The Blob on the Ballot

Plus, Seinfeld Conservatism, and an economist accidentally proves his uselessness

Below, Bankruptcy Court is back in session with a look at Seinfeld Conservatism, and a spectacularly silly Wall Street Journal op-ed inadvertently showcases everything wrong with the oversimplified models of economics. But first…

THE BLOB ON THE BALLOT

Through its steady flow of press releases, briefings, and readouts, the White House Communications Office would have the American people believe that President Joe Biden remains hard at work conducting their business. Here he is quarterbacking negotiations over the release of prisoners held in Russia. There he is delivering a tough message to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Of course, no one who has watched Biden’s attempts this year at speaking extemporaneously or answering simple interview questions, let alone participating in a high stakes debate with a political opponent, can believe he possesses either the critical thinking or communication skills to do more than play-act at the duties of his office. We can only hope that others are formulating the strategy, making the tough decisions, conveying the U.S. position. The alternative is too dangerous.

And yet the casual assumption normalized by this state of affairs, that the president is a figurehead rather than the government’s chief executive, represents the anti-democratic endpoint of the long-term progressive project to reallocate power from the government’s politically accountable actors to the appointees and civil servants of the administrative state. Until now, legal maneuvers were central to the effort. Delegations from Congress. Independent agencies. Special counsels. But in the Biden White House, for the first time, the president is entirely beside the point.

This context is especially important as Vice President Kamala Harris embarks upon what appears likely to be the most substance-free campaign ever run by a major presidential candidate. Harris skipped the primary process, of course. Two weeks into her candidacy, she has yet to take a question from the media. And she is rapidly renouncing the most distinctive positions she did take when she ran for president four years ago, on everything from single-payor health care to fracking. What’s left is her track record as a tough-on-crime prosecutor, which she now abhors, and the comedy of the “Oddly Specific Kamala Harris Policy Generator,” which pokes fun at her penchant for hyper-targeted identity politics with proposals like “a work visa program for international spies who open a Wendy's that operates for 7 weeks in an excavation site.”

Elections are never about policy specifics but, for democracy to function, they do have to be about competing worldviews, areas of focus, and visions. The message instead coming through loud and clear is that nothing matters. What voters are selecting is the coterie of experts who will govern however they see fit. The president doesn’t, shouldn’t, and won’t have the power. The president’s positions are merely of convenience, binding no one. Really, there’s no point in asking her questions or reporting the answers anyway.

Still, Republicans have chosen to run Donald Trump against the amorphous blob, and it’s entirely plausible that the blob will win. If it does, we will be all the way through the looking glass, to a form of government in which elections mark odd moments in time when voters get to express not their preference for how the country will be run, but merely their choice of which out-of-touch elite will rule over them however it wants until the next election comes around.

The good news is, it’s never too late for leaders in either party to choose a different course and offer up a political vision responsive to the concerns and priorities of voters. Indeed, that’s the dominant strategy for building a durable governing majority. The bad news is, it’s getting awfully late, at least this time around.

BANKRUPTCY COURT: SEINFELD CONSERVATISM

It was only a couple of weeks ago that I was picking on Heath Mayo of Principles First for his peculiar conception of the elite obligation to speak only on behalf of the elite. But he’s back again, because he represents so well that segment of the Old Right that has abandoned all pretense of diagnosing or addressing the nation’s problems, insisting instead that the voting public should prioritize respectability as the overriding end unto itself. This is what I call Seinfeld Conservatism—a politics about nothing—and it, um, does not work very well. Here, look:

These banalities generally fall into two categories. There’s the tenets of the American civic religion (“Uphold the Constitution.” “Don’t break laws.” “Stand with allies.” “Don’t praise dictators.” “Support our troops.” “Respect people.” “Tell the truth.”) and then there’s the, well, I guess we’d call it an agenda (“Pay down the debt.” “Defend our elections.” “Be for free enterprise.” “Secure the border.” “Cut tariffs.” “Focus on education & childcare.” “Fix healthcare.”).

The civic religion is very nice, as far as it goes. Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to find people anywhere on the political spectrum who disagree with these things. Insofar as the implicit critique is that we have leaders who fall short, fair enough. But herein lies the problem. What large swathes of the electorate are demonstrating is that they will overlook failure on that front if that’s what it takes to find someone willing to address what they consider to be the nation’s substantive problems. An Old Right that appears constitutionally incapable of understanding or tackling real problems writes itself out of the story.

Look at the “policy” positions here… Pay down the debt? So, not only close our $2 trillion budget deficit but run a consistent surplus? How, exactly? If this were an acknowledgment that taxes have to be raised, that would be interesting. But it’s not. If it were an acknowledgment that spending needs to be cut, that would be interesting, too. But it’s not. To the contrary, we’re also supposed to “fix healthcare” and “focus on education and childcare.” Not that there’s any indication what these things mean or what tradeoffs are being proposed. “Secure the border.” With a wall? With deportations? With asylum reform? “Defend our elections.” With voter ID? With same-day voting requirements? Can’t say any of those things, would offend too many people in the upper-middle-class coalition that doesn’t have to worry about many problems themselves but would really like to feel good about themselves while worrying in some non-specific but very pro-democracy way.

The funniest one, of course, is “cut tariffs.” Nearly all of the tariffs of recent vintage, imposed by President Trump and sustained by President Biden, are on China. The only concrete, decipherable commitment here is to embrace free trade with China. What a mess.

What we need is a conservatism that marries the strong commitment to democratic principles with a policy consensus that let’s go of the 1980s, addresses the problems of today, and emphasizes the importance of family, community, and industry to the nation’s liberty and prosperity. This is entirely doable. There’s no reason that people who care about democratic norms should also be totally devoid of useful ideas for campaigning and governing. But so long as they are, they will find themselves irrelevant to our politics, and will have only themselves to blame.

BONUS LINK: The “Freedom Conservatives” movement promoted by Avik Roy is another good example of Seinfeld Conservatism. Perhaps not coincidentally, Roy was also cited alongside Mayo in my recent discussion of the Elite Catch-22. Back when the FreeCons, as they call themselves, published their own empty statement of principles, I wrote an analysis of its shortcomings for the Financial Times: ‘Freedom Conservatism’ Is Much Ado About Nothing

ASSUME A CAN… OF PEARS?

From the department of you-can’t-make-it-up, a spectacularly silly op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Friday from economist Steven E. Landsburg begins:

Here’s an economics brain teaser: Apples are provided by a competitive industry. Pears are provided by a monopolist. Coincidentally, they sell at the same price. You’re hungry and would be equally happy with an apple or a pear. If you care about conserving societal resources, which should you buy?

Most of my sophomore-level economics students can solve this problem, which I posed on an exam. Almost nobody else can. I’ve tried it out on a lot of smart lawyers, accountants, entrepreneurs and scientists. Neither can the latest version of ChatGPT.

First I’ll tell you the answer; then I’ll tell you the moral. In a competitive industry, prices are a pretty good indicator of resource costs. Under a monopoly, prices usually reflect a substantial markup. So a $1 apple sold by a competitor probably requires almost a dollar’s worth of resources to produce. A $1 pear sold by a monopolist is more likely to require, say, 80 cents worth of resources. To minimize resource consumption, you should buy the pear.

The moral is that we need well-trained economists. Economists know things that are true, important and entirely counterintuitive to anyone who hasn’t had the right kind of training—and at least for now, that includes the bots.

I love two things about this example. The first is how useless it is. If this mode of economic analysis is so important, surely there is a real-world example in which its insights would be determinative. But no, it’s apparently good mostly for brain teasers. Think how much poorer our world would be if we didn’t have economists to score higher than entrepreneurs and scientists on economist-imagined brain teasers.

The second is how wrong it is. How are we defining societal resources? Agriculture has enormous externalized costs, after all. The price of the apple and pear may tell you very little about which consumes more resources, of which the grower may pay only a small share. What is the monopolist’s strategy? Is he trying to maximize profit? Maybe he’s trying to gain share, or drive the apple seller out of the market. Indeed, what does it even mean to be a “monopolist” in pears when apparently our brain-teased consumer is indifferent between one and an apple? Sounds like they’re pretty good substitutes, such that the pear seller cannot price without reference to the apple’s price. Maybe the fact that they’re priced the same isn’t so coincidental after all.

The very structure of the question—you see two goods that you consider perfect substitutes for each other, but one is sold in a “competitive industry” and the other is sold by a “monopolist”—is so nonsensical that it should itself earn a failing grade for the professor, who nonetheless is using it to lecture us all in the Wall Street Journal on the wonders of the special knowledge possessed by economists with “the right kind of training.” No thank you.

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