End U.S. COVID-19 Restrictions Now

It’s not in the public interest to sacrifice the young and the healthy to the old, the sick, and the fat. 

Updated September 14, 2020

COVID-19 has upended life globally. As of August 2020, it has directly killed over 800 thousand people  and indirectly killed thousands more due to their not being treated for other medical conditions. It has led to a global recession that may turn into a second Great Depression. Governments worldwide have taken unprecedented powers to enforce social distancing, lockdowns, and other public health measures, and to try to prop up economies.

There are heroes in this worldwide tragedy. Doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers have stepped up at significant personal risk to treat the sick. They should be saluted, along with other essential workers like grocery store workers, police officers, and transit workers who have helped keep us fed, safe, and able to go to where we need to go.

But we must not overlook the collective failure of important institutions that could have prevented this catastrophe. This pandemic is both a scientific and political failure. Scientists knew from the SARS epidemic of 2002 – 2004, and the MERS epidemic beginning in 2012 that certain coronaviruses could be deadly, but didn’t do enough to prevent the COVID-19 pandemic. What could they have done? Universal (aka panviral) coronavirus vaccines or treatments. Isn’t that very difficult? Yes. It would have required the combination of a major research effort, including funding, along with a scientific breakthrough. In other words, a combination of political long-term, strategic planning along with scientific genius. Both are globally lacking in today’s world, and we are now paying the price.

Many countries have combined lockdowns with widespread contact tracing, testing, and social distancing to flatten the curve  The economic cost has been high, but countries that managed to reduce the case count are now reopening (although some of them are locking down again due to renewed COVID-19 spread). In the U.S., this has not been successful. Although it created a temporary flattening of the curve, buying time for health professionals to ramp up testing, PPE, and better treat the disease, we are now seeing a spike in many parts of the U.S. (although this spike is associated with much lower death rates than before). The combination of poor U.S. public health infrastructure, large number of people with chronic health conditions, fragmentary government responses, and history of individual freedom and rejection of government authority, made the global standard COVID-19 public health response a failure in the U.S.

While some commentators have attributed this failure to American decline, others have noted that the projected COVID-19 death count is not comparable to the horrific Spanish Flu of 1918 – 1919, but instead the Asian flu of 1957 – 1958, or Hong Kong flu of 1968 – 1969, in which there were no U.S. shutdowns, and minimal public health response and economic impact. We had better leaders back then who, guided by common sense, understood that shutting down the economy in response to a pandemic would have devastating effects.

At this point, it’s time to reopen the U.S. economy. Repeated widespread lockdowns to flatten the curve are not going to be politically acceptable anymore. The business closures that remain are only postponing the inevitable deaths, while destroying the economy. People are going to become sick and die of COVID-19 whether or not the economy reopens. We might as well reopen it now.

It’s summer as I write this. People are doing less risky outdoor activities. It makes sense to completely open up the economy now. Let’s build up herd immunity among liberated younger people. Continuing the way we’re going with partial closures and restrictions will result in a large number of susceptible people this coming flu season. Then hospitals will be overwhelmed with the combination of flu and COVID-19, and our leaders will demand more shutdowns. Small businesses can survive a single shutdown, but not repeated ones. Very soon, years of hard work and effort among thousands of business owners to build their brands will be flushed down the toilet.

By rescinding all state, county, and local COVID-19 business restrictions, many small and medium-sized businesses will be saved from destruction. Governments are not expropriating wealth, but instead are destroying it by continuing with these restrictions. This will save a large fraction of our middle class, many of whom are small business owners. It will save millions of jobs from elimination. Opening schools will save our children, the future of our country, whose education is at risk of being abandoned. Many school systems refuse to reopen despite the overwhelming evidence that remote schooling is ersatz, especially for disadvantaged kids, and children rarely become seriously ill with COVID-19.

I’ll now discuss some arguments and counterarguments for COVID-19 restrictions.

Economist Paul Krugman argues that Republicans have “sacralized selfishness,” encouraging people to act irresponsibly by going to bars and refusing to wear masks. Implicit in this argument is that it’s selfish for young people to party, hang out at bars, and engage in what otherwise would be a normal social life for a young adult. Taking its argument to its logical conclusion, it’s also selfish for young people to go to school, work, shop, socialize, travel, or do anything other than sit at home and watch Netflix, because there’s the chance that they will catch COVID-19 and pass it onto vulnerable people. That’s one way to look at things.

There’s another way to look at this. We know that people vulnerable to getting seriously ill and dying from COVID-19 include the elderly, those with chronic health conditions like hypertension and diabetes, and the obese. In other words, the old, the sick, and the fat. Isn’t it selfish for the old, the sick, and the fat to tell the young and the healthy that they cannot have a life? They cannot go to school, work, shop, socialize, or do anything that normal, healthy young people do? They cannot do this because there’s a chance they will catch the virus and pass it onto a vulnerable person? Many of the old, sick, and fat were once young and healthy. Back then, they had the opportunity to go to school, work, socialize, travel, and have fun. Isn’t it selfish of them to tell the youth of today that they cannot do what they themselves did when they were younger? That the youth of today must come of age in Great Depression 2, a Great Depression that was caused by a global overreaction to COVID-19, with no opportunities to have a fulfilling career and make money? That the youth of today must pay off massive government debt that we have accumulated trying to prolong the lives of the old, the sick, and the fat?

Another perspective, common in contemporary America, is the rights perspective. The old, the sick, and the fat have a right to life, that’s being taken away by the irresponsible young and healthy who party and pass on the virus to them. That’s one perspective, and the right to life is important.

But there’s another perspective: the right to liberty. The young and healthy have a right to liberty, which is being taken away in an unprecedented way with COVID-19 restrictions. For example, when in American history has there ever been a general stay-at-home order or lockdown, affecting most of the population? World War II? There were restrictions and shortages, and young men were subject to the draft, but people were free to move about and go on with their lives. The same was true for World War I and the Civil War (with the possible exception of being actively attacked or invaded). There were pandemics in the past that provoked a public health response, the most notable being the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 – 1919. As I said above, COVID-19 is not comparable to the Spanish flu. The Spanish flu’s death rate was 2 to 6 times higher than COVID-19’s death rate. Also, unlike COVID-19, the Spanish flu was especially deadly for young adults. But despite being the most deadly flu pandemic in modern history, the public health response was muted compared to what we’ve done with COVID-19. In some cities, bars, restaurants, theaters, and schools were closed, and masks were required. Sound familiar? But there were no general lockdowns, no attempt at universal “social distancing” (a euphemism for enforced mass social isolation), and no restrictions on private social functions. The economy back then was mostly agricultural and industrial, and healthy people continued to work in the farms and factories.

If this extreme mass denial of liberty resulting from the global overreaction to COVID-19 didn’t come from democratic historical examples, where did it come from? China, where the virus also came from. Although China at first denied the severity of the virus, allowing it to escape to other countries, eventually they instituted a strict lockdown of Wuhan. Other countries, including the U.S., decided to imitate the Chinese response, conveniently forgetting that China is a totalitarian communist dictatorship. Why should democracies imitate the actions of a totalitarian communist dictatorship? Aren’t we supposed to value individual liberty? 

In my opinion, the best perspective to evaluate the COVID-19 response is on the basis of the “public interest.” I define this as the long-term interest of society as a whole. In the contemporary U.S., the public interest is not discussed very often. On the political left, identity politics rules. Every group is concerned with its own interests, and these interests conflict with each other. Examples include feminists, and advocates for blacks, gays, and the disabled. On the political right, the interests of the wealthy donors are paramount. Hence the Reagan, Bush Jr., and Trump tax cuts, which overwhelmingly benefited the rich.    

Looking at COVID-19 from a public interest perspective, is it in the public interest to sacrifice the young and the healthy to the old, the sick, and the fat? Let me ask the question in another way. Who is the future of our country? Is it the demented 85-year-old man in a nursing home, or a 7-year-old in elementary school? Should the 7-year-old elementary school student be denied an education because there’s a chance that, not that the student will get seriously ill from COVID-19, but that he might pass the virus to someone, who will pass it to someone else, and it will eventually reach the 85-year-old demented guy in the nursing home? The 85-year-old demented guy represents the past. He’s lived his life. It may have been a good life, maybe not. He has, at best, a few more demented years left. The 7-year-old represents the future. He may live another 80 years or more. His development could be irreparably harmed if he’s denied an education and normal social interaction with his peers.

Some may argue that I am making a straw man argument. Many people who die of COVID-19 are not demented old guys in nursing homes. But 40% of U.S. COVID-19 deaths are linked to nursing homes (nursing home residents make up only about 0.5% of the U.S. population). Elderly people are in nursing homes for a reason. They’re not doing too well. The point is that by continuing these restrictions, we’re sacrificing our future to our past.

What about teachers in schools? Let’s take the case of a 65-year-old teacher with diabetes and hypertension. She is afraid of contracting COVID-19 from her students. I would be afraid if I were in her situation, also. But there’s a simple solution for her: she can quit. There are plenty of unemployed and underemployed young healthy college graduates who could replace her. You could hire someone with a bachelor’s degree and without teaching credentials, and have her earn credentials while she’s working.

Another argument is that the restrictions are only temporary, until we get an effective vaccine or treatment. In the meantime, why can’t the young and healthy stay at home and not infect the vulnerable? If “temporary” meant a month or two, I might agree with this. But the lockdowns and restrictions in the U.S. started in March, over 4 months from the time I’m writing this. I don’t see an end date. The longer the restrictions occur, the more businesses will fail, the more the economy will suffer, and the better chance the world economy will sink into Great Depression 2. While optimists can say that as soon as we have a vaccine everything will return to normal, we don’t know that. We don’t know if or when we’ll have an effective and safe vaccine. Many small businesses, and the jobs associated with them, will be permanently closed. The passion, energy, and years of hard work they put into these businesses will be lost forever. Some of these businesses go back generations. It’s unlikely that we can just flip a switch and get back to the way things were. It’s incredibly risky to start a Great Depression 2. Along with the expected consequences of widespread unemployment, homelessness, starvation, etc., the unexpected consequences can be catastrophic, as they were for the Great Depression in the 1930s. The Great Depression led to Hitler and the Nazis coming to power in Germany, and six years later Hitler started World War II by invading Poland. 70 to 85 million people died in that war.

Rushing a vaccine to return as quickly as possible to normal life is also a bad idea. An unsafe and ineffective COVID-19 vaccine would not only hurt the people who received the vaccine and got sick and/or died, but would also make people wary of taking other vaccines. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been a lot of people refusing to take safe and effective vaccines like measles. A COVID-19 vaccine fiasco would accelerate this anti-vaccination trend, resulting in preventable outbreaks of measles and other diseases.

The solution in the U.S. (and many other countries) is to no longer utilize public health interventions for COVID-19. These interventions, such as testing, contract tracing, and isolation/quarantining, made sense early in the pandemic, as an attempt to contain the virus. Not only would containment have saved thousands of lives, but it would have had minimal impact on the economy and daily life. After containment failed, it no longer was logical to continue these interventions. The cost in terms of jobs, economic collapse, mass restrictions on individual liberty, and disruption to daily life have become too high. “Flattening the curve” sounded good in theory, but has proved to be a total failure, at least in the U.S. People with serious symptoms requiring medical attention should be tested and treated; everyone else with mild or no symptoms should be left free to go on with their lives. All state, county, and local restrictions should end (with the exception of protecting nursing homes and other elderly long-term care institutions). Schools should be open for full-time in-person instruction under normal pre-pandemic conditions. People with mild or no symptoms should go about their life without being subject to testing, enforced mass social isolation, masking, quarantining, or any other public health intervention. If businesses want to implement health measures such as masks/distancing/cleaning, they should be allowed to but not required by law. Vulnerable people living outside of institutions will need to take appropriate precautions while there is community spread (e.g. while usually it’s healthy for obese people to work out at the gym, not now). It’s possible that natural herd immunity will occur before an effective and safe vaccine is developed, which will make the vaccine superfluous. Whether the herd immunity is achieved naturally or through a vaccine, life must go on.

Tea Party Republicans Are Anarchists

Two years ago, I blogged about Tea Party Republicans, asking the question if they are anarchists. This was the first time that the Tea Party brought America to the brink of default on its debt. I blogged that since Tea Party Republicans want limited government, they are not, strictly speaking, anarchists. But they are extremists, and if they get their way the economy and federal government may collapse, producing a condition of anarchy.

After the recent government shutdown and near-default, I will change my question to a statement: Tea Party Republicans are anarchists. They were willing to let our country default on its debts to force a repeal of Obamacare. Whatever one thinks of Obamacare, it’s crazy to seriously consider having the country default. As we got closer to potential default, economists, bankers, and financial people sounded the alarm. A default by the U.S. on its debt would be catastrophic, as reported by International Business Times and Center for American Progress. Some of the consequences of a default include:

• Higher interest rates on Treasuries and all consumer credit
• Stock market crash
• Plunge in value of the dollar
• Worldwide recession
• Freezing up of the U.S. financial system

It would be very bad, a major economic blow to every American (and to others in the world). Anyone who would consider this as serious policy option does not have the best interests of the country at heart. Such a person is an anarchist and saboteur. Instead of blowing up buildings or factories, he has the potential to do immeasurably more damage by blowing up the entire U.S. economy.

Public opinion has soured against the Tea Party since the shutdown and debt ceiling debacle. A Pew Research Poll earlier this month shows the Tea Party with 30% favorable, and 49% unfavorable ratings. Business leaders have also turned against the Tea Party, igniting a Republican civil war between business groups allied with the Republican establishment versus the Tea Party. It’s possible that the Tea Party has reached its peak, and is on the decline. But there’s no way to be sure.

There is considerable danger ahead. If Republicans and Democrats can’t come up with a budget agreement, which is a realistic possibility, we will have to go through another possible government shutdown and debit limit crisis next year. The 2014 elections could provide the Tea Party more victories. The more Tea Party members in Congress, the greater chance of a default, economic crisis, and descent into anarchy.

I see nothing wrong with criticism of Obamacare. The American health care system is an expensive mess, and Obamacare falls short in many areas. If Republicans don’t like it, they need to come up with a viable alternative. After coming up with an alternative, they would then need to convince the voters that this alternative is better. That’s the way change is done in a stable democracy. It may not be quick, and will involve compromise, but can lead to gradual improvement. Threatening economic chaos and ruin if Tea Party Republicans don’t get what they want is not the American way. These anarchists need to be voted out of office, the sooner the better.

David Brooks on American Politics

David Brooks has an interesting perspective on American politics and public policy. A New York Times Op-Ed columnist, his viewpoint can be described as moderately conservative (a vanishing breed in contemporary American politics). His commentary is informed by a humanities and social sciences perspective that is rare among political analysts today. I earlier blogged about his criticism of the current American meritocracy. I want to talk today about two of his recent columns that provide an interesting perspective on what’s wrong with our political thinking. While he doesn’t provide specific solutions, he talks about some failings among both parties, along with how we need to change our thinking about what we want government to do. As we enter the election year 2012, in which Americans will choose between the same tired and failed alternatives, it’s important to think about our political problems in a different way, as Brooks does.

His first article entitled The Two Moons, is named after Samuel Lubell’s concept of a “political solar system.” Lubell, writing in the 1950’s, proposed the idea that at any moment there’s a Sun Party (the majority party) and a Moon Party (the minority party). The Sun Party drives the agenda, and the Moon Party (which shines by reflecting the Sun’s rays) opposes the Sun Party. During the New Deal, the Democrats were the Sun Party. During the Reagan Revolution, the Republicans were. Between 1996 and 2004, the two parties were tied. This was a transition time, in which from historical experience a Sun Party usually emerges. But no Sun Party emerged. No party was able to take the lead; they both are now Moon Parties. Both Republicans and Democrats have record low approval ratings. “Neither party has been able to rally the country behind its vision of government.”

Having two simultaneous minority parties leads to strange outcomes. Both parties embrace minority mentalities. Democrats feel oppressed by big business and big finance, while Republicans feel oppressed by big government and the big liberal establishment (the media, academics, judges, artists, Hollywood, etc.). Neither side wants to compromise, feeling that the outside world, and especially members of the opposing party, are hostile. They instinctively protect their special interests (labor unions, the poor, the old, and minorities for Democrats; the rich, big business, big finance, and evangelicals for Republicans), and refuse to engage or try to convert outsiders. Neither party engages in serious internal debates, and moderates are no longer welcome.

The Two Moon era is volatile. Voters reject one party, then two years later reject the other party. That happened in the 2008 and 2010 elections, which had a historically large shift from Democrat to Republican. Usually, minority parties suffer a string of election defeats, promoting modernization and revision. The Republicans’ defeats in 2006 and 2008 did help promote internal change via the Tea Party. But rather than owning up to the failures of their neoconservative ideology, and moving more to the center, Tea Party Republicans pushed the party to an extreme libertarian agenda. The Republicans’ 2010 victory encouraged them to act like a Sun Party, trying to force their Tea Party agenda, but were stymied by the fact that they were not a true majority party, and that Democrats controlled the Senate and Presidency. The Democrats’ defeat in 2010, along with subsequent Republican intransigence, is making the Democrats become more extreme. Even if they win big in 2012, however, they do not have the broad-based support to become a Sun Party.

How will the Two Moon era become resolved? Brooks suggests either a third party or a crisis. A third party faces enormous obstacles in the American political context, as discussed in this article. A third-party presidential run has always lost, but sometimes (e.g. Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, or Ross Perot in 1992) can spoil an election. Even in the unlikely event that a third-party candidate can win the election, he’ll have to govern with a Congress in which almost all members are Republicans or Democrats. For a third party to make fundamental changes in government, it needs to control both the executive and legislative branch, which the American political system makes virtually impossible.

This leaves a crisis as a way to break the Two Moon deadlock. It’s possible that a financial panic and/or war will force some major political change. Exactly how the events will unfold and what the responses will be are impossible to determine, but the American political system will have to undergo a radical (and painful) transformation for the Two Moon deadlock to become resolved.

* * *

Brooks’ second article is entitled Midlife Crisis Economics. Brooks criticizes the Obama’s administration’s historical accuracy. When the administration first came to power in 2009, it compared the current situation to the 1930’s, and promoted a second New Deal. Obamacare was a product of this thinking, a successor of ambitious social legislation like Social Security. The problem is that the public’s perception of government has radically changed since the New Deal. “Today, Americans are more likely to fear government than be reassured by it.”

The Obama Administration then switched historical analogies from the New Deal to the progressive era at the beginning of the 20th century (e.g. Obama’s “Roosevelt Speech” in Kansas). There are some similarities between today and a century ago. “Then, as now, we are seeing great concentrations of wealth, especially at the top.” But the differences outweigh the similarities. The economy was much different back then, a vibrant jobs machine at the height of the industrial era. The information age we live in today is not a jobs machine. The industrial decline and elimination of jobs due to outsourcing/offshoring/automation was taking place well before the current recession. Factories that used to employ 1000 workers can now produce more products while employing fewer than 100 workers.

Inequality, while due partially to government policy, has a structural economic component that would be difficult to reverse (short of communism). Inequality is growing in all developed countries, including ones (e.g. Sweden and Germany) that have much more generous welfare states.

Brooks succinctly summarizes the essential differences between today and a century ago: “In the progressive era, the economy was in its adolescence and the task was to control it. Today the economy is middle-aged; the task is to rejuvenate it.” A century ago there were few or no government agencies, institutions, or regulations to protect workers, the sick, the disabled, the old, children, minorities, etc. Today, we have more than enough government; the challenge is to make government more effective. We need to reform existing programs to make them deliver more services at less cost.

Brooks also talks about the moral differences between today and the progressive era. The beginning of the twentieth century was still a time of Victorian culture, with its strict moral code. Individuals and the government taking on debt that they had no hope of repaying would have been considered sinful. Illegitimacy and divorce were culturally prohibited and very rare.

These moral differences have major practical consequences. It’s obvious today what harm the contemporary embracing of public and private debt has caused our economy. Subprime and other risky mortgages led directly to the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent recession. Deficit financing that the American federal government has been doing routinely for decades has led to a buildup of unsustainable debt, and is preventing the government from responding in an appropriate way to the magnitude of the current crisis. The fact that 40% of American children are born out of wedlock leads to a number of social and mental health problems that were unknown a century ago. These problems, including crime, juvenile delinquency, drug abuse, dangerous neighborhoods, failed schools, etc., forces the government to intervene in family life and child upbringing, and spend billions of dollars that it otherwise would not have had to spend.

My favorite quote from this article is the following: “One hundred years ago, we had libertarian economics but conservative values. Today we have oligarchic economics and libertarian moral values — a bad combination.” It’s important to understand that the last (and only) time that libertarian economics was ever practiced, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America, Britain, and (to a lesser extent) in other Western European countries, was a time of strict conservative Victorian morality. There is no historical example of a combination of libertarian economics and libertarian morality. There is no contemporary example of libertarian economics. Contemporary countries with strong, rapidly growing, export-oriented economies, e.g. China, are anything but libertarian.

Ron Paul’s fans need to understand that they are advocating an experimental system, something never before tried. They also need to understand that the rise of American government deficit spending, regulation, waste, inefficiency, and all the other things they complain about occurred during a time of increasing libertarian morality. It was the 1960’s embrace of individual social liberty, of personal and sexual freedom from authority, of licentiousness, that represented a cultural revolution, something unique in history. The trend for increasing individual social freedom and autonomy has only increased since the 1960’s. During that period, government deficit spending, regulation, litigation, interference with the economy, waste, fraud, and incompetence has also increased. The two are clearly correlated; it’s impossible to prove whether libertarian morality caused the explosion of government spending and regulation.

Note that Brooks said that we have “oligarchic economics” in America today, not “socialist economics.” The distinction is important. It implies that libertarian ideas did in fact influence not only social and cultural life, but also the economy. Instead of moving toward the libertarian ideal of limited government, however, we moved toward a corrupt, oligarchic form of government, one in which the rich and powerful use a bloated government to become more rich and powerful. The most egregious example is explosion in growth of the financial sector, which occurred after libertarian-inspired deregulation. The investment banks won the freedom to gamble on risky mortgage-based securities, a gamble that led to the 2008 crisis. Unlike in a truly free market, they felt secure enough to make these gambles knowing that the government would bail them out.

As usual, Brooks has no specific solutions to the problems he talks about. “The job is to restore old disciplines, strip away decaying structures and reform the welfare state. The country needs a productive midlife crisis.” I’d agree with that, but how is it going to happen? How can we reform an oligarchic government while maintaining libertarian moral values? How can people from different socioeconomic status, intelligence, race, age, ethnicity, culture, sexual orientation, political beliefs, religious beliefs, etc. come together and agree on anything, when libertarian morality tells them to pursue their own self interest no matter the social cost? Will they be willing to make sacrifices for the common good, whether it take the form of accepting fewer government benefits, more taxation, or a combination of the two? I doubt it. My view is that the “productive midlife crisis” our country needs must include a serious re-evaluation of the permissive morality that has been dominant since the 1960’s.

Are Tea Party Republicans Anarchists?

NY Times columnist Timothy Egan’s recent article describes radical Republicans as anarchists, seeking to destroy the U.S. government. Their refusal to raise the debt limit, and refusal to deal at all with Obama and Democrats, threatens America with another financial crash and economic catastrophe. This “burn-it-all-down position” indicates that the Tea Party Republicans “didn’t go to Washington to find solutions; they went there to destroy the place.” Is Egan being fair in his description of radical Republicans?

Anarchy is the absence of government, a condition of complete freedom from government coercion. Anarchists are people who want to bring about this utopian condition. Tea Party republicans claim to want to reduce the size of government, not eliminate it entirely. So by the strict dictionary definition, radical Republicans aren’t anarchists. They are extremists, however, and this extremism threatens the stability and health of our government and society. It also threatens to bring about a condition of anarchy.

Extremists share some common attributes, whether they are anarchists, libertarians, communists, Nazis, sixties radicals, or religious zealots:

1. Promoting extreme change
2. Wanting the extreme change now
3. Being unwilling to compromise
4. Promoting violence

I’ll go over these attributes and see if the Tea Party Republicans fit these characteristics.

1. Extreme change: The Tea Party Republicans claim to be conservative, wanting the federal government to return to its small pre-Great Deal size. But since so many people have become dependent on government programs, and we’ve had for decades a large military, progressive income tax, and widespread regulation of industry, a return to the way things were 80 or more years ago is an extreme change from the status quo. Thus I can conclude that radical Republicans promote extreme change.
2. Wanting the extreme change now: Paul Ryan’s plan to overhaul Medicare doesn't take effect until 2022, exempting people 55 and older from the change. Although it proposes a radical change to Medicare, it’s not extremist in the sense of wanting the change now. The refusal to extend the debt limit in the absence of an immediate agreement to major cuts in government spending is, however, extremist. It threatens economic catastrophe unless changes are made now. While it’s true that changes are badly needed in Washington, threatening an economic crisis unless changes happen immediately is extremist and very dangerous. So I conclude that in the context of the debt crisis radical Republicans want extreme change now.
3. Being unwilling to compromise: Tea Party Republicans are refusing to compromise with Obama and the Democrats on the issue of tax increases. They will not accept any deal that involves tax increases, even if the spending cuts vastly outnumber the tax increases, as is the case in the Obama plan. This “my way or the highway” attitude is definitely extremist. Tea Party Republicans have exuded this type of extremism since they began their term in office.
4. Promoting violence: Tea party advocates and representatives so far haven’t advocated violence or committed any violent acts. But the other three extremist characteristics that describe Tea Party Republicans make it highly likely that violence will eventually happen. If one of the two major American political parties wants extreme change, wants it now, and is unwilling to compromise, then the legislative process will grind to a halt. We can see that happening already. If legislators cannot accomplish anything, then the government won’t be do anything, even to pay its bills. This will provoke a crisis.

While it’s possible that the crisis can be solved peacefully, I wouldn’t bet on it. Historically, economic crises have sometimes led to violent revolutions in other countries. The French Revolution and subsequent reign of terror was a product of a financial crisis. The Bolsheviks came to power in the context of the economic and political chaos of World War I.

A revolution can sometimes be a good thing, right? What about the American Revolution? The Tea Party Republicans may claim to be intellectual heirs of the American Revolution, but in reality they are far apart ideologically. Compared to other revolutions, the American Revolution was moderate. Before the revolution and after, Americans enjoyed the privileges of a representative government, freedom of expression and religion, a capitalistic economic system, and the absence of any hereditary aristocracy. The biggest change was the withdrawal from the British Empire and the establishment of a new republican political system. While this was a substantial change, it didn’t affect the daily life of most people. There was no widespread expropriation of property or political murders that characterized the contemporaneous French Revolution.

The Tea Party Republicans may not provoke a revolution at all. Since their dominant ideology is anti-government, if they succeed in bringing the economy and the federal government to their knees, we may end up with a condition of anarchy. The best contemporary example is Iraq after the 2003 invasion. Like the Iraqi government, the American government may become so weakened and ineffective that terrorists and criminals will basically take over the country. Anarchy is an unstable condition, so it won’t last forever, but as we’ve seen in some countries (e.g. Somalia) this could last for years and possibly decades.

I think that America has too much going for it (i.e. its wealth, history, political system, social structures) that we will become another Iraq or Somalia. But there’s a real chance of some major political and economic disruption that will affect the lives of millions. If the Tea Party Republicans get their way, this disruption will happen soon.

How Greed and Ideology are Endangering America’s Financial and Mental Health

I just watched the excellent documentary Inside Job about the financial crisis. Its main point is that the 2008 crisis and subsequent Great Recession were a consequence of deregulation of the financial sector. This deregulation (primarily in the United States, but also in other countries like Iceland and Ireland) led to an explosion of trading in risky investments like CDO’s, that in turn led to the housing bubble and crash. The tragic thing about this crash is that if we had kept the regulations in place that came about after the 1929 crash and Great Depression, we would never have had the recent crisis. Protections such as separation of savings and investment banks, restrictions on leverage, and enforcement by the SEC and other regulatory agencies of securities and fraud laws were stripped away in recent decades. Also, the financial services industry created new exotic “financial weapons of mass destruction” and successfully lobbied to keep them unregulated.

How did this unstable and risky situation develop? Inside Job argues that a combination of greed and free market ideology led to the housing bubble and bust. The greed came about from the enormous profits generated by the deregulated post-1980 financial services industry. This money flowed to traders in the form of multi-million dollar bonuses, to politicians in the form of lobbying and campaign contributions, and to academic economists in the form of consulting fees. The free market ideology, promoted by right-wing think tanks, politicians, and academic economists, provided a rationalization for the government to deregulate the financial services industry. This ideology argued that allowing an unfettered financial services industry to generate incredible amounts of wealth, and to make riskier and riskier investments, was good for the economy. This attitude is best summarized by Gordon Gekko’s memorable line in the first Wall Street movie: "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good."

While the free market ideology is seductive, and I admit that I was once an enthusiastic follower, it clearly failed as a rationale for financial services deregulation. While it’s easy to blame the government for everything bad that happens, and the government did promote home ownership for people who should have been renting, the leaders of the Wall Street investment banks were the main culprits. They knowingly and deliberately invested their client’s savings in risky mortgage securities, sometimes while simultaneously betting against the securities (i.e. betting that their own clients would lose money). It was Wall Street money that bid up housing prices, that promoted subprime mortgages, that paid the ratings agencies to give ridiculously high ratings to what was basically junk, and that led to the worst financial crash and recession since World War II. Some foreign banks also were to blame, as they did the same thing that the Wall Street banks did. Ireland and Iceland are two egregious examples of investment banks destroying their economies. The executives in charge of the investment banks got greedy, and even after their companies lost billions and needed to be bailed out, they got to keep their multi-million dollar bonuses and salary. The most disgusting thing is that not one of them has been prosecuted (in the U.S.) for fraud or securities violations.

When an ideology fails in the real world, people who believe in it have two options. One is to accept reality, and stop believing in the ideology. The other is to continue believing in the ideology, and abandon reality. Most Democrats, who in the past (especially in the Clinton administration) joined with Republicans in eagerly stripping away financial services regulation, realized after the crash that they made a grave error. When they were in charge of Congress, they passed the Dodd-Frank bill to improve regulation of Wall Street. These regulations, while inadequate, were better than doing nothing. These regulations are now law, but as Paul Krugman writes in an article, they are in danger of not being enforced. The reason for this is that Republicans have chosen to keep their free market ideology, while abandoning reality. Republicans are now in charge of the House, and Republicans don’t believe in regulation in any form. Since they control the funds, Republicans can prevent the SEC and other agencies from doing any regulating and investigating. Wall Street will then be free to create more bubbles and more crises.

Why do people continue believing in an ideology when it has clearly failed? To answer this, consider the historical example of Communism. Within a few years after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, it was clear that Communism was failing in its ability to provide goods and services that people wanted. That’s when the scapegoating started. It wasn’t Communism’s fault, it was the fault of the capitalists (or the kulaks, or the imperialists, or the fascists, etc.). That scapegoating continued for decades, until finally no one believed the ideology any more, and all that was left was greed and corruption.

In the case of Republicans, the scapegoat is the government. Wall Street didn’t do anything wrong, it was government intervention in the economy that caused the crash and recession. The fact that the financial services companies made many risky investments and bad decisions, not just in the U.S. but also overseas, is also a result of U.S. government intervention. If the government hadn’t provided guarantees and bailouts, the companies wouldn’t have made these risky investments.

In the context of a mixed economy, with an internationally-linked market, the government needs to regulate the financial markets. If Republicans get their way, and repeal or refuse to enforce the new regulations, another crash will happen. We’ll then be in the same situation in which the choice will be government bailouts or a second Great Depression. Blaming the government for all our problems is similar to the Communists blaming the capitalists for all their problems. The free market ideology has failed the reality test vis-à-vis financial regulation, and continuing to adhere to it is a sign of either delusion or greed. Regarding the latter motive, Wall Street continues to utilize its vast wealth to lobby politicians to weaken and gut regulations.

Now let me turn to mental health and psychiatry. While watching Inside Job, I was struck with the parallels between the financial services industry and the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industry. While the free market ideology is used by the financial services industry to justify deregulation, the chemical imbalance ideology is used by psychiatists to justify their prescribing drugs to patients. The chemical imbalance ideology states that schizophrenia is caused by too much of the neurotransmitter dopamine, and that depression is caused by too little serotonin. These imbalances can be treated by antipsychotic and antidepressant drugs, respectively. Patients who take their drugs restore balance in their brains, become symptom free, and function better than patients who are unwilling or unable to take drugs.

This chemical imbalance ideology doesn’t fit the facts. As Robert Whitaker describes in his book Anatomy of an Epidemic (which I reviewed in a previous blog post), after many millions of dollars of research money, and enormous time and effort spent, this theory remains unverified. Scientists haven’t made much progress in understanding the cause or pathophysiology of mental illness. Diagnosis is still based on symptoms due to a lack of any reliable or valid lab tests. Drugs that seem to help patients in the short term, have a much more problematic long-term outcome. As newer drugs began to be prescribed more frequently, patients seemed to function worse than they ever did before, many of them becoming permanently disabled and unable to work.

Just as the free market true believers identify the government as an all-encompassing scapegoat, the chemical imbalance true believers come up with their own scapegoat: the disease. The reason why juvenile bipolar disorder prevalence skyrocketed, why so many children were being diagnosed and treated with drugs, and becoming permanently disabled, wasn’t due to drugs they were being prescribed. It was due to something else in the environment causing a psychiatric epidemic. It’s almost comical reading Whitaker’s description of how bipolar disorder was “discovered” in children. Before psychiatric drugs were widely used, children never got bipolar disorder. The fact that stimulant and antidepressant drugs induce manic episodes, and that many more children were taking stimulants and antidepressants than ever before, was conveniently ignored. Since many children taking antidepressant drugs became bipolar, some researchers argued that the drugs were an effective diagnostic tool, unmasking the bipolar disorder that was hidden underneath. Diagnostic boundaries for juvenile bipolar disorder were expanded to include irritable and antisocial children, and these children were given drug cocktails that led to functional impairment and serious physical and mental side effects.

Another similarity between the financial services industry and the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industry is greed. When the ideology has cracks, fill in the gaps with cash. Just as academic economists receive thousands of dollars from the financial services industry in consulting fees, academic psychiatrists receive thousands of dollars from the pharmaceutical industry. This money provides an incentive for economists to spout free-market/deregulation dogma, and psychiatrists to promote drugs.

This ideology-greed connection becomes self-perpetuating. Academic economists promote deregulation and free markets, which leads to more profits for Wall Street, which means more consulting fees, which means more economists promote deregulation, etc. Academic psychiatrists promote the chemical imbalance theory and drug treatments, which means more profits for the pharmaceutical industry, which means more consulting fees for the psychiatrists, which means more psychiatrists promote drugs, etc.

What can be done to emerge from these vicious circles of greed and failed ideology? Reform from within isn’t an option. Both the financial services and psychiatric-pharmaceutical industries are too hopelessly corrupt to reform or regulate themselves. The only institution powerful enough to take on the economic and ideological might of these two industries is the federal government. But the government is itself corrupted by Wall Street and Big Pharma money. The government must be spurred into action by grassroots advocacy groups.

Any advocacy group needs to have a clear, specific goal in mind. The American Tea Party had a vague goal of opposing big government and bailouts. It has now been hijacked by libertarian/free market extremists.

The group that takes on Wall Street should have these goals: Phase 1 should be to pressure the government to fully fund all the regulatory agencies involved in enforcing Dodd-Frank. In addition, the government should prosecute bank and financial executives who committed fraud and securities violations during the housing boom and bust. Phase 2 should be to make even more ambitious reforms to curb the power, influence, and money of the financial services industry.

The group that takes on Big Pharma should begin with pressuring for congressional hearings. Robert Whitaker and other people who criticize the psychiatric-pharmaceutical industry should be allowed to speak, along with academic psychiatrists, drug company representatives, and parents and patients. If it turns out that there’s not enough evidence to demonstrate that drugs do long-term good (the burden of proof is on the pro-drug people to show that they work), then Phase 2 should be a major overhaul of psychiatric drug regulation. This can include banning drug advertising, banning off-label prescribing, banning prescribing the drugs to children, and extending clinical trials to several years (from the current 6 weeks).

Did America’s Economy Implode Because the Rich Are Too Wealthy? A Review of “Aftershock” by Robert B. Reich

The Great Recession has forced Americans to confront political and economic issues that have been ignored for decades. Since around 1980, middle class real wages have stagnated, both personal and government debt have increased to unsustainable levels, infrastructure and education have declined—and both Democrats and Republicans are to blame. The optimism, pragmatism, “can-do” attitude, and belief in continual progress that characterized America for most of its history (with some notable exceptions, including the Civil War and Great Depression) have been shattered. Americans have grown increasingly pessimistic that their children and grandchildren can achieve the “American Dream.”

Robert B. Reich, former secretary of labor under Bill Clinton, writes about the causes of America’s economic problems in his book Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future. His central message is that the concentration of wealth at the top of the income ladder results in insufficient domestic demand for products and services, which leads to economic stagnation, anemic recoveries, and deep recessions.

There’s no question that income has become more concentrated the last 30 years. In the late 1970’s, the richest 1% of the country took in less than 9% of the nation’s total income. By 2007, the richest 1% took in 23.5% of the nation’s income, or more than double what it was before. Real wages of a typical American worker, however, stagnated during the same time period. If the gains of the American economy had been more equally distributed during the last 30 years, a typical person would be making 60% more now than he did then.

The problem with the rich becoming too wealthy is that they don’t spend enough. They live too modestly compared to what they can afford. The overall demand for goods and services shrinks because the rich invest most of their income. If more of the nation’s wealth went to the middle class, who spend a greater percentage of their income than the wealthy do, demand would increase, businesses would expand and hire more, and the economy would grow.

Reich writes approvingly of the period of the “Great Prosperity”, the years 1947 through 1975, in which American implemented a “basic bargain”: workers made enough to buy what was produced, resulting in complementary mass production and mass consumption. Wages of lower-income Americans grew faster than those at or near the top, doubling over these years. Productivity also doubled, giving the lie to those who argued that large inequality was needed for economic growth. It’s true that high income and wealth is an incentive for entrepreneurial and executive achievement, but how high does this income and wealth have to be? Even though CEO’s made only 30 times the typical worker salaries during the Great Prosperity (as opposed to 300 times today), they seemed motivated enough back then to do their jobs well.

The Great Prosperity also included powerful unions, generous health and pension benefits, minimum wage and overtime laws, unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid (in 1965), and interest deduction on mortgages. The G.I. Bill and expansion of the public university system helped make college affordable for the middle class. The interstate highway system became the most ambitious public works program in American history. The Cold War resulted in continued high military spending, which (via the “military-industrial complex”) led to the invention of the transistor, laser, computer, jet engine, and Internet. Unlike today, there was a societal consensus that this high level of government spending had to be paid for. The top marginal income tax rates in the 1950’s were 91%, and were 77% as late as 1969.

After the late 1970’s, the Great Prosperity ended and America began a period of increasing inequality. Reich recognizes that both globalization and automation led to the loss of high-paying manufacturing jobs. New jobs that were created, mainly in the service sector, didn’t pay as well as the jobs lost. At the same time that the middle and working classes had to accept lower wages, however, business executives and Wall Street traders saw their incomes skyrocket.

Government could have enforced the basic bargain, and reversed these trends leading to more wealth concentration at the top. For example, it could have given employees more bargaining power to get higher wages, especially in industries sheltered from foreign competition. It could have enlarged safety nets, financed Medicare for all, and forced industries laying off large numbers of workers at once to pay a year’s severance, along with training them for new jobs. It could have raised taxes on the rich and cut them for the poor. Instead, it did the opposite. Under the influence of libertarian, free-market economists, the government deregulated, privatized, cut taxes, and shredded the safety nets. It allowed companies to bust unions, slash jobs and wages, cut benefits, and move factories and jobs overseas. Government deregulated Wall Street while insuring it against major losses. This changed the finance industry from the servant to the master of American industry. Wall Street demanded short-term profits over long-term growth. “Between 1997 and 2007, the finance sector became the fastest-growing part of the U.S. economy” (p. 56). Finance and insurance companies’ share of American corporate profits increased from 10% to 40%.

It’s true that confidence in government began to decline toward the end of the Great Prosperity, with events such as the Vietnam War, Watergate, oil shortages and double-digit inflation. This confidence has continued to decline since. Reich attributes this decline to deterioration of government services and explosion of deficits, both of which were caused by the tax cuts. Also important was the increasing appeal of free-market dogma, which came through think tanks, books, media and ads that were largely financed by the rich and powerful.

Middle class Americans developed three “coping mechanisms” to help mitigate the effects of their declining economic status. These mechanisms included:

1. Women moved into paid work. In 1966, 20% of mothers with young children had jobs outside the home. By the late 1990’s, this had risen to 60% of mothers. While women with college degrees were able to land high-paying jobs, most women worked low-wage jobs to try to prop up stagnant and declining family income.
2. Everyone worked longer hours. By the 2000’s the typical American family worked 500 hours, or 12 weeks longer per year than it had in 1979.
3. People saved less and borrowed more. During the Great Prosperity, the American middle class saved about 9% of their after-tax income each year, and their debt averaged 50 to 55%. The savings rate declined to 2.6% in 2008, while debt exploded to 138%. Reich sees this indebtedness not as a moral failing, but as a way to try to maintain their previous lifestyle. When the debt bubble burst during the Great Recession, people were unable to continue borrowing.

The wealth inequality today is similar to what it was in 1928, just before the Great Depression, and Reich draws parallels between the two eras. There were high levels of private debt, especially mortgage debt, in both the 1920’s and 2000’s. Richer Americans speculated on a limited range of assets, resulting in stock market and real estate bubbles. The 1920’s even witnessed a Florida real estate boom, similar to recent times.

After the Great Recession that began in 2007, the U.S. government kept interests rates near-zero, bailed out the banks, and printed a great deal of money. This helped avert a second Great Depression, but left the federal government with vastly increased debt and deficits. Unlike during the Great Depression, in which the Roosevelt administration created a new economic order through its New Deal policies, the post-Great Recession Obama administration has done very little fundamental reform. The problem of widening inequality will likely continue. Reich predicts many years of high unemployment, middle class economic insecurity, and economic stagnation. From this Great Recession “aftershock”, we’ll see either a major political backlash against both big business and government, or large-scale reforms.

Some reforms that Reich would like to see implemented include:

• A reverse income tax that supplements the wages of the middle class.
• Higher marginal tax rates on the wealthy.
• A carbon tax, to promote the development of “green” technologies.
• A redesign of the unemployment system, making it a “reemployment system” that smoothes the transition to a new job.
• Replacing spending on public schools with vouchers based on family income, which would force wealthy suburban schools to take in lower and middle-income students.
• Making tuition free in all public colleges and universities, which will be financed by requiring that all graduates pay a fixed percentage of their taxable income for the first 10 years of full-time work.
• An expansion of Medicare to all Americans (replacing the current private insurance system).
• Expanding government spending on public goods such as transportation, parks, recreational facilities, museums, and libraries, making them free for all.
• Strengthening campaign-finance laws, funding elections publically, and limiting issue advertising.

Reich’s agenda for change makes sense in a nation in which there’s a consensus for government activism, high taxation, and social programs, in which people respect and admire politicians and bureaucrats, and are confident in the competence and ability of government to follow through on its promises. Such a nation doesn’t have anything in common with contemporary America. Reich’s laundry list for change has no chance for passage.

Reich’s views are similar to those of Nobel Prize-winning Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. The Reich/Krugman viewpoint can be classified as “Liberal Democrat” and “Keynesian”. Unlike Thomas Friedman, who focuses on competitiveness and tries to appeal to both ends of the political spectrum (see my review of his book The World is Flat), Reich and Krugman focus exclusively on the demand side of the economy, and their appeal is mainly to liberals.

Was the Great Recession caused by too much wealth possessed by the rich? The speculative real-estate boom that led to the Great Recession was a world-wide phenomenon. Lax regulation certainly contributed to it. I’m not sure that American wealth inequality was a direct cause, although it may also have contributed to it. European countries have much less wealth inequality than America, yet they also suffered from the recession. The fact that the rich invest most of their money has led to more speculation and greater influence and power of Wall Street.

Regarding Reich’s point that the economy would be doing better if there was less inequality, I don’t agree with that. The American economy grew enormously during the (relatively) laissez-faire period of 1870-1928. This graph shows how real per capita GNP in the U.S. more than doubled. During that period, there were significant inventions and technological advances that improved the standard of living of many Americans, including electric power, electric lights, bicycles, telephones, automobiles, airplanes, widespread use of railroads and steamboats, medical advances, improved public sanitation, central heat, air conditioning, appliances, and radio. While there were few government social programs, and little military spending, America emerged from the ashes of its Civil War to become the world’s premier economic power. So I don’t agree that government programs are necessary to have a robust, vibrant economy, or to have a higher standard of living for the majority of people.

On the other hand, contrary to what many conservatives and libertarians say, a mixed economy with substantial military and social welfare spending, along with high marginal taxes, isn’t inimical to economic progress. Reich and Krugman are correct that the Great Prosperity (1947-1975) period in America was a time of enormous economic and technological progress, along with an improved standard of living for the majority of people.

Both liberals and conservatives agree that the last 30 years has been a period of economic decline in America. They’re in sharp disagreement, however, over the causes. Liberals such as Reich and Krugman argue that the decline was due to tax cuts and subsequent reduced government investments in social programs and infrastructure, along with deregulation, leading to wage stagnation among the middle class, concentration of wealth at the top, and increased deficits and debt. Conservatives argue that government social welfare and entitlement spending, regulation, and litigation exploded, leading to increased taxes, deficits, debt, and economic decline.

Both sides are right. Liberals are correct that the tax cuts have largely benefited the wealthy. Infrastructure has been neglected. Deregulation led to the housing boom and bust. Conservatives are correct that social welfare and entitlement spending has increased, along with some types of regulation and litigation (especially connected to employment, discrimination, and civil rights).

I think the problem isn’t the level of government spending or taxation, but fundamental disagreements between the two parties that has led to gridlock. Both periods of growth and progress, the laissez-faire one of 1870-1928, and the mixed economy one of 1947-1975, were a time of general consensus. While there were people and groups who opposed the consensus, they were an insignificant minority. During both periods, there was a long-term vision, and large investments in infrastructure and education. The infrastructure and education investments during the laissez-faire period were largely private; during the mixed economy period they were mostly public and military. The private versus public nature of the infrastructure and education investments is less important than the fact that they get done. They haven’t been getting done the last 30 years—existing American infrastructure and education has not been well maintained, and new investment is virtually nonexistent.

The Great Depression and World War II eras (1929-1945) were a transition time from a laissez-faire to a mixed economy. Reich argues in this book that the Great Depression was caused by income inequality, leading to inadequate demand. Conservatives would counter that the Great Depression was caused by government meddling in the economy, both before (income tax, antitrust regulation, the Federal Reserve), and after (New Deal regulations and programs, increased taxation). I would argue that the laissez-faire consensus was lost during the Great Depression, and the fact that the consensus was lost led to the length and severity of the depression. The crisis of World War II created a new consensus for big government, and led to the mixed economy Great Prosperity of 1947-1975. It was a combination of the transmutation of liberalism from a strictly economic philosophy to a combination economic-social philosophy in the 1960’s and 1970’s, along with the religious and libertarian conservative backlash that began with the Regan administration in the 1980’s, that led to the demise of the Great Prosperity consensus.

As further evidence of the importance of consensus to economic progress, consider contemporary China. It’s difficult to characterize the political-economic situation there—part Communist, part mixed-economy, part laissez-faire—but it’s undeniable that whatever they are doing, is working. The consensus there is produced partly by a dictatorship that tolerates no dissent, but this dictatorship, unlike the Maoist one, isn’t based solely on fear and ideology. The people in China are seeing their standard of living improve—millions have achieved middle class status, and the general progress there is perhaps the greatest economic miracle of our time. Compared to how other countries have fared in the Great Recession, especially America, China has weathered the downturn well.

This Chinese success story directly contradicts both the liberal and conservative perspectives. As Reich notes in his book, most of Chinese government spending is devoted to production, not consumption. Chinese people have virtually no safety net—spending on social services is about 6% of the economy, compared to an average of 25% in most developed nations. China isn’t following the Reich-Krugman vision of a demand-oriented, socially-generous nation. It also isn’t following the conservative/libertarian vision of “free minds and free markets.” The basic political system is a Communist dictatorship that arrests and jails dissidents, limits families to one child, and suppresses religious expression. Contemporary China bears little resemblance to past or present America. Yet its economy is one of the fastest-growing in the world. This chart shows China’s explosive GDP growth since 1990, 5 times America’s growth during the same period.

Since neither Reich’s liberal agenda, nor a libertarian/conservative agenda can be enacted in the current political climate of gridlock, what can be done to achieve a new consensus that will allow America to grow and prosper again? One possibility is for centrists like Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, Fareed Zakaria, and others to bring the two sides together and come up with a workable compromise. The problem is that the two sides have been trying to compromise for 30 years, and the compromises haven’t been working:

• Conservatives cut taxes and increased defense spending, while liberals increased social welfare and entitlement spending. This has led to skyrocketing deficits and debt, along with declining infrastructure and education.
• Conservatives deregulated the financial industry, while liberals used the government to insure against poor investments and losses. This led to the financial crash and bailout of 2008.
• Conservatives tried to keep some private sector, free market elements in the American health care system, while liberals tried to expand the public sector options and give more people access to care. The conservative influence has produced a supposedly competitive private insurance sector that fails to control costs, and the liberal vision has produced a public sector that provides all the benefits of socialized medicine (free and unlimited health care for seniors and the disabled) without any of the cost controls (i.e. rationing). The result is the most expensive health care system in the world that provides mediocre results. We have the highest infant mortality among the world’s industrialized nations, and our life expectancy is shorter than 40 other nations.
• Conservatives promoted school choice, especially private schools, while liberals maintained the status quo in the public schools. The result has been that most students today attend mediocre public schools, while a few lucky or rich kids attend charter or private schools.
• Conservatives promoted oil drilling and other fossil fuel development, while liberals advocated for conservation and green technology. The result has been that we’ve had no energy policy, and we’re almost twice as dependent on foreign oil today than we were at the time of the first oil crisis in 1973.

These differences and failed compromises on economic issues are only part of the bad blood between conservatives and liberals. The other part is the profound differences over social issues. Since the 1970’s, liberals have become more secular and hostile to traditional religion, as exemplified in their using the courts and legislation to legalize abortion, to restrict public religious expression, and promote alternative lifestyles such as homosexuality. At the same time, conservatives have embraced fundamentalist Christianity, seething at the godless liberals and their secular-humanistic agenda. For many liberals and conservatives, these differences are more important than the economic ones.

The over 30-year marriage of modern liberals and conservatives has failed. The two sides have spent most of the time attacking and criticizing the other, neglecting their duty to promote the public good. It’s unlikely that centrist marriage counselors like Thomas Friedman can do anything constructive to bring the two sides together. It’s time for a divorce.

I propose that the country split into two, a predominantly liberal Coastal America, and predominantly conservative Middle America. Coastal America would include most of the “Blue” states. Some states in the middle portion of the country would likely join, such as Illinois. Some states in the Southeast, such as South Carolina, would likely not join. Middle America would include most of the “Red” states. My guess is that the capitol of Middle America would be in Texas, the most heavily populated among the “Red” states. Splitting the country this way would cause major logistical and transportation issues, since some state borders would transform into international borders. If, for example, Kansas joins Middle America, and Missouri joins Coastal America, many commuters in the Kansas City metro area would have to cross an international border to get to work. Also, the “marriage settlement agreement” (i.e. splitting the assets and debts between the two countries) would be a source of contention. Would both sides get nuclear weapons? There would be a possibility of military engagement between the two sides (perhaps leading to civil war, as it did 150 years ago).

While not an ideal situation, and one with many obstacles and pitfalls, it’s the best of several bad alternatives. One alternative is to continue the way we’ve been going. This will lead to continued economic decline, neglect of infrastructure and education, growing frustration at government, and the increased possibility of widespread political unrest or civil war. Another alternative is to wait for some crisis or external threat to bring the sides together. Even in the unlikely event that some unifying crisis will happen, such as the 9/11 attacks, this crisis won’t change the fundamental differences. Just as with the 9/11 attacks, after the crisis is over the status quo will resume. Another alternative is for one side to establish a dictatorship, imposing its ideas on the other. That’s the only way that either the liberal Reich or the conservative/libertarian agenda can be achieved in an intact America. An American dictatorship would be impossible without first a civil war, a major economic disaster, or both.

Reich’s agenda has a good chance for passage in Coastal America. While there would be some conservatives there, they wouldn’t be numerous or influential enough to stop the liberals from passing the legislation, and a President Obama or some other liberal President from signing it. Reich, Krugman, Obama, Hillary Clinton and others can transform Coastal America into a European-style welfare state, complete with high taxes, universal Medicare, and, most importantly, public investment in infrastructure and education. Their model would be the Great Prosperity America of 1947-1975, along with contemporary European countries. One thing liberals need to understand is that the aging of America, along with foreign competition, forces them to be much less generous with social welfare and entitlement spending than they were in the past.

Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Ron/Rand Paul, Newt Gingrich and others can transform Middle America into a Libertarian-Christian utopia, using as their model the laissez-faire U.S. from 1870-1928. They can promote private investment and free markets in health care, infrastructure and education. Since American today is closer to the 1947-1975 model than the 1870-1928 model, and many people depend on social welfare and entitlement programs, the conservatives would have a harder time enacting their agenda. One thing that conservatives need to understand is that the America of 1870-1928 had very little defense spending (with the brief exception of World War I). If Rush, Glenn, Sarah and the others want to cut taxes to pre-1930 levels, or eliminate the income tax, they’ll need to radically cut defense spending.

The good thing about a split America is that neither the Coastal nor Middle parts would have any pretensions about being a superpower. There would be no need for (or ability to fund) the level of military spending we have now. We wouldn’t be able to send troops to a future Iraq or Afghanistan to try to perform nation building. We would have to sell off or destroy much of our military hardware, and send most of our troops back to private life. Our military would transform from being the world’s policeman to being a self-defense force.

Like with West and East Germany between World War II and the destruction of the Berlin Wall, Coastal and Middle America can be seen as a large-scale political-economic experiment. If one is vastly more successful than the other, as West Germany was compared to East Germany, then perhaps the failed one will eventually agree to accept the system adopted by the successful one. Like with the reunification of Germany, America may then become reunited again. On other hand, if both are successful, or neither one successful, then perhaps America may remain divided for a long time.

In conclusion, Aftershock has some good examples of how our country has become more economically unequal in the last 30 years. The middle class has struggled while the rich have gotten much richer. The coping mechanisms that those in the working and middle classes have used to try to maintain their standard of living, including having both spouses work, increasing their work hours, and increasing their level of debt relative to income, have been exhausted. The money going to the rich, unlike that going to the middle class, is usually invested, not spent, which helps out Wall Street but not Main Street.

I don’t agree with Reich’s argument that a massive increase of government social welfare spending and taxation is needed to grow America’s economy. While such a policy will lead to more equality, there are other ways to promote economic growth and improved standard of living that rely more on stimulating production than consumption. These alternatives include laissez-faire economics that America utilized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, along with a mix of Communist dictatorship and capitalism that contemporary China uses. Reich’s agenda can only be achieved in a Coastal America that results from splitting the country into two. Such a split is the best of a number of bad alternatives that face America today, a result of a failed marriage between modern liberals and conservatives.

Are American Educators Living in a Fantasy World? A review of “Real Education” by Charles Murray

I enjoy reading books by Charles Murray. Although he identifies himself as a libertarian conservative, he’s an independent thinker. His books The Bell Curve and Human Accomplishment are examples of his unique perspective. A central point of the The Bell Curve is that intelligence, which is determined by genes and early childhood experience, is a major factor in determining who succeeds in life and who doesn’t. Since whether a man is intelligent or not is outside of his control, there’s no basis for the libertarian argument that those who are financially successful have “earned” their money. A less intelligent person can work just as hard as a more intelligent one, sometimes harder, but only make a fraction of what the smart person is making. In Human Accomplishment, which celebrates past creative achievements in the arts and sciences, Murray doesn’t find any correlation between political/economic freedom and rate of achievement. I’d expect a conservative writer to argue that living in a free and democratic society promotes achievement, but that would ignore the facts of history. Most great achievement occurred by men living in monarchies and aristocracies that had very little freedom or liberty in the modern sense.

In his latest book, Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality, Murray again stakes out an independent position. While one would expect a conservative writer to extol the virtues of George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” initiative, Murray is very critical of it. Murray also is realistic about the limitations of conservative initiatives such as school choice, charter schools, and tuition vouchers.

Murray’s 4 simple educational truths are:

1. Ability varies
2. Half of the children are below average
3. Too many people are going to college
4. America’s future depends on how we educate the academically gifted

I’ll discuss Murray’s arguments for each of these truths. In the case of “ability varies,” Murray focuses on academic ability, which correlates highly with intelligence. The simple truth is that “half of the children are below average” in academic ability. Research has shown that there’s a normal (“bell curve”) distribution of academic ability. It follows that half the children will be on the left side of the bell curve, i.e. below average.

Murray next argues that there’s not much that schools can do to improve performance of below-average ability children. This is much more controversial than the statement that half of the children are below average. Murray presents actual questions from standardized tests that below-average ability children have problems answering. These are pretty simple questions, and it’s surprising that so many children have difficulties with them. The fact that they can’t answer them, however, could be indicative of a problem with the schools, not their lack of intelligence.

Murray then discusses various programs designed to improve students’ test scores, including preschool programs (Abecedarian Project and Infant Health and Development Program), and elementary/secondary school programs (Title I and No Child Left Behind). His conclusion is that these programs produced little to no improvement in student achievement. His case is bolstered by the results of the Coleman Report, which studied the effects of inequality of educational opportunity on student achievement. The Coleman Report found that quality of schools explains almost nothing about differences in academic achievement. Family background is more important a determiner of student achievement than any educational measure. What about the terrible quality of many American public schools, including chaotic and sometimes violent classrooms, incompetent teachers, low standards, and dearth of teaching resources such as textbooks and computers? Murray states that these “worst of the worst” inner-city schools only affect about 2 to 3 percent of all students. Based on the failure of programs to improve test scores, the results of the Coleman Report, and the small percentage of students attending failing public schools, Murray says that “[t]o continue to assert that major improvements are possible in the academic test performance of the lower half of the distribution through reform of the public schools is more than a triumph of hope over experience. It ignores experience altogether. It is educational romanticism” (p. 62).

I have a few criticisms of Murray’s argument. The first has to do with the way the book is structured. In a chapter that focuses on below-average students, Murray makes his case that schools can’t do much to lift student achievement. Murray separately discusses gifted children in another chapter. He doesn’t have much to say, however, about average and above-average (but not gifted) children. Wouldn’t better schools help improve scores of average and above-average students? Wouldn’t these students have more potential to achieve than below-average students?

I’m also not convinced that schools can’t do better for below-average students. Murray says that failing public schools only affect 2 to 3 percent of all students. But these are the “worst of the worst”, the most extreme examples of poor schools. Is he implying that no other public schools have problems with lack of discipline, gangs, violence, incompetent teachers, and low standards? In other words, that 97% of American public schools today have absolutely no problems? I think that many schools have similar problems, but not just as extreme as the worst of the worst inner city schools. Students in these moderately bad schools can perform better if their schools had higher standards.

In a book on education, it’s surprising that Murray ignores international comparisons. I constantly read articles and charts showing how poorly American students compare to students in some other countries. Based on his argument that schools can’t do much to lift ability, it follows logically that the reason why Singaporean students perform so much better than American students is that their students are a lot smarter than ours are. This might be true, but I would have liked to see Murray discuss this in his book. Is the fact that Singaporean public schools have very high standards, excellent teachers, a demanding curriculum, and no discipline problems completely unrelated to the fact that Singaporean students score higher than American students? I find it hard to believe.

Murray’s next educational truth is that too many people are going to college. He makes some good arguments that many people, including some who have the ability to get a bachelor’s degree, would do better in some other type of post-secondary education. He uses an example of a young man deciding whether to become an electrician or white-collar manager. He’s smart enough to get his bachelor’s degree in business, but is this the right choice? He has special small-motor and spatial skills that would make him a good electrician. He’d probably be an average manager. Based on his abilities, interests, and future career opportunities (mediocre managers are much more likely to be laid off than top electricians), becoming an electrician would be a good option. In fact, skilled technicians and artisans are in high demand even in this recession, while many white collar jobs have been downsized and outsourced.

There are many students such as the one described in the above paragraph, who choose a 4-year college over other options (e.g. technical school, community college, or apprenticeship). The reason why they choose college is that their parents, teachers, and guidance counselors push them in this direction. The reason why adults push children into college is that our society has made the bachelor’s degree a requirement for professional success. Murray questions this cultural worship of the bachelor’s degree. There are some for whom college is appropriate. This includes good math and science students who major in engineering and the hard sciences. It also includes good students who want to study pre-med or pre-law. But for the vast majority of students, especially those who become liberal arts or business majors, college is not the best option. It’s not good for their personal development, as they don’t learn much self-discipline or self-restraint with their light workload or partying lifestyle. It’s not good for their professional development, as their BA degree doesn’t give them the specific skills to get good jobs after they graduate. When I graduated college over 20 years ago, I was basically a liberal arts major with no job skills. My first job out of college was a management trainee at a shoe store. I eventually got a job at a computer help desk, which gave me my start in IT, but it was at near-minimum wage. Today, it’s even tougher for liberal arts majors. The recession has hit them especially hard, leaving them with a lot of student debt and little opportunity for a good job.

Murray next discusses education of the gifted. America’s future depends on the (unelected) intellectual elite, those who have risen to the top jobs that directly impact the nation’s culture, economy, and politics, along with those who influence smaller communities. “The members of the elite are drawn overwhelmingly from the academically gifted. We had better make sure that we do the best possible job of educating them” (p. 107).

Gifted children should be allowed to advance at their own pace, not be held back by their peers. This could include skipping grades, or getting advanced material within their age-appropriate grade. I found myself unchallenged as a gifted public school student, and would have been better off being pushed to take more demanding classes.

Murray focuses on training the gifted to be good citizens. This training should continue through college. “We need to structure their education so that they have the best possible chance to become not just knowledgeable but wise” (p. 112). Murray’s wisdom training of the gifted includes improving their verbal skills, teaching them how to make sound judgments, teaching them how to think about ethical issues, and teaching them humility. I’ll discuss each of these points below:

• Verbal skills—SAT-Verbal scores never recovered from their decline in the late 1960’s and 1970’s. SAT-Math scores did recover, indicating that educational priorities led to a toughening of the math and sciences curriculum. These priorities didn’t result in improvement in humanities and social sciences education, fields that depend heavily on verbal skills. Part of this failure to teach verbal skills is a result of the progressive education movement, which emphasized creative self-expression over correct spelling and grammar. When I was in high school in the early and mid-1980’s, my school had very good math teachers, but mediocre English and social sciences teachers.
• Sound judgments—Members of the elite make decisions all the time, judgments that affect the culture and nation. The Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq still impacts us eight years later. When music company executives decide to sign a gangster rap artist, and ignore a quality musician, they weaken our culture a notch. When the FDA approves a psychiatric drug for children that has been inadequately tested, it jeopardizes our children’s mental health and development. Some components of sound judgment are unteachable, such as intuition and common sense. A teachable component includes how to evaluate data, especially the knowledge of basic statistics. Another one is pattern recognition, including knowledge of history. Personal and vicarious experience is also important in being able to see patterns in different situations.
• Ethical issues—Schools used to teach morality and virtue. Today, there is a widespread moral vacuum at all levels of education. This moral vacuum leads to nonjudgmentalism and ethical illiteracy. While there is more tolerance today than ever before, this tolerance extends to behavior that should not be acceptable in any society, including greed, selfishness, dishonesty, irresponsibility, and intemperance. It’s the function of the intellectual elite to help promote ethical behavior by example, by policy, and by writing and speaking. The default of the elite in this area has led to anomie and anarchy. We need to teach the gifted about virtue and ethics. This can be done by using examples from the great religious traditions and secular philosophers. These traditions and philosophies are in remarkable agreement on core issues (e.g. “the golden rule”).
• Humility—The self-esteem and individual rights movements have led to a widespread decline in student humility and personal responsibility. If a student gets a bad grade, it’s not his fault, but the fault of his teacher. The teacher is violating his “right” to a good grade. Students are supposed to feel good about themselves, no matter what they do or how well they perform academically. Criticism should be avoided at all cost. Research has shown that improving self-esteem doesn’t raise grades, promote good achievement, or have any positive effect. While there’s nothing wrong with praising gifted children for their successes, there’s nothing wrong with criticizing them for their failings, either. Many parents and teachers do the former, but not the latter. To gain perspective, and acquire humility, the gifted need to be challenged enough so that they fail sometimes. A little humility goes a long way in promoting sound judgments and ethical behavior.

In conclusion, Real Education provides a different and valuable perspective on the failings in American schools. We need to be more realistic about the capabilities of below-average students, we need to offer more students an alternative to college, and we need to provide better wisdom-training of the gifted. I feel that Murray is too pessimistic about the capability of public schools to improve student academic performance, especially for average and above-average students. I recommend this book as an independent perspective on American education.

How Did “The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave” Become the Land of Lawyers and the Home of Bureaucrats? A Review of “Life Without Lawyers” by Philip K. Howard

In these recessionary times, Americans are divided along partisan lines on many important issues, such as whether to give tax breaks to the rich versus extending unemployment benefits. Democrats and Republicans argue about government spending, taxation, health care reform, immigration, foreign wars, and a host of other issues. But away from the spotlight of media attention and political debate is a cancer that has gnawed away at the social fabric of American society. This cancer has been growing for the last four decades, and shows no signs of improvement. I am speaking about the litigation and regulation explosion that has reduced Americans' ability to take risks, exercise authority, fire incompetent employees, maintain discipline in schools, and to take responsibility for their actions. The tragic part of this is that there is a bipartisan consensus for reform that is stymied by self-serving special interests such as trial lawyers and public-sector unions. Philip K. Howard takes up this issue in his latest book Life Without Lawyers: Restoring Responsibility in America

Howard, author of the best-selling The Death of Common Sense, has talked about the issue of excessive and nonsensical lawsuits and regulation in previous books. Since the problem hasn’t gotten any better, Howard revisits these issues, presenting newer examples, but also suggesting solutions. He also is trying to improve things via his organization Common Good.

There are two main points in the book. One, is that there are too many rules prescribing how to do things. These rules derive from the assembly-line mentality that arose from the Industrial Revolution. While some rules are necessary in any complex endeavor, such as a business, government, or school, our society has gone overboard with rules and organization. Too many rules stifle individual initiative and decision making. Howard presents many examples of this in the public schools. Teachers in New York City are forbidden from calling on students who raise their hands during the first part of class. A mother of a third grader, who arrived with a supply of birthday cupcakes, was turned away because there is a rule against parents in the classroom. Teachers write out detailed course plans every week that no one ever reads. Loudspeakers constantly blare out announcements, interrupting classes and making it impossible for teachers and students to concentrate. No Child Left Behind made things worse by focusing on standardized testing. Teachers’ union contracts dictate hours worked, limit teacher duties, and make it virtually impossible to fire incompetent teachers. Paint crumbles at the top of walls in some New York City schools because unions prohibit painting walls higher than ten feet.

The second main point is that since the 1960’s individual rights have trumped concerns over the common good. “Let any individual who feels aggrieved bring a legal claim for almost anything” (p. 23). This mindset arose from a desire to remedy abuses due to racial and gender discrimination. The problem is, however, that “[u]nlike constitutional rights, which shield citizens from state power, these new rights gave citizens a sword against other free citizens” (p. 23). It isn’t hard to find examples of how citizens utilize lawsuits as swords against other citizens. In 2007, a Washington, D.C. lawyer sued his dry cleaner for $54 million because he claimed that they lost a pair of pants. This idiotic and absurd case, which should have been immediately dismissed, was allowed to go on for more than two years, costing the family owning the dry cleaner over $100,000 in legal fees. While they won the case, they ended up having to close the store. Another example is a medical malpractice case. A dermatologist advised a patient to remove skin based on a biopsy indicating malignancy. The patient got a second opinion which indicated no malignancy, and didn’t get the skin removed. After getting terminal cancer several years later, the patient sued the first doctor on the basis that the doctor should have been more insistent about getting the skin removed. While the doctor prevailed in the case after seven years of legal battling, it could hardly be called a victory.

The result of out-of-control lawsuits is that Americans don’t trust the justice system anymore. They become defensive in their behavior, refusing to take risks out of fear of being sued. The most familiar and costly example of defensive behavior is in the field of medicine. Unnecessary care accounts for 30% of total health care spending. Nursing homes send dying ninety-year-olds to intensive care units, so that they can’t be sued for negligence in the person's death. Doctors have to document everything, in case they have to justify their decisions in court. Minor surgeries require expensive and unnecessary preoperative tests to prevent the providers from being sued.

The threat of lawsuits, combined with burdensome regulation, has eroded discipline in public schools. In a 2001 survey, 43% of high school teachers said they spent more time maintaining order than teaching. One in seven teachers in urban schools has been physically assaulted by his students. In New York City more than 60 steps and legal considerations are required to suspend a student for over 5 days. “Just sending a disruptive student out of the classroom requires layers of bureaucratic compliance” (p. 104). A violent autistic child in Hartford, CT, was kept in a regular classroom because his parents, exercising their rights under federal law, refused to allow him to be transferred to special ed. The school had to institute formal legal proceedings and receive a judge’s order to remove the disruptive child. After 2 years of hearings and thousands of dollars of expense, the school finally received the order to move the child.

Howard uses the “broken windows” analogy to explain how this erosion of discipline has harmed schools. If broken windows in a building aren’t fixed, the tendency is for vandals to break more windows, and eventually break into the building. After a few unchecked incidents, disorder takes over a school. “Young people aren’t known for their maturity, and pushing the envelope becomes a sport” (p. 105). Zero tolerance rules, which were supposed to counteract school disorder, only make things worse. The problem with these rules is that they can’t distinguish trivial from severe infractions. In 2001, a National Merit scholar in a Florida high school was suspended because of a small kitchen knife found in the back seat of her car on school grounds. “Instead of bolstering school authority, zero tolerance rules have become a symbol of lack of authority to do what’s right” (p. 106).

The fear and distrust of authority that began in the 1960’s was a major factor that led to our current legalistic mess. We tried to outlaw any type of discretion by people in positions of authority—teachers, administrators, managers, and government executives—by replacing this discretion with a tangle of rules and threats of litigation. But there is no substitute for good judgment, and good judgment relies on subjective and intuitive factors. Having to prove the correctness of decisions in legal proceedings leads to worse decisions. It’s true that people can explain why they did something, but only to a point. These explanations rarely rise to the level of legal proof.

“The alternative to absolute rights is not absolute discretion” (p. 58). Legislatures can establish clear public goals, and give officials the responsibility to achieve these goals. But meeting these goals requires the use of individual judgment, such as the decision that a student is too violent to be mainstreamed. People in power will at times make mistakes, and they should be held accountable for their mistakes. But trying to prescribe decisions by legal rule is a self-defeating way to organize our society.

Some specific reforms that Howard advocates include:

1) Judges must draw legal boundaries of reasonableness as they pertain to lawsuits. The “lost pants” type of lawsuit should be immediately dismissed. For other suits that aren’t obviously ridiculous, judges need to take into account whether a claim might undermine reasonable activities of people not in the courtroom. For example, the threat of lawsuits has resulted in playgrounds being stripped of fun equipment. Many schools have eliminated recess, and parents are afraid to allow their children to engage in unstructured play. As a result of these changes, children today spend much of their time in front of television and computer screens. This lack of exercise is one important factor in the obesity epidemic plaguing our nation’s youth. By trying to eliminate risky behavior among children, we’ve succeeded in making many of them fat, a health problem which will eventually cause much more suffering and death than an occasional accident.

2) Special courts are needed for medical malpractice claims. The problem isn’t the setting of standards of care. The problem is finding courts that are trusted to uphold these standards. Allowing medical malpractice claims to be heard in regular courts, with greedy trial lawyers manipulating clueless juries, has led to an explosion of defensive medicine. Special courts for medical malpractice would have the following characteristics: judges dedicated to health care claims, written judicial opinions rather than jury verdicts, neutral experts in place of hired guns, and expedited proceedings with incentives for early settlements.

3) Abandon the due process model for social services, especially public schools. Daily choices in schools and other public institutions need to be made by teachers and administrators with the freedom to use their judgment, without fear of lawsuit. These choices should not be determined by burdensome detailed regulation. In successful private and charter schools, teachers and principals are free to do what they think is best for their students. For public schools to succeed, their teachers and principals need the same freedom. This freedom includes the freedom of school administrators to fire incompetent teachers.

4) Don’t tolerate disorder in public schools. Principals and teachers need the authority to promptly remove disruptive students without worrying about following regulations or being sued by parents. Some students are too disruptive or violent to be mainstreamed, and they need to be removed from the regular classroom. Allowing individual students to disrupt classes makes it very difficult to properly educate the other students. While one student and his parents may win, everyone else loses. This individualistic and selfish model needs to change.

5) Discrimination cases should only be allowed for systematic practices of discrimination. This was the original purpose of discrimination laws, which since the 1960’s have been corrupted by greedy trial lawyers and irresponsible minority advocates. If a minority feels he’s being discriminated against, his lawsuit would be dismissed unless he can present evidence that the employer discriminates against minorities in general. Individuals should not be allowed to bring claims only on behalf of themselves. An exception is for individual claims of sexual harassment, but only if they rise to the level of quid pro quo.

6) Washington needs to be fixed from the outside. Partisan politics and special interests have made it impossible for our representatives to achieve any important changes in the areas that Howard talks about. As with the No Child Left Behind law, they just pile layers of legal concrete on people and institutions that are already crushed by law. We must form a national coalition of citizen leaders, a shadow government, to propose an overhaul of government. The models for this are the base-closing commissions in the 1990’s, or the current deficit-reduction commissions. To effect change, public opinion must be mobilized in a way that it hasn’t been since the 1960’s. “America doesn’t need a new Constitution, just a healthy spring cleaning and a practical approach to making public choices without crushing us under endless law” (p. 177).

The only problem with this book is that it lacks an index. I don’t remember ever reading a nonfiction book without an index.

Due to excessive regulation and litigation, America in the early 21st century is a shell of its former self. We’ve become afraid to take risks, afraid to use our judgment, and afraid to do what we think is right. Is this the type of mentality that motivated the early pioneers, people who risked everything to settle an unknown and sometimes hostile country? Is this the type of mentality that motivated the great American inventors, entrepreneurs, and other creative people? Would Edison have invented the light bulb if he was afraid of being sued by the candle makers? Would Tesla have invented A/C electric power if he was afraid of being sued by the family of the rare person who was electrocuted? Would railroads, cars, and planes have been invented and made available to the masses if companies were afraid of being sued due to accidents? Would America have risen to a leadership position among nations if its public schools were always in the sorry shape they are in today? Would a legal and political system have been a model to the world if it allowed a greedy scumbag to sue his dry cleaner for $54 million dollars?

The problems that Howard describes in his book are not the only problems that America faces. Obviously, we need to be concerned about other things, including the recession, our government’s long-term fiscal health, and the threat of terrorism. But overregulation and overlitigation, although less publicized, nevertheless affect Americans in their daily lives—in their schools, workplaces, doctors offices, hospitals, and even their homes. The cost in money, worry, wasted time, and unhealthy behavior is severe. I recommend “Life Without Lawyers” to all Americans.