This book represents an attempt to explore the problem of the discrepancy between the trends in two phenomena: knowledge is becoming more diffuse, while political power is becoming more concentrated.
That's the first sentence of Arnold Kling's second new book; in another context I might have called it "Words of Wisdom." My blurb on the back was:
This is essential reading on the political dangers facing us today and the risk of excess centralization. Arnold Kling is one of my favorite commentators.
Here Arnold explains his two books.
Political power is becoming more concentrated?!
Political power is incredibly decentralized in this country and it has not measurably moved towards centralization is any meaningful way!
Other than that little problem, the book sound great.
Hope that spelling error isn’t in the blurb.
There’s a simple solution. Just have all the people with the diffuse knowledge send the knowledge to the people in power. Then we’ll have centralized knowledge and centralized power, and things will run smoothly.
What the world needs now is to go back and read Tocqueville. Especially The Old Regime. I don’t think anyone has understood the problem of centralization and its remedies better than he. Although I’ll read the Kling book to test that.
@anon
Yes, well, it’s not as if libertarians have any image problems already for yelling “state’s rights!”, right?
Now’s a particularly apt time, in fact. I wonder who the next libertarian to heroically champion the state’s prerogative in discriminating against
blacksgays will be.Again with the “libertarians support evil little states instead of the warm fuzzy federales.”
Yeah, and the Feds having the power to send 50,000 people to die in Vietnam was a good tradeoff for the lynching of 3,437 blacks. Oh, and that’s all the lynchings versus just one unnecessary war. There are any number of comparisons that explain the silliness and lack of proportion in the idea that the “victory” of the civil rights was worth any cost, but that’s a pretty good start. More blacks died in Vietnam (5,711) than in lynching since before the start of the Civil war. Of course, statists always claim the successes and the failures are always the other guys’s fault.
The thing about libertarians and whatever image problem we might have over the 10th amendment is like Krugman’s columns. If you don’t like it, it wasn’t for you anyhow. But here’s a difference, in case you haven’t noticed, PR ain’t our bag baby. Who said we really want people that don’t get it?
Thank you Andrew.
Many of the folks who like centralized power seem only able to play the race card. Like David.
Hey David! Drag your sorry ass kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
Because I don’t hear any libertarians or states rights folks calling for discrimination against blacks or homosexuals or trying to drag us back into the early 19th century. (Or into the medieval age, either.)
Set up some more straw men.
Are you saying that the increasing centralization of power in this country trumps the 10th Amendment because we used to have slavery?
Are you saying that the increasing centralization of power in this country is a good thing?
Are you saying that the only body or bodies capable of judging whether the federal government’s powers are “constitutional” is the federal government itself, the 3 branches of the federal government? You mean, the states have no role? Then why do we have states? Why is the 10th Amendment in the Constitution?
Go look at your history. The USA is a confederation of states. We do not, as a body, elect anyone, even the president. We vote state by state, not as “the people”.
Saying that “states rights” is only code for slavery and discrimination is similar to saying a hammer can only be used to bash in heads. Or only pound nails.
So David, if the 10th Amendment was so unimportant, why was it included in the Bill of Rights? By people who were very familiar with the Constitution? People like Jefferson and Madison, who warned us about the dangers of too much centralized power.
Nope, nothing to see here, don’t pay any attention to that 10th Amendment, just move along….
Oh hey, here’s Bob Barr, during his 2008 Presidential run as Libertarian Party candidate:
Anyway. It doesn’t matter whether you believe your utopian vision of What A Hypothetical Libertarian Government Would Have Done, you see – I said that libertarians have an image problem. Okay, maybe you buy into whatever ingenious excuses to explain that, no really, state’s rights would really have resolved segregation (please ignore the George C. Wallace behind the curtain). Unfortunately you still have another few million Americans to convince, and I reiterate: libertarians have an image problem, and hitching libertarianism to the cart of socioconservativism is just going to end as well as the last attempt did.
You can always pull the Andrew response above and say that you don’t want people who “don’t get it”. Well, okay. Good luck with your secession attempt. We’ll be over here watching you burn whatever credibility libertarianism had left.
Is forager’s comment serious or in jest? I honestly can’t tell. Part of me thinks that it is a brilliant parody, another part of me is afraid that he’s entirely serious.
“This argument that some state would just enslave all African Americans is flat out ridiculous, and it just shows how poor your understanding of decentralized government and the US constitution is.” Surely forager isn’t actually arguing that black slavery never occurred? He’s not arguing that the Bill of Rights protected blacks from slavery? He’s not arguing that the problem of slavery was solved purely through market forces, and had nothing to do with the big bad federal government crushing seceding states in a devastating war, not to speak of several Constitutional Amendments passed 75 years after the Bill of Rights was ratified?
No, it must be a parody… a reductio ad absurdum of market thinking in an area where it fails to explain real historical events. Surely. But the use of “California” in the example… no, I don’t think it’s a parody.
The mind boggles.
The Feds are all-in for those states rights such as taking people’s property to give to private interests. Project sometimes never happen as in the Kelo case. Real principled. Real trustworthy with power.
This from Wikipedia:
While the U.S. Supreme Court majority in 1896 Plessy overtly upheld only “separate but equal” facilities (specifically, transportation facilities), Justice John Marshall Harlan in his dissent protested that the decision was an expression of white supremacy; he predicted that segregation would “stimulate aggressions †¦ upon the admitted rights of colored citizens,” “arouse race hate” and “perpetuate a feeling of distrust between [the] races. Feelings between whites and blacks were so tense, even the jails were segregated.”[35]
Institutionalized racial segregation was ended as an official practice by the efforts of such civil rights activists as Clarence Mitchell, Jr., Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., working during the period from the end of World War II through the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 supported by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Many of their efforts were acts of non-violent civil disobedience aimed at disrupting the enforcement of racial segregation rules and laws, such as refusing to give up a seat in the black part of the bus to a white person (Rosa Parks), or holding sit-ins at all-white diners.
Back to me: Again, go see the timeline for civil rights. The Feds were with the segregationists before they were against them. All the heavy lifting of activists and the change in zeitgeist that allowed progress happened before The Feds jumped in front of the parade for the victory lap. So, this oft-cited, coup-de-grace example of why states rights is unworkable is pretty much a myth.
Couple notes:
My point with the lynchings is not that once people stopped lynching everything was peachy. The point is having a numerical indicator of a trend and this discrete, number clearly indicates the trend was toward racial assimilation long before the Feds got on board. Even if you don’t believe that forced association can breed further resentment, even up until 1896 The Feds were FOR segregation.
Second point, it is fair for people who don’t know anything about the party or the philosophy to point to the presidential candidate, and this is why the party needs to be very careful. I opposed Bob Barr for that reason. Others wanted him because the very problem with libertarianism RIGHT NOW is that it needs exposure. Any press is good press…or maybe not.
good post and thank you
It’s pretty good.
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