What's Wrong with Substance?
GMU economist Peter Boettke is yet another to come out with a mixture of critique and puzzlement about the Obama campaign. Like others who've commented on this before him, particularly of a libertarian bent, he has a great respect for Obama's economic advisers and I'm sure he's referring to chief adviser Austan Goolsbee even though he doesn't mention him by name.
As you might expect, Boettke doesn't really take to Obama's populist rhetoric. He says it has a flavor that reminds one of William Jennings Bryan's "classic class warfare" populism...
where the poor masses are extolled while the rich are ridiculed
His central point, which I share completely even though I still mildly support Obama, is:
But the reality is that he runs on a populist program that says very little of substance, except that he represents hope and change. But why can't he run on the more "reasonable" policies that his economic advisers are designing to address the economic problems he deems as vital for implementing a program of hope and change? Is this because even a fairly left leaning but respectable economist is more 'right wing' from the point of view of the population than is popularly acceptable? I guess the recognition of scarcity, the necessity of trade offs and the importance of incentives is just too much.
Is it just too much?? I often wonder that myself. It's not ideological to view policy ideas and prescriptions on the basis of scarcity, trade offs and incentives...not to mention a recognition of how previous policies contributed to current circumstances in terms affecting behavior via incentives and trade offs and so on. Should such a simple basic methodology be considered "right-wing" or conservative or libertarian? I don't think so.
What do you think? What would happen if Obama were to discuss real policy ideas directly from his advisers instead of a blend of vague "hope and change" wrapped in a blanket of rather ordinary and rank populism?...Populism that probably has little to nothing to do with any real policies he may have in mind. Of course, I'm not talking about speaking verbatim from policy papers but rather conveying the very real tenets of policy ideas and explaining why and how it would work in easily digestible terms. Would THAT lose an audience or come across as "right-wing" to folks who just want to hear populism void of any real policy ideas of realistic methods for achieving results? I'd like to think not but I could be wrong. Granted, there are liberals and Obama supporters who would welcome such an approach and nod in approval...their wheels turning as they conceptualize how XYZ-policy would work in action AND achieve its stated results. But there are a great many who just eat up the standard red-meat fare and may be put off by anything real.
Of course, if politics and elections are as important and influential as many fervently insist they are, don't you think real substantive discussion about policy ideas and the defense of those ideas against other candidates doing the same thing would be the norm?? Funny that they aren't.
- John's diary
- Login or register to post comments
Comments :
Brad Spangler has the low down
Clear Evidence of the Superiority of the Anti-Political Approach
With all due respect to The Austrian Economist, Ron Paul demonstrated the absolute upper-bound on votes one can expect from targeting those who frequent the Austrian Economic blogosphere. Spangler is dead on about any delusions of relying on politics to transform the typical American into a libertarian policy geek.
By the same token, abject economic populism has never really sold well in America and I never take it that seriously when expounded on the campaign trail. But the problem is when a George Bush failed corporatist economic policy gets portrayed as free market economics and then even worse statism gets proposed as the solution, and Americans, even though generally skeptical at heart about big government, are ready for any kind of change.
Oh I agree
couple things, though.
Ron Paul was not the greatest communicator of ideas. Even though I agreed with him on general substance, I didn't care for his messaging and constant harping on the Fed among other things.
And Boettke (and i) is not talking about libertarian policies. He's talking about fleshing out the sensible policies that Obama's advisers have and campaigning more on them instead of using constant populism. Some like Liberal economists, politics aside, still use basic sensible tenets like incentives and trade offs when advocating policy and it's still worlds better than populism.
To consider using such tenets as being "libertarian" or even right-wing speaks to exactly to what Boettke is talking about and I agree with him that minding such factors is not libertarian...it's just sound reasoning on the most basic level and people like Goolsbee still employ such factors.
As for Bush, I agree 110%. Hell, that misconception still happens here even though people like you, me and QB constantly show otherwise.
the importance of elections, and hurricanes
Elections are important...but that does not mean that voting is an important decision (in any direct, practical manner). This is a subtle distinction, and I think it's very hard for a person to keep these two types of "importance" separate from each other. In fact, I think that many people (i.e. politicians) go out of their way to conflate these two types of importance--it's how they legitimize the state.
As an analogy, elections are like hurricanes -- they are a single, identifiable event for which small changes in behavior can have drastic changes in outcome, due to the immense power embodied in the system.
However, there's not much for us to do about it except prepare to weather the storm. Expecting your vote to impact an election is akin to setting up a fan in the hope that it will dissipate a hurricane.
"You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man." --Frederick Douglas
agreed for the most part
and this goes back to a previous discussion on bottle necks.
But it's also where part of the problem lies. the aggregate of the votes are important but the individual vote is not. Therefore, one's vote need not be well-thought out because to the man, it's inconsequential. That's people will vote on personality and skin color and aimless rhetoric.
Herein lies the problem:
Nowadays, no matter what it may be, whether it be politics, art, science, you name it; there seems to be no room for substance these days. It's also true in the movies and, often enough, in theatre, where "style" often takes the place of substance. Quite sad, indeed.