvisational government, characterized by continuous ad hoc revisions of statutory law by executive decree. This is a reversion to a primitive form that long antedates our Constitution and rule-of-law traditions. Transported to the modern world, it leaves the private sector in a state of constant uncertainty and subjection.
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A Referendum on ObamaCare and Liberty (2012)
A Referendum on ObamaCare and Liberty
Wall Street Journal, November 5, 2012
On Tuesday, Americans will go to the polls to choose whether or not to nationalize their health-care system.
The choice for president will have numerous other consequences. But in most cases we will be choosing between tendencies shrouded in uncertainty. The candidates have staked out positions and made some explicit promises—but how these work out in practice will depend on many future contingencies, and many an earnest campaign promise has been confounded or even reversed in the past. The health-care choice is singular not only for its importance but for its certainty.
If President Barack Obama is re-elected, ObamaCare’s controls over doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical firms and other providers of medical care will be tightened, and the operations of private insurance companies will be progressively restricted. Everyone involved will know where the process is going—to a single-payer system or one with a few chosen insurers subject to national public-utility controls—and will negotiate the best possible accommodations to it. Within a few years, a new political equilibrium will be in place, making the system irreversible and subject to only marginal adjustment.
If Gov. Mitt Romney is elected, by contrast, ObamaCare’s controls will be turned to promoting freer, more competitive markets, laying the groundwork for legislative “repeal and replace.” That will involve straightforward policies to correct defects in health-insurance markets (portability, restrictions regarding pre-existing conditions, special-interest state mandates) while reversing ObamaCare’s gratuitous further step of nationalizing health care for everyone. It will also involve bolstering the solvency of Medicare, reforming Medicaid and, one hopes, limiting the tax subsidy of employer-provided health insurance, which now distorts consumer behavior in the direction of wasteful consumption.
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Some Trans-Atlantic Challenges (2006)
Some Trans-Atlantic Challenges
Fundación para el Análisis y Estudios Sociales, May 18, 2006
The governments of the United States and Western Europe collaborated successfully for many decades during the Cold War, but they now often disagree and oppose each other on important matters of policy and strategy. Beyond the government ministries, European and American economies and cultures seem to be growing apart as well. But Atlanticism nonetheless has a future–Americans and Europeans will continue to collaborate closely despite our differences and disagreements. We will do so not so much because we share a common heritage but because we face common problems today which are rooted in our heritage. These are the problems of societies that are rich and comfortable, pluralist and democratic, highly mobile, and technologically adept. Such problems exist in other places as well but they are most pronounced in Western Europe and North America, the homelands of prosperous liberal civilization. It has fallen to us to cope with these problems–successfully or unsuccessfully, with happy or unhappy consequences not only for ourselves but for the rest of the world.
Let me describe six of our common problems in general terms that abstract from the particulars of recent events and debates, and then bring them down to earth a bit with a striking example from current European politics.
First, modern technology has vastly increased the potency of terrorism as a political tactic. As recently as a century ago, the small-group lethality ratio was about 1:1, where it had been for millennia–that is, a dozen men could, with careful planning and luck, expect to kill only another dozen or so human beings by surprise before they themselves were killed or incapacitated. Today we know empirically that a cohesive group of 10-20 men can massacre hundreds of people, as in the Madrid bombings of March 11, 2004, or thousands of people, as in the American attacks of September 11, 2001. And we know in theory that the ratio has fallen by several more orders of magnitude–a small group could conceivably slaughter tens or hundreds of thousands of people or more in a surprise attack.
Second, out of the social and political failures of the Arab Middle East has arisen a powerful ideology and movement, now usually called Islamism or Islamofacism, which combines elements of ancient Muslim doctrine with the modern methods and furies of totalitarianism. That movement supplies the fanatical motivation and group cohesion needed to plan and execute terrorist attacks. It is lavishly funded by the oil wealth of the Gulf States, and it holds a more-or-less furtive appeal for many disaffected Muslim men living outside the Middle East; these factors give the movement global reach and social depth.
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Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: Lessons in Freedom and Democratic Leadership (2005)
Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: Lessons in Freedom and Democratic Leadership
Presented at FAES, Madrid, Spain, March 7, 2005
President Aznar, distinguished guests, it is a great honor to appear in this FAES lecture series. I must say that the moment of the invitation was one of some puzzlement and amusement. I met with President Aznar in Washington last summer and we spoke about political developments and think tanks and his new association with FAES. He told me that he and Ana Palacio were planning a lecture series for 2005 to commemorate “the 25th anniversary of the revolution.” “Excuse me, President Aznar,” I interjected, “what revolution?” He responded in his gentle way, “Do you remember 1980—Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher?”
We were both amused that a European political leader should be reminding the president of the American Enterprise Institute of the importance of Ronald Reagan and of this anniversary. But it was also a telling moment. There is some truth to the caricature of Americans as being preoccupied with the present and Europeans as having a greater sense of history, of how the pasts looms over and shapes our current endeavours. So I greatly appreciate the invitation to reflect on the Reagan–Thatcher years and to see what lessons they might teach for the different—but equally momentous and contentious—problems we are facing today.
But I must begin with an historical point of my own: 2005 is really the 30th anniversary. The Freedom Revolution is appropriately dated not to November 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States, but to five years earlier—November 1975—when King Juan Carlos took the throne in Madrid and announced that he would be King of all the people and intended to usher in democracy in Spain. The importance of that moment cannot be over-emphasized. Through the King’s leadership, and that of a rising generation of young Spanish political activists, Spaindemonstrated for the first time in modern history that it was possible for a nation to go from dictatorship to democracy without great violence. Many brilliant intellectuals and political observers had argued against the very possibility, right up to the moment that it happened. The Spanish example soon spread to Portugal and Latin America. By the end of the 1980s there were only two nations in the Spanish– and Portuguese–speaking world that were not free democracies.
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Governors (and Generals) Rule (2004)
Governors (and Generals) Rule
The American Enterprise, January/February 2004
With early and sustained leads in the polls, in contributions, in the enthusiasm of crowds, and in the proficiency of his media appearances and campaign organization, former Vermont governor Howard Dean is the man to beat in the 2004 race for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination. This has surprised political analysts in Washington and the national media. The Democratic candidates include prominent figures with long experience in national politics and policymaking, such as Senators Joe Lieberman and John Kerry and former House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt. How could they be bested by a former governor of a small, rural state with no experience in national affairs or exposure to the national electorate?
The conventional explanation is that Governor Dean has positioned himself well to the left of the other candidates on the war in Iraq, taxes, health care, and other issues. By leveling harsh attacks at President Bush, he has energized the left-liberal Democratic Party “base” in a way that the other, more seasoned and moderate candidates have not.
Democratic Party activists and primary voters are indeed more liberal than the rank-and-file, just as their Republican counterparts are more conservative than Republicans as a whole. But many primary voters also appear to want to win general elections, even at the expense of doctrinal purity. In recent primaries, more moderate candidates have routinely beaten more liberal or conservative candidates—George W. Bush over Steve Forbes, Bill Clinton over Tom Harkin, Bob Dole over Phil Gramm and Pat Buchanan, George H. W. Bush over Jack Kemp and Pete du Pont, Michael Dukakis over Joseph Biden and Paul Simon, Walter Mondale over Gary Hart and Alan Cranston.
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Some Problems of Prosperity (2000)
Some Problems of Prosperity
The Centre for Independent Studies, May 18, 2000
This is the text of a dinner talk at the annual Consilium conference of the Centre for Independent Studies, Australia’s preeminent think tank, in May 2000. It was separately excerpted in The Australian and The Australian Financial Review on May 23.
Why the Era of Big Government Isn’t Over (2000)
Why the Era of Big Government Isn’t Over
Commentary, April 2000
I
Americans are today the richest, freest people the world has ever known. They enjoy unprecedented levels of personal health, mobility, safety, education, and amenity. Their worst foreign enemies have been vanquished, and for the time being the prospect of war appears remote. The same may be said of civil discord, as many old and often violent animosities of race, class, and economic interest are melting away. Pollsters report levels of social contentment never seen before.
Freedom and fortune in the United States are also very widely shared, making us the most egalitarian of any advanced, prosperous society. True, the distribution of income has become somewhat less equal, but income is an incomplete measure of real-life circumstances in a society where the average income is so high and where so many things that were once luxuries—good food and clothing, cars, homes, advanced communications, art, entertainment, foreign travel—have become mass-market commodities. The down-to-earth measures of material welfare like consumption, health, and longevity show a marked increase in real equality.
Many of today’s most talked-about political problems—reducing pollution, relieving traffic congestion, providing better medical care to people of modest income—are hardly problems of resources at all; we possess ample means to address them. The constraints on their solution are not material but political—the capacity of our political system to mediate our inevitable differences of interest and opinion.
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After the Ascent: Politics and Government in the Super-Affluent Society (2000)
After the Ascent: Politics and Government in the Super-Affluent Society
AEI Francis Boyer Lecture, February 2000
I
To the friends of human freedom and progress, it is difficult to imagine a time more pleasing and full of promise than our own. Americans are today the richest, freest people the world has ever known. We enjoy unprecedented levels of personal health, mobility, safety, education, and amenity. Our worst foreign enemies have been vanquished and for the time being the threat of war is remote. The same may be said of civil discord, as many old and often violent animosities of race, class, and economic interest are melting away. The best of our popular and high culture is wonderfully good. We may not be in a Great Awakening, but religious belief and observance are widespread, and many secular varieties of ethical and spiritual inquiry and self-improvement are booming. We may not have abolished the business cycle, but it has moderated enormously in the post-war period (coinciding exactly with the American Enterprise Institute’s presence on the scene). Pollsters report levels of social contentment never seen before.
Our freedom and fortune are also very widely shared, making us the most egalitarian of any advanced, prosperous society. It is true that the distribution of income has become somewhat less equal, but income is an incomplete measure of real life circumstances in a society where average income is so high, where the necessities have become practically universal, and where so many one-time luxuries—good food, clothing, cars, and homes; advanced communications; art and entertainment; foreign travel—have become mass-market commodities. The down-to-earth measures of material welfare, such as consumption, health status, and longevity, show a marked increase in real equality.
Indeed one of the most valuable commodities of modern life is time itself, and time is being redistributed down the income spectrum as Americans are increasingly substituting personal pursuits for additional earnings. Popular culture has come to acknowledge, and to a striking degree celebrate, the social contributions of the entrepreneur and the economic risk-taker. But we should also acknowledge the claims of those of modest economic aspiration. An old libertarian saw holds that true freedom must include the freedom to be one’s potty little self. To which many an overweight corporate lawyer would add: and also the freedom to be one’s hard-bodied self! New uses of time that our social wealth makes possible—early retirement, part-time telecommuting, second careers in the nonprofit sector, Doctors Without Borders, working-class sabbaticals—make the income distribution statistics worse but real life better. The statisticians and editorialists will catch up. Meanwhile, that so many of us can even contemplate life as a style is one of the greatest blessings of living in such a free, abundant, and beautiful nation.
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Politics, Science, and Human Progress—1820, 1998, and Beyond (1998)
Politics, Science, and Human Progress—1820, 1998, and Beyond
December 11, 1998
My remarks this evening will span four subjects that have dominated the morning headlines and evening news throughout the year: genetics and biotechnology; the uneven performance of the global economy; the quest to break Babe Ruth and Roger Maris’s home run records; and politics and sex (after all, it’s Friday evening). I am going to demonstrate that these matters are deeply related to each other and I am going to finish in time for the salad course in thirty minutes. And just to make it interesting I am going to begin not in 1998 but in the year 1820, when the whole story really got going.
Eighteen-twenty was a political year and epoch strikingly like our own. The recent defeat of the Napoleon’s Evil Empire had put an end to nearly fifty years of continuous war and revolution in Europe and North America-leaving the world suddenly at peace and releasing vast, pent-up social energies for science, commerce, art, and literature. Yet the one remaining superpower, Great Britain, seemed consumed by a sensational sex scandal at the heart of the government. Queen Caroline, wife of the new King George IV, was a woman with a past, and also a present. A team of special government investigators had compiled overwhelming evidence of her adulteries and delivered it to the House of Lords, which began proceedings to strip her of her queenship. The lurid details of the Queen’s assignations shocked even the most cosmopolitan, and presented embarrassing challenges to newspaper editors, hostesses of dinner parties, and parents of young children throughout the realm. Yet the nation was deeply divided over what, if anything, ought to be done, and the pro-Queen and anti- Queen forces reflected partisan political divisions as much as disagreements about sex and lying. One contemporary wrote that “I never remember any question which so exclusively occupied everybody’s attention and so completely absorbed men’s thoughts and engrossed conversation.”
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Biology and Society—1820, 1998, and Beyond (1998)
Biology and Society—1820, 1998, and Beyond
Remarks at the Business Council of Williamsburg, Virginia, October 9, 1998
To grasp the importance of developments in genetics and biotechnology in the year 1998, one really must go back to the year 1820. The recent defeat of Napoleon’s Evil Empire had ended a half-century of continuous war and revolution, releasing vast, pent-up social energies for science, commerce, art, and literature. Yet the one remaining superpower, Great Britain, seemed consumed by a sensational sex scandal at the heart of the government. Queen Caroline, wife of the new King George IV, was a woman with a past, and also a present. A team of special government investigators had compiled comprehensive evidence of her adulteries and delivered it to the House of Lords, which began proceedings to strip her of her queenship. The lurid details of the Queen’s assignations shocked even the most cosmopolitan, and presented embarrassing challenges to newspaper editors, hostesses of dinner parties, and parents of young children throughout the realm. Yet the nation was deeply divided over what, if anything, ought to be done, and the pro-Queen and anti-Queen forces reflected partisan political divisions as much as disagreements about sex and lying. One contemporary wrote that “I never remember any question which so exclusively occupied everybody’s attention and so completely absorbed men’s thoughts and engrossed conversation.”
But not everybody’s thoughts and attention. For in that same year of 1820 John Dalton delivered his landmark “Memoir on Oil, and the Gases Obtained from it by Heat,” the scientific origin of the modern oil and petrochemical industries; papers by Orsted and Ampère described an amazing relationship between magnetism and electricity, propelling Michael Faraday on his quest for machines to generate electrical energy from physical motion and vice versa; and Charles Lyell began his first work on geology, which, by treating the origin and history of the earth as natural and continuously changing rather than supernatural and fixed, was to inspire the lifework of his friend Charles Darwin.
By year’s end the British public had wearied of the Queen Caroline scandal and wished that it would go away and the Queen with it; the proceedings in the Lords were soon abandoned amid bitter political recriminations, and within a year the Queen herself was dead. But in a decade Faraday had bequeathed the world his electric dynamo and Darwin was embarked on HMS Beagle on the most consequential voyage in the history of mankind. The quiet scientific advances of that tumultuous year lived and grew and transformed the world.
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The New Wealth of Nations (1997)
The New Wealth of Nations
Commentary, October 1997
I
The nations of North America, Western Europe, Australia, and Japan are wealthier today than they have ever been, wealthier than any others on the planet, and wealthier by far than any societies in human history. Yet their governments appear to be impoverished—saddled with large accumulated debts and facing annual deficits that will grow explosively over the coming decades. As a result, government spending programs, especially the big social‑insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare in the United States, are facing drastic cuts in order to avert looming insolvency (and, in France and some other European nations, in order to meet the Maastricht treaty’s criteria of fiscal rectitude). American politics has been dominated for several years now by contentious negotiations over deficit reduction between the Clinton administration and the Republican Congress. This past June, first at the European Community summit in Amsterdam and then at the Group of Eight meeting in Denver, most of the talk was of hardship and constraint and the need for governmental austerity (“Economic Unease Looms Over Talks at Denver Summit,” read the New York Times headline).
These bloodless problems of governmental accounting are said, moreover, to reflect real social ills: growing economic inequality in the United States; high unemployment in Europe; an aging, burdensome, and medically needy population everywhere; and the globalization of commerce, which is destroying jobs and national autonomy and forcing bitter measures to keep up with the bruising demands of international competitiveness.
How can it be that societies so surpassingly wealthy have governments whose core domestic welfare programs are on the verge of bankruptcy? The answer is as paradoxical as the question. We have become not only the richest but also the freest and most egalitarian societies that have ever existed, and it is our very wealth, freedom, and equality that are causing the welfare state to unravel.
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