Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

John Holbo:

Religious Freedom and Contraception: I’m amazed by the turns this issue has taken…. I took the legal issues to be relatively clear-cut. Obviously, for Scalia-endorsed reasons, you can’t just give everyone the private right to nullify any public law, piecemeal. Religious liberty doesn’t mean that. But, apparently, it does?

“The fact that the White House thinks this is about contraception is the whole problem. This is about freedom of religion, it’s right there in the First Amendment. You can’t miss it — right there in the very first amendment to our Constitution,” McConnell said. “What the overall view on the issue of contraception is has nothing to do with an issue about religious freedom.” McConnell went on to embellish the argument, claiming Obama is being “rigid in his view that he gets to decide what somebody else’s religion is.” He said that “this issue will not go away until the administration simply backs down.”

McConnell is sensitive to the fact that most Americans aren’t opposed to birth control…. A surprising number of commentators, including some on the left, have been saying they think the Obama administration is in the wrong here, on religious liberty grounds. But it seems obvious (to me) that this is absurd, because the McConnell line is absurd…. What will McConnell have to say about the Muslim employer who… wants to impose de facto sharia law on Muslim and non-Muslim employees alike by unilaterally nullifying the application/enforcement/funding of various laws in creative – and religiously sincere! – fashion. Obama is going to oppose this sort of thing, because he hates religious freedom. Republicans, on the other hand…

Or take the classic case: should sincere pacifists be allowed to withhold a portion of their tax bill, proportionate to the amount of the budget that goes to funding the military? The GOP, I take it, will be supportive of all who choose to check that box.

I suppose someone is going to try to argue that this case is different…. The government doesn’t provide this thing. The government requires employers to do it. So the case is analogous to conscientious objection to military service. You can force people to pay taxes that pay for guns, but you can’t actually force them to shoot the guns, personally. You have to let them be stretcher-bearers instead…. Only in this case the objection is to one particular form of stretcher-bearing, as it were. But it’s really hard to take this too seriously. It’s not as though anyone is suggesting we force Catholic employers to hand out birth control pills… force employees to take the pill or anything like that. Forcing employers to pay… an insurance company… to pay… a doctor… to tell… a pharmacist… to give something to someone that the employer wouldn’t ever ask for, for themselves, hardly seems analogous to asking a pious Quaker to shoot a man.

(The principle that layers of bureaucracy are semi-prophylactic against moral pollution is subject to doubt. But we seem to have no other principle, so this will have to do in the case of prophylactics.)…

[S]uppose the Muslim owner of a large company that employs Muslims and non-Muslims (or even just Muslims) wants to be exempt from insuring medical stuff except in cases where male employees see male doctors and female employees see female doctors. The owner find it objectionable that ‘his money’ should pay for anything he finds religiously repugnant, and this is his take on sharia law. Would Republicans have any objection?

What goes for employers will go for family law as well…. [I]f you really think that religious conviction automatically overrides public law then you clearly just legalized not just same-sex marriage but polygamy and a bunch of other stuff that’s not even occurring to me at the moment. How not?…

Conservatives are hammering home the talking point that Obama is telling you what religion to practice. No…. Religious liberty is individual liberty…. When you give groups the right to restrict the religious liberties of individuals, you sacrifice this principle…. Surely the right to take the pill is not a religious right…. But it does not follow that restricting the right to take the pill is not a restriction on individual freedom of religion….

Yes, employees can go out and buy the stuff even if it isn’t covered by employers. But, since it would be free otherwise, by law, the church groups are, in effect, imposing a ‘sin’ tax, to express religious disapproval of what these individual are up to. Surely that’s a violation of religious liberty: to wit, the right not to regard being on the pill as sinful. If the Catholic church wanted to impose a voluntary sin tax on practicing Catholics – if the Bishops said all Catholics who use birth control should pay a bit extra, to atone for this sin – that would be acceptable (at least legally non-objectionable, in the eyes of the government). But the church can’t… compel the state to help them extract payment even just from Catholics, let along non-Catholics. It’s not the government’s business. Quite the contrary…

I remember Jacob Levy lamenting how he couldn't find any attractive conservative thinkers for his students to read--that everybody writing more than a generation before the president came across as a hide-bound silly narrow-minded prejudiced dolt. Some, admittedly, are long-past their sell-by date the moment they write: think of Leo Strauss's proud declaration that his principles were "fascist, authoritarian, imperial" and Ludwig von Mises's:

Only when the Marxist Social Democrats had gained the upper hand and taken power in the belief that the age of liberalism and capitalism had passed forever did the last concessions disappear that [social democracy] had still been thought necessary to make to the liberal ideology…. The fundamental idea of these movements—which, from the name of the most grandiose and tightly disciplined among them, the Italian, may, in general, be designated as Fascist—consists in the proposal to make use of the same unscrupulous methods…. Only under the fresh impression of the murders and atrocities perpetrated by the supporters of the Soviets were Germans and Italians able to block out the remembrance of the traditional restraints of justice and morality and find the impulse to bloody counteraction. The deeds of the Fascists and of other parties corresponding to them were emotional reflex actions evoked by indignation at the deeds of the Bolsheviks and Communists. As soon as the first flush of anger had passed, their policy took a more moderate course and will probably become even more so with the passage of time… Now it cannot be denied that the only way one can offer effective resistance to violent assaults is by violence…. It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history…

But there is more--and it is interesting for read in the context of the Republican desire to go all-in on opposition to birth control. Mike Konczal:

Ludwig Von Mises Makes the Libertarian Case against “Free Love”: Huh.  So apparently the GOP is going all-in on the birth control stuff.  TPM: “Republicans will move forward with legislation by Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) that permits any employer to deny birth control coverage in their health insurance plans.”… [W]here are the libertarians? Perhaps we need a refresher course on the libertarian case against female sexual autonomy and birth control. UPDATE: See below: Gene Callahan, who actually knows a lot of stuff, points out that Mike is wrong: that in Human Action von Mises is both against female sexual autonomy and for birth control. For this, let’s go to our man Ludwig von Mises and his 1922 book Socialism…. He starts the case like this:

Proposals to transform the relations between the sexes have long gone hand in hand with plans for the socialization of the means of production. Marriage is to disappear along with private property… Socialism promises not only welfare—wealth for all—but universal happiness in love as well.

Corey Robin suggested I check out this book, and it is great.  I love this part, as it is very relevant for the Right today:

The arguments, sometimes unctuous and sometimes venomous, which are put forward by theologians and other moral teachers, are entirely inadequate as a reply to this programme. The socialists are coming with a plan to equalize gender relationships – and by making the wife an equal of the husband it is only a matter of time until the worker seeks to be the equal of the boss, and with sex itself freely shared among consenting equals how can we even maintain the idea of “private property”?...

Let’s get some more quotes onto the internets and then encourage our libertarian friends to have at it.  Help that whole fusionist project by spending 2012 finding increasingly esoteric ways of denouncing birth control alongside the religious conservatives – the future of private property depends on it!  Mises:

So far as Feminism seeks to adjust the legal position of woman to that of man, so far as it seeks to offer her legal and economic freedom… it is nothing more than a branch of the great liberal movement, which advocates peaceful and free evolution. When, going beyond this, it attacks the institutions of social life under the impression that it will thus be able to remove the natural barriers, it is a spiritual child of Socialism. For it is a characteristic of Socialism to discover in social institutions the origin of unalterable facts of nature, and to endeavour, by reforming these institutions, to reform nature…

Free love is the socialist’s radical solution for sexual problems. The socialistic society abolishes the economic dependence of woman which results from the fact that woman is dependent on the income of her husband. Man and woman have the same economic rights and the same duties, as far as motherhood does not demand special consideration for the woman. Public funds provide for the maintenance and education of the children, which are no longer the affairs of the parents but of society. Thus the relations between the sexes are no longer influenced by social and economic conditions…

Just as the pseudo-democratic movement endeavours by decrees to efface natural and socially conditioned inequalities, just as it wants to make the strong equal to the weak, the talented to the untalented, and the healthy to the sick, so the radical wing of the women’s movement seeks to make women the equal of men…. But the difference between sexual character and sexual destiny can no more be decreed away than other inequalities of mankind…

UPDATE: Gene Callahan, in comments, brings information to the table:

Oddly, the quotes from Mises say nothing about birth control. That's not surprising, because Mises was an enthusiastic advocate of birth control:

It is not the practice of birth control that is new, but merely the fact that it is more frequently resorted to. Especially new is the fact that the practice is no longer limited to the upper strata of the population, but is common to the whole population. For it is one of the most important social effects of capitalism that it deproletarianizes all strata of society. It raises the standard of living of the masses of the manual workers to such a height that they too turn into “bourgeois” and think and act like well-to-do burghers. Eager to preserve their standard of living for themselves and for their children, they embark upon birth control. With the spread and progress of capitalism, birth control becomes a universal practice. The transition to capitalism is thus accompanied by two phenomena: a decline both in fertility rates and in mortality rates. The average duration of life is prolonged. -- Human Action

Ben McLannahan:

Japan’s GDP shrinks 2.3% in fourth quarter: Japan’s economy shrank for the third time in four quarters between October and December, after floods in Thailand damaged production and a strong yen and subdued overseas demand hurt exports.

Government figures on Monday showed that real gross domestic product fell an annualised 2.3 per cent in the fourth quarter, much worse than consensus forecasts of a 1.3 per cent decline. On a quarter-on-quarter basis, output fell 0.6 per cent, dragged down by exports – which fell 3.1 per cent – following a 1.7 per cent rise in the third quarter.

The nation’s currency has eased only a little since hitting a postwar high of Y75.35 against the US dollar in October. The trade balance for 2011 showed a deficit of Y2.5tn ($32bn) – the first annual deficit in 31 years – as exports to the eurozone and Asia, including China, fell sharply….

Nationwide core CPI fell 0.1 per cent, year on year, in December, the third straight month of decline. Prices haven’t risen at least 1 per cent for any year since 1997.

Paul Krugman watches the catastrophe-in-progress:

Severe Conservative Syndrome - NYTimes.com: Mitt Romney has a gift for words… telling the Conservative Political Action Conference that he was a “severely conservative governor.” As Molly Ball of The Atlantic pointed out, Mr. Romney “described conservatism as if it were a disease.” Indeed. Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, provided a list of words that most commonly follow the adverb “severely”; the top five, in frequency of use, are disabled, depressed, ill, limited and injured….

[Y]ou have to wonder whether it was a Freudian slip. For something has clearly gone very wrong with modern American conservatism.

Start with Rick Santorum… the clear current favorite among usual Republican primary voters…. Mr. Santorum made a point of defending the medieval Crusades against the “American left who hates Christendom.” Historical issues aside (hey, what are a few massacres of infidels and Jews among friends?), what was this doing in a 21st-century campaign? Nor is this only about sex and religion: he has also declared that climate change is a hoax, part of a “beautifully concocted scheme” on the part of “the left” to provide “an excuse for more government control of your life.” You may say that such conspiracy-theorizing is hardly unique to Mr. Santorum, but that’s the point: tinfoil hats have become a common, if not mandatory, G.O.P. fashion accessory…

Everytime I reread http://www.ehs.org.uk/ehs/conference2007/Assets/AllenIIA.pdf, I think: Robert Allen is a fracking genius!:

The Industrial Revolution is one of the most celebrated watersheds in human history. It is no longer regarded as the abrupt discontinuity that its name suggests, for it was the result of an economic expansion that started in the sixteenth century. Nevertheless, the eighteenth century does represent a decisive break in the history of technology and the economy. The famous inventions–the spinning jenny, the steam engine, coke smelting, and so forth–deserve their renown1, for they mark the start of a process that has carried the West, at least, to the mass prosperity of the twenty-first century. The purpose of this essay is to explain why they occurred in the eighteenth century, in Britain, and how the process of their invention has transformed the world... […]

The industrial revolution was fundamentally a technological revolution, and progress in understanding it can be made by focussing on the sources of invention.... [T]he reason the industrial revolution happened in Britain, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was not because of luck (Crafts 1977) or British genius or culture or the rise of science. Rather it was Britain’s success in the international economy that set in train economic developments that presented Britain’s inventors with unique and highly remunerative possibilities. The industrial revolution was a response to the opportunity… […]

What commercial success did for Britain was to create a structure of wages and prices that differentiated Britain from the continent and, indeed, Asia: In Britain, wages were remarkably high and energy cheap. This wage and price history was a fundamental reason for the technological breakthroughs of the eighteenth century whose object was to substitute capital and energy for labour. Scientific discoveries and scientific culture do not explain why Britain differed from the rest of Europe. They may have been necessary conditions for the industrial revolution, but they were not sufficient: Without Britain’s distinctive wage and price environment, Newton would have produced as little economic progress in England as Galileo produced in Italy... [...]

The working assumption of this paper is that technology was invented by people in order to make money.... [L]abour was particularly expensive and energy particularly cheap in Britain, so inventors in Britain were led to invent machines that substituted energy and capital for labour.... The scale of the mining industry in eighteenth century Britain was much greater than anywhere else, so the return to inventing improved drainage machinery (a.k.a. the steam engine) was greater in Britain than in France or China. Third, patents that allow the inventor to capture all of the gains created by his invention raise the rate of return and encourage invention... [...]

Britain was a high wage economy in four senses:1. At the exchange rate, British wages were higher than those of its competitors. 2. High silver wages translated into higher living standards than elsewhere. 3. British wages were high relative to capital prices. 4. Wages in northern and western Britain were exceptionally high relative to energy prices...

The different trajectories of the wage-rental ratio created different incentives to mechanize production in the two parts of Europe. In England, the continuous rise in the cost of labour relative to capital led to an increasingly greater incentive to invent ways of substituting capital for labour in production. On the continent, the reverse was true…. It was not Newtonian science that inclined British inventors and entrepreneurs to seek machines that raised labour productivity but the rising cost of labour... [...]

Britain’s unusual wages and prices were due to two factors. The first was Britain’s success in the global economy, which was in part the result of state policy. The second was geographical–Britain had vast and readily worked coal deposits…. The superior real wage performance of northwestern Europe was due to a boom in international trade…. In a mercantilist age, imperialism was necessary to expand trade, and greater trade led to urbanization.... Coal deposits were a second factor contributing to England’s unusual wage and price structure…. First, inexpensive coal raised the ratio of the price of labour to the price of energy (Figure 4), and, thereby, contributed to the demand for energy-using technology. In addition, energy was an important input in the production of metals and bricks, which dominated the index of the price of capital services.... [C]oal is a ‘natural’ resource, but the coal industry was not a natural phenomenon.... It was the growth of London in the late sixteenth century, however, that caused the coal industry to take off. The Dutch cities provide a contrast that reinforces the point (Pounds and Parker 1957, de Vries and van der Woude 1997, Unger 1984). The coal deposits that stretched from northeastern France across Belgium and into Germany were as useful and accessible as Britain’s.... The pivotal question is why city growth in the Netherlands did not precipitate the exploitation of Ruhr coal in a process parallel to the exploitation of Northern English coal. Urbanization in the Low Countries also led to a rise in the demand for fuel. In the first instance, however, it was met by exploiting Dutch peat. This checked the rise in fuel prices, so that there was no economic return to improving transport on the Ruhr or resolving the political-taxation issues related to shipping coal down the Rhine. Once the Newcastle industry was established, coal could be delivered as cheaply to the Low Countries as it could be to London, and that trade put a ceiling on the price of energy in the Dutch Republic that forestalled the development of German coal. This was portentous: Had German coal been developed in the sixteenth century rather than the nineteenth, the industrial revolution might have been a Dutch-German breakthrough rather than a British achievement... [...]

The following generalizations apply to many inventions including the most famous: 1. The British inventions were biased. They were labour saving and energy and capital using.... 2. As a result of 1, cost reductions were greatest at British factor prices, so the new technologies were adopted in Britain and not on the continent.... [C]oke smelting was not profitable in France or Germany before the mid-nineteenth century (Fremdling 2000). Continuing with charcoal was rational behaviour in view of continental factor prices. This result looks general; in which case, adoption lags mean that British technology was not cost-effective at continental input prices. 3. The famous inventions of the industrial revolution were made in Britain rather than elsewhere in the world because the necessary R&D was profitable in Britain (under British conditions) but unprofitable elsewhere.... 4. Once British technology was put into use, engineers continued to improved it, often by economizing on the inputs that were cheap in Britain. This made British technology cost-effective in more places and led to its spread across the continent later in the nineteenth century.... The theory advanced here explains the technological breakthroughs of the industrial revolution in terms of the economic base of society–natural resources, international trade, profit opportunities. Through their impact on wages and prices, these prime movers affected both the demand for technology and its supply... [...]

Why did the French ignore the new spinning machines? Cost calculations for France are not robust, but the available figures indicate that jennies achieved consistent savings only at high count work, which was not the typical application (Ballot 1923, pp. 48-9). In France, a 60 spindle jenny cost 280 livre tournois in 1790 (Chassagne 1991, p. 191), while a labourer in the provinces earned about three quarters of a livre tournois per day, so the jenny cost 373 days labour. In England, a jenny cost 140 shillings and a labourer earned about one shilling per day, so the jenny was worth 140 days labour (Chapman and Butt 1988, p. 107). In France, the value of the labour saved with the jenny was not worth the extra capital cost, while in England it was. French cost comparisons show that Arkwright’s water frame, a much more capital intensive technique, was no more economical than the jenny. The reverse was true in England where water frames were rapidly overtaking jennies. The French lag in mechanization was the result of the low French wage… […]

Why did the industrial revolution lead to modern economic growth? I have argued that the famous inventions of the British industrial revolution were responses to Britain’s unique economic environment and would not have been developed anywhere else. This is one reason that the Industrial Revolution was British. But why did those inventions matter? The French were certainly active inventors, and the scientific revolution was a pan-European phenomenon. Wouldn’t the French, or the Germans, or the Italians, have produced an industrial revolution by another route? Weren’t there alternative paths to the twentieth century? These questions are closely related to another important question asked by Mokyr: Why didn’t the industrial revolution peter out after 1815? He is right that there were previous occasions when important inventions were made. The result, however, was a one-shot rise in productivity that did not translate into sustained economic growth. The nineteenth century was different–the First Industrial Revolution turned into Modern Economic Growth. Why? Mokyr’s answer is that scientific knowledge increased enough to allow continuous invention. Technological improvement was certainly at the heart of the matter, but it was not due to discoveries in science–at least not before 1900. The reason that incomes continued to grow in the hundred years after Waterloo was because Britain’s pre-1815 inventions were particularly transformative, much more so than continental inventions. That is a second reason that the Industrial Revolution was British and also the reason that growth continued throughout the nineteenth century.... The nineteenth century engineering industry was a spin-off of the coal industry. All three of the developments that raised productivity in the nineteenth century depended on two things–the steam engine and cheap iron. Both of these, as we have seen, were closely related to coal. The steam engine was invented to drain coal mines, and it burnt coal. Cheap iron required the substitution of coke for charcoal and was prompted by cheap coal. (A further tie- in with coal was geological–Britain’s iron deposits were often found in proximity to coal deposits.) There were more connections: The railroad, in particular, was a spin-off of the coal industry. Railways were invented in the seventeenth century to haul coal in mines and from mines to canals or rivers. Once established, railways invited continuous experimentation to improve road beds and rails. Iron rails were developed in the eighteenth century as a result, and alternative dimensions and profiles were explored. Furthermore, the need for traction provided the first market for locomotives. There was no market for steam-powered land vehicles because roads were unpaved and too uneven to support a steam vehicle (as Cugnot and Trevithick discovered). Railways, however, provided a controlled surface on which steam vehicles could function, and colliery railways were the first purchasers of steam locomotives. When George Stephenson developed the Rocket for the Rainhill trials, he tested his design ideas by incorporating them in locomotives he was building for coal railways. In this way, the commercial operation of primitive versions of technology promoted further development as R&D expenses were absorbed as normal business costs.... The reason that the British inventions of the eighteenth century–cheap iron and the steam engine, in particular–were so transformative was because of the possibilities they created for the further development of technology. Technologies invented in France–in paper production, glass, knitting–did not lead to general mechanization or globalization. One of the social benefits of an invention is the door it opens to further improvements. British technology in the eighteenth century had much greater possibilities in this regard than French inventions. The British were not more rational or prescient than the French in developing coal-based technologies: The British were simply luckier in their geology. The knock-on effect was large, however: There is no reason to believe that French technology would have led to the engineering industry, the general mechanization of industrial processes, the railway, the steam ship, or the global economy. In other words, there was only one route to the twentieth century–and it went through northern Britain...

Cf: <

• TheStalwart Joseph Weisenthal James Hamilton with a quick demolishment of people like Jim Grant, who pine for a return to the gold standard. http://bit.ly/xsdPUR 26 minutes ago Retweeted by delong

• AmandaMarcotte Amanda Marcotte http://bit.ly/yyP531 Mitch McConnell supports letting your employer prevent your insurance company from covering your BC directly. 8 hours ago Retweeted by delong

• mmhastings Michael Hastings Watching CNN now. When people blame Nader for the Dems losing in 2000, there is only one appropriate two word response: Joe Lieberman. 8 hours ago Retweeted by delong

• pamspaulding Pam Spaulding They tire me w/the BS. RT @owillis: cons seem to think its the "race card" to acknowledge that we live in a society with multiple races. 8 hours ago Retweeted by delong

• markos Markos Moulitsas In other words, state GOP just stole Maine's caucuses for Romney. 9 hours ago Retweeted by delong

• markos Markos Moulitsas Best part of Romney's "victory" in Maine? State GOP decided not to count the last 17% needing to report ... in Romney's worst 2008 counties 9 hours ago Retweeted by delong

• DougHenwood Doug Henwood Who knew GS cared? “@GSElevator: Whitney Houston jokes are pathetic... She was awesome. And it's genuinely sad.” 11 Feb Retweeted by delong

• drgrist David Roberts Like most "good news" for Romney, this looks good only in contrast to the narrowly avoided awful news. 11 Feb Retweeted by delong

• BorowitzReport Andy Borowitz Now that we all agree contraception is a bad idea, let's take a harder look at electricity and soap. 11 Feb Retweeted by delong

• DemocratMachine Viva DemocratMachine Romney's a lock to win the Presidency. Provided he can win the Presidency while running behind John McCain's 2008 numbers 11 Feb Retweeted by delong

• blakehounshell Blake Hounshell RT @AKaczynski1 Maine caucus results: Mitt Romney 39% (2,190 actual votes), Ron Paul 36 (1,996) Rick Santorum 18 (989) Newt Gingrich 6 (349) 11 Feb Retweeted by delong

• radleybalko radleybalko My parents went to CPAC and all I got was this racist old minstrel movie. MT @Slate More ridiculous CPAC swag--PHOTOS: http://slate.me/zAm7lz

• FrankPasquale Frank Pasquale @ @delong oh the ind. ins. mkt...recissions, pre-X conditions, daily limits, denying coverage 4 past prescriptions...those were the days 7 hours ago

• mI_kul Michael Tobechukwu @ RT @delong: RT @sam_baker: Mitt Romney endorsed an individual mandate. Can we just carve that into a stone somewhere? 9 hours ago

• MattCowgill Matt Cowgill @delong you may be interested in this post by Peter Whiteford, coauthor of the OECD report that de Rugy misrepresented http://j.mp/yTfDcU 16 hours ago

• Professionaleft Professional Left Not as much as economists RT @delong: How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy - Magazine - The Atlantic http://bit.ly/A6ruBq 20 hours ago

• tanmoy77 Tanmoy Chatterjee @delong sometimes its amusing & surprising for us from India to find controversies goin on abt contracption in #Paris_hiltons homelnd #US. 21 hours ago

• Problem Set 2 Solutions

February 15. The Industrial Revolution (DeLong):

• Robert C. Allen (2011), “Why the Industrial Revolution Was British: Commerce, Induced Invention and the Scientific Revolution,” Economic History Review 64, pp. 357-384. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0289.2010.00532.x/pdf

• Jeffrey Williamson (1984), "Why Was British Economic Growth So Slow During the Industrial Revolution?" Journal of Economic History 44:3, pp. 687-712. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2124148

• Nicholas Crafts (2002), "The Solow Productivity Paradox in Historical Perspective," CEPR Discussion Paper no.3142. http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/articles_of_the_month/pdf/Newsolow.pdf

Industrial Revolution Memo Question

Jillian Rayfield, February 2011:

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/02/rick-santorum-the-crusades-get-a-bad-rap.php?m=1: If you were worried there wouldn’t be a 2012 candidate touting the pro-Crusades platform, then today is your lucky day!

“The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical,” former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) told a South Carolina audience yesterday. “And that is what the perception is by the American left who hates Christendom.”

Santorum’s defense of the Crusades came in Spartanburg, S.C., reports Andy Barr of Politico....

Referring to the “American left,” Santorum observed: “They hate Western civilization at the core. That’s the problem.” Sanoturm also suggested that American involvement in the Middle East is part of our “core American values.” “What I’m talking about is onward American soldiers,” Santorum continued. “What we’re talking about are core American values. ‘All men are created equal’ — that’s a Christian value, but it’s an American value.”

The Crusades were religiously sanctioned military campaigns waged in Europe during the Middle Ages and pre-dated the emergence of the United States by a few centuries. The original goal was to recapture Jerusalem from Muslim rule, though along the way the Roman Catholic forces massacred thousands of Jews, among others.

How the crusaders viewed themselves: From Deeds of God Done by the Franks:

July 15, 1099: Then the emir who was in the Tower of David surrendered to the Count [Raymond], and he opened up the gate.... [O]ur pilgrims chased after and killed Saracens right up to the Temple of Solomon, where they had gathered and wher they fought furiously against our men the whole day, until their blood ran through the temple. When the pagans were defeated, our men captured men and women in the temple and they killed those that they wanted and they let live thos that they chose. On top of the Temple of Solomon were gathered a great many pagans, of both sexes. To these Tancred and Gaston of Beert gave their banners. And then our men rushed throughout the city, seizing gold and silver, horses and mules, and houses filled with all good things.

And finally our men came rejoicing and weaponig with happiness to the Sepulcher of our Savior Jesus to adore it and to render their great debt to Him. The next morning, our men climbed up on the roof of the temple and attacked the Saracens, both men and women, beheading them with naked swords. Some of them jumped from the temple. Seeing this, Tancred was filled with anger.

Then our men took counsel and decided that each one should give alms and pray that God might choose someone who pleased him to rule over the others and to rule the city. They also ordered that all the dead Saracens be thrown outside the city because of the terrible stench, because the entire city was filled with their corpses And the living Saracans carried the dead ones out to thr front of the gate and made mounds of them as high as houses. There were so many dead pagan men that no one has heard of nor seen the like, and they were then laid up on pyres. And as to how many there were, no one knows, except God...

I presume that Tancred d'Hauteville (the Younger), future Prince of Galilee and Regent of Antioch, was filled with anger because the other crusaders were beheading captives who were his valuable slaves, but perhaps I malign him.

The War Relocation Authority and The Incarceration of Japanese-Americans During World War II: 1942:

Columnist Walter Lippmann publishes a nationally syndicated column in which he says:

The Pacific Coast is in imminent danger of a combined attack from within and from without. The Japanese navy has been reconnoitering the coast more or less continuously. The Pacific Coast is officially a combat zone; some part of it may at any moment be a battlefield. Nobody's constitutional rights include the right to reside and do business on a battlefield. And nobody ought to be on a battlefield who has no good reason for being there.

Mark Kleiman:

How much does Newt Gingrich hate Mitt Romney?: Mitt Romney and his SuperPac not only destroyed Newt Gingrich’s campaign, they assassinated his character: with a little bit of help, of course, from Newton Leroy himself. The Gingrich campaign, having morphed from a book tour into a serious run (for one brief, scary moment) at the Presidency, has now been transformed again, this time into a revenge drama. But just how angry is Gingrich? Is he angry enough, for example, to withdraw from the race, putting Romney in the position that was always Romney’s nightmare: head to head against a single extremist? Now that would be a low blow….

I don’t think this will happen, for the same reason that Bill Clinton missed the chance to take his revenge by resigning in early 1999, which would have stirred up sympathy for Clinton and rage against his foes while allowing Gore to campaign as the incumbent. Yes, Gingrich cherishes his grudges; but it will probably turn out that he cherishes his media appearances even more.

Governments Create Markets; Governments Correct Markets:

• Lecture Slides
• Lecture Audio
• Lecture Notes pdf
• Lecture Notes epub

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread…"

--Anatole France, The Red Lily

From http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/40/23/49170253.pdf:

OECD (2011), Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising

http://www.oecd.org/els/social/inequality

COUNTRY NOTE: UNITED STATES

The United States has the fourth-highest inequality level in the OECD, after Chile, Mexico and Turkey. Inequality among working-age people has risen steadily since 1980, in total by 25%. In 2008, the average income of the top 10% of Americans was 114 000 USD, nearly 15 times higher than that of the bottom 10%, who had an average income of 7 800 USD. This is up from 12 to 1 in the mid 1990s, and 10 to 1 in the mid 1980s.

Income taxes and cash benefits play a small role in redistributing income in the United States, reducing inequality by less than a fifth – in a typical OECD country, it is a quarter. Only in Korea, Chile and Switzerland is the effect still smaller.

Key findings:

• The wealthiest Americans have collected the bulk of the past three decades’ income gains. The share of national income of the richest 1% more than doubled between 1980 and 2008: from 8% to 18% [Table 9.1]. The richest 1% now makes an average US$1.3 million of after-tax income (compared to US$17,700 for the poorest 20% of US citizens). During the same time, the top marginal income tax rate dropped from 70% in 1981 to 35% in 2010.

• The rising incomes of executives and finance professionals account for much of the rising share of top income recipients. Moreover, people who achieve such a high income status tend to stay there: only 25% drop out of the richest 1% in the US, compared to some 40% in Australia and Norway, for instance.

• The main reason for widening inequality in the US is the widening wage gap. The gap between the richest and poorest 10% of full-time workers has increased by almost one third, more than in most other OECD countries.

• Contrary to the OECD trend, annual hours among lower-wage workers in the US increased by more than 20% over the past decades [Table 4.A1.2] – probably linked to incentive policies such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) but also the relatively low level of the minimum wage. This trend partially offset the rising wage gap and led to a more moderate increase in overall annual earnings inequality. 

• Societal change — more single and single-parent households, more people with a partner in the same earning group — accounts for much less of the increase in household earnings inequality (about 13%) than the widening dispersion of men’s earnings (about 46%). At the same time, increase in employment, both among women and men, countered the increase toward higher inequality.

• Redistribution of income by taxes and benefits is limited. Over the long run, these offset less than 10% of the increase in inequality of market incomes – gross earnings, savings and capital taken together.

• The limited redistributive effect in the United States is to be found on the benefit side rather than the tax side: benefits represent just 6% of household income, while the OECD average is about 16%. Income support for the unemployed has become less generous over time prior to the 2008-09 financial crisis. The gap between in-work and out of work income has increased for lone parent families and couples with children particularly. The income of a lone mother with 2 kids, who had full unemployment insurance and earned around the average wage, is less than 40% of her former take-home pay – in 1995, this was over 50%.

• On the other hand, the US invests relatively more in public expenditures in in-kind services [Figure 8.1], and those help reducing inequality by roughly 18%.

Key policy recommendations for OECD countries from Divided We Stand:

• Employment is the most promising way of tackling inequality. The biggest challenge is creating more and better jobs that offer good career prospects and a real chance to people to escape poverty.

• Investing in human capital is key. This must begin from early childhood and be sustained through compulsory education. Once the transition from school to work has been accomplished, there must be sufficient incentives for workers and employers to invest in skills throughout the working life.

• Reforming tax and benefit policies is the most direct instrument for increasing redistributive effects. Large and persistent losses in low-income groups following recessions underline the importance of government transfers and well-conceived income-support policies.

• The growing share of income going to top earners means that this group now has a greater capacity to pay taxes. In this context governments may re-examine the redistributive role of taxation to ensure that wealthier individuals contribute their fair share of the tax burden.

• The provision of freely accessible and high-quality public services, such as education, health, and family care, is important.

Poor Jonathan Chait tries to be nice to Veronique de Rugy.

Could she possibly be right? Is the U.S. tax system unusually progressive?

Well...

Source: OECD, Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising

Looks to me like only 6 OECD countries have less progressive systems, and 21 OECD countries have more progressive systems…

As Chait writes:

Jonathan Chait:

I Will Try To Be Nice This Time: De Rugy wrote a column arguing that the U.S. has a more progressive tax system because rich Americans pay a higher share of the tax burden than do rich people in other countries:

Contrary to common belief, the United States already has a more progressive tax system than do the most industrialized democracies worldwide. The nearby chart uses data from a recent report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on the share of taxes (both personal income and payroll taxes combined) paid by the richest 10 percent of households in 24 industrialized countries. The bars represent the share of the total taxes collected that are paid by top earners in these 24 countries.

The richest 10 percent of U.S. households (those making $112,124 or more) contribute a greater share of taxes (45.1 percent of all income taxes) than their counterparts in any other industrialized nation.

This widely-circulated argument is completely fallacious…. If rich people earn a far larger share of the income in the U.S., which they do, then they may pay a higher share of the tax burden even if the U.S. income tax system is less regressive. I don’t see how anybody can deny that. Indeed, I don’t see de Rugy or her copious defenders even attempting to deny it. Instead, de Rugy keeps writing multiple replies attempting to change the question.

One thing she’s doing is suggesting other measures of progressivity that might show the U.S. is extremely progressive. That is an interesting question. It’s not, however, the subject of the dispute…. Clive Crook argues… [that] the U.S. tax code really is unusually progressive. That’s fine. But that is not the subject of the dispute…. [I]f Clive Crook were to argue that he is the most handsome man in the world because he owns an Oxford shirt, and I were to respond that this is a fallacious argument, then it would be beside the point if Crook summoned some other measure to prove he really is the most handsome man in the world…. You can’t claim that the proportion of taxes paid by the rich is a good measure of the progressivity of the tax code…. Now, if de Rugy’s frantic efforts to change the subject amount to a tacit confession that her original argument was false, and she will endeavor to cease recirculating (she has done it before) this totally wrong claim, then that would be very nice…

If you want to read more than you probably really want to know about changes in redistribution in the OECD over the past two decades, you can go here. No, the United States is not and has not been unusually progressive.

Twitter / @blakehounshell: RT @AKaczynski1 Maine cauc ...:

@blakehounshell Blake Hounshell RT @AKaczynski1 Maine caucus results: Mitt Romney 39% (2,190 actual votes), Ron Paul 36 (1,996) Rick Santorum 18 (989) Newt Gingrich 6 (349)

• delong J. Bradford DeLong @ @rrichard09 Back in 1987 claim efficient market fell by 25% 10/19 because House ctte. sent bill to floor 10/15. Been this way a long time 1 hour ago

• delong J. Bradford DeLong @ @rrichard09 do I have to read it? Or are there highlights? I mean, this is genuinely scary... 2 hours ago

• hblodget Henry Blodget One thing clear about these News Corp arrests--no way are there 12 "bad apples" in the same newsroom. Mgt had to know read.bi/AbWOUZ 2 hours ago Retweeted by delong

• 7im Tim Dickinson I'd like to thank newt gingrich for finally inspiring me to pick up Rules for Radicals 2 hours ago Retweeted by delong

• delong J. Bradford DeLong @ @brianbeutler @PatrickRuffini It's not a national poll or a poll of Republicans, but of "usual Republican primary voters" 2 hours ago

• delong J. Bradford DeLong @ @cblatts Must you be willing to smile and nod when somebody in the TNR office says that Muslims are not worthy of 1st amendment rights? 2 hours ago

• delong J. Bradford DeLong Can Anybody Tell Me Why the Frack Eugene Fama Thinks the U.S. Economy Was in Recession in 2006? http://bit.ly/ySFtiU 2 hours ago

• Ihnatko Andy Ihnatko My supermarket has its own sushi chef. A tray of California rolls is less than a Big Mac Value Meal. The 21st century kicks ass! 4 hours ago Retweeted by delong

• BorowitzReport Andy Borowitz BREAKING: In Sign of Desperation, Romney Introduces Mischievous Dog Sidekick, Scrappy-Mitt 4 hours ago Retweeted by delong

• AriBerman Ari Berman RT @DanaHoule Romney also 0-3 in caucus states where Mormons aren't 7% of state population & 25% of GOP caucus participants 4 hours ago Retweeted by delong

• delong J. Bradford DeLong 656 Usual Republican Primary Voters Don't Like Romney Very Much, According to Public Policy Polling http://bit.ly/wJgtip 6 hours ago

• delong J. Bradford DeLong Felix Salmon on Obama Economic Policy http://bit.ly/ygCv7i 17 hours ago

• aterkel aterkel Santorum: Women shouldn't get to use insurance to cover contraception at all. http://huff.to/yjIPpW (via @samsteinhp) #cpac 10 Feb Retweeted by delong

• ezraklein Ezra Klein Bottom line, Romney's budget promises would require a 36.4% cut in all domestic spending, including SS http://wapo.st/AzgYtk 10 Feb Retweeted by delong

• delong J. Bradford DeLong Noam Scheiber on Obama’s Worst Year: 2011 http://bit.ly/y7WL6g 10 Feb

• delong J. Bradford DeLong Noahpinion: Department of "WTF?!?!" http://bit.ly/zPERHC 9 Feb

• EconOfContempt EconOfContempt The Street can always count on Peter Wallison to turn a technical dispute into an ideological war http://on.wsj.com/y9QkSd It's all he knows 9 Feb Retweeted by delong

• drgrist David Roberts Signing off. Tomorrow, I hope to hear from many more old white men about what kind of contraception young women should be allowed to have. 9 Feb Retweeted by delong

• delong J. Bradford DeLong Deus Ex Macchiato » Safe by fiat http://blog.rivast.com/?p=5505 9 Feb

• normative Julian Sanchez You can fit the entire Pirate Bay on a $5 thumb drive. Good luck with those shutdowns. http://bit.ly/zCN0RX 9 Feb Retweeted by delong

• MiddleClassPoli Kenneth Thomas Even conservatives criticizing Stuart Butler's denial Heritage invented individual mandate. …eclasspoliticaleconomist.blogspot.com/2012/02/conser… #aca @delong @markos 9 Feb Retweeted by delong

• delong J. Bradford DeLong Inequality Deniers Fudge the Numbers Again -- Daily Intel http://nymag.com/daily/intel/20… 9 Feb

• daudig Dave Gilson Santorum praises the Crusades. This day has officially gone medieval. http://goo.gl/Hfj1p 8 Feb Retweeted by delong

• counterparties Counterparties Thank Sarbanes-Oxley for the lack of major corporate accounting scandals in the past decade http://bit.ly/xkypWl by @eisingerj 8 Feb Retweeted by delong

• AnnieLowrey Annie Lowrey Startling, sad interview with Cardinal Egan. http://bit.ly/xRjK1u 8 Feb Retweeted by delong

• delong J. Bradford DeLong What Jonathan Gruber Meant When He Said That Although Charles Murray's "Losing Ground" Was Impressive as Rhetoric, "... http://bit.ly/z6WRvq 8 Feb

• delong J. Bradford DeLong Why Oh Why Can't We Have Better Right Wing Think Tanks?: Stuart Butler/Heritage Foundation/Individual Mandate Edition http://bit.ly/w4PXWw 8 Feb

• irincarmon Irin Carmon Cardinal: “I don’t think we did anything wrong” on sex abuse. Hey, let's take policy cues from this leadership! http://nyti.ms/xLbUvM 8 Feb Retweeted by delong

• ThePlumLineGS Greg Sargent Moral of Romney's defeats yesterday: They don't like him. They really don't like him. In Morning Roundup: http://wapo.st/xnn6rA 8 Feb Retweeted by delong

• markos Markos Moulitsas RT @jesseltaylor: If I didn't know better, I'd say that the Alinsky/Soros left managed to make the GOP race about social conservatism. 7 Feb Retweeted by delong »

• rrichard09 RC Richards @ @delong maybe it will be less painful to listen to the podcast http://bit.ly/yWcdOv : ) 1 hour ago

• rrichard09 RC Richards @ @delong It's a quandary. I think he's senile. But the WSJ keeps publishing his op-eds, so he's still influential. Latter suggests reading. 1 hour ago

• hblodget Henry Blodget @ @delong They're assisting! In handcuffs! (They arrested Rebekah Brooks a hundred years ago--and still no charges) 1 hour ago

• rrichard09 RC Richards @ @delong He's made many statements about the great recession that don't make sense. His latest EconTalk interview is full of them 2 hours ago

• LDJEconomics Louis D. Johnston Prime-age men are benefiting from job growth: RT @delong Prime-Age Employment by Sex http://bit.ly/z2kL0M 2 hours ago

• SSTunic Lindsay Southwick RT @delong: Adele Stan Watches Rick Santorum http://bit.ly/Amy5cl 2 hours ago

• EmanuelDerman Emanuel Derman Definitely worth reading RT @delong: Getting up to Speed on the Financial Crisis: Gary Gorton, Andrew Metrick :: SSRN http://bit.ly/zOLZb7 4 hours ago

• ElizabethDrewOH Elizabeth Drew @ @delong Dem leaders on Capitol Hill told White House not propose stimulus fig that even suggests $1 trillion. Said number wd grow on Hill. 9 hours ago

• HalesOysters Hale Soyster "Obama's Katrina"...not new but still relevant @delong: Felix Salmon on Obama Economic Policy http://bit.ly/ygCv7i 16 hours ago

• NobleIdeas Michael Noble Read this: RT @delong: Daniel Gross: The Strange Controversy Over Chrysler’s Ad http://bit.ly/AxE7Rp 16 hours ago

• fnj Faisal N. Jawdat @ @delong Funny you should mention that. We have a family tradition of not wanting to be dictator of Syria. And also one of better passwords. 8 Feb

Paul Krugman maintains that potential output is independent of asset prices:

Bubbles and Economic Potential: The ongoing discussions of economic policy and principles since the Great Recession struck have, I have to say, been a source of continuing revelation. Again and again one sees people with seemingly sterling credentials — Federal Reserve presidents, economists with Ph.D.s from good schools — propounding views that I thought were obvious fallacies, at least to anyone who had studied the subject a bit. And the hits just keep coming. The latest, via Scott Sumner, is St. Louis Fed president James Bullard’s suggestion (pdf) that the bursting of the housing bubble has permanently reduced U.S. potential output:

A better interpretation of the behavior of U.S. real GDP over the last five years may be that the economy was disrupted by a permanent, one-time shock to wealth. In particular, the perceived value of U.S. real estate fell substantially with the 30 percent decline in housing prices after 2006. This shaved trillions of dollars off of the wealth of the nation. Since housing prices are not expected to rebound to the previous peak anytime soon, that wealth is simply gone for now. This has lowered consumption and output, and lower levels of production have caused a significant disruption in U.S. labor markets…

Bullard… [is] seeming to say that a drop in asset prices is itself a destruction of output capacity. What?

And yet we have David Andolfatto apparently endorsing this view, and Tyler Cowen at least expressing sympathy. What is going on?

OK, first things first. Capital gains are not counted in GDP. The direct effect of a bursting bubble on measured output is zero. Nor, by the way, is a fall in asset prices counted as a decline in the capital stock, which is in principle measured in physical terms. So what are these guys talking about? Maybe the idea is that the burst bubble reduces demand, and hence leads to lower production. But at that point you’re into a Keynesian world of deficient demand, and you should be talking about ways to close the gap, not accepting it as a fact of life….

Imagine… farmland prices go through the roof. Then those prices slump. Why should this impair the ability of the farmers to keep growing corn?… And guess what — this isn’t a hypothetical example…. US farmland prices…. US farm output…. Do you see a permanent reduction in farm production when the bubble burst? I don’t….

Well, you might say, but farmers don’t buy a large fraction of farm output, whereas homeowners buy a large fraction of overall US output. Bzzzt! You’re talking demand-side economics again, and making, whether you know it or not, the case for monetary and fiscal stimulus. At a basic level, this is all kind of terrifying. If top financial officials and credentialed economists can’t even avoid getting confused about the difference between asset prices and productive capacity, what hope is there for rational policy discussion?

I think that there is a possible second-order effect of asset prices on potential output.

Think of it this way: Workers swap leisure for money. Businesses use labor to build stuff. Households--including rich investing households--pay money to businesses to buy stuff. If there is a bubble then investors think some forms of new property are much more valuable than they really are, are willing to pay through the nose for them, and businesses are willing to pay higher wages to pull more workers into employment.

Suppose that there are a bunch of workers who are willing to work only if they are paid more than $40K a year, and due to the housing bubble investors think their time pounding nails in Nevada produces $60K a year of value, while in actual fact the houses they build in Nevada will only be worth $30K per year of labor input once the bubble crashes. Such workers will be employed during the bubble, and out of the labor force after the bubble collapses.

Is this an explanation for why unemployment should fall during a bubble and permanently rise after the collapse of a bubble? No, it is an argument that labor force participation should rise during the bubble and fall back to its pre-bubble level afterwards. It is, at most, a second-order part of what is going on. It might be out there--and it might well not.

But this possible second-order effect does not seem to be what Bullard, Andolfatto, and Cowen are talking about…

Doesn't anybody know how to play this game?

I cannot help but think that I ought to have something truly smart to say about this graph.

But I don't…

Mark Thoma:

Economist's View: "Reading the Bump in Inventories": David Altig says he isn't too worried about inventory accumulation in the fourth quarter of last year translating into slower growth in the first part of this year….

For me the big uncertainties right now are the pace of the recovery (will it remain plodding and take years or will we see an accelerattion in activity?), how much trouble we'll encounter along the way -- it's unlikely the return to full employment will come without setbacks of some sort -- whether the setbacks will be temporary blips or longer lived problems, and how policymakers react when the inevitable trouble hits.

Policymakers will have a lot to do with how those uncertainites play out. Monetary and fiscal authorities could push a faster recovery with the appropriate policies, but while the Fed seems more inclined in this direction than fiscal authorities, I don't expect anything substantial from either. More likely is that policies will be reversed before the economy is ready for it. If monetary and fiscal authorities withdraw support for the economy too soon through austerity measures designed to balance the budget and interest rate increases out of fear of inflation, the recovery will be delayed. In addition, there will be a tendency for policymakers to minimize any trouble we encounter and continue with the assumption that greener pastures are just around the corner. This avoids difficult policy decisions, but misplaced optimism of the type we've seen throughout the crisis puts policymakers behind the curve when we encounter difficulties that are persistent rather than blips, and the delayed policy response hampers our recovery efforts. The risks of too much policy and too little are not symmetric. If policymakers make a mistake, it ought to be in the direction of too much support for the economy for too long rather than too little support that ends early. The reality is that policy support has been too little all along, and that's unlikely to change, but that doesn't mean it also has to be reversed too soon as well.

There is one paragraph in James Fallows's "Obama, Explained" that I find very odd--not so much for what it says as for the fact that it is not followed by what seems to me the obvious next passage.

What Fallows writes:

Rahm Emanuel told me that within a month of Obama’s election, but still another month before he took office, “the respectable range for how much stimulus you would need jumped from $400 billion to $800 billion.” In retrospect it should have been larger—but, Emanuel says, “in the Congress and the opinion pages, the line between ‘prudent’ and ‘crazy spendthrift’ was $800 billion. A dollar less, and you were a statesman. A dollar more, you were irresponsible.” The three Republicans who voted for the stimulus bill—Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, and about-to-be-Democrat Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania—all complained that it was far too large, as did Jim Webb and many other Democrats...

Next should have been this natural rebuttal:

But an administration that seriously believed the economy needs a greater boost and finds itself hobbled by the process of congressional normal order would have made other adjustments. Its decisions about who to nominate for the Federal Reserve and how hard to push for their confirmation--or whether to short-circuit confirmation in the short run via recess appointments--would have been powerfully informed by the desire to use Federal Reserve quantitative easing and other non-standard monetary policies to fill in the gaps. And an administration that believes that it must step cautiously on Federal Reserve appointments, lest it shock confidence in some way, the Treasury's TARP authority and the fact that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are arms of the government enable Treasury action to substitute for the missing monetary and fiscal boosts.

Moreover, not just Collins, Snowe, Specter, and Webb but Nelson, Lincoln, and Lieberman are irrelevant if the White House pushes to use the Reconciliation process as it stood in November 2008 as the legislative vehicle for macroeconomic policy.

Last, once you recognize that you have a jobless recovery, you sound the alarm. You do not keep claiming that the Recovery Program was the right size and that the recovery is proceeding fine up to and beyond the election of 2010.

But that rebuttal is missing.

It is, to my mind, the failure of Obama in early 2009 to set up the game board so that he could still take macroeconomic policy actions in 2010 and 2011 should the rapid recovery he expected not come to pass that is his greatest unforced policy error. And I find it difficult to understand how Fallows can ignore this issue entirely.

And note that he is not alone. Here is Elizabeth Drew twittering me this morning:

Twitter / @ElizabethDrewOH: @delong Dem leaders on Cap ...: @delong Dem leaders on Capitol Hill told White House not propose stimulus fig that even suggests $1 trillion. Said number wd grow on Hill.

That the Obama administration did all that it could because it was constrained by the congressional process seems to me to be willfully blind to 3/4 of the policy actions Obama could have taken to give the economy a boost.

And this to my mind misreading of the record makes me doubt Fallows's major thesis:

[T]he test for presidents is not where they begin but how fast they learn and where they end up. Not even FDR was FDR at the start. The evidence is that Obama is learning, fast, to use the tools of office... [...] Obama has shown the main trait we can hope for in a president—an ability to grow and adapt—and that the reason to oppose his reelection would be disagreement with his goals, not that he proved unable to rise to the job. As time has gone on, he has given increasing evidence that the skills he displayed in the campaign were not purely a fluke...

Both economic policy and legislative strategy look to me to have been worse in 2011 than in 2010, and worse in 2010 than in 2009.

UPDATE: DELONG SMACKDOWN WATCH: Extremely well-informed sources assure me that there is no way that either of the necessary committee chairs would have allowed what they would have regarded as "abuse" of the Reconciliation process to pass a fiscal boost through Reconciliation in the spring of 2009. The open question is whether a 50-218-2 committee chair-president coalition could have been assembled if you had tied "entitlement reform"--standby tax increases and Medicare growth-rate spending cuts if the deficit remained large after 2015--to the Recovery Act as a single Reconciliation package. And that I do not know and probably will never know...

Adele Stan:

At CPAC, Santorum Surgest: Listening to Santorum, it was sometimes difficult to discern whether he was running for president or village idiot. I'm not generally inclined to use those kinds of pejoratives, but what else can be said of a candidate who makes the kinds of claims made by Santorum from the CPAC podium?

Liberals, he said, had preyed on the well-meaning "sentimentality" of Americans who want "to pass a beautiful Earth onto their children" by promoting the "radical idea" of "man-made global warming." It was all a ruse, he said, to assert government control of choices that should be up to the individual -- choices like what kind of light bulb to buy and what kind of car to drive. But that wasn't even the idiotic part.

Correlating two phenomena as if one caused the other, Santorum pointed out that among the nations of the world, the highest standard of living was enjoyed by those nations that used the most of the world's energy resources. So, implied, if you want to keep your standard of living up, use more energy than you need. (Going on vacation? Be sure to turn on all the houselights before you leave and return America to greatness!)

He contended that Margaret Thatcher, former prime minister of the United Kingdom, failed "to accomplish what Reagan did" because of Britain's nationalized health-care system, which encouraged "dependency" among the people….

[I]nstead of mentioning his opposition to birth control of any kind (he has said he believes it to be "wrong"), Santorum argued against the administration's new rules -- which will require contraception coverage by employer-provided health insurance -- by calling contraceptives "things that only cost a few dollars." Actually, a month's supply of birth-control pills goes for about $50, a good chunk of change for, say, an orderly working in a Catholic (or any other kind of) hospital.

Of course, like his fellow candidates -- and nearly every other speaker who graced CPAC podium -- Santorum characterized the Obama administration's requirement that workers in Catholic hospitals and universities be granted access to contraception coverage as a violation of religious freedom, a claim that is less idiotic than it is demagogic.

(UPDATE: And speaking of demagogues, Right Wing Watch reported that before the day was through, white nationalist leader Robert Vandervoort, who enjoyed major exposure at CPAC this year, would tweet that he had dinner with Santorum. You'll recall that Santorum told a group of white Iowans last month at a campaign stop, "I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money"…

At the moment Intrade has Santorum a 25% chance for the Republican nomination and a 7.9% chance for the presidency--that means a 32% chance of winning the presidency if he gets nominated. I think that is probably twice what it should be: 15% rather than 32%...

It's not clear to me why they do this: 656 strikes me as a sample size too small by a factor of 3 if you want your cross-tabs to be reliable. But they do it:

Santorum surges into the lead - Public Policy Polling: Riding a wave of momentum from his trio of victories on Tuesday Rick Santorum has opened up a wide lead in PPP's newest national poll [of usual Republican primary voters]. He's at 38% to 23% for Mitt Romney, 17% for Newt Gingrich, and 13% for Ron Paul. Part of the reason for Santorum's surge is his own high level of popularity. 64% of [usual Republican primary] voters see him favorably to only 22% with a negative one. But the other, and maybe more important, reason is that Republicans are significantly souring on both Romney and Gingrich. Romney's favorability is barely above water at 44/43, representing a 23 point net decline from our December national poll when he was +24 (55/31). Gingrich has fallen even further. A 44% plurality of GOP voters now hold a negative opinion of him to only 42% with a positive one. That's a 34 point drop from 2 months ago when he was at +32 (60/28).

Santorum is now completely dominating with several key segments of the electorate, especially the most right leaning parts of the party. With those describing themselves as 'very conservative,' he's now winning a majority of voters at 53% to 20% for Gingrich and 15% for Romney.  Santorum gets a majority with Tea Party voters as well at 51% to 24% for Gingrich and 12% for Romney. And with Evangelicals he falls just short of a majority with 45% to 21% for Gingrich and 18% for Romney…

When a poll with a small sample size produces large outlier results for cross-tabs, the reason it looks surprising--and is news--is that it is quite likely wrong. Seems to me that the media are giving PPP the wrong incentives here.

But it seems to me that we are about to see Romney open up with his opposition research on Big Government Santorum...

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Obama and Purple America: If there's one thing I'm disappointed in it's that [Obama] really did think that by shrinking the stimulus, by proclaiming faith in Chuck Grassley, by proclaiming faith in John Boehner, he would actually get somewhere. And in that sense I could come in for the most common rebuttal of Obama criticism--failing to understand that he really meant what he said…

The "Channel Dash" — History.com This Day in History — 2/11/1942:

[T]he German battleships Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, as well as the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, escape from the French port of Brest and make a mad dash up the English Channel to safety in German waters…. All three [had been] subject to periodic bombing raids--and damage--[in Brest] by the British, as the Brits attempted to ensure that the German warships never left the French coast. But despite the careful watch of British subs and aircraft, German Vice Admiral Otto Ciliax launched Operation Cerberus to lead the ships out of the French port…. Six German destroyers and 21 torpedo boats accompanied the ships for protection as they moved north late on the night of February 11.

In the morning, German planes provided air cover as well; ace pilot Adolf Galland led 250 other fighters in an unusually well coordinated joint effort of the German navy and Luftwaffe. The British Royal Air Force also coordinated its attack with the Royal Navy Swordfish squadron, but a late start--the RAF did not realize until the afternoon of February 12 that the German squadron had pushed out to sea--and bad weather hindered their effort. All three German warships made it to a German port on February 13, although the Gneisenau and Scharnhorst had been damaged by British mines along the way.

The British lost 40 aircraft and six Navy Swordfish in the confrontation, while the Germans lost a torpedo boat and 17 aircraft. The "Channel Dash," as it came to be called, was extremely embarrassing to the British, as it happened right under their noses. They would get revenge of a sort, though: British warships sunk the Scharnhorst in December 1944 as the German ship attempted to attack a Russian convoy. The Gneisenau was destroyed in a bombing raid while still in port undergoing repairs, and the Prinz Eugen survived the war, but was taken over by the U.S. Navy at war's end.

"Every dollar raised by taxing harmful activities is one dollar less that we must raise by taxing useful ones."

--Robert H. Frank, The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good

Felix Salmon:

Where Obama’s economic policy went wrong: In one of his biggest errors as economic advisor to the president, Larry Summers told Barack Obama that “It is easier to add down the road to insufficient fiscal stimulus than to subtract from excessive fiscal stimulus. We can if necessary take further steps.” He was absolutely wrong….

[Obama] makes it seem as though the administration tried to get America to see the effects of the stimulus, and failed. But in fact, the opposite is true: a large part of the stimulus — the payroll-tax cut — was specifically designed to be invisible…. [T]he Obama administration… reasoned that people would be more likely to spend a small, recurring extra bit of money that they might not even notice, and that the quicker the money was spent, the faster it would cycle through the economy….

There’s evidence that the [second] Obama economic team wasn’t entirely unhappy with the lack of a second stimulus[. Noam Scheiber]:

By January 2011, two months after Democrats suffered a rout in the congressional midterm elections, the West Wing again faced a critical choice… Should they tackle the trillion-dollar deficit, co-opting the anti-government zeal that Republicans had ridden to power? Or should they try to lower the stubbornly high unemployment rate, which had exceeded 9 percent for 20 straight months?

The president’s team quickly concluded that the deficit was the higher priority…. The decision to focus on the deficit in 2011 was defensible at the time. It wasn’t until much later that the economy’s weakness became clear.

This is simply bonkers: I was describing the stubbornly-high unemployment rate as “Obama’s Katrina” as early as June 2010, when unemployment stood at 9.6%. By January 2011, nothing much had changed: the unemployment rate was still 9.4%. It’s hard to see what’s happened since then which has made the economy’s weakness any clearer. Scheiber saves his harshest words for the White House political tacticians who ignored the debt ceiling issue for too long and overestimated the tractability of the House Republicans. But… Obama’s economic strategy has been a victim of political miscalculations more or less since day one. Obama’s economic team has been consistently modest in what it considers politically possible…. It’s almost as though the Obama economic team — with the notable exception of Christy Romer — was consistently looking for excuses to do less rather than more…

Paul engages in a battle of wits with what appears to be a remarkably poorly-armed man:

The One Percent Versus the Twenty Percent: The good folks at EPI are upset by my colleague David Brooks’s claims that the gap between the top 20 and the bottom 30, not the gap between the top 1 and everyone else, is what really matters…. [I]t might be useful to have a calm discussion of what someone might mean by saying that the rise of the top 1 percent isn’t important.

One thing such a person might mean is that it’s unimportant in quantitative, dollars and cents terms. But this is just false…. [T]he rise of the top 1 percent has absorbed a large fraction (almost half, by my reckoning), of economic growth, leaving a much smaller pie for everyone else….

Now, David doesn’t focus on any of these things; instead, he talks about the “social gap.”… [But] social mores are not on the policy agenda; taxes and spending are. And if you ask how the parties differ — how the GOP agenda differs from the Democratic agenda — it’s all about the top 1 percent versus everyone else…. [T]he actual policy agenda of American conservatives serves the interests of Mitt Romney, not the Bobos. Maybe you think they should have a different agenda, but the fact is that they don’t.

And I guess I’d say that the attempts to shout down discussion of the 1 percent are in large part an attempt to distract our attention from that fact.

…along comes Rick Santorum.

Brad Johnson:

Conspiracy Theorist Sweeps Tuesday's GOP Presidential Battles: Conspiracy theorist Rick Santorum swept Tuesday’s Republican presidential battles, winning the sparsely attended Colorado and Minnesota caucuses and non-binding Missouri primary on a platform anchored by his denial of global warming. “I for one never bought the hoax,” Santorum said at the Colorado Energy Summit on Monday, claiming that climate change is “an absolute travesty of scientific research that was motivated by those who, in my opinion, saw this as an opportunity to create a panic and a crisis for government to be able to step in and even more greatly control your life.”

Just when you think the Republicans cannot lose any more touch with reality…

Dan gross:

The Strange Controversy Over Chrysler’s Ad: There were plenty of objectionable ads during the Super Bowl…. So it's surprising that the biggest controversy has been generated by Clint Eastwood's spot for Chrysler. The ad, "It's Half-Time in America," told a story of how a country and a city that have both suffered adversity and some tough knocks can nonetheless return to prominence and usefulness through hard work and ingenuity. Of course, the ad was a metaphor for Chrysler, which filed for bankruptcy in 2009, received a government bailout and has been revived under the ownership of Fiat….

Karl Rove complained that "The President of the United States' political minions are, in essence, using our tax dollars to buy corporate advertising and the best wishes of the management, which has benefited by getting a bunch of our money that they'll never pay back."

Huh?

Let's review the record. Chrysler was run into the ground by Cerberus, a private equity company controlled by Stephen Feinberg, a major contributor to Republican candidates. When push came to shove in late 2008, Feinberg, a billionaire, chose not to use his own resources or those of his fund to meet Chrysler's vast financial obligations. So in early 2009, the Bush administration, for which Karl Rove worked, used funds from the TARP, a piece of legislation the Bush administration proposed and that was supported by Republican Congressional leaders, to help Chrysler…. Bush told auto dealers that he made the loan because he "didn't want to gamble" with the possibility of a Depression…. There wasn't any capital standing in the wings waiting to turn the firms around.

Since that wasn't enough to keep Chrysler alive, the Obama administration in April and May 2009 provided another $8.8 billion in funding to Chrysler…. Forty-two days later, Chrysler emerged from bankruptcy with new owners, which included Fiat, a United Auto Workers trust, and the Canadian and U.S. governments…. Ultimately, however, the bailouts and the bankruptcy process put Chrysler and GM into positions where they could be functional companies. The loans provided by the Bush and Obama administrations were converted into shares, and in 2010 and 2011 the new Chrysler paid back the funds in bits and pieces. Last July, the 'investment' that had been initiated by the Bush administration and continued by the Obama administration was closed out….

In 2011, the company's sales rose by 26 percent. In January, Chrysler reported sales were up 44 percent from January 2011, the best monthly performance since January 2008. Chrysler is a functioning member of corporate society. It employs lots of people and is investing in factories. It purchases billions of dollars in supplies and services. Unlike many other companies, it pays income taxes -- $148 million in the first nine months of 2011.

So at a time when the economy is growing, when employment is rising, and when car sales and Chrysler's own business have bounced back from their lows, a privately held firm running an advertisement that talks about recovery and growth is somehow a political act that is subsidized by taxpayers?…

Since when did expressing optimism about the U.S. and its economic prospects become a political act?

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Paul Krugman sends us to Businessweek:

Paul Krugman vs. the World.

And he comments:

Two Minutes Hate: From BusinessWeek. Enjoy…. It would… have been nice if BusinessWeek had noticed that I have, of course, been right in all these arguments. But then when it comes to economic disputes, BW knows how to call them…

Indeed, it would have been very nice had Businessweek actually, you know, said something about the substantive points at issue between Krugman (and the rest of us) and Lucas (and the rest of them).

Businessweek could, for example, have noted that John Cochrane has a major intellectual consistency problem.

…is to say, publicly: "I said wrong things in the past because I did not do my homework. And I am embarrassed. The fact that seasonally-adjusted payroll employment grew by 250,000 between December and January is not a huge win for the Real Business Cycle model. The argument that expansionary fiscal policy boosts production, employment, and income requires a demonstration of "crowding out" and is not just a matter of arithmetic. My claim that U.S. bond rates would spike because 'I still don’t quite know who is going to buy' $1.75 trillion of bonds in a time of recession was the result of my not thinking about what happens to the bond market in a liquidity trap."

Is that so hard?

Paul Krugman:

Anti-Keynesian Revisionism: Hmm. A number of people who attacked Keynesian analysis vigorously seem to be in the process of backing off, which is good. But they also seem to be in the process of rewriting history, specifically the history of their own positions. So just a few notes about what actually happened.

Niall Ferguson now says,

I think the issue here got a little confused, because Krugman wanted to portray me as a proponent of instant austerity, which I never was. My argument was that over ten years you have to have some credible plan to get back to fiscal balance because at some point you lose your credibility because on the present path, Congressional Budget Office figures make it clear, with every year the share of Federal tax revenues going to interest payments rises, there is a point after which it’s no longer credible. But I didn’t think that point was going to be this year or next year.

What he said then:

After all, $1.75 trillion is an awful lot of freshly minted treasuries to land on the bond market at a time of recession, and I still don’t quite know who is going to buy them. It’s certainly not going to be the Chinese. That worked fine in the good times, but what I call “Chimerica,” the marriage between China and America, is coming to an end. Maybe it’s going to end in a messy divorce.

No, the problem is that only the Fed can buy these freshly minted treasuries, and there is going to be, I predict, in the weeks and months ahead, a very painful tug-of-war between our monetary policy and our fiscal policy as the markets realize just what a vast quantity of bonds are going to have to be absorbed by the financial system this year. That will tend to drive the price of the bonds down, and drive up interest rates, which will also have an effect on mortgage rates—the precise opposite of what Ben Bernanke is trying to achieve at the Fed.

Oh, and notice that his argument wasn’t about solvency at all.

John Cochrane now says,

This is all ridiculous, of course. No, I — and certainly Bob Lucas and Gene Fama — am not making the “Say’s law” fallacy. We all understand the difference between identities, budget constraints, and equilibrium conditions.

What he said then:

Every dollar of increased government spending must correspond to one less dollar of private spending. Jobs created by stimulus spending are offset by jobs lost from the decline in private spending. We can build roads instead of factories, but fiscal stimulus can’t help us to build more of both. This form of “crowding out” is just accounting, and doesn’t rest on any perceptions or behavioral assumptions.

And Tyler Cowen now says that he was making the case for New Keynesianism in a recent post that actually said,

The big winners, apart from the American public?: real business cycle theory.

Oh well. I guess we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.

Adam Kotsko:

Why is birth control the Catholic Church’s last stand? « An und für sich: To many observers, the Catholic hierarchy’s opposition to birth control seems nonsensical — they might as well oppose ice cream. It seems like a win-win: the liberals are happy that women get reproductive freedom, but meanwhile if you’re anti-abortion, it seems like avoiding unwanted pregnancies in the first place is the best possible solution. What’s not to like?…

I don’t think we can explain this simply through misogyny or fear of feminine sexuality, etc., because there are plenty of misogynists in the world who don’t make a point of picking a fight with the president of the United States over birth control…. I propose that the answer can be found in a historic compromise set forth by one of the most influential thinkers you’ve never heard of: namely, Clement of Alexandria, a second-century Christian philosopher…. Clement’s compromise… marriage should be permitted for Christians…. Jesus and Paul, the two major founding figures of Christianity, were themselves celibate…. [A] celibacy requirement obviously presented a huge obstacle if Christianity was to be a mainstream movement…. Clement came up with a solution: celibacy would be the elite path, but marriage would be permitted for the average believer.

Unlike Paul, who permitted marriage purely as a release of sexual tension, Clement’s rationale for permitting it was to limit sex to reproductive purposes…. Over the course of the Middle Ages, the stigmatization of non-reproductive sexual activities (including homosexuality) picked up speed, resulting in the invention of the category of sodomy….

Fast forward to the aftermath of Vatican II… the infamous encyclical Humanae Vitae…. [I]n the wake of Vatican II, the Catholic hierarchy was willing to make radical changes to the liturgy, to dethrone Thomas Aquinas as the standard of all theology and philosophy, to rethink its stance toward other religions, etc., etc. Why go to war over such a small and seemingly harmless issue?

I’d propose it’s because… widespread dissemination and normalization of birth control threatened to… decouple sex and reproduction — and also make sex seem less “dangerous,” less in need of control… because it strikes at the heart of that hierarchy’s own self-legitimation and day-to-day life experience. It may not be an exaggeration to say that the hierarchy views Clement’s compromise as something almost as fundamental as Paul’s refusal of conversion to Judaism for Gentile believers. The threat is just as great as if a council of theologians was suggesting that the Catholic Church should require believers to convert to Judaism after all — the very basis for a separate Christian structure of authority would be utterly destroyed…

Eleanor Roosevelt:

MY DAY by Eleanor Roosevelt, February 10, 1942: It was perfectly wonderful on Saturday morning, when I stepped off the train, to be met at 7:00 o'clock by our eldest son, who had just flown in from the Coast on orders. I find that in war time these visits are always a surprise. They are doubly precious, not only because of their unexpectedness, but because one's whole outlook today is sharpened to an appreciation of the need to make the most of every opportunity to be with those one loves.

My nephew, Mr. Henry Roosevelt, also was with us for a brief two days, so we had a quiet family dinner Saturday night. Yesterday, I went to see a friend in the hospital and devoted most of the afternoon catching up on mail.

I am spending today entirely at the Office of Civilian Defense so I was happy to be able to see Mr. and Mrs. Grosvenor Allen, of Oneida, N. Y., at lunchtime. When old friends come to Washington, it is such a joy to see them even for a short time.

I saw by the papers that Franklin, Jr., was resting comfortably in the Brooklyn Naval Hospital over the weekend. As a matter of fact, he returned home on Saturday, after being checked up at the hospital, and was ordered to report on Monday afternoon in preparation for the removal of his appendix early Tuesday morning.

I am so thankful that after the slight attacks which he had during his last period of sea duty, he is able to get off and to have this operation performed, for destroyers in winter seas are not very good places on which to be taken ill. He tells me over the telephone that the new baby is wonderful, but he is a little afraid of handling him.

We have a perfectly lovely baby spending a few days with us in the White House. She is three-and-a-half months old, the daughter of my cousins, Mr. and Mrs. W. Forbes Morgan Jr., and seemed completely engrossed in the President so long as he held her in his arms.

The Governor of New Hampshire, the Honorable Robert O. Blood, has sent me two wonderful wooden pails. They are called "Granite State Bom-Pails," and he says: "We of New Hampshire are pleased to contribute in a small way to the national defense program by furnishing a substitute which will conserve scarce material, such as metal, using our hurricane lumber and using labor of an average of sixty years of age as is found in our pail factories. I think you will find them most satisfactory. They look ample and substantial."

"[I]gnoramitocracy—a country in which ignorance-driven political paralysis prevents us from grappling with even our most pressing problems."

--Robert H. Frank, The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good

Minting large-denomination platinum coins to expand the money supply, pointing out that appropriations bills constructively repeal the debt ceiling, recess-appointing Nobel Prize winners to the Federal Reserve Board, using FHFA to attempt to rebalance the housing market--there were lots of things Obama could have done in 2011 to boost the economy.

Noam Scheiber:

Obama’s Worst Year: BACK IN THE SUMMER of 2009, David Axelrod, the president’s top political aide, was peppering White House economist Christina Romer with questions in preparation for a talk-show appearance. With unemployment nearing 10 percent, many commentators on the left were second-guessing the size of the original stimulus, and so Axelrod asked if it had been big enough. “Abso-fucking-lutely not,” Romer responded. She said it half-jokingly, but the joke was that she would use the line on television. She was dead serious about the sentiment. Axelrod did not seem amused….

Only in the fall did Romer finally gain an ally—White House economic adviser Larry Summers, who had begun to echo her pleas. But Orszag insisted that any additional stimulus be paired with deficit-reduction. The result was stalemate. Even when the two sides worked out a compromise—$100 to $200 billion of stimulus in the short term, with offsetting cuts over ten years—the truce quickly unraveled.

Seated in the Roosevelt Room in early December 2009, the president wondered why both sets of ideas were so timid. Orszag grumbled that it was, in fact, disappointing to offer so little on the deficit front. Summers interjected that the economy was in dire need of more stimulus. Each side then labeled the other’s proposals political nonstarters, and the president lost his patience. “You know what, this is the same meeting we’ve been having,” he said, excusing himself. “Talk to me when you’ve thought this through.” The bickering soon grew so loud that Orszag’s deputy, Rob Nabors, lunged to shut the door.

With no agreement forthcoming, it was Orszag who filled the vacuum throughout the fall. He urged the president to freeze domestic spending in his next budget and favored setting up a commission of Washington elders to recommend trillions in savings over a decade. Summers believed such ideas were gimmicks unworthy of a president. To colleagues he complained that “what’s really important in life is not to believe your own bullshit.” The president sided with Orszag.

BY JANUARY 2011, two months after Democrats suffered a rout in the congressional midterm elections, the West Wing again faced a critical choice between engaging with Republicans and playing partisan hardball. Should they tackle the trillion-dollar deficit, co-opting the anti-government zeal that Republicans had ridden to power? Or should they try to lower the stubbornly high unemployment rate, which had exceeded 9 percent for 20 straight months?

The president’s team quickly concluded that the deficit was the higher priority. Bill Daley, a former Commerce secretary and bank executive who had recently taken over as chief of staff, considered the administration so out of touch on the issue of government spending that large cuts could only bring political benefits. David Plouffe, who had replaced Axelrod as the president’s top political counselor, thought Obama needed to establish himself as a budget-cutter to regain credibility with voters. “Plouffe specifically said, ‘We’re going to need a period of ugliness’—he meant with the left—‘so that people in the center understand that we’re not wasting their tax dollars,” recalls a former administration official who observed the discussions….

The decision to focus on the deficit in 2011 was defensible at the time. It wasn’t until much later that the economy’s weakness became clear…

Ummm… Noam:

The economy's weakness was plain in the summer of 2009. It was plain in the winter of 2010. It was plain in the summer of 2010. It was plain in the winter of 2011. It did not "become plain" sometime in 2011.

I have not found anybody who claims that Daley and Plouffe understood the situation.

Noam goes on:

[O]ne judgment call that was harder to forgive. It had to do with the debt ceiling…. Many incoming Republican members of Congress had campaigned on their refusal to raise the limit, which was rapidly approaching, and senior Treasury Department officials worried that their resistance could prove disastrous. Most economists believed that hitting the debt ceiling could heighten doubts about the government’s creditworthiness and trigger a run on U.S. Treasury bonds, driving interest rates into the stratosphere. But the Tea Party Republicans asserted that not raising the debt ceiling would simply force a profligate Congress to spend less money.

After the midterm elections, Geithner’s chief of staff, Mark Patterson, thought the administration should try to defuse the debt-limit issue once and for all before the incoming Republicans arrived. He drafted a law giving the president the authority to raise the debt ceiling unilaterally and sent it to the White House. To sell it politically, the president could explain that renewing the upper-income Bush tax cuts, as Republicans were then demanding, would cost the government $700 billion over ten years, forcing it to hit the debt ceiling sooner.

The White House was initially interested, but dropped the idea once Republicans made clear they would oppose it. But, of course, the way to win concessions from obstructionist opponents isn’t to sound them out quietly. It’s to cause them public discomfort. As one former Treasury aide who was involved explains: “Imagine the alternative reality where the president comes out in December and says, ‘I understand you want to increase the high-end tax cuts. But that will make the deficit go up. … I am willing to do some of what you want to do, but you have to pay for it by raising the debt ceiling.’” At the very least, it would have put the GOP on the defensive.

But the White House didn’t have an appetite for going to war so soon after the midterms…. There wasn’t a lot of fight in folks,” says the former Treasury aide. “We [at Treasury] were a little bit obsessed. They were, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ll deal with it later.’ ”

Sensing an advantage, the GOP pounced. Within a few months, Republicans had begun to insist they would only raise the debt ceiling if Democrats agreed to cut trillions from the deficit over a decade—essentially threatening the country with financial ruin unless they got their way.

The proper response to such a threat is to refuse to negotiate under duress. Treasury pleaded with the White House to hold the line and, for a while, it did. But, in mid-April, the White House blinked….

WHEN THE BIPARTISAN talks over the long-term deficit began in early May, the White House was prepared to hammer away at each galling detail of the GOP’s proposals…. But when the administration’s envoys to the talks—Vice President Joe Biden, Geithner, Lew, Reed, and Gene Sperling, the president’s top economic adviser—trooped back from their first few meetings with Eric Cantor and Jon Kyl, the second-ranking Republicans in the House and Senate, they conveyed a fateful message to their colleagues: Hold your fire. “The view from the negotiators in the room was that publicly attacking the Republicans would blow up the negotiations,” recalls a former White House aide involved. “They thought the negotiations were going well. No one was leaking out details to the press. They thought they could do it.”…

In June, the negotiators reached a provisional agreement with Republicans on more than $1 trillion in cuts, and the Obama contingent had begun to believe a much larger deal was in sight….

The problem was that Obama’s team had actually presented an optimistic view of what was possible—what it had assumed would be the best-case scenario. The negotiators hadn’t actually broached the idea of tax hikes with Cantor and Kyl in any detail, and the two Republicans certainly hadn’t said they would be open to them. Not even meager hikes, not even in return for a longstanding conservative goal like scaling back Medicare. In fact, Cantor and Kyl had waved off Democratic efforts to pin them down on the tax question.

Eventually, one congressional Democrat participating in the negotiations, worried that the conversation had focused too much on cuts for Medicare recipients of modest means, insisted to the Republicans that they could defer the tax discussion no longer…. “Let me get this right,” Kyl finally said to Lew and Sperling when the discussion flared up again. “You’re saying there are Medicare savings you think would be good policy. But you won’t do them unless we agree to raise taxes?” Lew and Sperling looked back at him stone-faced and simply said, “Yes.” A few days later, on June 23, Cantor and Kyl withdrew from the negotiations. Even the deal the president had deemed insultingly weak was out of reach….

For most of July, Obama and Boehner went back and forth at frequent intervals. But while the buzz of activity mimicked a high-stakes negotiation, there was never anything to show for it. At one point, over the July Fourth weekend, the president called back his entire economic team from vacation because it looked as if the talks were ripening. By the following weekend, Boehner’s office went silent with no explanation. Sperling began cracking that he “wouldn’t want to date these guys. They leave without having the ‘can we see other people’ conversation.” After a few weeks of this routine, it was blindingly obvious that Boehner wouldn’t be bringing conservatives with him on any deal involving taxes.

Under normal circumstances, the logical response to a negotiation in which one’s counterpart walks away from increasingly attractive offers is simply to give up. But, by late July 2011, this was no longer an option. There were less than two weeks before the government’s mounting pile of IOUs ran smack into the debt ceiling, risking global financial calamity… the White House still had to reach agreement with the Republican House. Not surprisingly, given that Obama was determined to avoid a debt ceiling catastrophe while many Republicans believed hitting the limit might do some good, the eventual deal skewed heavily toward Republican priorities. It cut $900 billion over a decade from the pot of money Congress doles out each year and instructed a special “supercommittee” of congressmen and senators to find at least $1.2 trillion more in cuts. Were the committee to fail at this task, then the deal called for automatic cuts totaling $1.2 trillion over a decade, with roughly half to come from domestic programs, including Medicare. The deal raised not one cent of taxes.

FOR TWO AND A HALF YEARS, Obama had been hatching proposals with an eye toward winning over the opposition. In most cases, all it had gotten him was more extreme demands from Republicans and not even a pretense of bipartisan support. Now, after the searing experience of the deficit deal, he still wanted reasonable, centrist policies. But he was done trying to fit them to the ever-shifting conservative zeitgeist. When he finally turned back to jobs in August, he told his aides not to “self-edit” proposals to improve their chances of passing the Republican House. “He pushed us to make sure this was not simply a predesigned legislative compromise,” one recalls. Sperling, who had long been a voice for ambitious policy, took the directive to heart. By the end of the month, his staff had come up with $450 billion worth of proposals to boost the economy, including an expanded version of the payroll tax cut Congress had approved the previous December…. It wasn’t the only valuable lesson the president had learned. He also seemed to recognize that the nonstop commotion over the deficit was a political loser, especially if he was at the center of it…. Obama was finally shedding the caution of his first three years in office. Even before the deficit negotiations collapsed, he'd begun criticizing Republicans for their aversion to “shared sacrifice.” He gave an impassioned speech about economic inequality and vowed to ensure that millionaires paid their fair share in taxes. “It is wrong for Warren Buffett’s secretary to pay a higher tax rate than Warren Buffett,” he famously said.

For voters contemplating whether he deserves a second term, the question is less and less one of policy or even worldview than of basic disposition…. [Obama's] adjustments didn’t come until the crisis was already at hand. His initial approach was too passive and too accommodating, and he stuck with it far too long…. Sooner or later, Obama may encounter a crisis that can’t be reversed at the eleventh hour…

Noah Smith:

Thursday Roundup (2/9/2012): 3. John Taylor thinks that our economic recovery has been terrible, and continues to be terrible. He chalks this up to the failure of "Keynesian" policies. I think it would be interesting to see him argue with Tyler Cowen, who says that we are having a good, strong recovery, and that this is evidence of the failure of "Keynesian" macro.

February 9, 1942 : Detroit Auto Plants Turn Out Last Civilian Car; Refocus on War Production

"Demagogues who were too old to enter the army if there should be a war, others who entertained so high an opinion of their own ability that they did not believe they could be spared from the direction of the affairs of state in such an event, declaimed vehemently and unceasingly against the North; against its aggressions upon the South; its interference with Southern rights, etc., etc. 

"They denounced the Northerners as cowards, poltroons, negro-worshippers; claimed that one Southern man was equal to five Northern men in battle; that if the South would stand up for its rights the North would back down. Mr. Jefferson Davis said in a speech, delivered at La Grange, Mississippi, before the secession of that State, that he would agree to drink all the blood spilled south of Mason and Dixon's line if there should be a war. 

"The young men who would have the fighting to do in case of war, believed all these statements, both in regard to the aggressiveness of the North and its cowardice. They, too, cried out for a separation from such people. The great bulk of the legal voters of the South were men who owned no slaves; their homes were generally in the hills and poor country; their facilities for educating their children, even up to the point of reading and writing, were very limited; their interest in the contest was very meagre--what there was, if they had been capable of seeing it, was with the North; they too needed emancipation. Under the old regime they were looked down upon by those who controlled all the affairs in the interest of slave-owners, as poor white trash who were allowed the ballot so long as they cast it according to direction."

--U.S. Grant, Personal Memoirs (via Ta-Nehisi Coates)

From my perspective the nadir of human liberty in the twentieth century comes in the first half of the 1930s. Thereafter we have a long march--a march that was fastest in the North Atlantic from 1942 to 1975 or so, and that has continued (albeit at a slower pace) since then. But Milton Friedman thought not. And now it turns out that a surprisingly large number of people think not, even today.

With Friedman I think I understand. He was curiously blind to racism, sexism, etc.--and to the importance of their decline. As I see it, he saw only the failures of social democratic regulation (transportation, professional practice, nimbyism, drug war, etc.) and none of the successes (telecommunications, federalization of food and drug regulation, finance, etc.) and none of the places where society in 1980 was still underregulated (pollution, medical insurance, etc.). From my perspective, Friedman had a touching but naive faith in the bona fides, competence, and benevolence of his political masters. And he had a great overestimation of how successful the policies he believed in--stable money stock growth, deregulation, "starve the beast" through low taxes--would turn out to be.

With people today I don't understand. I really don't see a rationale for believing today that 1980 was in any sense a nadir of human liberty--a point well down the Road to Serfdom--or for believing that the progress of human liberty has been materially more rapid after 1980 than it was in the 50 years before.

Noah Smith performs the public good of picking up the litter with respect to John Cochrane:

Noahpinion: A standard intellectual-Republican narrative of history: John Cochrane has a new post up in which he discusses the historical importance of Milton Friedman's book Free to Choose…. The first half of the post is a discussion of the difference between negative and positive rights, with which I largely (but not completely) agree. But the second half consists of a reading of events since 1980 with which I take a number of exceptions….

1980 was an inflection point for the advance of freedom…! Yes, some of the Friedmans' dark worries did not pan out. Why not? Because people read the book! The Friedmans were fighting against the "tide of history." And turned it back…

[Cochrane's] appears to me to be a very standard intellectual Republican narrative of recent history; if you surveyed registered Republicans with postgraduate degrees, and then took an  average of their responses, it seems like you might get something like this. Now, standard narratives are not necessarily wrong. But this narrative happens to be one about which my feelings are quite mixed…. I agree about China. I basically agree about India (though where did Keynes support a "license raj"??). I agree about the Cold War and the spread of democracy. I agree about inflation. None of these positive developments should be forgotten or ignored.

But there are some points with which I strongly disagree. Let me address these:

1. "[1980] was the end of stagnation in the US and UK." What? Really?? What about the Bush years? You know, the 8 years when the inflation-adjusted stock market did worse than in the 1970s, income stagnated, and GDP growth underperformed past booms, all despite massive tax cuts and substantial deregulation?

2. "The economic and political ills of the 1970s seem to be returning." Really? Inflation?? No. I know there are some people who believe that a fiscally induced hyperinflation is just around the corner, but that is pure speculation...

3. "US and UK inflation -- the result of mindless "stimulus"" Really?? But budget deficits were low in the 1970s, and only exploded in the Reagan years (and again in the Bush years). And most economists believe that the 70s inflation was caused by loose monetary policy (and possibly oil shocks), not by fiscal policy.

Basically, in 2000, this Republican narrative was looking pretty good - though not entirely thanks to Republicans. Bill Clinton seemed to have proven that market liberalism did not require exploding deficits and exploding inequality (the ills of the Reagan years) in order to create prosperity. But then came the Bush years, and America doubled down on the Milton Friedman program with more tax cuts, more deregulation, more privatization. And income stagnated, stocks stagnated, and growth was lackluster, while debt and inequality resumed the explosive growth of the Reagan years. By the eve of the financial crisis, the Republican narrative was looking pretty shopworn…

I would quibble with one point. I would say that it was not the Republican narrative of ever-more deregulation, ever-greater tax cuts, ever-higher degrees of inequality, and ever-larger structural deficits that looked good as of 2000. I would say it was, rather, the Clinton narrative of smart neoliberalism: using market incentives and mechanisms to achieve social democratic goals.

Paul Krugman piles on. Many hands make light work:

Reaganite Delusions: The great era of US economic growth was the postwar generation; even during the good years of the 90s we didn’t achieve comparable growth, and overall, the post-Reagan era was marked by slower growth than the equivalent period of time pre-Reagan. And I haven’t even gotten into the income distribution thing.

All of which makes me wonder: what goes on in these peoples’ minds? Do they never even think of actually looking at the numbers, because they know that Reagan ushered in a great boom? Inquiring minds (which they obviously don’t have) want to know.

I will leave the discussion of negative and positive liberty to the trained professionals in the field--but I would say that if you have not listened very closely on these issues to Amartya Sen, you should not claim to be an economist.

On the data issues... I am thinking, increasingly, that what is going on is a combination of selection by right-wing funding sources for complaisant intellectuals, of subservience to whatever their political masters set forth as the party line (individual mandate as a conservative responsibility principle, anybody?), and is at some level a simple lack of work ethic: people unwilling to open up their web browsers to look at the data, people unwilling to do their homework, and people unwilling to take even small steps to see whether their prejudices meet the test when marked to market. It is, after all, very hard not to notice that for America's lower, working, and middle classes, the economic stagnation in real compensation per hour that started in the early 1970s did not magically come to an end on January 21, 1981 but has--alas!--continued (with a short interruption in the Clinton years) to this day.

That is really hard to miss.

JC:

Why I’m So Mean: People often ask, “Why is Jonathan Chait so mean?” It is a fair question…. The latest person to ask it is ubiquitous right-wing misinformation recirculator Veronique de Rugy, who notes that I am "constitutionally incapable of disagreeing with anyone without impugning motives, professionalism, I.Q. or mental stability."

I’m actually not incapable of disagreeing with people without insulting their intelligence, motives, or other qualifications. I especially enjoy debating the most intelligent and interesting conservatives… not to mention numerous liberal writers I respect.

But it is true that I do spend a lot of time arguing with the lesser lights of the intellectual world as well, and de Rugy herself is a good example. Our current debate offers a useful example of why I do this. De Rugy wrote a column centered around the claim that the United States has a more progressive tax system than any other advanced country, and as her sole piece of evidence cited the fact that rich people pay a higher share of the tax burden in the U.S. than in other countries. I wrote a response, noting that this reasoning is completely idiotic. Rich Americans pay a bigger share of the tax burden because they earn a bigger share of the income, not because the U.S. tax code is more progressive.

De Rugy’s reply is an incoherent collection of hand-waving that does not come close to addressing this very simple and fatal flaw with her claim. She… conflat[es] the marginal tax rate (the percentage tax you pay on your last dollar) with the total tax rate (the overall percentage of your income paid in tax), using “income tax” as a stand-in for total taxes, and trying to broaden the debate into a bigger philosophical dispute. But it’s not a philosophical dispute. It’s a simple case of her making up false claims based on extremely elementary errors.

And this is why I am forced to be so mean. There are just a lot of people out there exerting significant influence over the political debate who are totally unqualified. The dilemma is especially acute in the political economic field, where wealthy right-wingers have pumped so much money to subsidize the field of pro-rich people polemics that the demand for competent defenders of letting rich people keep as much of their money as possible vastly outstrips the supply. Hence the intellectual marketplace for arguments that we should tax rich people less is glutted with hackery. The very simple fallacy I pointed out by de Rugy has been knocking around for years, without end. (Here it is in a piece by Stephen Moore in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal op-ed page. Here is Senator Jim DeMint making it today in an interview with the approving editors of Reason.) A similar problem exists, perhaps to an even worse extent, with climate change denial.

Most people don’t follow these issues for a living and have a hard time distinguishing legitimate arguments from garbage. I don’t mean this patronizingly: I certainly would have trouble distinguishing valid arguments from nonsense in a technical field I didn’t study professionally. But that's why there’s a value in signaling that some arguments aren’t merely expressing a difference in values or interpretation, but are made by an unqualified hack peddling demonstrable nonsense.

Being so mean is a labor of love, I confess, but also one with a purpose.

I must say, I do find it very hard to see how, in her words, anybody professional, with good motives, and mentally stable could have written what Veronique de Rugy wrote in response to Chait. But I am anxious to be enlightened as to how this would be possible, if anybody cares to do so…

Econ 210a: UC Berkeley: Spring 2012: Memo Question:

To what extent should we view the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Britain as a unique turning point in economic and social development?

• Lecture Slides
• Lecture Audio
• Lecture Notes pdf
• Lecture Notes epub

It looks as though my office hours will be interrupted at 3 by a (hopefully) brief faculty meeting...

Office hours today: 2-3, 4-6.

Sandy Jencks vs. Charles "Cross Burner" Murray:

How Poor Are the Poor?: Systematic efforts at assessing the impact of [welfare] benefits on illegitimacy rates support my version of the Harold and Phyllis story rather than Murray’s. The level of a state’s AFDC benefits has no measurable effect on its rate of illegitimacy. In 1984, AFDC benefits for a family of four ranged from $120 a month in Mississippi to $676 a month in New York. David Ellwood and Mary Jo Bane recently completed a meticulous analysis of the way such variation affects illegitimate births.17 In general, states with high benefits have less illegitimacy than states with low ones, even after we adjust for differences in race, region, education, income, urbanization, and the like. This may be because high illegitimacy rates make legislators reluctant to raise welfare benefits.

To get around this difficulty, Ellwood and Bane asked whether a change in a state’s AFDC benefits led to a change in its illegitimacy rate. They found to consistent effect. Nor did high benefits widen the disparity in illegitimate births between women with a high probability of getting AFDC—teen-agers, nonwhites, high school dropouts—and women with a low probability of getting AFDC.

What about the fact that Phyllis can now live with Harold (or at least sleep with him) without losing her benefits? Doesn’t this discourage marriage and thus increase illegitimacy? Perhaps. But Table 2 shows that illegitimacy has risen at a steadily accelerating rate since 1950. There is no special “blip” in the late 1960s, when midnight raids stopped and the “man in the house” rule passed into history. Nor is there consistent evidence that illegitimacy increased faster among probable AFDC recipients than among women in general.

Murray’s explanation of the rise in illegitimacy thus seems to have at least three flaws. First, most mothers of illegitimate children initially live with their parents, not their lovers, so AFDC rules are not very relevant. Second, the trend in illegitimacy is not well correlated with the trend in AFDC benefits or with rule changes. Third, illegitimacy rose among movie stars and college graduates as well as welfare mothers. All this suggests that both the rise of illegitimacy and the liberalization of AFDC reflect broader changes in attitudes toward sex, law, and privacy, and that they had little direct effect on each other.

But while AFDC does not seem to affect the number of unwed mothers, as Murray claims, it does affect family arrangements in other ways. Ellwood and Bane found, for example, that benefit levels had a dramatic effect on the living arrangements of single mothers. If benefits are low, single mothers have trouble maintaining a separate household and are likely to live with their relatives—usually their parents. If benefits rise, single mothers are more likely to maintain their own households.

Higher AFDC benefits also appear to increase the divorce rate. Ellwood and Bane’s work suggests, for example, that if the typical state had paid a family of four only $180 a month in 1980 instead of $350, the number of divorced women would have fallen by a tenth. This might be partly because divorced women remarry more hastily in states with very low benefits. But if AFDC pays enough for a woman to live on, she is also more likely to leave her husband. The Seattle–Denver “income maintenance” experiments, which Murray discusses at length, found the same pattern.

The fact that high benefits lead to high divorce rates is obviously embarrassing for liberals, since most people view divorce as undesirable. But it has no bearing on Murray’s basic thesis, which is that changes in social policy after 1965 made it “profitable for the poor to behave in the short term in ways that are destructive in the long term.” If changes in the welfare system were encouraging teen-agers to quit school, have children, and not take steady jobs, as Murray contends, he would clearly be right about the long-term costs. But if changes in the welfare system have merely encouraged women who were unhappy in their marriages to divorce their husbands, or have discouraged divorced mothers from marrying lovers about whom they feel ambivalent, what makes Murray think this is “destructive in the long term”?

Are we to suppose that Phyllis is better off in the long run married to Harold if he drinks, or beats her, or molests their teen-age daughter? Surely Phyllis is a better judge of this than we are. Or are we to suppose that Phyllis’s children will be better off if she sticks with Harold? That depends on how good a father Harold is. The children may do better in a household with two parents, even if the parents are constantly at each other’s throats, but then again they may not. Certainly Murray offers no evidence that unhappy marriages are better for children that divorces, and I know of none.

Shorn of rhetoric, then, the “empirical” case against the welfare system comes to this. First, high AFDC benefits allow single mothers to set up their own households. Second, high AFDC benefits allow mothers to end bad marriages. Third, high benefits may make divorced mothers more cautious about remarrying. All these “costs” strike me as benefits.

Consider Harold and Phyllis again, but this time imagine that they married in 1960 and that it is now 1970. They have three children. Harold still has the deadend job in a laundry that Murray describes him as having taken in 1960, and he has now taken both to drinking and to beating Phyllis. Harold still has two choices. He can leave Phyllis or he can stay. If he leaves, Phyllis can try to collect child support from him, but her chances of success are low. So Harold can do as he pleases.

Phyllis is not so fortunate. She is not the sort of person who can earn much more than the minimum wage, so she cannot support herself and three children without help. If she is lucky she can go to her parents. Otherwise, if she lives in a state with low benefits, she has two choices: stick with Harold or abandon her children. Since she has been taught to stick with her children, she has to stick with Harold. If she lives in a state with high benefits she has a third choice: she can leave Harold and take her children with her. In a sense, AFDC is the price we pay for Phyllis’s commitment to her children. At 0.6 percent of total US personal income, it does not seem a high price.

Giving Phyllis more choices has obvious political drawbacks. So long as Phyllis lives with Harold, her troubles are her own. We may shake our heads when we hear about them, but we can tell ourselves that all marriages have problems, and that that is the way of the world. If Phyllis leaves Harold—or Harold leaves Phyllis—and she comes to depend on AFDC, her problems become public instead of private. Now if she cannot pay the rent or does not feed her children milk it could be because her monthly check is too small, not because she doesn’t know or care about the benefits of milk or because Harold spends the money on drink. Taking collective responsibility for Phyllis’s problems is not a trivial price to pay for liberating her from Harold. Most of her problems will, after all, remain intractable. But our impulse to drive her back into Harold’s arms so that we no longer have to think about her is the kind of impulse decent people should resist.

The idea that Phyllis will be the loser in the long run if society gives her more choices exemplifies a habit of mind that seems as common among conservatives as among liberals. First you figure out what kind of behavior is in society’s interest. Then you define such behavior as “good.” Then you argue that good behavior, while perhaps disagreeable in the short run, is in the long-run interest of those who engage in it. Every parent will recognize this ploy: my son should take out the garbage because it is in his long-run interest to learn good work habits, not because I don’t want to take it out or don’t want to live with a shirker. The conflict between individual interests and the common interest, between selfishness and unselfishness, is thus transformed into a conflict between short-run and long-run self-interest. Unfortunately, the argument is often false...

Yes, Stuart Butler of the Heritage Foundation is a bullshit artist. Why do you ask?

Kenneth Thomas:

Middle Class Political Economist: Heritage Doubles Down on Individual Mandate Denialism: [T]he Heritage Foundation has been bellowing against the Affordable Care Act despite the fact that the critical elements (individual mandate, community rating, and subsidies so everyone can afford insurance) were first proposed by -- the Heritage Foundation!In USA Today (via Don Taylor) Stuart Butler, author of the Heritage lecture linked above, says "Don't Blame Heritage for ObamaCare Mandate." He writes:

The confusion arises from the fact that 20 years ago, I held the view that as a technical matter, some form of requirement to purchase insurance was needed in a near-universal insurance market to avoid massive instability through "adverse selection" (insurers avoiding bad risks and healthy people declining coverage). At that time, President Clinton was proposing a universal health care plan, and Heritage and I devised a viable alternative. My view was shared at the time by many conservative experts, including American Enterprise Institute (AEI) scholars, as well as most non-conservative analysts. Even libertarian-conservative icon Milton Friedman, in a 1991 Wall Street Journal article, advocated replacing Medicare and Medicaid "with a requirement that every U.S. family unit have a major medical insurance policy." My idea was hardly new. Heritage did not invent the individual mandate.

What this self-serving narrative omits, as Taylor points out, is any mention of Butler's original proposal, linked above, from October 1989. This is more than three years prior to the Clinton health care legislation he claimed to be opposing. Butler's entire article puts his support of the mandate in "the 1990s," despite the fact that he had to have been conducting research on it prior to lecturing on it in 1989. Indeed, he cites no publication prior to his own where an individual mandate was proposed. That doesn't mean one isn't out there, but he gives us no reason to think there is.

He continues:

Additionally, the meaning of the individual mandate we are said to have "invented" has changed over time. Today it means the government makes people buy comprehensive benefits for their own good, rather than our original emphasis on protecting society from the heavy medical costs of free riders.

This is a very strained distinction. I'm not aware of the President or any other supporter of the mandate (I myself would prefer single payer) claiming people are to be forced to buy insurance "for their own good." Just as with Governor Romney's health care reform in Massachusetts, the idea behind the individual mandate remains preventing free riders from not getting insurance until they are sick. That is crucial in making it possible to require insurance companies to insure anyone regardless of pre-existing conditions….

While I guess it is in some way intellectually appealing to see Butler try to explicitly defend his changed position, the fact of the matter is that his defense is entirely bogus. You don't craft a policy in 1989 to defend against a proposal in 1993 by a President who hasn't been elected yet. No, the truth of the matter is that the individual mandate was the conservative approach to expanding health care access right up until the time President Obama advanced it as his own. Then it became both bad policy, and unconstitutional, to boot.

Soldiers of the 5th and 18th Japanese army divisions cross the Johore Straits and land on the island of Singapore.

"Spinoza was the first to argue that the Bible is not literally the word of God but rather a work of human literature; that “true religion” has nothing to do with theology, liturgical ceremonies, or sectarian dogma but consists only in a simple moral rule: love your neighbor; and that ecclesiastic authorities should have no role whatsoever in the governance of a modern state."

--Steven Nadler, A Book Forged in Hell: Spinoza's Scandalous Treatise