Why are you a liberal?

[meiroy]

There are reasons why we have these fences: like social security, the Fed, and financial regulation. And we saw what happened when we took one of those down without asking why it was there in the first place. And there other sectors where there is substantial evidence that the government does a better job than a privatized system ... like health insurance that is bound to become more important.

 

Exactly, and some of these fences are just a necessary evil.  They help in keeping at bay those men who just want to watch the world burn, and those who want to take over it or take advantage of it.  And there are people like that, plenty enough in the history books. The fences are not perfect, far from it, yet they are better than nothing.

 

[eclecticvalue]

Saw this on Reddit shortly after reading this board, and thought some here might like it:

 

Good read, people need to see the NBC show Rock the Center. They did a segment on the extremism of news on television. It was eye opening to watch Bill O Reilly come forth and talk about how vitriol sells. The segment was on 3 hours ago.

[moore_capital54]

Plan, you had me with Chesterton :), although (and not to get drawn into a political discussion) I think the idea that Chesterton, Dickens, Johnson, Lewis, or any of the other true intellectual giants of Britain would identify or support modern progressives is outright lunacy - and not saying your drawing that connection - just felt like it needed to be pointed out. Also, I think the idiosyncratic differences of the countries above vis a vi their tax rates (and this discussion) makes any comparison specious at best...so I would hesitate to refer to the inference as a fact to say the least.

 

Anyhow, Chesterton's book on Dicken's was an absolute masterpiece. The best ever written by far... 

 

You are probably correct on that point AAOI, Dickens and Chesterton probably would not even imagine the modern welfare state. They could also not imagine the level of wealth that we currently have. What was important was the system and the balance. Also, if you follow that conservative lineage to more modern times you will find people like Eisenhower, Rockefeller and George Romney that were concerned with the Goldwater revolution and Nixon's southern strategy ...  and were always "good sports".

 

Also, is not to say we have not increased the scope of Liberty over the last 150 years and the State has played a key role in it. Why we should not increase also the scope of equality, fraternity, security, and even happiness with the level of wealth that we have ?... well that is a decision that the republican framework has been answering over time. And it is a great framework.

 

There are reasons why we have these fences: like social security, the Fed, and financial regulation. And we saw what happened when we took one of those down without asking why it was there in the first place. And there other sectors where there is substantial evidence that the government does a better job than a privatized system ... like health insurance that is bound to become more important.

 

You know that I would love to throw some Keynes and data to the mix (smile) . But since were are at the level of literature and philosophy, and I have not packed for an early flight, I will leave it at that.

 

"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."

 

PlanMaestro, you strike me as one of the most brilliant posters on the board. Please do me a favour and read some biographies about Vanderbilt (TJ Stiles) and Rockefeller before you say the level of wealth today is incomparable to that at the time of Dickens. Frankly the level of wealth today is nothing near the levels that had been previously experienced as a percentage of GDP. Today a billionaire can buy 10 high priced condo's with his wealth and based on Bloomberg there are only 100 humans with a net worth over $10 Billion. Forbes pegs 400 with over $1 Billion.

 

The redistribution has ALREADY occurred. Money simply does not provide the same purchasing power it used to. .We now live in a world where the average family will need $5-10 million in gross income over 50-100 years just in order to keep up with the jones's. The carrot's will dangle in front of them as they try and grab this prize that is continually escaping them. Meanwhile the saver with the $5-10 million cannot earn an income on that capital without taking risk. And all the excess in the system is used for unproductive means...

 

[Kraven]

 

  Imagine that Warren, Charlie, Paulson, Simmons, Klarman and Soros had been born in a hut in the middle of the Congo rainforest ~70 years ago. The difference between the life they would have had there and the one they have had in the US is called civilization. The price of civilization is called taxes.

 

hmm than you would have a white sextuplets in the middle of a Congo rain-forest with at least one of the babies cooing in yiddish... Someone would probably raise an eyebrow.

 

That was pretty funny.

[AAOI]

Plan, you had me with Chesterton :), although (and not to get drawn into a political discussion) I think the idea that Chesterton, Dickens, Johnson, Lewis, or any of the other true intellectual giants of Britain would identify or support modern progressives is outright lunacy - and not saying your drawing that connection - just felt like it needed to be pointed out. Also, I think the idiosyncratic differences of the countries above vis a vi their tax rates (and this discussion) makes any comparison specious at best...so I would hesitate to refer to the inference as a fact to say the least.

 

Anyhow, Chesterton's book on Dicken's was an absolute masterpiece. The best ever written by far... 

 

You are probably correct on that point AAOI, Dickens and Chesterton probably would not even imagine the modern welfare state. They could also not imagine the level of wealth that we currently have. What was important was the system and the balance. Also, if you follow that conservative lineage to more modern times you will find people like Eisenhower, Rockefeller and George Romney that were concerned with the Goldwater revolution and Nixon's southern strategy ...  and were always "good sports".

 

Also, is not to say we have not increased the scope of Liberty over the last 150 years and the State has played a key role in it. Why we should not increase also the scope of equality, fraternity, security, and even happiness with the level of wealth that we have ?... well that is a decision that the republican framework has been answering over time. And it is a great framework.

 

There are reasons why we have these fences: like social security, the Fed, and financial regulation. And we saw what happened when we took one of those down without asking why it was there in the first place. And there other sectors where there is substantial evidence that the government does a better job than a privatized system ... like health insurance that is bound to become more important.

 

You know that I would love to throw some Keynes and data to the mix (smile) . But since were are at the level of literature and philosophy, and I have not packed for an early flight, I will leave it at that.

 

"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected."

 

Great points as always and balance is what its all about - and of course, any true civilization will take care of those that truly can't take care of themselves. That's not what we have today. That, and Moore's point is a great one and personally I think the balance is substantially out of whack and the pendulum must swing back...the center of the modern nanny state simply will not hold my friend.

 

Ha, yes, it was late last night and after posting I immediately regretted not throwing Keynes in the mix - was certain I'd get pushback on that. But once again though there's the rub, as I'm pretty confident that Keynes himself wouldn't even recognize the progressive economists that bear his name presently.

 

"There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning society than to debauch the currency" - J.M. Keynes 

 

;)

 

 

 

[alwaysinvert]

 

What is the use of data when we have ideology?

 

 

OK, so we agree that a civilized country need taxes. The question is how much.  As value investors, we should avoid the ideological crap and go straight to the numbers. These are the top 10 countries in terms of Human Development index, a measure of the "standard of living" or the "quality of life", and their tax revenue as a function of GDP

 

Country                  Tax revenue/GDP

1. Norway                          43.6%

2. Australia                        30.8%

3. Netherlands                    39.8%

4. United States                26.9%

5. New Zealand                  34.5%

6. Canada                          32.2%

7. Ireland                          30.8%

8. Liechenstain                  ? but probably very low

9. Germany                        40.6

10. Sweden                        47.9

 

  You see very little correlation between standards of living and taxes. The tax rate in the US is probably average in the world. Sweden's is one of the highest. You could increase taxes in the US by 50-80% and still live as well as people do in Germany, the Netherlands or Sweden, some of the most civilized, free, humane, economically developed and innovative societies in the world. Those are the facts. And given those facts, saying that a country like the US will be destroyed if you increase its taxes is just not true.

Data can be used for anything when mixed with ideology :) Correlation does not equal causation.

 

The truth is Sweden's wealth was built to a huge extent in an environment of low taxes and free markets. I see this constant glorification of Swedish/Scandinavian system by American Liberals. As a Swede myself, I have always been envious of the American way, so this is a bit puzzling to me.

 

For an alternative theory, which harks back all the way to Weber, see this report http://www.iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files/Sweden%20Paper-%20revised.pdf

 

One important reason why Sweden performs well according to many social metrics has its roots

in history and  sociology: Sweden and other Scandinavian nations have, for hundreds of years,

benefited from sound institutions, potentially a strong Lutheran work ethic and high levels of trust,

civic participation, and cooperation. These cultural  phenomena do not disappear when Swedes

cross the Atlantic and emigrate to the USA. The 4.4 million or so Americans with Swedish origins

are considerably richer than average Americans, as are other immigrant groups from Scandinavia.

If Americans with Swedish ancestry were to form their own country, their per capita GDP would be

$56,900, more than $10,000 above the income of the average American. This is also far above

Swedish GDP per capita, at $36,600. Swedes living in the USA are thus approximately 53 per cent

more wealthy than Swedes (excluding immigrants) in their native country (OECD, 2009; US Census

database).

It should be noted that those Swedes who migrated to the USA, predominately in the nineteenth

century, were anything but the elite. Rather, it was often those escaping poverty and famine. The

success of this group illustrates both the pervasiveness of norms and low-level social institutions,

which to some degree have been hindered in the pursuit to create ‘social good’ by the economic

policies implemented in Sweden. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Americans

with Swedish ancestry do not have significantly higher aptitude test-scores than other  European

immigrant groups, and score no higher than Swedes in Sweden, which confirms that immigrant

Swedes were not a ‘selected’ elite group.

6

A Scandinavian economist once said to Milton Friedman, ‘In Scandinavia, we have no poverty’.

Milton Friedman replied, ‘That’s interesting, because in America, among Scandinavians, we have

no poverty, either’ (quoted by Kotkin, 2009). Indeed, the poverty rate for Americans with Swedish

ancestry is only 6.7 per cent: half the US average (US Census). Economists Notten and Neubourg

(2007) calculated that the poverty rate in Sweden using the American poverty threshold was an

identical 6.7 percent, though it should be noted that the Swedish figure includes poor immigrants.

 

As late as 1950, Swedish tax revenues were still only around 21 per cent of GDP. The

policy shift towards a big state and higher taxes occurred mainly during the next thirty

years, as taxes increased by almost one per cent of GDP annually

 

The rapid growth of the state in the late 1960s and 1970s led to a large decline in Sweden’s

relative economic  performance. In 1975, Sweden was the 4th richest industrialised

country in terms of GDP per head. By 1993, it had fallen to 14th.

 

Since the economic crisis of the early 1990s, Swedish governments have rolled back the

state and introduced market reforms in sectors such as education, health and pensions.

Economic freedom has increased in Sweden while it has declined in the UK and USA.

Sweden’s relative economic performance has improved accordingly.

 

Big  government  had  a  devastating  impact  on  entrepreneurship.  After  1970,  the

establishment of new firms dropped significantly. Among the 100 firms with the highest

revenues in Sweden in 2004, only two were entrepreneurial Swedish firms founded after

1970, compared with 21 founded before 1913

Yes, it's from a biased source, obviously. Like almost anything else, but check it out anyway. I think there is a lot to be said for cultural factors when looking at that list of countries.

 

Norway is a bit of an outlier because of their oil - all the other top countries have considerably lower tax rates, which is interesting. And it should be said that HDI as a measurement is considerably biased towards more equal socities. All ways of measuring are flawed and nothing can capture everything (like p/e, p/b, ev/ebitda etc) so we should be aware of that.

[AAOI]

 

What is the use of data when we have ideology?

 

 

OK, so we agree that a civilized country need taxes. The question is how much.  As value investors, we should avoid the ideological crap and go straight to the numbers. These are the top 10 countries in terms of Human Development index, a measure of the "standard of living" or the "quality of life", and their tax revenue as a function of GDP

 

Country                  Tax revenue/GDP

1. Norway                          43.6%

2. Australia                        30.8%

3. Netherlands                    39.8%

4. United States                26.9%

5. New Zealand                  34.5%

6. Canada                          32.2%

7. Ireland                          30.8%

8. Liechenstain                  ? but probably very low

9. Germany                        40.6

10. Sweden                        47.9

 

  You see very little correlation between standards of living and taxes. The tax rate in the US is probably average in the world. Sweden's is one of the highest. You could increase taxes in the US by 50-80% and still live as well as people do in Germany, the Netherlands or Sweden, some of the most civilized, free, humane, economically developed and innovative societies in the world. Those are the facts. And given those facts, saying that a country like the US will be destroyed if you increase its taxes is just not true.

Data can be used for anything when mixed with ideology :) Correlation does not equal causation.

 

The truth is Sweden's wealth was built to a huge extent in an environment of low taxes and free markets. I see this constant glorification of Swedish/Scandinavian system by American Liberals. As a Swede myself, I have always been envious of the American way, so this is a bit puzzling to me.

 

For an alternative theory, which harks back all the way to Weber, see this report http://www.iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files/Sweden%20Paper-%20revised.pdf

 

One important reason why Sweden performs well according to many social metrics has its roots

in history and  sociology: Sweden and other Scandinavian nations have, for hundreds of years,

benefited from sound institutions, potentially a strong Lutheran work ethic and high levels of trust,

civic participation, and cooperation. These cultural  phenomena do not disappear when Swedes

cross the Atlantic and emigrate to the USA. The 4.4 million or so Americans with Swedish origins

are considerably richer than average Americans, as are other immigrant groups from Scandinavia.

If Americans with Swedish ancestry were to form their own country, their per capita GDP would be

$56,900, more than $10,000 above the income of the average American. This is also far above

Swedish GDP per capita, at $36,600. Swedes living in the USA are thus approximately 53 per cent

more wealthy than Swedes (excluding immigrants) in their native country (OECD, 2009; US Census

database).

It should be noted that those Swedes who migrated to the USA, predominately in the nineteenth

century, were anything but the elite. Rather, it was often those escaping poverty and famine. The

success of this group illustrates both the pervasiveness of norms and low-level social institutions,

which to some degree have been hindered in the pursuit to create ‘social good’ by the economic

policies implemented in Sweden. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Americans

with Swedish ancestry do not have significantly higher aptitude test-scores than other  European

immigrant groups, and score no higher than Swedes in Sweden, which confirms that immigrant

Swedes were not a ‘selected’ elite group.

6

A Scandinavian economist once said to Milton Friedman, ‘In Scandinavia, we have no poverty’.

Milton Friedman replied, ‘That’s interesting, because in America, among Scandinavians, we have

no poverty, either’ (quoted by Kotkin, 2009). Indeed, the poverty rate for Americans with Swedish

ancestry is only 6.7 per cent: half the US average (US Census). Economists Notten and Neubourg

(2007) calculated that the poverty rate in Sweden using the American poverty threshold was an

identical 6.7 percent, though it should be noted that the Swedish figure includes poor immigrants.

 

As late as 1950, Swedish tax revenues were still only around 21 per cent of GDP. The

policy shift towards a big state and higher taxes occurred mainly during the next thirty

years, as taxes increased by almost one per cent of GDP annually

 

The rapid growth of the state in the late 1960s and 1970s led to a large decline in Sweden’s

relative economic  performance. In 1975, Sweden was the 4th richest industrialised

country in terms of GDP per head. By 1993, it had fallen to 14th.

 

Since the economic crisis of the early 1990s, Swedish governments have rolled back the

state and introduced market reforms in sectors such as education, health and pensions.

Economic freedom has increased in Sweden while it has declined in the UK and USA.

Sweden’s relative economic performance has improved accordingly.

 

Big  government  had  a  devastating  impact  on  entrepreneurship.  After  1970,  the

establishment of new firms dropped significantly. Among the 100 firms with the highest

revenues in Sweden in 2004, only two were entrepreneurial Swedish firms founded after

1970, compared with 21 founded before 1913

Yes, it's from a biased source, obviously. Like almost anything else, but check it out anyway. I think there is a lot to be said for cultural factors when looking at that list of countries.

 

Norway is a bit of an outlier because of their oil - all the other top countries have considerably lower tax rates, which is interesting. And it should be said that HDI as a measurement is considerably biased towards more equal socities. All ways of measuring are flawed and nothing can capture everything (like p/e, p/b, ev/ebitda etc) so we should be aware of that.

 

Exactly my point!

[txitxo]

 

Norway is a bit of an outlier because of their oil - all the other top countries have considerably lower tax rates, which is interesting. And it should be said that HDI as a measurement is considerably biased towards more equal socities. All ways of measuring are flawed and nothing can capture everything (like p/e, p/b, ev/ebitda etc) so we should be aware of that.

 

  Very thoughtful and interesting post, alwaysinvert. Yes, as a Spaniard I am pretty aware of the difference that  "cultural equipment" makes, in Spain you can have almost a factor of 2 difference in GDP/person or in the unemployment rate between North and South. For instance the highest PISA math score in Spain is that of Castilla y Leon (north of Madrid), 514, above that of Germany (513) and Sweden (494). However, and although you'll find many Castillians in managerial posts in Madrid, its GDP/person is slightly below the Spanish average (and significantly lower than that of Germany or Sweden), probably because there is not a widespread entrepreneurial and risk taking culture in that region.

 

I am nor arguing whether it is better to have a 26% or a 42% tax/GDP ratio. That is something that each country has to decide by itself. My point is that discussions about taxes in the US often have apocalyptic overtones, full of hysterics, as if the US is going to sink in the ocean as Atlantis if you immediately cut spending or, god forbid, you raise taxes by the smallest amount. And experience shows (the Swedish example you mention is  excellent) that you could probably increase taxes 1% per year for the next 15 years, e.g introducing a VAT, and you would still have an amazing standard of living, be a economic powerhouse (look at Germany), and fully pay off the current public debt. At that point you could worry, as Sweden does now, about having too much state (which can certainly become a problem) and lower the tax burden. 

 

 

[rkbabang]

I voted "other" of course, which is to say none.  As soon as you join a party you tend to root for your team regardless of what they do (see liberals overlooking Obama's murderous foreign policies for a good example), it becomes all "Go TEAM!!!!" and all principle, logic and reason go straight out the window.

 

P.S. I'm only picking on Obama because he's the current president, this same thing can be said for all the other parties, the Libertarian Party included.  Anyone who could support Root or Bar and still call themselves a Libertarian has some serious cognitive dissonance going on.  In general politics seems to do this to people.

 

[alwaysinvert]

As a funny side anecdote I can tell you that the only reason H&M was publically listed in 1974 was because of the political climate in Sweden. The founder thought that if worse came to worst, it would make it harder for the government to seize the company (!). They never ever needed outside capital to keep growing. The IPO was shunned by analysts because of it's high price (p/e 6). 

[PlanMaestro]

Some people blame bad campaign managers for Romney’s underperforming campaign, but the problem is deeper. Conservatism has lost the balance between economic and traditional conservatism. The Republican Party has abandoned half of its intellectual ammunition. It appeals to people as potential business owners, but not as parents, neighbors and citizens.

 

David Brooks

The Conservative Mind

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/25/opinion/brooks-the-conservative-mind.html?_r=1

 

But there was another sort of conservative, who would be less familiar now. This was the traditional conservative, intellectual heir to Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, Clinton Rossiter and Catholic social teaching. This sort of conservative didn’t see society as a battleground between government and the private sector. Instead, the traditionalist wanted to preserve a society that functioned as a harmonious ecosystem, in which the different layers were nestled upon each other: individual, family, company, neighborhood, religion, city government and national government.

 

Because they were conservative, they tended to believe that power should be devolved down to the lower levels of this chain. They believed that people should lead disciplined, orderly lives, but doubted that individuals have the ability to do this alone, unaided by social custom and by God. So they were intensely interested in creating the sort of social, economic and political order that would encourage people to work hard, finish school and postpone childbearing until marriage.

 

Recently the blogger Rod Dreher linked to Kirk’s essay, “Ten Conservative Principles,” which gives the flavor of this brand of traditional conservatism. This kind of conservative cherishes custom, believing that the individual is foolish but the species is wise. It is usually best to be guided by precedent.

 

This conservative believes in prudence on the grounds that society is complicated and it’s generally best to reform it steadily but cautiously. Providence moves slowly but the devil hurries.

 

The two conservative tendencies lived in tension. But together they embodied a truth that was put into words by the child psychologist John Bowlby, that life is best organized as a series of daring ventures from a secure base.

 

The economic conservatives were in charge of the daring ventures that produced economic growth. The traditionalists were in charge of establishing the secure base — a society in which families are intact, self-discipline is the rule, children are secure and government provides a subtle hand.

 

[PlanMaestro]

Alain de Botton: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success

 

 

Many of the greatest economic evils of our time are the fruits of risk, uncertainty, and ignorance. It is because particular individuals, fortunate in situation or in abilities, are able to take advantage of uncertainty and ignorance, and also because for the same reason big business is often a lottery, that great inequalities of wealth come about; and these same factors are also the cause of the Unemployment of Labour, or the disappointment of reasonable business expectations, and of the impairment of efficiency and production.

 

Yet the cure lies outside the operations of individuals; it may even be to the interest of individuals to aggravate the disease. I believe that the cure for these things is partly to be sought in the deliberate control of the currency and of credit by a central institution, and partly in the collection and dissemination on a great scale of data relating to the business situation, including the full publicity, by law if necessary, of all business facts which it is useful to know. These measures would involve Society in exercising directive intelligence through some appropriate organ of action over many of the inner intricacies of private business, yet it would leave private initiative and enterprise unhindered. Even if these measures prove insufficient, nevertheless they will furnish us with better knowledge than we have now for taking the next step.

 

John Maynard Keynes,  'The End of Laissez-Faire', 1926

[AAOI]

Some people blame bad campaign managers for Romney’s underperforming campaign, but the problem is deeper. Conservatism has lost the balance between economic and traditional conservatism. The Republican Party has abandoned half of its intellectual ammunition. It appeals to people as potential business owners, but not as parents, neighbors and citizens.

 

David Brooks

The Conservative Mind

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/25/opinion/brooks-the-conservative-mind.html?_r=1

 

But there was another sort of conservative, who would be less familiar now. This was the traditional conservative, intellectual heir to Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, Clinton Rossiter and Catholic social teaching. This sort of conservative didn’t see society as a battleground between government and the private sector. Instead, the traditionalist wanted to preserve a society that functioned as a harmonious ecosystem, in which the different layers were nestled upon each other: individual, family, company, neighborhood, religion, city government and national government.

 

Because they were conservative, they tended to believe that power should be devolved down to the lower levels of this chain. They believed that people should lead disciplined, orderly lives, but doubted that individuals have the ability to do this alone, unaided by social custom and by God. So they were intensely interested in creating the sort of social, economic and political order that would encourage people to work hard, finish school and postpone childbearing until marriage.

 

Recently the blogger Rod Dreher linked to Kirk’s essay, “Ten Conservative Principles,” which gives the flavor of this brand of traditional conservatism. This kind of conservative cherishes custom, believing that the individual is foolish but the species is wise. It is usually best to be guided by precedent.

 

This conservative believes in prudence on the grounds that society is complicated and it’s generally best to reform it steadily but cautiously. Providence moves slowly but the devil hurries.

 

The two conservative tendencies lived in tension. But together they embodied a truth that was put into words by the child psychologist John Bowlby, that life is best organized as a series of daring ventures from a secure base.

 

The economic conservatives were in charge of the daring ventures that produced economic growth. The traditionalists were in charge of establishing the secure base — a society in which families are intact, self-discipline is the rule, children are secure and government provides a subtle hand.

 

+1

[PlanMaestro]

When I lived in the USA, one of the things that striked me was how strange was the Republican party. It was so different and, please I am not trying to insult anyone, crazy compared to any other Conservative movement I've seen previously in Latin America or Europe. With crazy I mean revolutionary. Where were the moderate Gattopardos, that thought that "everything must change so that everything can stay the same".

 

Looks like I have no other option but to buy these fringe books to understand why.

 

Who Remembers Clinton Rossiter?

http://crookedtimber.org/2012/09/29/who-remembers-clinton-rossiter/

 

When I was in Texas I met Carl T. Bogus, law prof. and author of Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism [amazon]. He and I turned out to have something in common: affection for Clinton Rossiter’s forgotten Conservatism in America: The Thankless Persuasion [amazon]. I was trying to baffle someone else at the conference, saying ‘Look, the thing you think conservatism should be is the thing the conservatives made a point of writing off in the 1950’s. You’re a neo-Rossiterian.’ Carl’s ears pricked up. We hit it right off.

 

When I got home I bought and read Bogus’s Buckley book. I liked it, and it filled in some blanks for me, history-wise. Going back and reading the reviews, I see TNR’s reviewer thought Bogus didn’t much improve on John Judis’ earlier Buckley book. I can’t say. Haven’t read it. (But Judis is a good writer so probably his book is good.) But the reviewer does grant that one area in which Bogus really distinguishes himself is in handling the dead and forgotten ‘new conservatives’ - Rossiter, Viereck and Nisbet, in particular. (Kirk was another, but not one who has been forgotten.)

 

The most interesting passages in Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism chronicle the new conservatives of the 1950s—Russell Kirk, Clinton Rossitter, Peter Viereck, and Robert Nisbet — when they might still have become the leading voices of twentieth-century American conservatism. Theirs was a conservatism of high culture, moderation, and communal aspiration, skeptical of the market and anchored in the writings of Edmund Burke. In 2009, when Sam Tanenhaus declared American conservatism dead, in the pages of this magazine and then in his book The Death of Conservatism, it was the death of Burkean conservatism he had in mind, and George W. Bush was the killer. For Bogus, this death occurred much earlier, with Buckley the eager undertaker, pushing some new conservatives away from National Review. Others, such as Russell Kirk, he labored to co-opt and thereby to neutralize. “Today the new conservatism is forgotten,” Bogus writes. “Even most of the intellectuals in the conservative movement itself are unaware that this struggle [between Buckley and the new conservatives] took place.”

 

Yep, nobody remembers Rossiter. Except then David Brooks goes and writes a column, just two days ago, recollecting how when he was a lad at National Review, in 1984, what Bogus calls ‘new conservatism’ was still half the story.

 

 

[PlanMaestro]

Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren

John Maynard Keynes, 1930

http://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/keynes-essaysinpersuasion/keynes-essaysinpersuasion-00-h.html

 

The Golden Age

John Quiggin, 2012

http://www.aeonmagazine.com/living-together/john-quiggin-keynesian-utopiav1/

 

The prevailing world depression, the enormous anomaly of unemployment in a world full of wants, the disastrous mistakes we have made, blind us to what is going on under the surface to the true interpretation. of the trend of things. For I predict that both of the two opposed errors of pessimism which now make so much noise in the world will be proved wrong in our own time-the pessimism of the revolutionaries who think that things are so bad that nothing can save us but violent change, and the pessimism of the reactionaries who consider the balance of our economic and social life so precarious that we must risk no experiments.

 

My purpose in this essay, however, is not to examine the present or the near future, but to disembarrass myself of short views and take wings into the future. What can we reasonably expect the level of our economic life to be a hundred years hence? What are the economic possibilities for our grandchildren?