Principles For Breakfast

One thing about passing fifty years of age is that I now feel old enough to invoke what I call Samuel Johnson's Dictum. It is thus: If I invoke a view based on an author that I read in the past, and that view is not actually held by that author, I'm more than willing to claim the view as originating with me. The beauty of this Dictum is that it is self-referential. It is based upon my reading of Johnson and on Boswell, but I can't remember the actual references that led me to believe that Johnson believed something like this. In any case, I do.

Another of my motley list of nostrums is what I call Burke's Principle. Burke's Principle holds that there is a distinction between:
1) Political Theory: A theory of the perfect society, the good life, etc. Your general political philosophy.
2) Politics: The rather messy art of governing which involves dealing with what is possible on earth and compromising as the need arises.

Now, Burke once wrote a book about the French Revolution that caused a number of his fellow Whigs to be irked with him. One reason that some Whigs were bothered, not all, but some, was that, to put it in modern terms, on most issues Burke was to the left of them, and they didn't much like being lectured from the right by Burke.

Burke's response was that this response constituted a kind of bad faith. First of all, his views on this issue shouldn't call into question his being a Whig. Secondly, since Politics is the art of the possible and Political Theory was a general view of principles, these fellow Whigs were constantly confusing the two. Also, Burke thought that where he had expressed some far left views of Political Theory in private, it didn't do him a lot of good to have fellow Whigs trumpet his views in public merely to show that they were generally more conservative than he was. Like Johnson, Burke found charges of hypocrisy in Politics based on a misunderstanding of Politics.

One can see this today, in the fate of a few leftists that supported the war in Iraq. I didn't, but it does seem to me that Hitchens, Friedman, and Lieberman are being tossed out from Whigdom even though they are, well, Whigs. Lieberman is following a kind of Burkean trajectory in actual politics.

One other pet theory I have about finance, besides Bagehot's Principle, is the Spigot Theory. I might rename it. It applies to the low rate of interest or the sloshing pool of money explanations for the current crisis. Turn the tap too far, then you can't stop the tub from overflowing, even if you're a human agent standing right next to the tub. I call this a mechanistic explanation as opposed to an explanation based on human agency.

Now, I feel similarly about government incentives. When Fannie and Freddie tempted investors, this led to the housing bubble. I think that I'm going to call this the Cake As Gift Theory. I hand you a cake assuming that you have the good sense to eat it over time, and you gorge yourself and eat it at one sitting and get sick. Clearly I'm responsible for this by handing you the cake. Give you a gift or incentive, clearly I must assume that it will cause you to be irrational.

Anyway, a few rules that will help me going forward to explain things.

Oh, a final one. The Pragmatic Milton Friedman Principle. Friedman introduced a concept called the Negative Income Tax. He proposed it saying that it was a pragmatic compromise between the Welfare State and a basic libertarian position. I think that it committed him to my view of a weak notion of Positive Liberty, because, without that notion, even a compromise would be unprincipled. In other words, in offering the plan, he had to have some philosophical basis for assuming that it was acceptable or justifiable at all in his view. This one is useful for libertarians who make exceptions for their own deviations from what they call libertarianism, as opposed to their view of deviations by others, where they engage in the profound policy analysis of Burke's detractors; Namely, you're not a real Whig.

As for libertarianism, it is the view that personal liberty should be your guiding, although not only, principle in constructing a Political Philosophy. Please don't confuse it with politics. Burke wouldn't like it, or, maybe it's me.