No new posts until early June

I will be traveling and not in reach of internet connections for the next 10 days, so the next posts will not come until early next month.

Now who is fiscally irresponsible?

For the past eight years President Bush’s Republican administration has overseen, even encouraged, a massive increase in government spending. And as we come into an election year, no doubt the Democratic candidate will point this out repeatedly.

However, today Bush vetoed as fiscally irresponsible a farm bill loaded with almost $40 billion (yes, billion) in subsidies to farmers, and another $30 billion (yes, billion) to pay farmers not to grow crops on their land, and it is almost certain that Congress – with support from both parties - will override his veto. Why? Because it’s an election year, and Congress has long since figured out how to buy votes with billions (yes, billions) of dollars in taxpayer’s money.

We do tend to blame the person in the White House for whatever isn’t going right, but in fact the President has a good deal less power than most people think, and Congress has a good deal more. So as we come into this election year, perhaps we ought to pay more attention to the Congressional misdeeds -- on both sides of the aisle -- rather than just attending to the high-profile Presidential race.

The lesson of corn ethanol

Faced with increasing oil prices, the US government decided a few years ago to encourage an increase in the production of ethanol. Now ethanol can be made from all manner of plant material, and even from green algae. So what did the US government do? It decided to subsidize ethanol from corn, a food crop which takes intensive mechanized cultivation, a great deal of fertilizer (made from oil, of course) and very good soil. In fact, as several studies have now shown, when one factors in the fertilizer and energy used for intensive cultivation, making ethanol from corn requires about 29% more energy (from oil) than the ethanol yields, and the process wastes enormous amounts of water besides. In fact, even the most efficient ethanol feedstock crops (switchgrass and soybeans) still require more energy input than one gets out of the ethanol.

Did any of this scientific evidence make any difference to the government? Of course not, because the corn belt states have a lot of votes, so in 2006 the government handed out $7 billion (yes, billion) in ethanol subsidies (about $1.50 per gallon of ethanol produced), and the subsidies are set to increase in the next few years. Nor can one blame the Bush administration or the Republicans for this -- members of Congress from both parties have been had a part in shaping the farm and energy bills that provide these subsidies.

What can one learn from this? Perhaps that even in our “advanced” first-world nation, politics and ideology still trumps science and common sense. Perhaps that politicians in general are either woefully ignorant of science, or simply unwilling to believe inconvenient evidence. Perhaps that, despite their pious promises to serve the nation, politicians really only care about getting re-elected. Those who still favor government action to solve our nation’s serious problems might ponder this lesson.

On big government

One of the perennial political battles in America is between those who favor a large and powerful central government to advance social issues and those who favor a smaller, less powerful and less intrusive government. There is no doubt that a strong central government can impose important social advances on the nation, as the Civil Rights Act shows. But those who continue to favor a strong central government might want to consider the lessons of the present administration, which has used the powers of a strong central government to impose on the nation its minority religious views on issues like family planning policy and stem cell research, and to impede progress on critical issues like global warming and preserving the environment.

There is no doubt that a strong central government comprised of wise and far-sighted leaders (the ones that agree with us, of course) could do much good. If only we could be sure such a powerful government would always be in such good hands. The problem is that that same strong central government, in the hands of short-sighted or more self-serving leaders, can do enormous damage, as dictatorships around the world prove daily, and there is no way to ensure that our leaders are always going to be wise and far-sighted. Indeed, the evidence of history would suggest that wise and far-sighted government leaders are few and far between, and that voters aren’t especially good at putting them into office.

Given that, I’d just as soon that central government not get too big and powerful. It’s too dangerous a weapon to leave lying about for the more ambitious and unscrupulous among us.

Recommended: The Return of History and the End of Dreams

In 1993, in the flush of the fall of Communism in Russia, Francis Fukuyama wrote an influential book entitled The End of History and the Last Man which advanced the thesis that history was the story of the evolution of political power, that liberal democracy was the end state of that evolution, and that the world was rapidly approaching an era when everyone would live under such enlightened democracies. Hence, we were at ”the end of history”.

Robert Kagan’s message, writing 15 years later, is “I don’t think so….”. He points out that the world is currently divided between the great democracies (America, Europe, Japan, India, Brazil) and the great autocracies (Russia, China, Iran, some middle East countries like Saudi Arabia), and that there are very 19^th century geopolitical games being played between these groups, as the autocracies try to preserve their power and the democracies try to undermine it. And as he points out, the autocratic rulers, and often their people as well, have different worldviews than ours, worldviews in which actions which we view as supporting democracy often appear to them instead as actions designed to keep their nations in second place.

As he says in the conclusion

” The great fallacy of our era has been the belief that a liberal international order rests on the triumph of ideas and the natural unfolding of human progress. It is an immensely attractive idea, deeply rooted in the Enlightenment worldview of which all of us in the liberal world are the product……Such illusions are just true enough to be dangerous…. But a little more skepticism was in order. After all, had mankind really progressed so far? The most destructive century in all the millennia of human history was only just concluding; it was not buried back in some deep, dark, ancient past.”

This is a short little book well worth reading and pondering (see the booklist on the sidebar for the ISBN number and other details).