Excuse me...

…but I think I understand the grammar of the English language passably well. Apparently some of the law faculty of Georgetown University, who lately appeared on the News Hour, do not.

In English the subjunctive mood of a verb is sometimes used to express a condition that does not exist. Mr. Obama is not a commentator in the conservative media. If he were, he might have said that “unelected” persons display “judicial activism” when they overturn the deliberate acts of an elected body established for that purpose. But he’s not. And he didn’t. That’s how the subjunctive mood is supposed to work.

So the law professor who said the President’s proposition is “invalid” ignored, or is showing his ignorance of, the form and natural meaning of the sentence in question. Other speeches on this matter, including Mr. Ryan saying the expression was “unpresidential,” have some, if only partisan, cause for overlooking the rules of grammar.

The Georgetown colleague who delivered the counterpoint at least expressed the view that the statement is valid, without taking note of the question of grammar. Maybe that’s even worse, if it means he thinks the President was criticizing “unelected,” “activist” judges. The President made it clear he wasn’t, the following day, without backtracking, but just by expressing himself in the indicative mood.

Yet last Friday, even Mark Shields, whom I respect, didn’t note the construction of the sentence in question either. So perhaps what I call its “natural meaning” no longer holds. There’s a lot more to be said about this – from the people who brought you “Who to Contact,” in a collectively unconscious effort to obliterate the distinction between the nominative and objective cases.

What I heard the President say, I took to be a criticism of the conservative media, who, if they wanted to be consistent with themselves, ought to be criticizing the Court for legislating at all on the matter of insuring for the national health. But they don’t. And they aren’t.

Class Math: Public Money for Public Purposes

Certain people of limited outlook have long been able to score a debating point – at least with other people of limited understanding – by saying the government ought to be run like a business. It’s a valid point so long as it means only that expenditure of public money ought to be administered efficiently, and that vendors of goods and services to the government ought to be chosen through a competitive process, a real marketplace absent of corruption.

The further, really intended claim, that the people would get a better value if the service governments provide were provided instead by private, for-profit entities, goes too far. Along the way, it distorts or obliterates the notion of public purposes.

The reason government performs certain social functions is that the whole society has interests in the outcomes. Education and road-building are good examples.

Take roads. There was a day long ago when highways were like railroads still are today – privately owned and operated for profit – except they were made of wooden planks rather than iron rails. Is anybody saying we ought to go back to that situation? Maybe some people should if they want to be consistent.

Now streets and highways are one and all, of course, owned by the public. This is so obviously true it’s odd to think, why so? Well, every segment of the public and very nearly every public activity make use of them. Everybody has an interest in how they are built and maintained. Collectively these interests may be referred to as the public purpose of streets and highways.

Or again, they’re not just built so the big bourgeoisie can receive their components and distribute their products. They’re not just built so the proletarians can get to the places where they hand over their surplus labor. Nor so that petit bourgeois mom and dad can take the kids to, say, Wisconsin Dells.

All these interests have to be accommodated. The only way to do it is through a process accountable to be public, that is, a political process.

Of course, that’s not how you build highways. That function is bid out to an entity that is operated from the top down. There’s a difference.

Next take education. There’s a difference between training and education. The former develops skills required by and to be used for private purposes. The latter imparts the knowledge a child requires to function as a citizen: paying taxes, voting, understanding the laws and making a prudent decision about which ones to obey. As Vico observed about the Latin etymology of the word, education leads the citizen out from the child. That is, it serves public purposes.

The people generally are very sound on this. They understand that education creates potential and opens up opportunity. Only after they become adults and have a job do they submit to training. So nobody suggests that educational systems funded by public money ought to be training systems designed to serve private purposes – not even the big bourgeoisie.

But we do have privately owned and operated charter schools, funded at least in part by public money. And some of them meet the public purposes of education reasonably well.

Finally, those functions explicitly reserved to the branches of government by the Constitution and state constitutions, making laws, carrying out laws, and deciding cases at law, are one and all (at least in theory) performed exclusively for public purposes and in the interests of the people as a whole.

Now, if the notion of public purposes is well enough understood, the thoughtful reader will also admit that it nearly entirely – except in the senses already mentioned – negatives the notion that government should be run like a business, and the corollary that the people would be better off if businessmen ran the government.

The latter would of course be undemocratic. In business, the executive is informed and then decides, sets goals and policies, chooses subordinates and delegates at will, overhauls the whole organization or any part of it that is not meeting his objectives – in short, is in a position of command, responsible only to the shareholders, and that only in the limited and non-moral sense that they expect a return on their money.

Business has rather the structure of military authority than of public office. Only by obedience to order, without debate, can an army hope to move, fight, and gain its objectives. That is so, almost to the same extent, in business, though the urgency is not the life or death of the nation or its vital interests. It’s not so in politics, which must consult all public and private interests, with deliberate speed, before proceeding.

So it consequently is that businessmen have no special qualification to serve in public office, and on the contrary, that people with talent and experience serving - and negotiating, accommodating, compromising - conflicting public interests are in fact better qualified to so serve.

Unfortunately, my examples reveal a problem. It’s grounded in the ambiguity of the phrase “run [something] like a business.” Clearly decisions about public purposes aren’t business-like, and for the reasons given, ought not to be. But carrying out decisions, such as building a road, can be and sometimes should be run that way. Remember that, when we do this, we are giving public interests over to the private profit-taking interest. Prudence is required. This part of the problem may have to be solved on a case-by-case basis. It would probably be just as disastrous to turn over major projects of road-building (as opposed to minor repairs, which are done badly enough) to crews of public employees, as it would be to turn over foreign wars to armies of mercenaries.

A list follows of purposes and interests that might or might not be considered public. Inevitably this line of thought leads from purposes that the whole public shares, to purposes only some of us do, to purposes of which the connection to the public has become tenuous, to purposes you don’t want the government to be picking your pockets over. Along this path, the shared purposes of all gradually begin to look like the private purposes of some. You decide where to draw the line, and vote accordingly, keeping in mind you also have to consider what kind of entity ought to be doing any related work that comes up.

·         The national defense, in some configuration. And the first line of defense is always foreign policy – cheap at twice the price.

·         Health care, for certain protected classes. But which classes? The elderly, the disabled, to be sure. The poor? You can distribute that burden either through the public entitlement system at the expenses of the whole tax-paying population, or through the private insurance system, at the expense of people who are already insured. But then….

·         Heath insurance. Who gets to be insured? And for what? There’s more to be said, naturally, about this.

·         Financial security. Is one thing for workers, and another thing for the petit bourgeois. Even though Social Security is next to nothing by itself, at least the working poor are already accustomed to the level of finances – not to say security – it provides. On the other hand, it is possible to be financially secure without being among the Few. Maybe those people’s interests are served by voting Republican.

·         The public debt. It’s also true that everyone has a measureable interest, greater or smaller, and whether they know it or not, in the full faith and credit of the United States. Even the bean counters at Standard & Poor’s. So we have to pay the interest on the debt.

The question of party, class, or private interest becomes more vexed at just this point

·         Housing. Maybe you can’t afford it at all (working poor), or maybe you just can’t afford your mortgage anymore (petit bourgeois).

·         Regulation in general. In particular:

o   Of the greed of corporations

o   Of the quality of the environment

o   Of the quality of food and drugs

o   Of the uses of land (mostly by state and local governments)

I guess you would like to pick and choose, depending on whether you are more likely to be harmed by the lack (consumers and workers) or existence (the Few and their wannabes) of regulation.

·         Subsidies. For housing? Agriculture? Education, through grants and loans? It seems to depend on the interests – and influence – of the buyers and sellers.

·         Basic research. They have a lot of fun with this, don’t they? Back to the days of Senator Bill Proxmire. But it’s not profitable for business to do it, and academe – well, that is their business.

·         Quality of life. The arts? Public television? Some people think protecting the environment is a quality of life issue – the lives of the individuals of the endangered species.

·         Transportation – other than roads. It’s probably in everybody’s interest to have alternatives to $5.00 a gallon gas. Waiting to provide them until everybody realizes they need them only hastens the day of need.

·         Forests, Parks, Reservations. Public lands hold many kinds of valuable assets and tribal lands hold…casinos. All in all, this could be on the revenue side of the ledger, were there not so much potential for abuse.

It’s not impossible to find the public purposes in all these budget items. People whose private interests coincide to a degree ought to be willing to do their part to provide the revenue – at least to the same degree. You can’t begrudge money that creates public goods you yourself make use of. Certain deeply cynical people who already have more than they can even enjoy frequently prefer to spend some of the excess creating false resentments on this score. I guess it’s cheaper than paying their fair share of taxes.

Class Math will continue, visiting a few of these manipulations, and revisiting some of these budget items.

The Mining Legislation…

…was never legislation for and on behalf of the people of Wisconsin, was it? It wasn’t even for the six or seven hundred people who might have got a job. It was always the company’s bill, wasn’t it? They even let the legislators help them write it. It contained the maximum amount of restrictions the company could profitably bear, and the minimum unprofitable wait between applying to dig and digging. So the company walked away when they couldn’t get the bill past the one Republican senator the Outlaw could not influence – at least not on this issue.

Never mind. Like the load on the back of the pick-up, the ore isn’t going anywhere. Maybe they ought to write a sound piece of legislation first, and then find a buyer for the ore. And the path to sound legislation, like the course of the Bad River, runs through Ojibwe country. Unless their consent to the plan for mining the Penokee Range is obtained beforehand, my guess is, the mine will never be dug. The trumps they hold as a sovereign nation, unlike their drums, the Ojibwe have yet to play.

It’s not math class, it’s…

…class math!

I think some of the same folks who found math hard to understand in high school find economics hard to understand in real life – but for different reasons. It’s difficult to explain this without offering up insults valid of the generality of these persons, but gratuitous to the others, who perhaps suffer guilt only by association.

It says in my very first post, and I’ll say it again, that persons who are not one of them, but who can be induced to vote in the interest of the Few, likely suffer from a degree of ignorance of their real interests, indeed of their own place in the economic and political life of the nation.

To those people:

These lessons in class math will emphasize how few of them there really are, how small the likelihood you will ever become one of them is, how much greater the likelihood you will become one of the working poor is, and in fine, how wrong it is to vote for their interests and against your own.

Obama is not Hoover…

…because if he were, he would have done nothing at all for the last three years, and just let things get worse, until the people couldn’t think of anything better than to elect someone more like Frank D. Roosevelt than like, say for example, Ron Paul, or someone else who thinks the economy can fix itself. (I don’t know if it can, but I do know it can break itself.)

One can wonder whether any of the Republican candidates and fault-finders would have been able to do anything different about the situation Mr. Bush left behind: two expensive wars and a recession at least partly caused by his administration’s failure to manage corporate greed.

The decision to spend our way out of recession wasn’t perfect, but recall that there was a great deal of unanimity about it among the leaders of countries with developed economies. It also happens to accord with macroeconomic theory. And admit that the recession is over – otherwise, logically speaking, there couldn’t be a “double dip” to worry about. And then you also have to admit that the macroeconomic theory relied on is valid, and to that extent, so was the reliance.

Unfortunately for Mr. Obama, things weren’t bad enough for long enough for people to realize they needed policies that are connected to the people who are doing the suffering. Or they knew it well enough to elect him, but then, the impression not having gone deep enough (the way it did with Hoover), they forgot.

The fact is people don’t pay any attention even to recent history and don’t find arguments with historical premises at all persuasive. So I’m spinning my wheels here in the muck of short-sighted self-indulgence. But Obama is not Hoover. I’m just asking people to forgive him for coming into office before they could suffer under Republicanism even more than they did – long enough to understand the value and meaning of Democratic principles.

In a Word

Part 1 of 4. Draft begun August 9, 2011. [Originally posted on November 29, 2011, in order of composition. Reposted on January 10, 2012, in reading order.]

The explanations people give of incidents like what happened at the Wisconsin State Fair last summer are varied, but it seems they all have one thing in common.

The Journal-Sentinel’s community columnists, if not well worth reading, certainly meet the criterion for being selected: they represent a variety of viewpoints. The newspaper’s paid columnists add to that variety, yet all of them together never quite get to, much less beyond, the common ground I perceive.

One community columnist blames the whole thing on the want of sexual mores (my term, not his) among the rioters. I think the connection is indirect at best, but both tendencies do occur together in certain, let’s say for now, cultures.

Another emphasizes that young white folks are perfectly capable of behaving as badly as the young black folks behaved on this occasion, just as black adults can be as good parents and citizens as white adults. It all depends, I guess, on what culture they were raised up in, and not on their color.

And some people would not like to go so far, and say instead that it’s the family, not the culture, that’s responsible when a young person participates in a wilding. But then I’d like to ask them, what sort of culture creates families like that?

A third community columnist wanted to get to the “root cause” of the matter, without being able to specify what it is – apparently thinking our political and community leaders would be able to identify it forthwith if they would just act upon his simple advice.

The paper paid Mr. Kane for his view of the matter. He took two or three kicks at the can.

One try was aimed at a couple South Side aldermen who blamed the incident, like the others (Mayfair Mall, Riverwest), on an impliedly defective culture, without being able to what they mean by using the word “culture” in a context like that.

In another post, Kane asks the question whether it’s a hate crime. Hate, like malice is a state of mind. As an element of a crime, it must be inferred from circumstances that can be directly observed and put into evidence. According to Chief Flynn, I think wisely, if all the perpetrators are one color and all the victims another, that’s evidence of race antipathy. Whether it’s a motive, whether it’s hate: that’s one for the jury.

Then a black mother was murdered with her child watching by a number of “deviants” who were also black. Kane blamed the juvenile justice system and dysfunctional parenting.

So, as much as he would like to claim black culture for himself, or at least deny it to the aldermen, he can’t help but use it as an (unthematic) premise in his (inconclusive) arguments: a culture of hate, a dysfunctional culture.

The official editorial position was that Mr. Barrett ought to use his well-earned moral authority to – to do what? – address the matter? remedy the defect? First you’d have to decide whom to make an impression on, and then figure out how to make it. I suppose if you’re a member of a certain culture, the only impression mayoral posturing would make, if any at all, would be negative.

Mr. Stingel’s notion is, not to blame society, but rather hold the thugs responsible. Well, responsibility is a moral and legal concept. We lay the blame once we have been able to make a moral judgment. This is altogether possible and suitable to do, and none of the columnists, paid or unpaid, have failed to reach the correct result.

On the other hand, the question why opens up several avenues of explanation. And normally, explanations are expected to be objective. That’s true of cultural explanations too. Sociologists and anthropologists describe cultures; they don’t judge them. That’s unfortunate sometimes – if you are dealing with a defective culture.

Yet, it’s a whole lot easier to fix something if you can explain it first.

The Question of Culture

Part 2 of 4. [Originally posted on November 30, 2011, in order of composition. Reposted on January 10, 2012, in reading order.]

So far, nobody seems to be able to begin to explain phenomena like the State Fair mob without reference to cultural phenomena; then not really understanding the latter, they finally can’t explain them at all. The difficulty doesn’t stop there. Since we are trying to explain criminal phenomena in terms of cultural phenomena, we are pretty much forced to make a judgment about the culture. Even though ordinary people do this all the time, it’s not considered politically correct, especially for politicians, and in certain circles it is considered definitely unscientific.

So the threshold question is: under what circumstances is it possible and proper to decide that a particular culture is defective? And even this question has to be clarified before it can be profitably answered.

First, one would have to be willing to admit that a culture could be defective. Is that true of the German culture that grew up under the Nazi ideology, politics, and foreign “policy”?

If so, it’s arguably true of that whole German culture. No-one is trying to say any such thing about the whole black culture. No, if you want to say it, say it about a black sub-culture (we owe the notion to academe, but if it helps, so be it) – perhaps even say it about a subculture that is not exclusively black, but is otherwise possible to identify, isolate, and judge defective.

The biggest problem about culture is that, as a concept, it’s flexible and expansive. It’s like the National Geographic. Anything you find in it – geology, paleontology, anthropology, archeology, urban planning, green ecology, outdoor adventure – it’s all geography. All that and more – artifacts, ephemera, subtext – is culture.

This flexibility makes culture an academic playground. Sociologists and anthropologists at least gather data, even if they can’t conduct experiments. Maybe they can be considered scientists. But cultural historians base their free-floating interpretation on a mere selection of facts made according to a mere prejudice – philosophers call it begging the question. This is the very worst manifestation of academic political correctness, and the cause of what they used to call the “culture wars.” Are they over yet? Did anybody win?

This is of little importance and possibly no interest to our columnists, but it clearly shows how vexed the problem of cultural interpretation really is.

The last point is to remember that a culture is that in which something grows, which is favorable to the growth of that thing, like a culture for bacteria. So we are looking for a culture that grows deviants, thugs, dysfunctional families, and the like.