Roger Pilon mentions two interesting articles on the tea party movement in today’s Wall Street Journal. I have a feeling lots of people don’t read the Saturday Wall Street Journal, even though the Journal has made great efforts to promote it, including promising to deliver it to your home or country estate or private island if you normally get the Journal at your office. As my weekend Washington Posts get thinner and thinner, I can’t help noticing that the weekend Journal is getting bigger. If you didn’t read today’s Journal, you missed — in addition to Haidt and Berkowitz on the tea parties — Judy Shelton’s interview with Robert Mundell, Theodore Dalrymple’s atheist take on the value of religion in the Chilean mine, a brave article by a Chinese activist already under “residential surveillance” about growing agitation for democracy, Matt Ridley on Fibonacci, Larry Miller on the Marx Brothers, Amity Shlaes on American capitalism, and more college football analysis than the Washington Post.

In a long essay in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, “What the Tea Partiers Really Want,” University of Virginia psychology professor Jonathan Haidt argues, as the subtitle puts it, that “the passion behind the populist insurgency is less about liberty than a particularly American idea of karma.” Taking his cue from Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe’s claim in their new book, Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto, that tea partiers “just want to be free, … so long as we don’t infringe on the same freedom of others,” Haidt notes that his research shows that while self-described libertarians agree most strongly with that view, liberals are not far behind, in contrast with the social conservatives “who make up the bulk of the tea party,” who are more tepid in their endorsement of that idea.

So why are libertarians and conservatives largely teamed up in the tea party? Haidt doesn’t really answer that question. Rather, his main aim, as noted, is to show that the tea party’s moral passion is not so much about liberty as about “an old and very conservative idea” of karma, which “combines the universal human desire that moral accounts should be balanced with a belief that, somehow or other, they will be balanced.” In other words, “kindness, honesty and hard work will (eventually) bring good fortune; cruelty, deceit and laziness will (eventually) bring suffering. No divine intervention is required; it’s just a law of the universe, like gravity.”

Yet in “the last 80 years of American history” the welfare state has undermined that moral balance, Haidt continues, nowhere more clearly, recently, than with the Bush bank bailout, using taxpayer dollars, which Armey and Kibbe claim was the real start of the tea-party movement.

Listen, for example, to Rick Santelli’s “rant heard ’round the world” on CNBC last year and its most famous lines: “The government is promoting bad behavior,” and “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbors’ mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?” It’s a rant about karma, not liberty.

Haidt is certainly on to something here. And he develops and illustrates his thesis in some detail, including how the modern liberals’ focus on equality, and their attraction to government programs securing it, makes them uneasy with this karma, separating them from libertarians and conservatives. But he also argues that research that he and a colleague have done on “the five main psychological ‘foundations’ of morality” shows that “libertarians are morally a bit more similar to liberals than to conservatives,” leading him to conclude that it’s not clear how long the tea party blend of libertarians and conservatives can stay blended.

I won’t go into the details of Haidt’s five main psychological foundations of morality, except to say that, at least as presented in this essay, they raise as many questions as they answer. I will add, however, that lumping people into even self-identified ideological groupings is always problematic, since any such “group” will be constituted by individuals with a range of views and tendencies. Moreover, and more important, the contrast Haidt draws between liberty and what he calls karma is doubtless overdrawn. After all, the “libertarian” focus on liberty and the “conservative” focus on “karma” most often come to the same thing, at bottom. The “conservative” notion of individual responsibility, coupled with positive and negative sanctions, is fully realized only in a regime of liberty of a kind that “libertarians” have long promoted. In fact, to flesh that out more fully, the Journal has another useful essay this morning on the editorial page, Peter Berkowitz’s “Why Liberals Don’t Get the Tea Party Movement.” Much to think about as we cruise to the elections little more than two weeks away.

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Bill Kristol has a plan to help the US military[/caption]

George F. Will has called neoconservatism “a spectacularly misnamed radicalism” whose adherents are “the most radical people in this town.” (It is a shame that the Heritage Foundation has fallen so far from its sensible opposition to the neoconservative vision and evidently bought into the neoconservative program in toto.)

Like other radicals, however, they are pretty good at politics, which is clear from reading their latest offering, a talking points document [.pdf] produced by the “Defending Defense” initiative intended to demonstrate that U.S. military spending is not that large and should not be cut.

I have several things to say about the document, but all of the internet sniping and providing adversarial quotes to journalists probably aren’t the best way to adjudicate the debate. To that end, on behalf of my colleagues I extend the offer of an open, public, live debate to the Defending Defense people: Let’s debate the security of the United States, the strategy to best protect it, and the resources needed to fund the strategy. Any time, any place.

The overarching problem in this debate is that the big spenders keep inserting the red herring of defense expenditures as a percentage of GDP into the debate. This is relevant only as it pertains to their claim that “current levels of defense spending are affordable,” but last time I checked the mere fact that something wouldn’t, in itself, bankrupt the country is not a sufficient conservative justification for a government program.

The logic of basing the military budget on a percentage of GDP would imply that security and economic growth are inversely related. Of course, the simple fact is that economic growth does not pose a threat to the United States and economic contraction does not make us safer. During World War II we spent roughly 40 percent of GDP on our military, and given where we were, that seems sensible to this analyst. But the “given where we were” part of that sentence is doing a lot of work. Where are we today? What are the threats we face? How should we deal with them? How much would it cost to do so? Answers to those questions should provide the grounding for our military budget, not the deeply unconservative justification that “it won’t bankrupt us.”

Another point: It might sound pedantic, but many of what they characterize as “myths” can’t be myths. They might be wrong. They might be poor analytic points. But they can’t be “myths.” To correct just a few of what they call “myths”:

“Pentagon budgets were a “gusher” of new money in the Bush Administration.”

— A metaphor can’t be a myth.

“The United States should not be ‘the world’s policeman.’”

— Preferences aren’t myths.

“Defense spending should focus primarily on ‘winning the wars we’re in.’”

— Again, preferences aren’t myths.

Myths are mistaken empirical claims that people believe, or the stories surrounding mistaken empirical claims that cause people to believe them. For example, lots of people think President Obama signed the TARP. That’s a myth. President Bush did it. The way the neoconservatives are using the word “myth” in the document is something more like “argument I disagree with.”

But let’s take these “myths” one by one and have a look at the analysis.

1) “Additional defense spending is unnecessary as the United States already spends more on defense than half the world combined.”

Interestingly, the authors nowhere argue that additional military spending is necessary, although they strongly imply that it is. In 2005 Tom Donnelly and Gary Schmitt wanted 5 percent of GDP to go to defense, which today would be roughly $730 billion. It wasn’t clear whether they wanted to keep the supplementals going with the 5 percent comprising just the base budget, but with the wars we’re already spending roughly $730 billion on the military as it is. (Also, just a factual correction, the best estimate is that we spend just under what the rest of the world spends combined, not just over.)

The authors also spirit in a normative claim in the first sentence to fend off scrutiny: “No other country in the world has the enduring vital national interests of the United States, and therefore the U.S. military has global reach and responsibilities.” Given the weight hung around this claim, it would have been good if the authors could have offered even a superficial defense of it. They did not.

Instead, they move on to observing that using purchasing power parity, Chinese defense spending is closer to $150 billion than the $78 billion that market exchange rates would indicate. This is solid analysis. I am glad to see that someone has convinced Heritage president Ed Feulner, a leader of “Defending Defense,” to distance himself from his problematic 2007 judgment that “Beijing’s military spending, in purchasing power parity terms, would be around $450 billion — about what America spends.” (Maybe he read my blog post correcting him.)

2) “Pentagon budgets were a ‘gusher’ of new money in the Bush Administration.”

Again, “a gusher” is in the eye of the beholder. For facts, you should turn to the study authored by my colleagues Ben Friedman and Chris Preble. There they point out that U.S. military spending has risen by 50 percent over the last 12 years, not including inflation or the wars. If you include the wars, U.S. military spending has increased by more than 80 percent since 1998. Military spending constitutes 23 percent of the federal budget. That’s real money where I come from.

3) “Cutting waste and excess from the Pentagon budget will provide sufficient funds to make up for shortfalls.”

Depending on whether we change our grand strategy, this is definitely true. Our foreign policy is insolvent today. Given our commitments, defense spending is too low, but the commitments are the problem. We could spend less with fewer commitments and still be safe.

4) “Current levels of defense spending are unaffordable.”

Even though the rhetoric the authors assemble to knock down this claim isn’t very good, I agree with them. (I agree based primarily on Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth’s excellent book, which makes a strong case that the United States can afford a massive military budget.) Big, fabulously wealthy countries like ours can afford to do lots of expensive things, like Medicare Part D or funding a chunk of the defense of Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Israel ourselves. But it doesn’t mean we should, necessarily.

5) “The United States should not be ‘the world’s policeman.’”

Again, this is a preference, not a myth. But the authors’ central defense of the implied claim that we should be the world’s policeman comes in the argument that “the cost of preserving America’s role in the world is far less than would be the cost of having to fight to recover it or, still greater, the cost of losing it altogether. While many Americans would prefer to see our allies and partners play a larger part in securing the blessings of our common liberty, no president of either political party has backed away from America’s global leadership role —a bipartisan consensus that remains strong evidence that American leadership is still necessary to protect the nation’s vital interests.”

This argument, in turn, is based on an unstated theoretical premise, which is that when America isn’t somewhere, all hell breaks loose, and that when all hell breaks loose, it tends to land on our heads. The balance of power doesn’t work, we live in a bandwagoning world not a balancing world, and therefore if we aren’t everywhere, chaos will be, and if chaos is everywhere, it’s going to hit us eventually.

I think this is a silly claim, and I also think the theoretical roots of neoconservative foreign-policy thought are underdeveloped, but it would be good if an actual neoconservative could speak for himself about his own theory of international politics rather than allowing others to try to assemble coherent theoretical groundings for his ideas.

6) “Defense spending should focus primarily on ‘winning the wars we’re in.’”

This might be a surprising area of agreement, but as someone who has long thought that the wars we’re in are dumb (and deeply unconservative), I believe strongly that focusing our defense dollars on winning the wars we’re in is a dumb idea.

Again, though, there’s lots left to discuss, so let’s hope AEI, Heritage, or the Foreign Policy Initiative will agree to a debate.

This summer, the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved a bill that would require foreign companies that import goods to the United States to appoint a legal representative in the United States who could be sued if their products caused injury. Exhibit A in the push for the bill was the case of contaminated drywall from China.

Advocates of the bill, titled the “Foreign Manufacturers Legal Accountability Act,” say it is necessary to ensure compensation for American consumers injured by faulty foreign-made products. Without a designated domestic agent, foreign companies could escape liability by dodging efforts to serve them with papers in a lawsuit. Hearings earlier this year highlighted the case of the drywall, in which damaged homeowners were finding it difficult to sue the Chinese producer.

The trouble with this approach, as my colleague Sallie James and I pointed out in a recent Cato Free Trade Bulletin, is that it would impose an additional burden on importers without adding significantly to the ability of consumers to gain compensation. We argued that sufficient remedies exist without adding a new law that looks suspiciously like a non-tariff trade barrier designed to protect U.S. manufacturers from foreign competitors.

As Exhibit A on our side, it was announced this week that a group of affected homeowners has struck a deal with the Chinese drywall company for compensation. As The Wall Street Journal reported in today’s edition:

Knauf Plasterboard Tianjin, along with suppliers and insurers, agreed to remove and replace the company’s drywall, as well as all the electrical wiring, gas tubing and appliances from 300 homes in four states.

They also agreed to pay relocation expenses while the houses, in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Florida, are repaired. The cost of fixing the houses, expected to take several months, is estimated from $40 to $80 per square foot per home. At $60 per square foot for a 2,500 square-foot home, the cost would be about $150,000.

Although the settlement involves a fraction of the homeowners who have file claims over the past few years, it is seen as a possible model for the resolution of other pending state and federal lawsuits …

The deal for compensation shows that the existing system works reasonably well for foreign-made as well as domestic-made goods. Congress should give up its efforts to place needless obstacles in the way of imports in the name of solving a problem that does not exist.

Jim Harper’s post Monday, responding to communitarian Amitai Etzioni on “strip search” scanners at airports, gives me an opportunity to mount one of my hobbyhorses.

My beef with Etzioni’s conclusory argument isn’t just that, as Jim observes, he purports to “weigh” the individual right to privacy against the common good (here in the guise of “security”) without any real analysis of the magnitudes on both sides. It’s that his framing is fundamentally backwards. The importance of privacy is, to a great extent, a function of its collective dimension—a point to which you’d think a communitarian theorist who’s written an entire book on privacy would be more keenly attuned. If I may indulge in a little self-quotation:

[W]hen we talk about our First Amendment right to free speech, we understand it has a certain dual character: That there’s an individual right grounded in the equal dignity of free citizens that’s violated whenever I’m prohibited from expressing my views. But also a common or collective good that is an important structural precondition of democracy. As a citizen subject to democratic laws, I have a vested interest in the freedom of political discourse whether or not I personally want to [engage in]–or even listen to–controversial speech. Looking at the incredible scope of documented intelligence abuses from the ’60s and ’70s, we can add that I have an interest in knowing whether government officials are trying to silence or intimidate inconvenient journalists, activists, or even legislators. Censorship and arrest are blunt tactics I can see and protest; blackmail or a calculated leak that brings public disgrace are not so obvious. As legal scholar Bill Stuntz has argued, the Founders understood the structural value of the Fourth Amendment as a complement to the First, because it is very hard to make it a crime to pray the wrong way or to discuss radical politics if the police can’t arbitrarily see what people are doing or writing in their homes.

I’m actually somewhat sympathetic to the notion that the individual harms that result from strip scanners are relatively slight, especially when passengers can opt for a pat down instead. In the worst case scenario, some unscrupulous TSA employee might find a way to save and circulate some of these blurry quasi-nude images, the embarrassment potential of which is likely to be mitigated by the fact that the x‑ray view doesn’t really show an identifiable face.

I’m much more concerned about the social effect of making such machines commonplace—of creating a general norm that people who wish to engage in routine travel must expect to expose themselves in this way. As Michel Foucault famously observed, surveillance is not merely the passive gathering of information; it exerts a “disciplinary” power, creating what he called “docile bodies.” The airport becomes a schoolhouse whose lesson is that not even the most intimate spaces escape the gaze of authority.

In his fine book The Naked Crowd, legal scholar Jeff Rosen recounts presenting his students and other audiences with a hypothetical choice between going through a strip scanner and a “Blob Machine”—a similar scanner programmed to filter out the passenger’s body image and project any foreign objects (as determined by density) on a generic wireframe mannequin. Though he assured them that the Blob Machine was just as accurate at detecting hidden objects, he found that in every group some significant number of people still preferred to subject themselves to the strip-scanner, in what Rosen calls “a ritualistic demonstration of their own purity and trustworthiness.” But there may be more to it than that. To expose oneself, render oneself vulnerable, is also closely linked to rituals of subordination—not just in human cultures, but in the animal kingdom. Think of the pack dog signaling his recognition of the alpha male’s (or owner’s) dominance by rolling over to expose his belly. In the context of pervasive fear of terrorism, this kind of routine exposure is a way of reassuring ourselves of the power of our protectors, quite apart from whatever immediate utility the strip-scanners have as a detection and deterrence mechanism. We ought to be a little wary of any “security” measures that seem to feed into that psychological mechanism.

While I don’t think these sorts of considerations ought to be dispositive by themselves in particular circumstances where a security measure is otherwise justifiable in more conventional cost-benefit terms, I think a communitarian commentator in particular ought to be a lot more sensitive to the cumulative cultural effect of many such measures. Formal institutions and rules are important to the preservation of free societies, but so are background norms and expectations. A society that comes to accept as normal the routine observation of our naked bodies by authority as an incident to travel is, I think, in danger of losing some important cultural capital.

On NPR stations this morning, the “Power Breakfast” segment from Capitol News Connection profiled Rep. Betsy Markey (D‑CO), who is fighting hard to keep her seat this year. The reporter noted:

She’s a Blue Dog, one of those fiscally conservative Democrats who frequently complicate things for Party leaders by insisting on spending offsets and the like.

A claim slightly complicated by the reporter’s earlier noting that Markey voted for the $787 billion stimulus bill, the health care overhaul, and cap-and-trade. How exactly does that make her a Blue Dog fiscal conservative? Oh, and in her first year she got a score of 19 percent on tax and spending issues from the National Taxpayers Union. The search for an actual Blue Dog goes on.

But I was really struck by this line about the massive stimulus bill:

MARKEY: [E]very economist from the far left to the far right was saying the government needs to step in because there was absolutely no private sector investment.

This is of course not true. Hundreds of economists went on record against the stimulus bill. The Cato Institute’s full-page ad with their names appeared in all the nation’s major newspapers. It is hard to imagine that Representative Markey missed it. If she wasn’t much on reading newspaper ads, lots of economists wrote op-eds and blog posts opposing the stimulus. If she didn’t read op-eds or blogs either, the ad and the economists were featured on dozens of television programs.

And so we come to the question in this post’s headline: Could Rep. Betsy Markey really be so misinformed that she actually believed that “every economist” supported a massive increase in spending and debt on top of TARP and the other bailouts?

Over at Downsizing Government, we focused on the following issues this week:

• Could the results of the November elections be a nail in the Obama administration’s high-speed rail coffin? Let’s hope.
• The U.S. Postal Service can’t afford its unions.
• A new study finds that federal and state governments have wasted billions of dollars on subsidies for students who didn’t make it past their first year in college.
• The Obama administration’s plan to fix Head Start with some bureaucratic tinkering is not “almost enough to restore a person’s faith in the federal government.”
• Now is a good time to get rid of farm subsidies.

Note: Chris Edwards will be discussing Downsizing Government on Fox News’ Special Report With Bret Baier on Monday @ 6:00 PM EST.