January 15, 2010--Good As Goldman

Republicans I know are in full rant. The latest has to do with the Obama administration’s move to limit carbon emissions.

Here is a sample from an email that arrived recently from one such friend with whom I have been having an on-going debate about global warming—he recognizes that it is happening but contends that humans are not contributing significantly to it:

The science is nowhere near settled on this issue and the technology presently does not exists to significantly affect what the powers-that-be erroneously think is the problem. You don’t start down the road if it’s in the wrong direction. You often preach patience. Well, now you have your chance. Now is a time to do nothing because the reasoning behind measures being taken and contemplated is flawed.

When I pointed out to him that with science none of the big issues are ever fully “settled,” that it is the nature of science and the scientific method itself to continue to pose hypotheses and then to relentlessly test them when searching for the “truth,” I heard nothing back.

When I mentioned the Manhattan Project, about which he is enthusiastic, noting that the government decided to proceed with the work to develop the atomic bomb even though many scientific and technological questions were quite unsettled, and though some of the leading Los Alamos physicists, when the first bomb was tested, were not certain that it would not unleash an out-of-control chain reaction, still we proceeded to detonate it; and yet about this too from my friend I am still waiting to hear back.

For some reason, desiring certitude and motivated it seems to me more by belief and ideology than history or logic, though we do not have to come to any of the same conclusions, and he undoubtedly would say these same things about me, I have been pressing my conservative friends not just to make claims and offer opinions but to set them in historical context and back them up with real evidence. Again, we are unlikely to agree, but it would be good to have these exchanges proceed on the basis of at least a few agreed-upon facts.


The more these exchanges proceed, the more I am noticing that there is one overarching issue about which they and I irreconcilably do not agree--what role governments should play in taking on any of our nation’s most gnawing problems. From the economy to the environment to protecting us from terrorists. This is the biggest issue of all. All of our policy disputes are derived from the very different ways in which we view government itself.

Embedded in the quote above is a succinct statement about my friend’s basic distrust of government, any government, and in that context, what government should do. In a word, “nothing.”

Most of our problems, I keep hearing from him and others, are caused by the Government, with a capital G. As Ronald Reagan, without evidence, famously said, “Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem.”

This time Government gets blamed for the fallen economy (because of taxes and regulation and federal monetary policy) and for pressing on us “solutions” to global warming that would only make it worse and, further, ruin the economy.

However, there is one exception, in spite of the fact that the military is an arm of government, pretty much anything they want to do is fine. How they want to spend money and how and where to wage wars. This my Republican buddies see to be the one true role for Government.

When I argue back that though governments play various roles in, say, the economy, even at their worst, what they contribute to our problems is only one component of many interlocking causes. And, in my view, the damage government might do is significantly dwarfed by what rapacious financial institutions and corporations perpetrate. And, of course, how bad economic behavior on the part of individuals, which also contributes to our current crisis, is not governmentally determined.

When I ask in what ways government was responsible for the Enrons and Worldcoms of the world, I tend to hear nothing back. When I point out how Goldman Sachs has and continues to manipulate markets for its own benefit (often to the detriment of its clients—see the New York Times article linked below) and ask how government is responsible for this egregious behavior, I hear nothing back, except assertions about the perfection of the Market (with a capital M) and the blind and rational hand that guides it.

Again, it is unlikely that we will find much common ground, but I have been telling these friends recently that if our dialogue is to continue it has to be based on more than rhetoric and belief. I hope to hear something back from them about that.