National Sovereignty and multipolarity

"National Sovereignty!"

The best way to rally Americans against anything the UN might do is to yell this phrase at the top of your lungs, particularly while wearing eating a hot dog and revving your V8 engine while idling, out of spite. Carbon, schmarbon.

For Americans, National Sovereignty was born primarily from the fact of being out of the reach of other countries, which are the main threats to sovereignty. Of course, there was our obstreperous seizing of nation-hood from the British. Looking back, the event becomes a powerful symbol (We kicked them out), but it is not actually the source of the national noninterference. Sovereignty is expressed as a right over oneself, which another may not infringe. It develops into a "feeling of right" the same way any other right does - by surviving. The right to vote, or drive, or know what's going on in Congress, are not easily removed when they have been in existence for a while. Direct election of Senators (17th Amendment) cannot be taken away. The ownership of guns is held by some people as a more important political issue than abortion. People's inherent conservatism means they are loath to let go of the way their lives are, especially if it involves a right over oneself.

It has now been almost 200 years since we fought the last war dealing with our National Sovereignty, the War of 1812. Even that was begun by the Americans, though. So we have not been challenged.

This is very different in Europe, where all countries have challenged each other's sovereignty for centuries. (It is worth noting that there is no idea of national sovereignty until there is an idea of the nation. Thus, a king challenging another is not exactly the same, because the people may not have had a sense of right over themselves. It has more to do with the monarch's dominion. The English have expressed national sovereignty since 1688, drawing from their self-rule during the Interregnum. The Americans cannot properly be said to be a modern nation until after the Civil War, when the Southern cause was defeated, along with it's threat to the idea of the American nation.)

The American sovereignty, though, got its huge boost as we moved to global power, and then superpower. We became answerable to none, even when we acted internationally. China's nation-centric outlook developed in much the same way. Millennia of self-rule, and expressing the will of the government over anything it wished. The shame of Japan's invasion in the 1930s and Western exploitation earlier could have begun to undo this process, but Communist isolation enabled an unbelievable propaganda regime to let the people know again that the Chinese were the best in the world. They were answerable to none in international affairs because no one could ask them questions. They did not take part and so could not be rebuked.

As China's actual ascendency continues, it is engaging countries. It has not really done this in a way, yet, that has produced significant friction, but this is inevitable.

Russia, also, in its proud history, hopes to reassert its national will. And the Europeans like to boast that their collective population and economy are greater than that of the US. It seeks to lead on moral initiative, and like the others, it wants to be a counterbalance to the US. India and Brazil round out the list of great economic-cum-political potential.

Shift back to the UN for a minute. It often seems like the US is the only country 

Authority and Confidence

The Supreme Court is supposed to say today whether they will hear the Obama citizenship case. I am sure you have all heard about the alleged faked birth certificate, and maybe even about the president-elect withholding some of his college transcripts, etc. etc. I have no idea, or any real opinion, on whether this is true. All we can know is that if Barack Obama’s election was overturned, there would be blood in the streets. Every American would have to have a good look at the underside of their car, for the possible need they will have to identify it upside down. Forget the fact that voting barely went up this election; even those who didn’t cast ballots have invested themselves in the Obama victory. These are probably the more likely to riot, were such a thing to start.

Most of us would say that, legally, the Supreme Court should take up a legitimate case no matter what. I’m not so sure it’s possible here. If the Supreme Court can get around hearing this case, they will. Most Republicans are gearing up for the fight, and much of the Obama cabinet has already been chosen. I think we can say with relative certainty that an overturn of the election would tank the stock market immediately. Stocks are based on investor confidence. This normally does not involve politics, but the legitimacy of our political system would be called into question. A questioning of the stable order that has upheld our economy would be horrible. We have never seen anything like that since … the Depression, the only period in which Communism was a real possibility for a significant number of Americas. And this not based on the attractiveness of Marxism, so much as the vacuum left by the loss in confidence in our current system.

I am not striking similarities. Rather, I do mean to say that this case simply cannot be heard. Because there has been no uproar over it, I think it might be dismissed without too much of a problem, savored only by future “Politically Incorrect Guide to…” books and wing-nuts in Arkansas. There seems to be some legal room for the Supreme Court to leave this kind of decision to the Electoral College, which will of course pay no attention to it.

Isn’t this undermining our legal system? Our Constitution? The question is whether a significant destabilizing of these things is more dangerous than the undermining. Like I said, if the Supreme Court had no legal loophole out of this, they could not hide from the scrutiny. However, given that there is this room for maneuvering, could it be that the country’s constitution (lower case “c”) outweighs a legal technicality?

This is the same question dealt with in the Bailout, where possible Constitutional and ideological concerns were measured up against The Impending Collapse of the System. Whether those predictions were overstated is immaterial to us. The important thing right here is that, if there were a real possibility of the banking sector being the anvil tied to our feet as we sink into economic depths – would this be enough for us to put aside our scruples? Does it make sense to preserve the purity of a system so that it can destroy itself in whole?

The central element of capitalism is the banking (capital) system, which itself is extremely tied to the stock markets, bonds, securities, etc. In other words, the central element to the system has tied itself into things that are publicly traded, and those markets are – well, they are markets, based on investor confidence. The problem with investor confidence is that it is able to affect the banks, which are able to mess up most of the system that relies on them (which is most of it). Here is the parallel I am trying to draw. Politics also relies on confidence. A strong democracy is based on strong assumptions: that my vote will be counted, that the man elected will mostly vote how he said he would, that the politicians will respect the written Constitution, if there is one. A breakdown in the plausibility of these things will wreck it. And of course political instability leads to social instability, just as it has the potential to create it. (In many ways, politics supplies predictability to life through an explicit social system. The actual society is invisible, with unidentifiable forces. This unaccounted-for randomness is an impediment to the formation of paradigms, and the feeling of stability (confidence) which enables risk and adventure. In addition to the real punishment of crime, politics gives a false sense of predictability by superimposing an explicit and predictable scheme that can “symbolize” society itself: we are our government.).

The Supreme Court does not want to hear this case. That is what I am saying. The fallout would be worse than Nixon and Watergate, plunging the political hopes of a generation. That is the best possible scenario. The worst is much worse, and would clearly mean a retreat from world leadership, as well as domestic problems galore.

Ultimately this has to do with authority, which is a deeper issue than the Constitution itself. The Constitution carries an authority that is not inherent. It has been bestowed on the document, in order to give an authority to the government. The Founding has become worshiped because it strengthens our own identity, as well as our ability to have confidence in our government. We do not have a government created by men, in our own beliefs; if we did, we would have no problem starting a new one. History, and one’s own experience, makes it evident that this has never been an option for Americans.

It is hard to imagine a Supreme Court case that is not simply accepted, though maybe begrudgingly. The law is decided in court, and we accept people to fall in line. However, I think that really could be broken here. Faith in the legal system was broken in the 1960s and 70s during the race riots. Perhaps no one remembers them any more. We think we have moved past. While it is true that eras of social stability and anti-extremism tend to follow periods of instability (see post Civil War England, post 30 Years War Europe), we can never forget the possibility of a loss of confidence in the system. The reason the Supreme Court will avoid this case, if possible, is that four million people will be in DC on January 20th either way.

healthcare is a necessary defeat to conservatism

Is the source of law a moral component or social compact?
The old Lutheran idea of government-as-pedagogue is a Christian attempt at thinking about the government that I might have agreed to at the time, but in retrospect there are at least two problems.
1. Mixed faith societies (inc. nonbelievers) must admit a certain kind of humility and freedom of conscience. The reality of human existence is that people make choices about faith devotion. They will also make various decisions about morals, and the postlapsarian state must work in a postlapsarian world. The state itself must take its limitations. If the state is pedagogue, we are placing moral authority in it. Morals come out in governance, but the state itself does not have moral authority: the Church does.

The state does have a moral interest, of course, but this is only in a very vague sense. Most of the time, those ruling do not actually know what will be best for their country, or they are only defending what fear could be lost. This is not methodically pedagogical. 
2. the state as pedagogue cannot be clearly differentiated from the tutelle administrative. Perhaps the best distinction is that the pedagogue need only contain certain morals, and their enforcement displays them with the discipline of moral learning and the imprimatur of state authority. The morals can be seen as the "higher" thing because the state defends and enforces them. The administrative tutor is more actively guiding, even micromanaging.

A state forming its own society will become that society, though. When Henry Adams sees the force, or dynamics, or Russia or the US, he sees in those countries something that not even the state can contain.

Question: is this all or nothing? A step in that direction does not mean all the dominoes will fall, right?

If anything, a state's natural activity is to seek the stability that will ensure its perpetuity, for this is the purpose of the rulers. However, eventually in the West, people began to see the state's existence-unto-itself as absurd. They give up taxes and freedoms - why, so a prince might expand, squash, retaliate as his whim drew him? At least the men of letters saw this, and mocked it. The idea that a state should exist for its people is a natural flow of logic, dating back through Aquinas eventually to Plato's philosopher-king. Shear force established the state, but men came to assent to it naturally for the good it would produce. For this reason, a social contract is a plausible means for viewing government and society. However, this is not a contract between people but between any given person (or the whole community) and their rulers. Even the act of Constitution-making in a republic is merely a common social arrangement (undertaking) to determine the relationship that will exist between a man and his government. It does not determine the relationship between men. This became evident when parties (factions) formed in the American Republic, even against the Founders' wishes. The Founders could structure the state, but they could not structure the society. People would continue to form their relationships between each other, and the thing could not be stopped.

Now, the relationship to the state influences the relationships between each other - no doubt. And this indirect means is how our government has any claim to set direction or definition for our country. But in a country where the government does not presume to set social relations, they can only get so far.

So it does not make sense to outlaw homosexuality. It is permissible to disallow gay marriage, which has to do with a person's relationship to the state.

Now, the social contract affects the direct person-state relationship insofar as the person is concerned, but insofar as the state is concerned, the person-state is only one aspect. It is concerned with person-person, because it is charged with the government of persons, so that a person might live their life safely, sustainably, and possibly productively. A person has a right to life because the state does not make sense if people cannot expect even their own lives protected. Liberty, because this is this is how men fulfill their abilities (choosing) and social natures (choosing relationships). Property, because this is what people use to fulfill the previous.

The government is also charged with governing society, since society understands itself to be in relationship to the government. There is a collective understanding that the government's responsibilities should be similar toward the society as it is toward the person - we will defer to you, if you let us live our lives. This collective sense exists not because the society is collective, but because there is a satisfaction with the social system as a whole, an understanding that we are all within the rules of the game - even if it is cutthroat and we want to beat each other, we identify with the system because it enables us even in our competition. The player will fight for a proper relationship with government. This is why the society's relationship to the government must always play out as the relationship of specific groups (nobles, wealthy burghers, bourgeois industry-owners, interest groups, political parties) to the government. The hope is that there is a wide diffusion of money and power, so the compact between government and society is best comprehended as that of society as a whole. This can only take place in a complicated and inefficient government that gives many groups the right to speak at many different point in the system. "Congress is not designed to pass laws, but to keep bad laws from being passed."

As new power is created, and new groups emerge that can express themselves to the state, these groups are often not so powerful as to dominate the rest of the country, and so they themselves gain legitimacy by claiming to speak on behalf of the interests of the people. They must either fool the people, disguise their interests, or moderate their message closer to what would actually help or be in the interest of society as a whole. In modern America, all three take place; the hope of our system is that clear thought and better information would draw things closer to the 3rd. That is why there is a hope against interest groups, and that is also why interest groups play a very important role. Ultimately the legislator must assert his independence from them to best determine society, and to understand government's compact with them.

Since rights are understood in terms of a relationship, and especially a promise (that is, a contract), this is a good place to begin a discussion of rights. Not in what we give to each other, but in what we as individuals have in our relationship to the government, and what the government is able to assert against us, by its power, with the interests and feelings of our society being represented by various groups against the government's power. 

Some enlightened ruler might restrain himself for the good of society, but this is clearly not sustainable over generations. Absent this rule, we have only a commonly held belief in constitution, another self-restraint. Absent this, we have only dynamics.

The government accepts certain limits today, in what appears to be self-restraint. In some ways, it is actually restrained by commonly-held constitutional assumptions - such as rights to property. Some are long-term, but some are shorter. Society understands itself to be in compact with government, whereby it will not allow government to go past a certain point. That can be altered, and crises especially, but also persistent mass media and controlled language, provide the ability to change the compact. In example, the people and welfare; intrusions so the war on terror may be fought; the acceptability of war; the state's economic responsibilities. Practically speaking, these exist insofar as society understands itself to be in relationship to the government. So with their rights.

Their rights against each other have traditionally fallen more in the realm of torts, since it is hard to establish responsibilities that people have toward each other. However, we have begun to do this with banks, pharmaceutical companies, and medical units: they must exist for public good. The issue of corporate social responsibility can actually be apprehended because there ought to be a defined social relationship involving corporations, especially to the region of its operations.

The whole thing might be seen as an aspect of paradigms that we use to comprehend the world, to simplify groups of relationships. However, the lynchpin is the idea of understanding rights and responsibilities with regard to relationship. The rights are not abstract, at this point. The second key is that government is not understood as the product of our common action, necessarily and primarily (though this can exist), but necessarily and primarily as a person's relationship to the government, and the society's relationship to the government.

Now, there is a more abstract moral beneath this that exists. We claim certain rights against each other because we think they are necessary. This must rise from an abstract system, and eventually an absolute authority. As Christians, we assert certain universal human rights in natural law terminology only insofar as we hope others will not dig back to the absolute authority that it derives from. They agree because they act on assumptions and paradigms, and the Christian ones work with how they apprehend and live in the world. They accept on experience. Logic will kill this if they explicitly reject God, the authoritative source. Many reject God, but they don't use all the logic. Some do use it. Christians try to appeal to those who haven't and hope they won't. This is a natural law argument: finding common ground, but refusing to go deeper, when the Christian knows it runs deeper. To run all the way down would be to lose the argument (which is to say, not find resolution between the two) because the two are not connected at their source. However, many people run on Christian assumptions, and we lightly appeal to those. We also appeal to the fact that they work.

Some do not work so obviously, at least in one generation, such as religion itself. It is obvious then that the state must be non-religious with regard to religion. Some things it will find common agreement on, among its people.

rethinking a GOP policy

The third presidential debate just finished. I had heard that Barack Obama wanted to give everyone in America money for college, and I had dismissed it as a highfalutin, liberal salute to the clouds, where we solve all our problems simply by rubbing the government's magic piggy bank and getting what we ask for. Tonight, though, he mentioned his plan in the debate - 4000 dollars to anyone who wants to go to college ... plus they need to do some kind of community service to earn that money. Interesting.

The conservative response to this is typical - you're still dishing out $4000 at will. However, I noticed in this same debate John McCain's health plan, the core of which is a $5000 tax break to be used specifically for healthcare. Where does this money come from? Unless there is a specific accompanying spending cut (and there is none), this is the same as saying you are going to hand out $5000 to everyone to use for healthcare. The difference is that Obama (I believe) plans to incorporate his college education plan into his tax scheme, while McCain does not account for his lost revenue. The 800 lb gorilla - 12 figure budget deficits - is not going away under the McCain administration. Let's be honest.

Next we have McCain talking about his voucher plan for primary/secondary education: give everyone the money they are essentially paying in taxes (plus the money of taxpayers who don't have kids in school) for education, and let them spend it on whatever plan they want. The only difference here is that we do not have to think of a new tax or cost, since it is already built into the system in current taxes. Same idea, though.

But it is also quite similar to Obama's college education plan. Allocate a set amount of funds to anyone who would need it, and they have to use it for that purpose, but they get a whole range of choices. So the government is not providing the education, but it is helping to fund it (that is, society is funding the education, but that is provided under the laws of the free market). To be honest, I think the only objections the Republicans can have with this are 2: (1) that it is a new cost, and neocon knee-jerk reaction is to oppose new costs. I know this because it is the explicit way my Republican neocon office works. Every bill is considered and often questioned on cost before social value. This may not be wrong, but it is a statement of fact. (2) (a) College education is typically a field that requires free thinking and open academic debate, and has been built on this concept; (b) we all know what happens when federal funding comes into play - an institution must meet certain standards - and Washington ideology WILL come into play in this. Some schools (those with religious backgrounds) will feel they cannot participate in the program, and their students will pay attention to the fact that they need an extra 4000 bucks.

Valid objections. However, the same objections play into school vouchers (and to a much lesser extent, the McCain healthcare plan) - and by now we should realize that the Obama college plan is a kind of school voucher.

And then there is this community service element. To be honest, I kind of like it. Get people into community involvement, which is political involvement, of a sort. It is also a great ground to breed maturity, since it is real responsibility. If they slack off they don't get the money. Maybe they could do all the work in one solid year before college - a year in the real world before college always enhances a student's seriousness in the classroom.

Now, it is true that this would essentially shift the onus of supporting college education to the federal government, where it has been held by the states for the last hundred years. I will agree with the Republicans that this is troublesome - but it is not a trump card, and the clever policy proposal needs to be considered in its entirety. These kinds of proposals can have serious debate - which is now impossible on issues such as abortion.

Here is another concern about the plan, though - part of the reason college costs raise about 5-7% a year is that they can. People can get the loans, or pay outright, so colleges will increase the cost. If we take on $4000 that each person now has, I think we only shift the cost $4000 to the right. College will initially be $4000 cheaper, but colleges always have more spending they want to do - research, high tech classrooms, etc. The cost will increase again as people (and the colleges) know they can just get the new money increases in loans, just like they did before.

COUNTERARGUMENT: There are a number of people who cannot afford to go to college at all, who would like to go and are capable of being accepted. They have $5000, but tuition is $9000 - Obama's plan helps them go. The college brings in a new $9000 it did not have before; colleges will immediately be receiving more tuition money under the Obama plan. If they raise the rates, they know they will be losing people at the margins - those that just became able to pay the $9000 tuition, but cannot afford the $10,000. The college knows it has this new money, and will not wish to lose it.

REBUTTAL: Colleges already have people at the margins who cannot afford to pay the slightly higher rates, but costs still go up 5-7% a year - and the students do not drop out (at least not enough to stop the increase). There is only one group of people in America who know the answer this riddle - college students. Many students enter college with enough money and loans to get through at the current tuition rate; rates go up and they cannot afford it. However, once you already have student loans, it is not so hard to figure out how to get more, or how to increase them. Non-students would not have a clue where to begin, but those who already have the loans have a foot in the door, and a vested interest in figuring out how to get that new money (few people want to cut their education short of the degree). Moreover, there is another group with a vested interest in the students finding new loans - the school. Every school has an office full of staff to help out, because the college wants to keep its kids in school, too. So the system is weighted toward those students in college. If they can get in, they will take on more loans than they expected. Under the Obama plan, a new group would be added to this margin, and a new group would be shackled with the very burdensome student loans Obama is trying to relieve.

If this system is hardly different than McCain's voucher plans, we may have reason to fear about those, too. The college-education-costs problem is a free market problem. Karl Marx and David Ricardo (economists not usually grouped together) both noted this when each explained that an employer will generally pay his employees as low as he can to keep them employed and productive. Marx saw the problem of this in a saturated labor market (but confused this with the way future unsaturated labor markets might work, in more of an equilibrium). So part of the way out of the problem is decreased labor - that is, less demand for work and wages. This cannot be factored into the education problem because nobody wants to decrease the demand for education, which is not a material product, though it acts like one when strict market conditions are applied to it. The other way out of the problem is that growth will distribute a certain amount of wealth - we know this to be part of the West's escape from abject labor conditions in early industrialism. However, education cannot receive this solution either, since student loans (which are perceived to be the problem here) already function on an assumption of future increase in wealth. A college student has no money, but with a college education he will earn more in the future; so a loan is simply making that future growth pay for the education. Many people get out of this eventually, because they will earn more money than their loans cost. But some will not. Some cannot make up their mind about their career for a while, and they eventually work jobs that do not require college education or pay high salaries. However, no one sees this coming when they take out the loans.

This is all to say that more loans will not help solve the so-called college education problem, because they are the perceived problem. Actually, this is all to take it a step further and say that if we apply the laws of the free market to primary and secondary schooling as well, the exact same thing will happen. Families with kids already in private schools will stay, but will be able to afford to pay more, so the tuition will rise. Those with kids in public schools will likely move out, especially as new private schools are built, as will inevitably happen under a voucher system. That is, the system will become privatized. Even if we still have public schools, they will have to behave like private schools. At that point there is no rationale for public schools, and they ought to be completely privatized, which would make no difference in the way they would be acting anyway. Regardless of whether they are officially privatized, there will be more elite schools to cater to the wealthy. The middle income folks will get middle education, because that is what they can afford. The poor will get the worst. Everyone will get $5000 to spend, but the poor will have no more than that. The middle income people will have a little more than that - as middle class, they know the importance of education and will pay a little more to get their kids to a better school. As it stands now, you have to pay a lot more to go to a better, private school (the full tuition amount). But with privatization of this education, you could get a little better education for a little more money. These incremental steps are much easier for people to take, and this is similar to the "foot in the door" phenomenon that gets college students to take out a little more for loans once they are in. Eventually, we can see people taking out small loans to help, and then slightly larger. The situation will eventually mirror that of college education.

And of course the final result will be education stratified in the same way as income. Some schools will have high endowments that enable them to accept poorer students (a la Princeton University), and charitable scholarships will help. But we all know what the general skyline will look like: the rich will be in great schools, the middle income folks in decent schools, and the poor in the schools that no one else wants to go to. The good teachers will be lured to the richer schools, because that is where the money will be. The only liberal solution to the new mess will be higher subsidies for the poorer students. We also know this policy path quite well.

The reason for the revulsiveness of this solution is that education is not commidifiable. It should not be packaged and sold like a name brand product (or, if you cannot afford it, the generic brand). Sure - there would be regulation to ensure kids were getting real education, but this only means that education would be regulated like pharmaceuticals. The FDA ensures we get nothing dangerous, but drug companies are free to make their prices. Just like GM sold a "car for every purse" so does every other good product under capitalism. We would get a different kind of school for every income level. It is inevitable.

Public education arose because it was believed that everybody needed a certain level of it, not just those who could afford it, and not even just those who decided to spend the money if they had it (there will always be those who can afford it but choose to spend their money elsewhere - as some do with health insurance). School was made available and compulsory. College education, though, was seen as a non-necessity and therefore left private. While college education has certainly become more needed today, that problem was partly solved 100 years ago with the creation of many of the state universities. The lower and even more affordable level of community colleges was also made available under the state higher education system.

It is without question that a high school degree is necessary in America. One can certainly get by with just that, and the diligent (though poor) are typically able to get an associate's degree at a community college, if it is pursued. Privatizing the high school degree, though, will almost certainly mean that fewer people will achieve it. We must recognize that free markets have benefits (such as identifying problems and incentivizing solutions), but they have many consequences otherwise. Among these are product differentiation, the charging of the highest possible price, shifting payment to borrowing/loans if the product is valued enough, and essentially (and necessarily) viewing the product entirely within its material aspects. Because we chose, in the 19th Century, to view the material hurdles to primary education as less important than their immateral product, we have the public system we do today. While changing that system to a voucher system will give better education to some, we can be certain that some others will receive worse. The conservative opinion must not be to enter down this reckless path.

I may not be right on all this, but the thoughts are more coherent than the facts

Tomorrow will be the last vote on the current bailout package. Either the House will pass it and we will enter a new social conception of the public good, or the bill will be entirely discarded, and they may try to scrap together some kind of new stimulus package, which will include a suspension of the mark-to-market accounting rule and at least another $100 billion in spending. It is possible the latter will never have a shot, because House leaders are keeping tight tabs on their votes this time around, and will not see the embarrassment of another failure.

This whole issue is incredibly complicated. For those who love finding a culprit to blame (stand up, everyone) - well, it is easy to pick from the plethora of available candidates. The mess involves a series of problems acting on each other - no one is to blame, but many are at fault.

The federal housing policies, seeking to increase home ownership, especially among minorities, was a noble thought, and as far as I know did not find significant partisan opposition. It was very conservative, in linking social stability to land ownership, personal responsibility, and people committed to the place in which they live. The subprime lending necessitated by this, it seems, could have been justified since people might become more responsible and neighborhoods more stable, resulting in better credit scores and increasing income, respectively. "People are basically good if you just give them a chance" and "It takes money to make money." A nonessentializing, politically correct way of saying the poor are stuck in a system, which can and must be broken. You get the idea.

Anyway, we all know how this lead to the bloating of Fannie and Freddie as well as some of the subprime loans that helped bring down this economic ship. Further, then, Fannie and Freddie grew beyond their mandates and sold their debt in securities to rich people around the world (which has and will lead to speculation that the government ensurement of the GSEs' debt by takeover was actually pressured by these foreign investors). The companies grew to such a size that their tanking would become the economy's. Here is why we may blame their CEOs. If you haven't been counting, we've already also blamed the Carter and Clinton administrations for housing policy.

There were voices prophesying about the problems, but let's be honest - huge government undertakings won't be fundamentally changed unless there is a crisis or major abuse that can be masqueraded in front of the public for sufficient rage to ensue. Which is why crisis is always an opportunity - it creates a vague public demand that can be shaped into outrage and used by leaders to create the public support necessitating the change. Governmental leaders are too conservative to change the Leviathon because their minds become lost in it once they enter, and then formed by it. They cannot conceive another way, because the alternative will have holes as well, and it is always preferable to keep an imperfect situation than to replace it with an imperfect future. Like I said, the public outrage must arise or be facilitated through an occurring crisis. That demand can force the change, at least by the House of Representatives - the Senate being slightly more removed, of course.

Back to the blame. Turns out the fat cats are really good at making money, and always inventing new ways of doing so. Some folks at JP Morgan decided they needed to find a way to free up some of the capital sitting in their banks to invest elsewhere. The government had mandated they keep a certain amount of cash in case people defaulted on mortgages that the company owned. A fair regulation that has kept investment banks from their own greed - otherwise they would bring themselves to the point of bankruptcy in their mad rush for profit by leaving no cash on hand to pay when it was really demanded of them - when people stopped making mortgage payments and they could longer expect money that they had counted on coming in. So here was JP's trick: spread the risk by rolling a bunch of mortgages together and selling the liability away. Then, you don't really have the mortgage anymore, since the person who bought it from you in that package is insuring it by giving you the value now. You'd keep collecting on the interest, some of which you'd give to the buyer, but you'd have all this future-cash (that you should've had to wait for) on hand PLUS the government would not force you to keep cash in the bank because the mortgage was not really your asset anymore. This is a credit defualt swap, invented in a workable way in 1993, and then pushed into the mainstream around 1997. In 2006, the market for CDS's was $66 trillion, four times the value of the the stock market. We have blame here for JP Morgan's people, the financial industry for falling into this speculative, ballooning, risky mess - and the SEC and other regulators for failing to regulate CDS's.

The housing bubble might be blamed on the Federal Reserve for dropping interest rates below 1% after September 11. Adjusting for inflation, this meant a negative interest rate, and why not make a major purchase, then? Not only that, but lending institutions encouraged people, in this market of rising house prices, to increase their existing loans to the new value of their house. Got a $350,000 loan on a house now worth $400,000? Up your mortgage (this is called a home equity loan) and buy that new Hummer. Or send your kid to college. Either way, when the bubble popped and prices slipped back down, people were caught owing more money (on the principal) than their house was worth. They could not even sell the house and be out of debt. Foreclosure, bankruptcy maybe, you get the idea. We can blame the banks for being deceptive in pushing this, and people for not being financially responsible.

Also, the week dollar, rising fuel prices, rising food prices. It's a mess.

Why the blame? It seems like a human need. It is sad, but our minds operate by using paradigms to facilitate our thinking. What this means is that we can't think thoughts that don't make sense. Religion helps us do this, as do stories, worldviews, etc. I think blame does, too. Complicated cause and effect is difficult to process and probably causes as much tension as it fails to relieve. So there is a kind of catharsis to blaming a something discrete, a kind of relief.

Of course, it is also necessary to identify causes to correct them. Natural. Withholding judgment, however, is not. Typically they are only highly disciplined judges who can live through presuming innocence until guilt is proved. I think the need to make sense of the world causes us to rush to judgments even when they are not warranted, completely, because that makes the best sense of the facts for the time being, and relieves the distress of not knowing. This is why people always complain of Congress not "doing anything." Concrete action, like concrete blame, is soothing to the soul, and takes a psychological role as well as an emotional one. It helps us make sense of things.

The funny thing is that it is not that the person needs to be caught, or the wrong corrected - though this also plays a psychological function. The laying of blame is enough to complete the circle in their minds - to arrange the seemingly haphazard stars into a constellation.