Krugman What?

1938:

An argument by analogy can sometimes be helpful... but only if the analogy fits.

The story of 1937, of F.D.R.’s disastrous decision to heed those who said that it was time to slash the deficit, is well known. What’s less well known is the extent to which the public drew the wrong conclusions from the recession that followed: far from calling for a resumption of New Deal programs, voters lost faith in fiscal expansion.

Consider Gallup polling from March 1938. Asked whether government spending should be increased to fight the slump, 63 percent of those polled said no. Asked whether it would be better to increase spending or to cut business taxes, only 15 percent favored spending; 63 percent favored tax cuts. And the 1938 election was a disaster for the Democrats, who lost 70 seats in the House and seven in the Senate.

Then came the war.

From an economic point of view World War II was, above all, a burst of deficit-financed government spending, on a scale that would never have been approved otherwise. Over the course of the war the federal government borrowed an amount equal to roughly twice the value of G.D.P. in 1940 — the equivalent of roughly $30 trillion today.

Had anyone proposed spending even a fraction that much before the war, people would have said the same things they’re saying today.

Oh, right. Only one small point of disanalogy: the war also destroyed nearly all of our competition in the production of industrial goods, while leaving us with customers absolutely starved for replacements. Paying off all that debt therefore wasn't a problem: we had assured income in the form of people buying from us what they needed to put their country back together.

Now, if the proposed stimulus will reduce all our competitors to ashes, leave our industrial base intact, and also require them to buy stuff from us to rebuild? Then I'll be convinced that the analogy holds.

Tolkien on Film

Tolkien on Film:

The famous writer, in 1968, via the BBC. Hat tip to Mr. Lars Walker, whose fine blog pointed me to it.

Beijing Opera

Good Advice from China:

“Watch out for that sword,” the rehearsal director shouted.

“I don’t want anybody’s head getting cut off because you don’t know what you’re doing.”

The article is about the Beijing Opera, which is in some trouble as China turns away from its history and embraces the West. Western observers tend to think the opposite is happening -- that China is embracing a kind of resurgent Confucianism and seeking to regain its ancient imperial dominion. What seems to me to be the case is that they've embraced capitalism, and are seeking mostly greater control over their export corridors (as well as easier channels for exports).

The Beijing Opera is worth some study, if you're not familiar with it. If you like Hong Kong cinema, the roots are in the Beijing Opera. If you were scratching your head in the 1990s at Xena, Warrior Princess -- it's because you were having your first encounter with the offshoots of the Beijing Opera.

It has the advantage peculiar to Chinese society of not needing spoken language to convey its meaning. Chinese writing is intelligible to every Chinese speaker, but spoken dialects may be so wildly different as to seem nonsense. The symbols carry meaning. Chinese writing may do this:

For instance, by modifying 刀 dāo, a pictogram for "knife", by marking the blade, an ideogram 刃 rèn for "blade" is obtained.

In day to day life, much bargaining is done by hand signals. Even though almost every purchase requires haggling, I could easily do business in spite of my limited grasp of the language. Ten hand signals indicate numbers; and their use is expected, because of the dialect issue.

The Beijing Opera carries this symbolism through elaborate postures designed to carry the meaning of the act. The Japanese, as the Japanese will, absorbed and refined this idea to its highest degree. Their version of this kind of opera is called Noh, which influenced the more famous later form Kabuki. You see elements of the elaborate-postures-as-signals in Spaghetti Westerns -- which were notably influenced by Japanese cinema -- and even in American film. Note how the constant movement of the snow emphasizes the pauses in the actors' movements, and therefore draws your attention to their poses and what they are signalling.



So it's an interesting topic, this opera in Beijing.

UPDATE: For a Spaghetti Western use of this concept, look no further than the closing scenes of The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.

Color Without Pigment

Color Without Pigment

Pigments absorb light in most wavelengths and reflect back in just a few, which our eyes detect as "color." But that's not the only way for things to appear colored to us. Rainbows result from clear raindrops, for instance, and from the mysterious habit of light to bend when it passes through the barrier between one clear medium and another, together with the even more curious fact that light of longer wavelengths (like red) bends more than that of shorter wavelengths (like violet). Suspended water droplets act like a prism: sunlight bends coming into each drop, then some of it bounces off the back of the drop, and bends again coming back out. The red bends more than the violet, the yellow in-between, giving us the effect of a spray of colors stretched across the sky: ROYGBIV.

Why is the rainbow is only a pale reflection of the sun, instead of a glare like a glimpse of the sun in a polished mirror? For the same reason we catch only a ghostly, pale reflection in a window at night: when light passes through a thin clear layer, most of it goes out the other side, and only a little is reflected back. The reflected amount varies between zero and sixteen percent and achieves a maximum that depends on the thickness of the layer: specifically, what light wavelength it is a multiple of. Any particular thickness of layer will favor a particular associated color. A layer with a constantly varying thickness, like a sheen of oil on top of water, will shows swirls of color. We call this effect "iridescence," from Iris, the goddess of rainbows, the messenger of the gods. (The plural of "iris" is "irides"; this root also explains the spelling and is the only way I can remember not to give it a double "r" as in "irradiation.") We see iridescence in soap bubbles, oil slicks, and some kinds of crystals.

Many living creatures also have learned the iridescence trick, though strangely it's more common in reptiles, fish, birds, and insects than in mammals. An exception is the golden mole, a varmint that predates the entire dinosaur era and has several archaic properties such as a cloaca (a combined port for liquid and solid elimination). Its fur has a golden sheen that is said to be a function of iridescence. It "swims" through loose sand like a Dune sandworm, which I find charming, but it is iridescence I started out to discuss here, so I'll try to get back on topic.

The Blue Morpho butterfly has iridescent wings, as do the scarab beetle and many birds, including the peacock and the hummingbird. Insects' effects usually result from thin, clear scales, while birds employ tiny periodic nanostructures in their feathers' hairlike "barbules."

Cuttlefish (below left) use a combination of pigment and iridescence to exhibit color, which they can change instantly, like a TV screen.

And of course, there are the beautiful nacres, formed from thin clear layers of shell.

Cassandra

For Cassandra:

Here below find a video that combines my interest in feats of horsemanship with her interest in wiener dogs.



(H/t: The Whited Sepulchre.)

Ringgold Games

Ringgold Games:

I spent the weekend at the Ringgold Celtic Festival and Highland Games. The weather was beautiful, and many old friends were there. There's not much to say about it that would interest the readers, but that is why I've been so quiet.

Watermelon Gems

Watermelon Gems

I've never been that enthusiastic about diamonds; I like a lot of vulgar color. So here's a semi-precious stone I can really get behind. Tourmaline is a silicate crystal that exhibits all kinds of colors depending on the traces of minerals that slip in. Not only does this result in an entertaining array of colors, it yields mind-boggling chemical formulae, like this for elbaite, a variety of tourmaline associated with the island of Elba: Na(Li_1.5,Al_1.5)Al₆Si₆O₁₈(BO₃)₃(OH)_4.

The site Grim directed us to the other day, TYWKIWDBI (which they pronounce "TeaWikiWidBee"), has a beautiful picture of tourmaline today. I won't reproduce it here, because you should go over and check out the site, but here is a fine picture from Wikipedia, showing the reddish/greenish stripes that give "watermelon" tourmaline its name:

Some more pictures from Glendale Community College:

Tourmaline crystals are prismatic and columnar crystals that are usually triangular in cross-section. The style of termination at the ends of crystals is asymmetrical, so that a typical columnar crystal resembles a pencil, long and skinny with one flat end and one pointy end. This asymmetry is called hemimorphism, and can result either from changes in crystallization conditions during the growth, or, as in the case of tourmaline, from alternating patterns inherent in the complicated crystal structure. Hemimorphic crystals tend to display an unusual level of both pyroelectricity and piezoelectricity, meaning that if you heat or squeeze the crystal, the lattice does not expand or contract. Instead, ions are displaced, which generates electrical potentials on the crystal faces. This effect occurs in a lot of crystals, some of which will generate a visible spark when crushed, but for some reason it is accentuated in asymmetrical crystals.

If this kind of thing suits you, you might enjoy the Mineral of the Month Club, which explains all kinds of wonderful things in addition to selling you striking specimens by mail. I'm quite taken with August 2010's vesuvianite:

MOTMC memberships are available in various levels at surprisingly affordable prices, for those of you with birthday issues looming. My birthday happens to be in November.

Troops Turn Down "Stop Loss" Bonuses?

Troops Turn Down "Stop Loss" Bonuses?

The Washington Post reports that military servicemen required to remain on duty beyond their original discharge date during the last nine years are declining to submit the required paperwork to collect the bonuses that Congress voted for them last year. They are eligible for $500 for a month, for an average of several thousand dollars apiece. About 90,000 active servicemen and veterans (two-thirds of those eligible) have not turned in the applications, which are due on October 21.

Why? An Army personnel officer thinks the servicemen may question whether the bonuses are legitimate and not some kind of gimmick. Too good to be true? Offensive to their culture? Officials are struggling to figure it out, with about $324 million in soon-to-expire benefits at stake.

H/t Daily Beast.

Hungry to Vote

Hungry to Vote

Be afraid, incumbent progressives. People are about to pop with the need to get to the ballot box and express dissatisfaction. Last January, CBSnews.com ran a "report card" poll on the President's performance in half a dozen areas. I don't know what the initial response looked like, as I didn't notice the poll at the time. In the meantime, however, it seems to have gone viral on Twitter. The comment thread, which CBS never shut down, is up to an astounding 39,000 entries and going strong. Also interesting is that the results of the poll now show a a solid "F" grade.

The comments are harsh, too, despite the occasional forlorn appearance of an Obama supporter who tries to rally his friends to participate in the poll, wondering "Is this for real?"

November is going to be interesting.

"Put him in Camp Bucca"

It occurs to me that if you can make a comedy prank show out of planting fake IED's in celebrities' cars, then for all intents and purposes, the war has been won.

But I have to agree with Allahpundit that this rates a "99 out of 100 on the inappropriateness scale".

(via Hot Air)

They Walk Among Us

They Walk Among Us

I like to write movie reviews on Netflix, and to create "Lists" there. (They call them "Top Ten" lists, but there's nothing to prevent the list from being only five long, or extending far beyond ten.) Today I'm creating a list of movies with a theme that always entertains me, which is people who look like humans but whom the other characters gradually realize aren't from around here. I suppose this kind of thing appeals to people with alienation issues. I love it when characters make all kinds of excuses for an alien's alienness, but then finally to admit that the explanation for all these eccentricities is truly extraterrestrial, or supernatural, or sometimes a case of time travel. I also love a storyline that explores what it must be like for the alien.

Here's my list so far:

• The Man Who Fell to Earth
• Time After Time
• The Terminator
• Starman
• Kate & Leopold
• Unbreakable
• Highlander
• Splash
• Cat People
• Hancock

By coincidence, Netflex has decided today to shut down most of its reviewer-community functions, including all lists. Too bad. I liked being able to find a reviewer I trusted and then browse his reviews and order some of the movies he liked, many of which I would never have heard of earlier. Apparently Netflix is moving more into streaming videos, which would be great if we could get a fast internet connection here, but we're stuck with horrible HughesNet service until the cable gets laid out into the boonies near us.

Reason and Evolution

Reason and Evolution:

I doubt that this gentleman and I see eye-to-eye on everything, but I also believe in the power of evolutionary theory to explain many human behaviors:

Behavioral economists are inspired by psychology, not by evolutionary theory, and not even psychology writ large, but a particular sub-discipline called cognitive heuristics and biases, which shows how often people depart from the expectations of rational choice theory. The result is a long list of “anomalies” and “paradoxes” but no positive account of our psychological mechanisms as a product of genetic and cultural evolution. I wish that I could report otherwise, but it is necessary to take the Evolution Challenge for the field of behavioral economics, no less than for neoclassical economics....

What goes for economics also goes for every other body of knowledge about our species.

Philosophy as a discipline also needs to do more to account for the lessons of evolutionary science. Modern philosophy is dominated by the influence of Kant and Hegel, for whom the rational nature of humankind was the really important thing. In this they felt believed they were drawing upon and improving the legacy of the ancients, who had argued that thought was the faculty by which we regulate all our other faculties (Plato), or even that thinking was the essential nature of humanity (Aristotle).

The accounts of human nature arising from this rationality-centered picture tend to be wrong exactly where evolutionary theory says they should be wrong. It also tends to lead to a misreading of the ancients, who were closer to questions of survival, life, and death -- and therefore to evolution as a process. If you read Plato's Republic as a defense of reason, for example, you're missing the fear of destruction that arose from the Spartan conquest of Athens, the civil war, the tyranny. For that matter, if you read Aristotle as endorsing rationality as the dominant fact of human life, you've misunderstood what he meant by "reason." Reason, for the ancients, is a faculty that is supposed to be able to aim at both truth and beauty.

I doubt you can get to truth with reason alone; but I'm sure you can't get to beauty! Even the most friendly reading -- beauty as some sort of compliance to rules of symmetry or mathematical formulae -- still doesn't really get you there. Nor does it explain virtues like courage, magnanimity, friendship, or love.

Letting humans be a kind of evolved animal as well as a thinking being allows their animal nature to be as important in your philosophy as it proves to be in reality. The question becomes not: can reason control animality? Rather, the question is: what is the right balance between reason and animality for the best kind of life?

OK, and Along Those Same Lines

OK, and Along Those Same Lines

Tracey Ullman puts the same song to excellent use in this skit, a favorite of mine:

Lions and Birds:

We've talked about this before, but it's worth looking at again given that Mark Steyn has written about it lately. Listen to this song, by a group called "the evening birds" -- and they sound like them. You'll recognize the tune at some point.



At 1:10 in this next version, the lady piper hits what a bluegrass artist would call the "breakdown" of the interesting part of the song.



And here's Mark Steyn's story of how this song became the famous one you know.

The Viking Gateway

The Viking Gateway:

From TYWKIWDBI ("Things You Wouldn't Know If We Didn't Blog Intermittently") comes this:

[I]n northern Germany, not far from the North Sea-Baltic Canal... one can marvel at a giant, 30-kilometer (19-mile) wall which runs through the entire state of Schleswig-Holstein. The massive construction, called the Danevirke -- "work of the Danes" -- is considered the largest earthwork in northern Europe...

The researchers have discovered the only gate leading through the Danevirke, a five-meter (16 feet) wide portal. According to old writings, "horsemen and carts" used to stream through the gate, called "Wiglesdor." Next to it was a customs station and an inn that included a bordello...

People say that prostitution is the oldest profession, but I suspect this last sentence has the order the right way around.

How Did You Learn to Read?

How Did You Learn to Read?

Having no children in school (or anywhere else), I've had no dog in the fight over techniques for teaching literacy for a long time. Every now and then, though, I stumble on a debate over phonics, whole language, sub-lexical reading, holism, or graphophonemics that makes me wonder what in the world everyone is talking about.

I don't remember learning to read. I have no idea how I was taught, except that I think it must have included some attention to skillsets that now glare at each other over the barricade separating Phonics Land from Whole Languagea. I'm sure I can remember connecting letters to sounds, but I'm equally sure that no one drilled me in meaningless word-calling exercises before exposing me to stories, if only because I'd recall the physical violence that would have been required to keep me at the task. The earliest two things I can remember about learning to read are the shocking realization that it was possible to read silently to oneself -- who would have thought of such a thing! -- and the glow of pleased recognition when a neighbor explained that the ridiculous sequence of letters "i-n-g" meant the interesting sound I knew from words like "king" and "ring." Could it be that, back in the 1950s, I was being treated to what the New York Public School system calls its newly adopted system, "Balanced Literacy"?

When I turn to articles about literacy pedagogy, I begin to doubt my longstanding ability to read and comprehend:

*A reader uses three cuing systems:

1. the graphic (printed visual array);
2. the syntactic (conventions and consistencies of the language’s structure);
3. and the semantic (meaning or comprehension, including background information and personal previous experiences). [graphic organizers, Language Experience Approach (L.E.A.) and Directed Reading-Thinking Activity (DRTA), writing books and stories]

I don't know what any of that looks like when a teacher or a kid does it. I think people just read stories to me that I was interested in, pointed out the words, and probably explained the sounds of the letters, and at some point it sank in. Maybe that's what they call Directed Reading-Thinking Activity plus embedded phonics these days. Perhaps my family was all holistic and trendy! Maybe they began every lesson by activating my "prior knowledge (schema) through discussion" and continued this throughout the lesson to help me make connections to other books as well as my own experiences. There may have been attention to explicit skill instruction and the use of authentic texts, including culturally diverse literature in various modalities.

Or maybe the people who write about education have just become unusually insane in recent decades.

How did you guys learn to read? What about your kids?

Lives Well Lived

Lives Well Lived

What do people regret from their deathbeds? A palliative care nurse reports that her dying patients felt that they'd sold their dreams too cheap and wished they hadn't given in so thoroughly to the expectations of others. Breadwinners on treadmills regretted missing so much of their children's and partners' lives, only to be able to buy more things none of them really needed. Stoics and shallow peacemakers were sorry they'd lacked the courage to express their feelings. Many regretted not keeping in better touch with old friends. Others concluded that a fear of change had left them mired in old miserable habits when they could have chosen happiness for themselves.

I took this all as a rather sweet cautionary tale about drawing from the deepest wells within ourselves and not spending our lives caught up in frantic but not very meaningful scurrying: Mary vs. Martha. The comments on Assistant Village Idiot's site made me realize that others might see a much more unattractive "lotus-eaters" kind of message. Our friend Retriever, for instance, read the nurse's account as a kind of "watered down Joseph Campbell follow your bliss" screed, and doubted whether most people ever really regretted "doing the right thing, or meeting their responsibilities." Not being much of a "follow your bliss" type myself, I went back to read the original post to see if it still struck me the same way.

It did. I still see it the way AVI does. He quotes Screwtape on the human souls he was teaching his nephew to tempt:

...so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here [Hell], "I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked."

The difference must lie in my assumption that the work the dying patients regretted was neither their true duty nor their heart's desire but a lot of vain fuss. It's one thing to do hard, unpleasant work that really needs to be done, either for its own sake or to provide for your loved ones. It's another to get caught up in a rat-race that separates you from everything that should be most important. This is something that C.S. Lewis wrote about a lot: the idea that neither hedonism nor self-negation for its own sake was the ideal. Screwtape's advice continues:

As a preliminary to detaching him from the Enemy [God], you wanted to detach him from himself, . . . . Of course I know that the Enemy also wants to detach men from themselves, but in a different way. Remember always, that He really likes the little vermin, and sets an absurd value on the distinctness of every one of them. When He talks of their losing their selves, He only means abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever. Hence, while He is delighted to see them sacrificing even their innocent wills to His, He hates to see them drifting away from their own nature for any other reason. And we should always encourage them to do so. The deepest likings and impulses of any man are the raw material, the starting-point, with which the Enemy has furnished him. To get him away from those is therefore always a point gained; even in things indifferent it is always desirable substitute the standards of the World, or convention, or fashion, for a human's own real likings and dislikings. I myself would carry this very far. I would make it a rule to eradicate from my patient any strong personal taste which is not actually a sin, even if it is something quite trivial such as a fondness for county cricket or collecting stamps or drinking cocoa. Such things, I grant you, have nothing of virtue them; but there is a sort of innocence and humility and self-forgetfulness about them which I distrust. The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore-armed against some of our subtlest modes of attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the "best" people, the "right" food, the "important" books. I have known a human defended from strong temptations to social ambition by a still stronger taste for tripe and onions.

So there are different ways of looking at giving in to the expectations of others. A lot depends on what they expect.

Moving on to other Remedies

Other Remedies:

Having closed the last inquiry, then, let us examine other ways in which we might be able to repair -- or if need be, restore -- the proper function of the government. This essay looks at the structure of the original American government, and asks why that particular model was chosen. There was a problem at that moment in history that people were thinking about: the difficulty of defending a Republic that was extended over a large territory. Such a Republic would be necessary, because smaller republics would not be able to muster the resources to defend themselves in that era. But there were problems with the model:

Governments at a distance from the people they rule tend to be invisible; and when human beings are invisible, they tend rightly to suppose that they can get away with a lot. Moreover, large polities tend to face emergencies more often than small polities, and emergencies require from rulers vigor, alacrity, and resoluteness of the sort most easily provided by a man who can act alone. The challenge facing the American Framers was to devise a constitutional structure capable of producing a government fit for meeting emergencies but unlikely to become, as James Madison once delicately put it, “self-directed.”

To meet this challenge, they turned to the second and third parts of Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws – where he sketched out two different ways in which a republic can overcome this limitation on its magnitude. It was, he realized, necessary that it do so because – at least in modern times – no small republic could hope to marshal the resources necessary for its self-defense when attacked by monarchies of intermediate size or despotisms immense in size.

The first expedient suggested by Montesquieu was federalism. By means of federalism, a group of republics could project power in the manner of a monarchy while remaining small enough to be genuinely self-governing.

Montesquieu’s second expedient was the separation of powers. By distinguishing along functional lines between the executive power, the legislative power, and the judicial power and by distributing these three powers to different bodies in such a fashion as to render them separate and quasi-autonomous, the English had managed to transform a monarchy into a republic capable of sustaining itself on an extended territory. For emergencies, they had an executive capable of vigor, alacrity, and resoluteness. To prevent that executive from becoming a tyrant, they had a House of Commons responsible to the electorate and capable of calling the executive’s servants to account. To avoid populist excesses, they had a House of Lords capable of checking the House of Commons; and to protect the liberty of the citizens, they had judges who could not easily be removed from office and juries selected from among the peers of those accused.

The Americans combined both expedients. To begin with, they instituted a federation, building on the remnants of the old colonial system and on the structure that existed under the Articles of Confederation. At the center, they established a government of limited powers – capable of defending the nation, of guaranteeing to every state a republican government, of regulating commerce between the states, and of responding to emergencies. To the states and local governments, where the territory was comparatively small, they left all other legitimate powers. To make the federal government in some measure independent of the states, they provided for direct popular election of the House of Representatives; and to enable the states to protect their own prerogatives from federal encroachment, they had the state legislatures elect the federal senate.

At both the state and federal level, the American founders instituted a separation of powers, giving to the executive, the legislators, and the judiciary the means by which to defend their own prerogatives and the motives for doing so – and, by dividing and separating the powers, the Founders sought to make the government and its operations visible to the citizens. Each branch served the general public as a watchdog with regard to the others.

The measures undertaken by the Obama administration and by its supporters in Congress that gave rise to and sustained the Tea-Party Movement all have this in common. They constitute an assault – evident to anyone who cares to look – on our inherited political order. They transgress on the two great principles constitutive of that order. They are inconsistent with federalism and the separation of powers...

Federalism has another great advantage, which was important to the Founders: it allows for the diversity of opinion that was very important to making the early Republic as stable as it was. There was not a great deal of social trust between the early states, and the factions in those days were just as hostile to each other as our factions are becoming today. The Federalist structure intended to protect the states' rights to substantially different internal social contracts, so that the descendants of the Puritans in the north and the descendants of the Cavaliers in the South could each have their own laws and ways.

That part of the idea remains important today: a major part of the friction we have in the United States comes from the use of the Federal government to impose one-size-fits-all solutions on the whole of the nation. The more urban blue states have some basic assumptions about law and justice that are incompatible with what the more rural red states believe, and vice versa. Some of those issues have to be Federal issues (e.g., does the Constitution authorize programs like Social Security?). Many, though, could be handled in a Federalist manner without causing injustice to anyone -- after all, if they really did not like the interpretation of the state of California (say), they could move to New York or to New Mexico.

Such a model gives us more liberty, as we are free to have several different modes -- at least as many as fifty, as there are that many states. Individuals can then choose from among the many interpretations what they prefer for themselves and their families. Furthermore, they can then live at peace with their neighbors who feel differently, instead of constantly being in friction with each other over the attempt to finalize a 'one-size-fits-all' solution that their faction prefers.

Thoughts, on the essay or on these matters that it raises?

Limits Continued

Limits: Some Concluding Remarks

Eric says that he doesn't like the talk of limiting the franchise; he's not the first to say so.

We started with a similar exploratory thought experiment, in Plato: and it was far more tyrannical than anything as mild as 'perhaps the franchise should be earned in some fashion.' The dialogues are still very useful even though no one would ever want to live in such a republic. The good of them is in getting you to teach yourself how to think about the questions of politics. We certainly want a state that is well managed, which executes its functions wisely, and which is able to defend itself (because living in wars, losing wars, or being subject to anarchy is miserable). We certainly don't want a state that goes so far as Plato's in controlling our lives. The one we have now seems to be both overly coercive (as Eric notes) and destabilizing due to ruinous spending programs and internal factional friction.

Now, if the effect of limiting the franchise were to increase government power and decrease citizen ability to restrain the government, then it would be a bad idea. I agree with that prospect, and if I were certain that would be the effect, I'd agree with Eric's remarks entirely.

The counterargument: It's possible that by concentrating the power of the vote among those who have an interest in maintaining the small-r republican character of the nation, you could increase rather than decrease the effect of the vote in restraining government coercion. Hamilton was interested in limits in principle because he thought that was the best way to preserve the newly free character of the nation. His idea was that the government would otherwise naturally fall into the hands of the rich and powerful, who could sway the poor. In this, he was drawing on lessons from England, and fairly old traditions.

Now, that said, this exploration -- as interesting and profitable as it's been to look back at the source of the franchise, to note that the arguments for expanding it were based on virtue, and otherwise to examine how we got to where we are -- hasn't really brought forth useful results. Elise said that her chief objection was that she couldn't think of a way to limit the franchise that would ensure that all and only the right people got to vote. So far, I haven't been able to think of one either.

All I came up with as good examples of qualities that would demonstrate virtue were honorable military service, and faithful parenthood. That's inadequate: I can think of lots of people I know who don't fall in either category, but who are certainly not folks who should be disqualified from voting. And I can't think of any quality or union of qualities that would be a good proxy for virtue: neither education, nor income level (Hamilton notwithstanding, I don't think either wealth or payment of taxes is a good model), nor much of anything else that comes to mind is really useful in this regard.

I doubt that limiting the franchise is the answer. The lesson of the Norman expansion of the franchise is that it's worked better than the systems that did not expand it. I don't think there are good moral reasons to believe that the franchise should be universal and unearned, but I also can't think of a good model for earning it that allows all and only (or mostly) the right people to have access.

Finally, it really does have to be virtue that we have a good way of measuring, and not what Elise calls pragmatics. This is because, as we've discussed, conservatives and liberals seem to have different blind spots in things like threat perception. We need both sets of insights; a state that was ruled by either set alone would be missing a crucial part of the picture. It's important to remember that we need each other, so that someone can see the things I can't see, or that you can't see.

Unless there are solid suggestions that seem to answer that question, I propose to conclude the examination.

Yay Juliette

Yay, Juliette!

Baldilocks gets a cartoon. Nobody's ever made a cartoon about me; but, on reflection, that's probably just as well.