House of War

Robert Batemen joins the discussion at Matthew Yglesias’ blog with a hugely affecting post that crystallises disdain into pure rage .

MQ,

Yes, speaking as one of those doing, you can of course say what you like.

We, of course, also have the option of assessing your commentary in a B. Franklin-like way. (you perhaps recall the line, it ends in “and remove all doubt”)

We do not choose the wars mq. You do. You choose the civilians who decide to send us. Be that Wilson or FDR, Truman, or Kennedy, Johnson or Carter, Clinton or either of the Bush presidents. And the Congresses as well, of course. So yelling at us for upholding our end of our constitutional bargain is, to be blunt, counterproductive.

You dislike war, and in particular, this President. Got it. Your opposition to that guy is all yours, and you’re welcome to it. And your academic opposition to all conflict is nice to know, and we all appreciate that you in your happy little quasi-intellectual way, don’t like war. Fine. But we, who lose friends, both American and Iraqi, hate it.

We hate it in the mornings, when we wake up, sweating from a dream in which our ‘terp and her kids were still together, though even in our dreams we cannot forget that Ansar Al Sunna put a drill bit to her temple after raping her.

We hate it in the afternoons, when we see the back and profile of another soldier we knew well, and for an instant we think, “Hey, X, hey, wait up!” but then we remember that X went home in an aluminum box, missing most of the back of his skull.

We hate it in the evening when we’re walking home past a construction site and there is a loud goddamned boom from some asshat dropping a load from a crane which immediately collapses our knees in the first reaction that people like us now have to loud goddamned booms before our brains tell us we’re stateside.

We hate it when we open the paper and we see that you civilians have only let in 770 Iraqis into our precious country, many of whom put their asses, and their families, on the line for something better for their country by working with us. And we remember long nights and whole packs of bad cigarettes drifting off over the Tigris talking with them about how someday we will bring our families together, so they can meet, and we will picnic in Karada by the river and watch our grandchildren play near the spot where we watched a truck-bomb go off.

In short, MQ, we hate war in a way and with a depth that you only pretend to understand.

We hate death, because we know it.

We hate suffering, because we know it.

We hate religious extremism and violent extremism, because we know it.

We hate waste, in and by all of these, because we know it.

So perhaps, you might consider these things in your next, oh-so-cogent posting. Perhaps you might learn to differentiate between the wars and acts of violence of choice which so many civilian presidents (Wilson, Truman, Kennedy, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II) have directed us to, and the actions, intents, and behaviors of your imperfect military.

With disdain,

Robert Bateman

“The division of labour is limited by the extent of the market.”

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith, Randolph M. Siverson, and James D. Morrow, in their highly cynical book The Logic of Political Survival, state that when referring to categories of regime (and all other organisations, in fact) we should consider two institutional dimensions:

The selectorate, the group of people with a meaningful ability to choose the government or leadership;

The winning coalition, a subset of the selectorate that “backs” the leadership, whose support is essential for the incumbent, if they are to remain in power;

Selectorates vary according to type. In a democracy, the selectorate is the electorate. In an autocracy, the selectorate is the elite, like generals, important merchants, administrators and so forth. In a monarchy, the selectorate is the aristocracy. In North Korea, for instance, the nominal selectorate is the Korean Workers’ Party, but the real selectorate is a much smaller group within that. Selectorates vary greatly in size.

Winning coalitions also vary according to type. In the British parliamentary system, the winning coalition must be at least half the MPs, each with half the vote in their districts, or at least twenty-five percent of the vote. In a directly elected presidential system, you need fifty-one percent of the vote. In America, thanks to the vagaries of the Electoral College, you could potentially secure the presidency with as little as nineteen percent of the vote. Proportional representation can give even smaller winning coalitions, many with as little as ten percent of the vote, according to Bueno de Mesquita et al. In a rigged, autocratic system like North Korea’s, you can win with the support of one in every ten thousand, if they are the military leaders. Winning coalitions, too, vary greatly in size.

The example of North Korea is different from those that preceded it in an important way: in an electoral system, the selectorate and winning coalition (i.e. the voters) are essentially anonymous; in all other systems, they draw from a known set.

All governments want to survive, and all have the same basic functions: to set the tax rate, which generates revenue, and to keep their constituents happy, by allocating resources in the form of public goods, which benefit everybody, and private goods, which benefit the winning coalition. Private goods might be monopoly access, access to corruption, access to superior material goods. Democratic systems are no different. Republicans use tax policy to benefit their constituents, the relatively wealthy people who tend to vote Republican, and the Democrats do the same, using tax policy to benefit the relatively poorer people who tend to vote Democrat. The logic of political survival dictates this. The government must satisfy its winning coalition to maintain power, by definition. In this theory (correct, IMO), cronyism is inevitable. “It was written”.

Democracies differ from dictatorships only in terms of scale. They follow the same logic according to the same two institutional predicates. We need not be idealistic regarding the limits and true nature of democracy. It is abundantly clear that it is superior to dictatorial systems, because it guarantees a far larger group is involved in selecting and maintaining the government, because large absolute size of the selectorate contributes to more public goods and because large relative size of winning coalition (relative to the size of the selectorate) contributes to less private goods. A government that is supported by a large winning coalition will find it more efficient to reward that coalition by producing public goods, which can be consumed by all. A government that is supported by a small coalition willl find it much more efficient to reward that coalition with corruption. But, as Richard L. Stroup writes,

In democratic politics, rules typically give a majority coalition power over the entire society. These rules replace the rule of willing consent and voluntary exchange that exists in the marketplace. In politics, people’s goals are similar to the goals they have as consumers, producers, and resource suppliers in the private sector, but people participate as voters, politicians, bureaucrats, and lobbyists. In the political system, as in the marketplace, people are sometimes (but not always) selfish. In all cases, they are narrow: how much they know and how much they care about other people’s goals are necessarily limited.

The narrowness of the competing self-interests is a fundamental fact be it democracy or dictatorship. It is impossible not to be narrow. (Hayek wrote a great paper about this, probably one of the greatest papers I have ever read – The Use of Knowledge in Society). Thus, a government might want to pick the best policy for the national interest, but there is no reason to suppose that it will be able to, simply because its knowledge is so limited. And in any case, there are various groups to keep satisfied, whose support is more important than picking the best solution to any given problem. In America, for example, there are policies to protect a handful of super-rich sugar farmers, which keeps sugar prices high, stifles innovation in that sector and keeps developing world producers from accessing American markets. It is so because protecting American industry is popular both with the general population, who suffer as a result, and with the sugar manufacturers, who make lots of money and no doubt form part of a winning coalition somewhere or other.

This piece is mostly based on Russ Robert’s excellent interview with Bueno de Mesquita at EconLog.

Cross-posted at Dissensus.