The Vikings Again

Indulge me for another word on  my favorite (bogus) theory as to why the Scandinavians have such a reputation for cooperation.  You may recall my answer: it's the Viking sailing-vessel which some have called the greatest technological innovation in Europe in the dark ages.  Apparently these sea-flyers were communal projects: the boys would be hanging out down at the pub when somebody would say "hey gang, let's build a longship!"  They'd all yell the Scandinavian equivalent of "great idea!" and run out to gather up their tools, to chop down a few trees (there were plenty) and to start chipping and caulking.  Then they'd go practice in the friendly waters of the Baltic.  And then...

Well, that's another thing.  Somewhere along the Nordic merrymaker achieved a reputation for misbehavior on holiday.  Oh boy, haven't we all been there, but my friend Ignota says they explained it to her in a somewhat different way.  "We don't think of it as 'loot, burn and pillage,' oh nej nej nej.  We just wanted to go on walkabout.  We'd go off to the sunshine, maybe chat up the local lassies, maybe an øl or two (those Germans make a mean pint, did you know?).   But we meant no harm, just havin' a bit of a good time."

It would be tendentious to try to draw a moral about the unintended evils of  imperialism.  But it is amusing to reflect that if Gustavus Adolphus  hadn't taken a musket ball in the ear at the Battle of Lützen in 1632 we might all be praying tonight for the good health of a Lutheran Pope.

Somebody Help Me Here: Contracting Out

Should the Treasury Department run its own cafeteria?  Was it stupid of Henry Ford to run a limestone quarry?  What, if anything, is so all-fired wrong about putting a prison in the private sector?  Or if it is wrong for the prison, is it also wrong for the hospital?  Should I care that or Hewlett Packard operate as centers of a force field of production and invoice? Should I rue the day when the draft gave way to the all-volunteer army?

DamifIknow, and that's the point. There is a common thread through this stuff and I pull on it, and it snags.  In short, I don't get contracting out.  I get the basics.  I've read Coase:  I know it is all about cost-reduction: we (should?) organize and manage when it is cheaper than buying on the market; if not, not.

I also know (snark alert) what bureaucrats are, habitually: they're lazy and self-absorbed, bent on protecting their turf and aggrandizing their domaine.  Of course I also (more snark) know that private providers are chiselers and wheedlers who care nothing about the product and everything about the bottom line.  I also know that it's a matter of comparative advantage: we should do what we do best and buy what the other guy does better.  

I guess I know that it comes down to comparative advantage: we should do what we do better than anybody else, and buy the rest.  Treasury should not run a cafeteria.  Henry Ford probably was wrong to run a limestone quarry but it's probably not wise to second-guess Henry on matters of organization and efficiency.    Still-- a while back I read Gerald Davis provocative Managed by the Markets (perhaps it was he who got me started on this wheeze).  I got the sense that Davis feels (he didn't quite spell it out) that all this contracting-out stuff bespeaks a calamitous, perhaps even a tragic, departure in our society: that we have lost some essence at the core of our being (Gerald, if you are out there, I apologize for this flight of fancy).

Go back to Milton Friedman, who saw compulsory military service as akin to slavery.  Set him up for a face-off with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who thought we ought to see military service as a kind of privilege--not just privileged access to pay and bennies, but a privilege in the sense of a chance to participate as a full member of society.    Is this, by the way, why gays battle (heh!) for the right to join the military, why women show so much eagerness to make it to the front lines?   Is this something that Friedman the free market ideologue missed, or something that Friedman the master polemicist seems simply chose to ignore?  Maybe I'm just being coy here: surely we can observe millions who would regard compulsory of service as an infringement on their freedom, yet who regard loyalty, community, yes (ack) patriotism as essential to their being.  Are they simply confused, or am I missing something?   Turned round, how can any libertarian be a patriot?  If we make the state so small as to drown in the bathtub, what is there to be patriotic about?

The army may be a high-salience instance but Davis, if I read him right, seems to feel somewhat the same way about Hewlett-Packard or Nike--that there has to be more to life than just putting your brand on an athletic shoe or, come to that, on a stadium.  I bet I know what he thinks about private prisons.  I wonder what he thinks about the all-volunteer army.   As I write, it's dawning on me that there is probably a whole literature out there, just something that hasn't come my way. Anybody want to tell me where to start?

An X with a Y

A while back I puzzled over the "the Holland principle"--the idea that the US “insurance company with an army,” or is it the other way round. Somebody pointed out that it may be a modern riff on Frederick the Great's Prussia—not a state with an army but an army with a state.

Today we have Matt Yglesias describing Amazon as “a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers.” and I'm beginning to wonder if we have here the beginning of a meme, on the theme of “an X that is really Y.” I'm remembering, for example, Samuel Butler saying that a chicken is just an egg's way of getting to another egg. Or my friend Nancy who declares that cake is just a delivery system for frosting.

I'm trying to play around with it myself but I don't think I have the chops. Barnes and Noble is a Starbucks that sells books (or offers them for sale, which is not quite the same thing).  A few years ago I might have said that the State Department is a high school band with a large dry cleaning bill. This morning I'm tempted to say that the CIA is an intelligence service with an army. Or that Homeland Security is a a police state with an Army. Or maybe—yes, that's the problem: these days, everything is an X with an army.

Levitin on Levitin: Polishing the Argument

For comment on credit/mortgage issues, I think nobody tops Adam Levitin.  And for world view in general, I think he is basically on the side of the angels.  But here is an argument that seems to me to need some polish:

 There isn't a binary division of public and private, but a spectrum of various types and levels of government involvement. For example, the basic building block of what you would term private behavior--contract--requires government to exist. Absent government, contract performance is optional, which seriously impedes contracting. Even the Mogadishu arms bazaar has some government involved--the warlord in charge has a monopoly on violence and decides what the rules are going to be in the bazaar. Government is always involved; the only question is how.


Indeed, consider what the US economy would look like with no federal spending. The defense sector, the higher education sector, the transportation sector, and the agricultural sector would barely exist. We wouldn't have the Internet. The financial sector would also be in huge trouble because of lack of market confidence absent a credible regulatory regime.

My analysis starts from the assumption that government exists in every form of human society....

There's so much to agree with here that it is hard to articulate a criticism, but try this: he doesn't go nearly far enough.  It's not just that "government is always involved."  The point is that by our very nature, we are social beings, caught in a web of our loyalties and betrayals, to govern or be governed (or perhaps better, both at once) is what it is to be human.    So to talk of being "free" of "government," is incoherent: freedom is never an abstraction; it is always merely the sum total of those "restrictions" that we regard necessary or appropriate.

[This explains, by the bye, why the libertarian case is at once so plausible and so incoherent.  Of course we want to be free: who wouldn't?  But not one libertarian in a hundred thinks through the idea of "freedom" much beyond "I want mine."]

Adam does a commendable job of trying to incorporate some coherent principles into his definition (and to be fair, of course, he is writing no more than a blog comment, not a treatise).  But I think I he falls into too common a trap: by "government," he seems to be thinking of the highly specific and particular case of a post-Medieval state system--or even more specific, the Kant/Mill duty/welfare jambalaya that underlies most of our conversations about government today.

The trouble with this approach is that this kind of "government," no matter how pervasive, is culturally specific, an artifact, and occupies only a fragment of human space or time.  And humans have governed and sustained government in one form or another since they crawled out of the slime. Maybe "the state" does it; but maybe not; maybe the church, or the paterfamilias, or the army, et cetera.

"The church" is a particularly useful example, because our "separation" of church and state is in large measure rooted in a particular historical accident--the fact that neither the Pope nor the Holy Roman Emperor could trump the other in the Middle Ages.  It's a model which, however attractive (and I do find it attractive) would strike most people in most places as a perverse curiosity.

"The  army" may be an even more useful example.  We might "privatize" (interesting choice of words) all our military functions by, say, deeding West Point over to Blackwater but we wouldn't be less "governed" thereby.  Ironically, the interesting thing about the military is the number of situations in which the military has washed its hands in the actual activity of governing, finding the quotidian just too damn hard and preferring to stay in the background as a court of last resort.

I suppose Adam might say he knows all this as well or better than I and no doubt he does.  But confusing "the particular,"--the culturally specific modern Weberian "monopoly of legitimate violence" with the pervasive nature of government in all times and all places can leave him defending things he doesn't want or need to defend.    The immediate example would be, I think, the government (sic) role in the mortgage market.  We've certainly got ourselves into a horrible cockup on that one, and straightening out will at best requrie some active, ongoing "public" involvement.  But I hope he doesn't want to go back to the institutional model we operated on prior to 2008--and certainly not to think that such a model is the essence of "government."  Oh and by the way, without stretching this post too far: Adam, you might want to back away from Amtrak.  Like you, I'm a huge fan, but for defenders of public involvement, it is not an ace card.   

Drezner on Political "Science"

Take a moment to read Dan Drezner's superb National Interest piece on how we got into the finance mess.it's a useful review of four new books, but it is also a good, crisp, if brief, outline of the big picture.  Top marks for all this, but listen carefully as he tell us that

All intellectual movements start with trenchant ways of understanding the world. As these ideas gain currency, they are used to explain more and more disparate phenomena, until the explanation starts to lose its predictive power.

Emphasis added.  The first sentence is just fine, but when anyone uses the phrase "predictive power" in the same paragraph with a discussion of political or social theory, I put my hand on my wallet.  I risk nihilism here; I readily coincide that we look for "ways of understanding the world," and find ways that appear more or less  satisfying.  But "predictive power" suggests hard science and the attendant doomed efforts to turn political or social theory into a hard science.  We've always failed in that effort up to now, and the very attempt makes us less likely to accomplish any more modest and realistic goal.

عصبية

عصبية, Asabiyyah:

`Asabiyya or asabiyah (Arabic: عصبية, ʕaṣabīya) refers to social solidarity with an emphasis on unity, group consciousness, and social cohesion, originally in a context of "tribalism" and "clanism", but sometimes used for modern nationalism as well, resembling also communitarism. It was a familiar term in the pre-Islamic era, but became popularized in Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddimah where it is described as the fundamental bond of human society and the basic motive force of history. `Asabiyya is neither necessarily nomadic nor based on blood relations rather it resembles philosophy of classical republicanism. In the modern period, the term is generally analogous to solidarity. However, the term is often negatively associated because it can sometimes suggest loyalty to one's group regardless of circumstances, or partisanship.

Link, The Muqaddimah, more accessibly, "An Introduction to History," and mislabelled "The Classic Islamic History of the World," (Bollingen Series, 1967) is one of the best books I've read in several years, but it is not a a history: it is better understood as a philosophy of history, perhaps the first ever, or an ethnography, if not the first then certainly the best since Herodotus.* The Bollingen edition declares itself to be "translated and introduced by Franz Rosenthal, abridged and edited by N.J. Dawood." A 2005 reprint includes a useful introduction by Bruce B. Lawrence. On Asabiyyah, Lawrence quotes one Mohammed Talbi"

...at one and the same time the cohesive force of the group, the conscience that it has of its own specificity and collective aspirations, and the tension that animates it and impels it ineluctably to seek power through conquest.

--Id., xv.

And one Jon Anderson:

[A]sabiyah seems to be a concept of relation by sameness, opposed both to the state (dawlah) based on relations of difference or complementarity, and to religion (din), which alone supercedes (sic) it.

--Id.

Oddly enough, the term does not appear in the index to the Bollingen edition.
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*The edition in question is a one-volume abridgment of a three-volume work; the longer version may contain more straight history, I cannot say.