1. I agree with Pete and Carl on the Seidman article. Nonetheless, it obviously has no legs. Here was (libertarian judicial activist) Randy Barnett’s reaction: Well, now we can get the income tax declared overturned if we can get five votes.
2. That reminds me of all the political lessons I learned talking with a couple of Tea Partiers and a couple of other conservatives for a few hours the other day.
3. One of their vehicles had this (now quaint) bumper sticker: 2010–The Second American Revolution.
4. A particularly eloquent guy reported that he had campaigned for Romney in Florida with “Americans for Prosperity” funded, of course, by the Koch brothers. On the long drive down to the I-10 corridor, they called various registered Floridians to ask them if Obama had made the economy better or worse over the last four years. Out of any 10 calls, four said better and four said worse. They targeted the wafflers for in-person visits. They thought if they talked them into worse they would vote for Romney.
5. Another guy spotted big flaws in this approach. Here’s one: The Americans suffering disproportionally from the jobless semi-recovery, such as African Americans and Hispanics, were going to stay with the president anyway. Take them out of the picture and the economy just wasn’t bad enough to turn out the president. And in any case, there were other issues besides “prosperity,” such as the constitutionality of ObamaCare, entitlement reform, and the family.
6. The Tea Partiers–like too many Republicans–have big problems with the income tax as such. They, despite the 16th Amendment and all, really think that it’s unconstitutional to tax production, as opposed to consumption. That’s why they’re so hostile to anyone who votes for any kind of INCOME tax increase.
7. The Tea Partiers really believed Romney would win and the revolution against the unconstitutional welfare state as such would continue. When I said that there was no evidence in the week or two before the election that that would happen, they admitted they were “high on 2010″ and its attendant fantasies.
8. So just like many Republicans, they’re overstating the significance of the election of 2012 as much as they overstated the significance of 2010. As much as Romney, they’re thinking too poorly of too many of their fellow citizens for how and (the Tea Partiers imagine) why they voted.
9. They’re impatient with the idea of entitlement REFORM–mending, not ending, the key features of our minimalist safety net–because they think we live in REVOLUTIONARY times with high constitutional significance. In the same way, they can’t see why the Republicans in Congress should compromise with the president even now. That’s compromising with evil-doing progressivism.
10. The real plight of one of the guys around the table showed the kind of reform we need. He is one of the most brilliant and admirable graduates of Berry College ever. He went to law school–instead of pursuing a PhD–for the highly responsible reason of wanting to provide for his family. Well, he graduated from law school at the wrong time, can only find contract work (because most firms have realized that what associates used to do can be more cheaply contracted out), and is saddled with law-school debt.
11. So he’s self-employed. He’s married with children and not rich, and so under the family-friendly Bush tax cut he pays little to no income tax. But he has to pay very significant self-employment tax, which is not calibrated to family size. So he’s actually part of the 47% if you go with income tax alone, but his actual tax burden–as a percentage of his income–is around Mitt’s.
12. Not only that, his job doesn’t include benefits, and so he’s been stuck with paying some big hospital bills at the retail level.
13. This guy doesn’t whine, and he’s doing fine by his family despite it all. Still: Shouldn’t a Republican priority be tax, health-care, and entitlement reform with the self-employed in mind? Like it or not, more and more of us are going to be self-employed. Fewer and fewer (and ObamaCare is going to help to accelerate this trend) are going to be covered by employer-based health care. Don’t Republicans have to tell the truth that we have to devolve insurance to the individual with appropriate, means-based government subsidies, making sure that affordable insurance is available to everyone? This brilliant and admirably responsible independent contractor reminds us how regressive our current system is in so many respects. Single-payer health-care insurance is unsustainable, and employer-based is unjust (and probably also unsustainable).
14. Of course, the true Tea Partier wants all the safety net abolished on behalf of a new birth of constitutional freedom. But one reason Romney lost is that too many struggling, working-class Americans thought he–to cut the taxes of really rich guys–wanted that too.
15. So I agree, as usual, with Pete: The Republicans need to focus on what Levin and Capretta tell us about entitlement reform, the demographic crisis, and doing what we can to shore up the family and other “intermediary” or relational institutions between the individual and big, impersonal government.
January 1st, 2013 | 12:20 am
[...] 1. I agree with Pete and Carl on the Seidman article. Nonetheless, it obviously has no legs. Here was (libertarian judicial activist) Randy Barnett’s reaction: Well, now Source: Postmodern Conservative [...]
January 1st, 2013 | 4:20 am
Thanks for the article.
For info on people using voluntary Libertarian tools on similar and other issues worldwide, please see the non-partisan Libertarian International Organization @ http://www.Libertarian-International.org ….
January 1st, 2013 | 10:27 am
“The Republicans need to focus on what Levin and Capretta tell us about entitlement reform, the demographic crisis, and doing what we can to shore up the family and other “intermediary” or relational institutions between the individual and big, impersonal government.”
My critique of the above is that it’s about five decades too late in being implemented. This gradualisim may have worked during the Eisenhower Admin. but it’s too late. My goodness, we’re on the cusp of an economic collapse that will forever change this country, brought about, intentionally, by sophists who seek to install a failed and pernicious ideology, no matter the cost.
The TPers have it about right but how does one go about abandoning a corrupt and failed state without violence? And, it will be the parasite classes fighting to force the producers to continue producing.
Secession is obvious and has the merit of being an American tradition. Do we really want to share a gov’t with the majority of those folks from California, New York, Illinois, Mass., etc.?
January 1st, 2013 | 10:44 am
Less than one quarter of the voting population voted for Obama. I am not altogether sure what that means about American politics, but know that if there is any indication that America is still truly prosperous it is that people think they can afford to be disengaged from our politics.
Plenty of Tea Partiers I know up here refused to vote for Romney and hoped he would lose so there could be a more virtuous revolution from the Right and lots more people would see the light. I’m not sure that they are sure or united about what that light is, but their faith in a “true” America warms my little heart, somehow.
As the wife of a self-employed husband, I have to agree with your contractor. My husband puts it differently, referring to the plight of the entrepreneurial in America these days; government is at war with the independent earner/small businessman. His take is that the Constitution was written by guys like that and anti-Constitutionalists are trying to make all corporate and/or unionized and/or part of government somehow to bring all of that independence under control. That may be a fantasy, too, but he’s not the only Republican to believe it true. We know a lot of small businessmen, may of them businesses without employees, perhaps like your independent contractor?
Seidman’s revelation is nothing new and the usual conversation stopper in such discussions is to ask who we would trust to put together a new government. The person insisting that we need to radically reconstitute ourselves always assumes he or someone who thinks just as he does will prevail in the arguments. “How do you know?” I ask. Then they start to worry about right-wing conspiracies to take over government and that’s that. Call it Democratic fantasy?
January 2nd, 2013 | 12:15 am
“Well, he graduated from law school at the wrong time, can only find contract work (because most firms have realized that what associates used to do can be more cheaply contracted out), and is saddled with law-school debt.”
I realize that this is a tangential point, but given Dr. Lawler’s devotion to Toqueville, and Toqueville’s assertion that the lawyer is one class of American who brings a measure of aristocratic stability and continuity to a system otherwise given to chaotic whimsy, I will make it.
The old system of partner and associate not only served to create a division of labor within a law firm (which function can be more cheaply done with contractors), it was also the way that young lawyers got their training. Just about any lawyer will tell you that law school does not prepare you to be an attorney.
This apprenticeship system is now in a shambles, and if it is not restored or effectively replaced over the coming decade (or so), we’ll probably face a crisis in our legal system concurrent with the demographic crisis Dr. Lawler mentions.
As the Baby Boomers start exiting the field, we’ll find our legal system under the care of a new generation that is largely incapable of maintaining our more complex legal institutions.
You’ll still be able to get your will done without any difficulty, but demand for services like mergers and acquisitions, or defense against administrative agency actions will likely far outstrip supply.
January 2nd, 2013 | 1:52 am
“The person insisting that we need to radically reconstitute ourselves always assumes he or someone who thinks just as he does will prevail in the arguments. “How do you know?” I ask.”
In this case because he is from Harvard Law, and they just about invented both sides of the arguments.
A simple question Kate: In the last election both presidential candidates were graduates of which institution?
In addition there is no way you guys are reading Seidman correctly, which ironically just makes his primary point. His message is actually quite conservative, especially once you identify the portions that have to be sarcastic and “dishonest”. He ends up placing less emphasis on the constitution in a way that makes sense even to Madison (if men are angels less government is necessary, if less government is necessary fewer centers of influence are state actors and constitutional law is therefore less relevant), albeit here he absolutely takes a bright line stand in favor of habitually acting as if the constitutional freedoms of the Bill of Rights applied even if they do not (which in fact most folks do).
Because one can see that he is essentially speaking to a different audience not necessarily disposed to have a brick on its shoulder, and to a new years sort of aspiration that is perhaps blinded and structured by his rooted position at Georgetown, where indeed the U.S. Constiution is less important because Georgetown is not a state actor, (but Article I section 8, clause 8 (which theoretically would be intellectual property law) is relevant both because he works at a research university, and because he was engaged in copyright) his joke about comparative governments involving the examples he uses make this even more apparent. On every level any attempt to unravel just what he is saying (or which intra-faculty, georgetown-harvard nexis he is speaking to gets complex) Within the four corners of the two page article one might assume that if it was a legal document the first paragraph and the last paragraph would actually contain the meat of his argument, but in fact the most memorable lines are simply props, or bait for the Hobbesians. For him I suspect Constiutional law may indeed be closer to what you might call legal positivism, which in point of fact functionally all law probably is, so the new years aspiration was in fact to be less legalistic, or to be warry of which legal/constitutional criteria one was importing or reading into the arguments tossed around as “puffery”. In this sense the entire article was a sort of attempt to think about sophisticated parties, which essentially is the phenomenology that does all the work in a living constiutitution in the first place(even if impacted by the world wide web). I don’t think he was suggesting what you seem to attribute to him, which in fact he did openly advocate for while instantly also making historical arguments, none of which are in any way directly relevant to the budget(mind you). The overall message was actually to keep calm and carry on in virtue, to in some instances pretend the constitution applied (i.e. Georgetown), While lightly mocking the legal fiction of making a constitutional/legal argument embodied in copyright.
In other words “we” are not the ones who need to radically reconstitute ourselves. Rather certain folks (i.e. Harvard JD’s, and perhaps Georgetown ones), i.e. the ones who accept his theory of freedom that he culminates with, need to reconstitute themselves and capacity to do this is the Hallmark of the Harvard JD. Indeed he suggests they already have by virtue of being faculty, essentially formed themselves into micro-societies(with unique and living functional constiutional law), where he jokes in part about a shared language constituting a common form of intellectual property/human capital.
Essentially the essay is a sort of think outside the box(multi-door courthouse), pro-federalism reflection upon the relevance of arguments qua arguments(don’t make a federal/constitutional case out of it), or at least the essay could support such a construction, and the requirements of a modicum of originality implicit in copyright itself may indeed be guiding an argument that is quite old. Drop “constitutional” in “constitutional law” and parts of the argument mirror a traditional conservative critique of legal positivism.
I could be wrong, but I assume being from Harvard Law is more material than party identification. So I have a theoretical party(way of grouping a class) that joins Obama and Romney before joining Romney and Cheeks. No one it seems to me was very impressed with “seriously conservative”, because these sorts of derivatives seem quite un-natural. Leaving aside that grouping parties in law is somewhat arbitrarily confined to the catagory of labor law…part of what Seidman might be asking vis a vis Madison is why consider factions in terms of federalist 10 and ignore modern groupings of class, especially when there is so much current confusion over the grouping of class?
January 2nd, 2013 | 9:09 am
GeoSmiley, Well, you’re right, which means that our lawyer-partners have lost any sense of aristocratic responsibility to their indispensable profession to make quick bucks.
January 2nd, 2013 | 8:35 pm
[...] Lawler very astutely described the problems of some of the self-employed. Some of those observations also apply to much [...]
January 3rd, 2013 | 8:17 pm
Robert, how do you reconcile condemning the “parasite class” while expressing (false) sympathy with working-class Americans in an earlier comment? Many working-class Americans are on public assistance because of the still-dismal economy.
January 3rd, 2013 | 8:48 pm
Also, Robert, the secession you call for is never going to happen because the remaining red states would lose all of those D.C. subsidies, which are paid for by taxpayers from California, New York, Illinois, Mass., etc.
January 3rd, 2013 | 8:53 pm
Jeremy, the ‘parasite’ class are those who’ve been on ‘public assistance’ for one or more generations, or an extended period of time with no desire to work.
I have great sympathy for those who work and still qualify for ‘assistance’ and trust they will get it. In the meantime, I’d like to take ‘welfare’ away from the general gov’t and put it, entirely with the states. I’m not the crumudgeon that many would have you believe I am.
I have dwelt among the ‘working-class’ my entire life. I have great sympathy for them/us. However, Chairman Obama is a tyrant who seeks to welfarize as many of the ‘working’ class as he can, thus solidifying his power. If properly educated, the working class will man the barricades and take back the nation, and re-establish republican principles. I hope.
January 3rd, 2013 | 9:08 pm
Re: secession, I must agree with you Jeremy. We are no longer the men of ’61, let alone ’76. We have lost the symbols, the meaning, the ground. We are a nation of welfare recipients, owing our existence to an ignorant, tyrannical, Marxist. However, there is a remnant…there’s always a remnant.
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