Oh, jeez… Bobo had to read Burke in college and we’re in for a lecture. He gurgles on about “The Big Test,” and dithers that the Obama administration sees this economic crisis as an opportunity to expand its reach, but he fears that in trying to do everything at once, it will do nothing well. He claims to be a huge admirer of President Obama… When referring to himself he actually uses the phrase “my epistemological modesty.” Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Mr. Herbert isn’t feeling optimistic today. He writes about “That Can’t-Do Spirit,” and says there is something weirdly self-defeating about needing to move beyond a deteriorating U.S. infrastructure, and being unable to do it because of the outmoded way of doing politics. Here’s Bobo:
“We cannot successfully address any of our problems without addressing all of them.”
Barack Obama, Feb. 21, 2009
When I was a freshman in college, I was assigned “Reflections on the Revolution in France” by Edmund Burke. I loathed the book. Burke argued that each individual’s private stock of reason is small and that political decisions should be guided by the accumulated wisdom of the ages. Change is necessary, Burke continued, but it should be gradual, not disruptive. For a young democratic socialist, hoping to help begin the world anew, this seemed like a reactionary retreat into passivity.
Over the years, I have come to see that Burke had a point. The political history of the 20th century is the history of social-engineering projects executed by well-intentioned people that began well and ended badly. There were big errors like communism, but also lesser ones, like a Vietnam War designed by the best and the brightest, urban renewal efforts that decimated neighborhoods, welfare policies that had the unintended effect of weakening families and development programs that left a string of white elephant projects across the world.
These experiences drove me toward the crooked timber school of public philosophy: Michael Oakeshott, Isaiah Berlin, Edward Banfield, Reinhold Niebuhr, Friedrich Hayek, Clinton Rossiter and George Orwell. These writers — some left, some right — had a sense of epistemological modesty. They knew how little we can know. They understood that we are strangers to ourselves and society is an immeasurably complex organism. They tended to be skeptical of technocratic, rationalist planning and suspicious of schemes to reorganize society from the top down.
Before long, I was no longer a liberal. Liberals are more optimistic about the capacity of individual reason and the government’s ability to execute transformational change. They have more faith in the power of social science, macroeconomic models and 10-point programs.
Readers of this column know that I am a great admirer of Barack Obama and those around him. And yet the gap between my epistemological modesty and their liberal worldviews has been evident over the past few weeks. The people in the administration are surrounded by a galaxy of unknowns, and yet they see this economic crisis as an opportunity to expand their reach, to take bigger risks and, as Obama said on Saturday, to tackle every major problem at once.
President Obama has concentrated enormous power on a few aides in the West Wing of the White House. These aides are unrolling a rapid string of plans: to create three million jobs, to redesign the health care system, to save the auto industry, to revive the housing industry, to reinvent the energy sector, to revitalize the banks, to reform the schools — and to do it all while cutting the deficit in half.
If ever this kind of domestic revolution were possible, this is the time and these are the people to do it. The crisis demands a large response. The people around Obama are smart and sober. Their plans are bold but seem supple and chastened by a realistic sensibility.
Yet they set off my Burkean alarm bells. I fear that in trying to do everything at once, they will do nothing well. I fear that we have a group of people who haven’t even learned to use their new phone system trying to redesign half the U.S. economy. I fear they are going to try to undertake the biggest administrative challenge in American history while refusing to hire the people who can help the most: agency veterans who are registered lobbyists.
I worry that we’re operating far beyond our economic knowledge. Every time the administration releases an initiative, I read 20 different economists with 20 different opinions. I worry that we lack the political structures to regain fiscal control. Deficits are exploding, and the president clearly wants to restrain them. But there’s no evidence that Democrats and Republicans in Congress have the courage or the mutual trust required to share the blame when taxes have to rise and benefits have to be cut.
All in all, I can see why the markets are nervous and dropping. And it’s also clear that we’re on the cusp of the biggest political experiment of our lifetimes. If Obama is mostly successful, then the epistemological skepticism natural to conservatives will have been discredited. We will know that highly trained government experts are capable of quickly designing and executing top-down transformational change. If they mostly fail, then liberalism will suffer a grievous blow, and conservatives will be called upon to restore order and sanity.
It’ll be interesting to see who’s right. But I can’t even root for my own vindication. The costs are too high. I have to go to the keyboard each morning hoping Barack Obama is going to prove me wrong.
Listen up, Bobo you boob — If you think Obama gives half a crap about what you think you’re delusional. If your angst is so great consider that you don’t “have to go to the keyboard” each morning. Do us all a favor and stop doing that. Here’s Mr. Herbert:
In his first Inaugural Address, with the U.S. all but paralyzed by the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt declared that the nation’s greatest task was “to put people to work.”
Three-quarters of a century later, in the midst of perhaps the worst downturn since the Depression, that remains the biggest challenge.
The U.S. economy cannot work if ordinary men and women cannot find work. Let’s forget for a moment all the ritualized lingo about tax cuts, all the easy but uninformed talk about entitlement reform and all the empty rhetoric about balancing budgets that will never be truly balanced in our lifetimes.
What Americans need is new employment on a massive scale, and one of the most effective ways to get that started is to invest extraordinary amounts in the nation’s infrastructure, to rebuild America in a way that creates a world-class platform for a sustainable 21st-century economy.
President Obama’s stimulus package is just a first step in the government’s effort to stabilizing the hemorrhaging economy. It contains infrastructure spending, but nothing comparable to the vast amounts it will take to make the desperately needed improvements.
Funds spent on those improvements, which will have to be made sooner or later, are also cracker-jack investments in putting people to work. The idea that the government is spending trillions on wars, bank bailouts, tax cuts, and so on, while still neglecting its infrastructure needs — and at a time when Americans are desperate for jobs — is mind-boggling.
The financier Felix Rohatyn has been carrying the banner for infrastructure spending for the longest time. During an address in Washington over the weekend to a meeting of the National Governors Association, he emphasized the importance and long tradition of investing government revenue, with an eye to returns in the long run.
“From the Louisiana Purchase and the Erie Canal, through the creation of the Land Grant colleges, to the interstate highways and the G.I. Bill, government investment was pivotal,” he said.
His new book, “Bold Endeavors: How Our Government Built America, and Why It Must Rebuild Now,” opens with the stark phrase: “The nation is falling apart.”
Mr. Rohatyn goes on to write: “Three-quarters of the country’s public school buildings are outdated and inadequate. More than a quarter of the nation’s bridges are obsolete or deficient. It will take $11 billion annually to replace aging drinking water facilities. Half the locks on more than 12,000 miles of inland waterways are functionally obsolete.”
According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, an investment of $2.2 trillion from all sources over five years would be required to get the nation’s infrastructure into decent shape.
You might ask where that money would come from. Great question. How about an infrastructure bank?
The current economic crisis is the perfect time to decide that we need to change some of the tired old ways of doing the people’s business. Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut has offered a bill that would create an infrastructure bank. It would be a bipartisan entity that would streamline the process of reviewing and authorizing major projects. It would provide federal investment capital for approved projects and use that money to leverage private investment.
President Obama supports the establishment of such a bank. When I asked him about it in an interview, he said, “The idea of an infrastructure bank, I think, makes sense.” But he suggested that there would be stiff resistance from lawmakers in both parties who are reluctant to give up their considerable influence over the selection and financing of lucrative infrastructure projects.
The president seemed optimistic about the prospects of moving ahead with some additional infrastructure spending, and he said he “would like to see some long-term reforms” in the way transportation money is spent. He acknowledged that the nation’s infrastructure “needs are massive, and we can’t do everything.”
But we could do a lot more. There is something weirdly self-defeating about having a need as clear-cut as the need to move beyond a deteriorating 20th-century physical plant, and being unable to do it because of the wasteful, inefficient and outmoded 20th-century way of doing politics and government.
In his address to the governors, Mr. Rohatyn noted that President Obama had asked Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood to come up with a plan for financing high-speed rail projects. He said he hoped that that would be a step toward the eventual establishment of an infrastructure bank.
Speaking about America’s competitors in the global economy, Mr. Rohatyn noted, among other things, that China was building 100 new airports and that Spanish trains traveling between Madrid and Barcelona can reach speeds of 300 miles per hour.
“We are falling behind on too many fronts,” he said.
