Public Policy vs. Illusions and Delusions

Dave Hoffman suggests that we are "forced by the Internet to nationalize problems", and as a result it is "harder for local communities to experiment with localized solutions to threats to the moral order". I would be more impressed with the argument if the imposition of national solutions on moral issues were a new phenomenon, or if it weren't the "don't tread on me" types who weren't often attempting to impose their own moral conventions upon the rest of us. But certainly, the national media, the 24 hour news cycle, and the Internet have changed the manner and speed at which local issues can become national news.

In fact, we have not been "forced" to "nationalize problems". We live in a society in which some problems that were once treated more uniformly on a national basis have been transitioned back to local mores. For example, obscenity is judged by community standards, and states are free to impose restrictions on access to abortion that were once considered forbidden under Roe v Wade. The Hatch Act and its creation of "right to work" states started the downhill slide of organized labor. We weren't "forced" to nationalize the problem of alcohol consumption during the prohibition era, nor was prohibition a product of the Internet. The anti-kidnapping laws that followed the Lindbergh kidnapping were not driven by the Internet. Behind the determination of what is "best" handled at the state vs. federal level lies a great deal of political gamesmanship that sometimes gets in the way of the formation of good policy.

Josh Marshall argued that suggesting that school shootings might not occur or might be less lethal if small children were trained to mob a gunman, or if schools were not a "feminized setting … in which helpless passivity is the norm" represents the discussion "quickly veering from the merely stupid [Megan McArdle's "mob the gunman" suggestion] to a pretty ugly kind of victim-blaming [Charlotte Allen's 'feminized settings' argument]". McArdle's suggestion is at best impractical and unrealistic, but to be fair to her she was comparing her own bad idea to ideas that she deemed worse - she admitted that her idea might not work, but had a better chance at preventing school shootings than the ideas she was criticizing. Marshall's criticism of Allen's comment is fair. Let's also throw in Mike Huckabee's blaming the shooting on a lack of prayer in schools.¹ That is blaming the victim, and it is ugly.

Hoffman appears to project his own discomfort with firearms onto people like Marshall,

I didn’t grow up with guns in the house, and the idea of allowing a child of mine into a school where the teachers are armed is horrifying. Worse, I think, is the concept that we ought to militarize children – to teach them that they are all on their own, and the state is powerless before the forces of chaos in society.

Marshall did speak of the growing militarization of our society. His comment is a bit cryptic, but he appears to be suggesting that fear of violent crime is resulting in people "seriously or [like McArdle] half in jest - pushing for a use of force race to the bottom".

Marshall's point is valid - even as violent crime has plummeted, fear of violent crime and terrorism has led to an expanded police and military presence in spaces that were far less secure during times when crime rates were significantly higher. I think part of the issue is that the more rare an event becomes, the more attention becomes focused on its increasingly rare occurrence. Marshall is making a public policy argument, that we should take a step back and try to figure out if the militarization is good for society, a good use of manpower and resources, or if it's likely to be effective before we expand it into new areas of society, such as public schools. Hoffman isn't actually addressing militarization - "teach[ing children] that they are all on their own, and the state is powerless before the forces of chaos in society" is not militarization - but more importantly he's not even arguing about how public policy should be formed.

My intervention here is to just to point out that the problem we actually have here is one of discourse – we are forced by the Internet to nationalize problems. This makes it much, much harder for local communities to experiment with localized solutions to threats to the moral order. If a community in, say, Connecticut wanted to ban assault weapon clips (because it made them feel safer – [(]let’s put to one side data on efficacy!), Glenn Reynolds would lead a charge against the liberal fascists. Indeed. Heh. Yes. If a community in Tennessee wants to arm its teachers (because it makes them feel safer – let’s put to one side data on efficacy!) Josh Marshall and Andrew Sullivan would call them out as conservative fascists. Or loonies. Or winners of the Moore award. And we’d all get to pat ourselves on the back, but no one would actually get the benefit that law is supposed to provide, which is the helpful illusion that we’re more civilized than we actually are, and that we’re actually doing something to push back against the tide.

The thing is, people like Marshall don't "put to one side data on efficacy" because they are interested in facts. They are interested in what works. Hoffman takes several potshots at Marshall,² but all the while misses that the McArdle "rush the shooter" comment was neither a serious policy proposal nor reasonably characterized as a proposal "offered by gun proponents". McArdle was in fact pointing out that some of the proposals being advanced in response to the school shooting, such as banning certain types of firearm or magazines of a certain capacity, would not have prevented the shooting. McArdle tends to get ridiculed in some corners because she has a history of making arguments that are not well-thought out, but her essential approach here is the same as Marshall's. She's not interested in making people feel safe. She's pointing out that your feelings have little to do with what actually does or does not make you safer.

At a basic level Hoffman is correct about a culture clash, although it's not s binary as he suggests. He's correct that a measure that to one person or community might serve as a "helpful illusion that we’re more civilized than we actually are" might differ from, or even be the opposite of, what another person or community would deem a "helpful illusion." If Hoffman wants to argue that communities should be able to create their own "helpful illusions", let's assume within reasonable constraints, he's only going to run into issues where those illusions start to impinge upon the rights of others. There already are schools that allow any teacher with a CCW permit to bring a gun to school.

The problem is that Hoffman is trying to impose his standard for "helpful illusions" onto a policy debate - an attempt to determine what may or may not actually work to prevent (in this instance) school shootings, and the extent to which arguments for measures that offer only illusory benefits are worth implementing, particularly when other civil, social and legal issues are implicated. The policy discussion does not "reduce[] our ability to try out different versions of the good life, and thus diminish[] our capacity live together in peace". In fact, if properly conducted, the policy discussion avoids imposing "helpful illusions" on a nationwide basis, instead implementing only those policies that can be reasonably expected to work, while leaving localities to form their own "helpful illusions" within the aforementioned parameters.
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1. There is a natural human tendency to try to explain away tragedy - to find a way to believe that a horror that happened to somebody else could not happen to you. Huckabee put himself into the same column as the TV ministers who blame local and national tragedies on homosexuality, feminism and the like - and they know exactly what they are doing when they exploit tragedies in that manner.

2. I found Hoffman's essay through a link provided by Jonathan Adler, a call for tolerance that, in context, is rendered odd by his hollow man arguments about mythic "liberal bloggers" who are having a "fevered reaction" and are in "a frenzy" about Megan McArdle's "what if kids mobbed the gunman" column. Adler's a law professor, so I assume he has enough familiarity with the Socratic method to understand that scorn, derision and ridicule, as unpleasant as they can be, do not constitute a frenzied or fevered reaction.

Primary Season Quote of the Day

Josh Marshall on Mitt Romney:

[R]unning around the country in a long twilight struggle with Rick Santorum is just … how to put it? Inherently demeaning and diminishing. It’s like struggling to land a one pound fish or searching for the way out of a paper bag. People see you doing that and you just look weak and feckless, even pitiful.

Doesn't TPM Usually Make Fun of Headlines Like This

Apparently, winning election as Minority Leader by a 3:1 margin is a "Bad Sign for Pelosi" - if she were forced into a do-over in a parallel universe against a different opponent, it seems she might not have won.

A Byproduct of Security Theater

Josh Marshall asks the question,

I tend to agree that if a young person gets on an international flight, not only with no checked luggage but no carry ons that suggest he plans on ever getting off the plane, that is sort of a tip off. But in these cases, I always wonder: Isn't it or why isn't it part of terrorist best practices to just bring some phony luggage? With all the trouble and subterfuge terrorists have to go to get stuff on planes, this seems fairly straightforward. This isn't a criticism of the policies. And obviously Abdulmutallab didn't do this. But in cases like this, I always do wonder: why?

I hate to say it, but... probably because it makes it easier to get through security. Nobody's going to be measuring your contraband shampoo as being 3.8 ounces, complaining that your computer has to be in a separate bin apart from its case, or finding a nail clipper with an unacceptably dangerous nail file attached.

Further, when you create a context that leads a significant number of travelers to check all of their luggage, you make it less suspicious when somebody goes through security empty-handed.

The Missing Element

Josh Marshal ponders why people are willing to

ethnically profile, do all sorts extra-judicial surveillance, maintain massive databases of hundreds of thousands of people who have some vague relationship to extremism, torture captives, condemn people to hours unable to go the bathroom on planes, even launch various foreign military adventures

while we hesitate to implement backscatter body scans

that might show a vague outline of boobs or penises (almost certainly no more than is exposed in most bathing suits)

and concludes,

It just tells me that at some level we're not really serious about this.

Really, though, the difference is obvious. With stuff that happens behind the scenes, we're comfortable assuming that it only happens to other people. Proponents of torture don't anticipate that they will ever be tortured. Proponents of racial profiling anticipate that it will only happen to other races - consider the recent spate of calls for the profiling of any person with an Islamic-sounding name, even though most made no similar demand for people with names like "José Padilla" and none that I know of made any such demand for people with names like "Richard Reid". The rule forbidding going to the bathroom on an airplane during the last hour of a flight - an idea that is unworkable (or potentially really messy) for people with certain medical conditions or for small children? It's already out the door. Now the decision is up to the discretion of the airlines.

It's simply another form of the anti-civil liberties retort, "If you're not breaking the law, you've got nothing to worry about" - which roughly translates to "If it's not happening to me, I don't care."

It should also be noted that the privacy technology for backscatter has improved, and will continue to improve, to the point that "nudity" is becoming a non-issue. Several years back, when I first heard about the use of this technology by the federal government, and the privacy issues it was raising, I asked, "Why not adjust the software to erase as much of the human body as possible - after all, you don't care about the body - just what's on it"? It took some time for others to hop on the clue bus, but that's the way the technology is heading. Note that the technology is anything but perfect - it won't see through fat folds, nor will it look inside body cavities - it's just another tool in passenger screening.

The Public Option

Josh Marshall's a smart guy, but I think he's about as wrong as wrong can be on the public option.

Now, there are many people who look at this and say that the bill(s) under discussion are so anemic that they're maybe not worth fighting for at all. And that's certainly a legitimate opinion. But I think there's another question. Considering how down to the wire this is, is it really worth holding up everything else contained in the bill when the point of contention, the public option, is as measly as it is?

The same thing probably could have been argued about the first version of Social Security or the first version of Medicare - "It's measly, so what's the big deal if it doesn't pass." Well, whether you like or hate the current version of those programs, I don't think you're apt to argue that they're "no big deal". People like David Frum and Martin Feldstein wouldn't be telling us that any public option, no matter how "measly", will inexorably bring about the end of private health insurance if the opponents of the public option shared Marshall's perspective. It's easy to hobble the public option, version 1, but it's very difficult to stop the public option from later being made viable.

Marshall follows up with a valid point about "up and down" votes, but I think he's jumping the gun:

If you go back to the earlier part of this decade when the cloture/filibuster issue became a big deal, largely on the Supreme Court nominations front, the right made a big push on the outside about the issue of allowing up or down votes (i.e., 51 vote majorities) simply as a matter of principle

So why not do that right now? Because the bill is advancing without that type of push. The best time to call for an "up or down vote", and to press people to "allow an up or down vote" is when the bill's up for final passage. Do that too soon and not only do you give opponents of the bill time to prepare and rehearse rebuttals, you risk inspiring a yawn from the media on the fourth, fifth or sixth round of voting when you want the headline to be, "Health reform opponents block up or down vote."

I'll Agree With... Half of That

Josh Marshall comments on what we both think is ill-advised tax policy, in the "90% clawback tax" on bonuses to employees of TARP recipients that have received more than $5 billion in federal money. It's a politically easy response to public anger, taking the place of more sober policy that should have been put in place from day one. And let's not forget that Congress is once again "the gang who couldn't shoot straight" - both parties were complicit in the "hold no one accountable" approach to the bailout. Perhaps some of their new found rage should be directed inward.

Marshall writes,

First, what's to stop the companies from just folding the 'bonuses' into straight salary income? In which, the whole thing goes out the window?

Actually, I think that would be a good thing, given how often we hear the argument that due to the pervasive nature of oversized bonuses in the financial industry, and how they routinely equal or exceed the recipient's annual salary, they really should be thought of as part of the recipient's salary. If this forces industry-wide salary renegotiation, I doubt that the new salaries will in fact be as inflated as that theory suggests. And our legislators will no longer have the excuse that we have to let the absurd salaries and bonuses slide for fear that financial industry employees will quit en masse. To the extent that these companies pay what should be salary in the form of bonuses to gain a tax advantage, all the better that the bonuses become salary.

Second, this cuts a pretty broad swathe. You don't want CEOs who drove their companies into the ground pulling down multi-million dollar bonuses from companies that wouldn't even exist any more without big taxpayer handouts. And the folks at AIGFP who played a big party in driving the whole economy into the ditch with their reckless and possibly criminal behavior shouldn't big reaping big rewards of taxpayer money for their behavior.

But it's not clear to me why a couple, both of whom work in the financial services industry, and make $150,000 each should essentially have their entire bonuses taken back in taxes.

Well, color me weird, but if you have a $300,000.00 household income from a company that would be out of business but for a huge taxpayer bailout, I don't have enormous sympathy for the notion that you should get a six or seven figure bonus simply for showing up at work. That ties into my earlier argument - if in fact those salaries are inadequate or aren't competitive, renegotiation is a good thing.

If I understand his point, though, it's less about that couple's specific circumstances and more about "why them?" That's fair - we're vesting the sins of the employer (and the sins of our political leaders) on employees who may simply be hard-working, honest, diligent bankers. (Yes, and there are also lawyers who fit that description. Go figure.) They may have nothing to do with their employer's situation, or may be the people who have kept it from being a lot worse, and we're singling them out for a reactionary, confiscatory tax. It seems like the worst form of hypocrisy for any modern Republican to vote for a 90% income tax on anybody, even without the angry declaration that the money being taxed is an undeserved windfall.

I do take issue with the conflation of the bizarre pseudo-retention bonuses (a retention bonus you may get even if you've quit) at AIG, as compared to a long-term retention bonus (e.g., a loan that is forgiven over six to ten years, issued selectively to people who you truly do want to retain) that can help keep key employees in place, or performance bonuses. (I'll grant, what passed for performance in the financial industry over the past decade included conduct that, in retrospect, would not warrant bonus pay.) I also think this is a bad way to make public policy.
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Update: Marshall partially explains the difference in our perspectives:

I know a number of people who work or in a few cases worked at the big investment banks here in the New York. And while the size of the bonuses would float to some degree with how well the bank did in a given year, and presumably how well they performed, to a great degree it was locked in income. And the great bulk of these people's incomes came from their bonuses.

That's all well and good, but to me if the bonuses are in fact salary they should be negotiated and paid (and as Marshall notes, taxed) as salary. Marshall shares a reader comment that is also instructive:

Most Wall Street firms began as partnerships, not as publicly-owned corporations. Partnerships apportion their profits at the end of their fiscal year; that practice has remained the norm, even though shareholders (or, in the case of AIG, taxpayers) now own these corporations.

And that's really the nub of the problem. Most Wall Street firms have gone public; at the same time, many public banks have entered the Wall Street game. But corporate governance, compensation, and accountability haven't kept pace. In essence, these firms offloaded most of their risk to shareholders, but continued to be run in an insular fashion, and to divert the great bulk of their surplus revenues to their workers and executives. In the bubble years, enough cash rolled in that the complaints were muted - executives and traders took it home in wheelbarrows, and the share prices still went up.

He argues that the Wall Street compensation system reflects the desire for "the rewards of ownership with the security of employment". I agree with the comment's conclusion, that the compensation model is unsustainable, but that a special "feel good" tax isn't a solution.

The real solution lies in ensuring that corporations are run in the long-term interests of their owners, not to line the pockets of their executives.

The need for that solution reaches far beyond the financial industry....