[Ham] At the time the United States came into existence as an independent nation, liberalism literally meant Freedom: freedom for individuals to pursue their own goals with the least possible government regulation and interference.
[Krimel] I was tempted to say that that is still what the US is about but there is problem in your statement. I would be with you if you had said, "... freedom for individuals to pursue their own goals with the least possible regulation and interference." Government is not the only source of interference and regulation. The United State came into existence at the dawn of the industrial revolution. There was nothing in colonial experience that would indicate the turmoil in economic understanding that would arise in the wake of transforming agrarian societies into industrial societies. [Ham] This was the concept of "laissez-faire" economics. It was also the ideology of our Founding Fathers who established America as a Constitutional Republic, essentially limiting the powers of government to securing "the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." [Krimel] First let me point out that securing the blessings of liberty is the last of several purposes listed for establishing a constitutional government. The others are: - To form a more perfect Union - Establish Justice - Insure domestic Tranquility - Provide for the common defense - Promote the general Welfare They did indeed seek to limit power through a system of checks and balances. They understand that in a dynamic environment when power begins to accumulate, a positive feedback loop ensues. If there is nothing to stop the accumulation of power (no negative feedback) that power can dominate every other source of power. What they could not have foreseen is how dramatically economic power could be concentrated and how corrosive radical growth of economic power could become to individual freedom. There is very little in the constitution that specifies what sort of economic system our government would support and absolutely nothing to suggest that they had laissez-faire in mind. The constitution in fact gives congress the power to control interstate and foreign commerce, collect federal taxes, coin money, defend the states, and patents and copyrights. The Constitution also supports property rights, the sanctity of contracts, and due process of law. This is hardly laissez-faire in fact it provides government with the tools to set the rules for economic activity. [Ham] By amendment, judicial edict, and the gradual "democratization" of America over the course of two hundred years, liberalism has taken on a new meaning. [Krimel] Exactly, over the course of time, with the benefit of experience, our understanding of government, economics and human rights as grown and changed. We have evolved and we are still evolving. The idea that we can return to some bygone era of pure ideals is a little nor than the myth of Eden run amok. [Ham] No one acquainted with American history can deny this idealistic shift in our society, or fail to observe that the new administration has taken political advantage of it. [Krimel] Who would want to deny that our understanding has grown with time. To desire otherwise is to long for stagnation. But who can look at the history of the last century and still make these kinds simplistic arguments your quotee makes? If you are truly concerned with learning the lessons of history here is a really simple one from Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren: "In 1792 we are a young country. George Washington is in his first term and we have a credit freeze. There is a financial panic and every ten to fifteen year there is a financial panic in our history. You can just look at it. There is a big collapse, a big trouble, people lose their farms, wiped out. Until we hit the Great Depression. We come out of the Great Depression and people say you know we can do better than this, we don't have to go back to this kind of boom and bust cycle. We come out of the Great Depression with three regulations: FDI insurance, it's safe to put your money into banks. Glass Steagall: banks won't do crazy things and some SEC regulations. We go 50 years without a financial panic. No crisis, no banks failing no big crisis. "Then what happens? We say, "Regulation? Aw, it's a pain, it's expensive, we don't need it." The n we start pulling the threads out of the regulatory fabric and what's the first thing we get: we get S+L crisis. Seven hundred financial institutions fail. Ten years later what do we get? Long Term Capital Management, where we learn that when something collapses in one place in the world it collapses everywhere else. Early 2000s, we get Enron, which tells us the books are dirty. And what is our repeated response? We just keep pulling the threads out of the regulatory fabric." One of the enduring patterns in America's vision of itself is that we are a great experiment in politics and governance. Warren's account reminds me of something from the notebooks of those great experimental psychologists, the behaviorists. In most kinds of experiments you need large samples with lots of controls to establish causality. Some of the behaviorists were concerned with establishing the cause of behavior change in a single individual. They invented what is call single case design. What you do is: ...establish a baseline called condition A; what happens when you do nothing. Then you implement something designed to change the behavior, condition B and see if the baseline behavior changes. Then to make sure that the condition you implemented actually "caused" the behavior change you remove what you implemented, return to condition A. If the behavior returns to baseline levels you can rightly claim that your intervention cause the change in the baseline behavior. It is called A-B-A or single case design. Warren's simple account is a beautiful example of this. Now the behaviorists would claim that at this point the smart thing to do would be to reinstate your intervention or A-B-A-B. But we shall see... ...after all we haven't had a lot of recent experience with being smart. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
