Apotheosis in Washington

The Apotheosis of Washington, U.S. Capitol

 

 Fellow Citizens: I am again called upon by the voice of my country to execute the functions of its Chief Magistrate. When the occasion proper for it shall arrive, I shall endeavor to express the high sense I entertain of this distinguished honor, and of the confidence which has been reposed in me by the people of united America.

Previous to the execution of any official act of the President the Constitution requires an oath of office. This oath I am now about to take, and in your presence: That if it shall be found during my administration of the Government I have in any instance violated willingly or knowingly the injunctions thereof, I may (besides incurring constitutional punishment) be subject to the upbraidings of all who are now witnesses of the present solemn ceremony. 

—George Washington’s second inaugural address, 1793

Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

—Article Two, Section One, Constitution of the United States

Thirty-five words in front of a judge or a notary public. This is the pomp of presidential inauguration, and everything else is circumstance.

I will not watch the presidential inauguration Tuesday. I have no disrespect for the man who will be our new executive, but I refuse to glorify the office he will assume.  The president is a citizen, a magistrate, and nothing more, and his assumption of office is a thing we ought not observe.  

No man, no matter how high his office, how strong his mandate, how historic his victory, deserves the exaltation our new president will receive this week. No matter, though, for today’s president is no longer a man: he is hope bringer, protector, decider, curator and Commander-in-Chief of our National Destiny. The celebration surrounding the modern inauguration is as fit for our Imperial President as it is for caesars and kings and rulers by divine right. For the religious, this sort of adulation is an affront to God; for Americans, it is an affront to our republic. 

Once, presidents shunned ceremony, and took care to avoid ostentation. George Washington’s second inaugural address was just 140 words, delivered before a small assembly of judges, cabinet officers, and members of the Continental Congress. It was shorter even than the speech he delivered in 1789, and for good reason: Washington was careful with the precedents he set as the first president of a new republic. He rejected “your Majesty” in favor of “Mr. President.” He resisted a second term and ardently refused a third. His modest inaugural was designed to promote government of laws over men.

Thomas Jefferson was even more humble—and more determined to reject the trappings of kings. In 1801, he walked from his D.C. boarding house to the Capitol, gave a quiet address, and walked back home. That night, the third President of the United States declined a seat at the head of the dinner table.

Today, a presidential inauguration is train rides, black ties, dinners, concert balls, Marine Bands, motorcades, balloons, parades, speeches and invocations and benedictions and ceremony and celebrity—first $33 then $44 now $150 million worth. It is a spectacle built out of lego, made into holograms, broadcast to rapt millions watching Jumbotrons on the national mall. 

There is a fresco painted in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol titled “The Apotheosis of Washington.” There, the president sits in purple robes alongside Victory and War and Science and looks down on men.  The tourists shuffle through and look up and take pictures. After all, it looks beautiful.

(photo via flickr user H4NUM4N)

Your serve

My friend Justyn has a couple quibbles with my recent column on national service. Time to bring one more blog into the fray. Point by point:

1. You didn’t address public schools!

It’s true that I didn’t address national service policies that won’t affect current college students. Alas, there’s only so much room on page four, and so much interest from the average college student before they flip over to the sudoku. However, the proposed policy for K-12 schools—to make federal funding for public schools contingent on some sort of national service program—is even worse than the tax credit, because it’s both less voluntary and more insidious.

Contra Justyn’s original column, which surmised that tying federal cash to service programs “seems contrary to the spirit of what Obama is trying to do,” Sen. Obama has said directly that “we’ll make federal assistance conditional on school districts developing service programs.” There is no doubt that this means mandatory service for most, with the dirty work delegated down from the federal government to local school boards.

I object to this sort of plan on moral, consequential, and constitutional grounds. But I especially object to it out of respect for federalism. Tying federal money to local policies is a nasty little trick that allows the federal government to muck around in all sorts of places where it doesn’t belong. The way this plan would be implemented is just like the 1984 National Minimum Drinking Age Act, which required states to raise their drinking ages to 21 as a condition of receiving federal highway funds. Technically, nobody was “forced” by that bill, but it didn’t matter much—today a 20-year old can’t buy a sixer of Sam Adams anywhere in our federal Union. Leaving local democracy to the mercy of the federal government is a recipe for no local democracy at all.

If a local school board wants to put a community service requirement in place, they have every right to do so, and indeed, many already have. But the federal government has no place dictating policy to the Waldorf County Board of Education. Not on national service, not on standardized testing, not on curriculum.

The “require” rather than “encourage” bit came from Obama’s website, and is supported by statements from his wife Michelle.

2. Separating “government” from “private” matters “stems entirely from the notion that any form of government is alien to and opposed to the way people actually live and conduct their lives.”

I don’t think this is true. Government isn’t opposed to the way people live—it’s been a feature of pretty much every human civilization since forever, and people have been living with it for at least that long. As I see it, government is just a tool for implementing collective choice, and often kind of a sucky one that makes people do things they don’t want. That doesn’t make it inherently more evil than any other kind of sucky things that can make people do things they don’t want—muggers, big terrible corporations, angry mothers, &c.

There shouldn’t be a Great Wall between private and government matters, especially when it comes to the sort of civil society volunteer stuff we’re talking about here. Both are just methods of social organization. The difference is that government, which uses force instead of consensus, often has nastier unintended consequences and bigger failures.

3. Hiring the unemployed at market wages rather than overpaying college students is kind of mean.

I’ll admit that this is my least persuasive point, because I don’t think government ought to be hiring anyone at all to do these “national service” sort of jobs. But, under the assumption that we must have some sort of national service program, I’d prefer that it stays as inexpensive as possible.

The reason nobody’s lining up to fill the jobs now is that they aren’t jobs. They’re volunteer positions, for which the market wage is effectively zero or negative. The “hard-up workers” are out there looking for real jobs. Thus, any national service program offering a stipend or a tax write-off is also something of a make-work scheme. But yeah, you’ve got me on this one—it comes down to whether you value the amorphous intangible social benefits of national service more than its outrageous cost.

A brief list of things I cannot do on the Internet in Turkey

"Access to this site has been prevented by court order"

1. Watch videos of sneezing pandas and cats playing the piano. A Turkish court banned access to YouTube in March 2007.
2. Download Ubuntu Linux for my laptop. A Turkish court blockaded the Pirate Bay and other torrent trackers in September 2007.
3. Visit the crappy website I made in middle school. A Turkish court censored Geocities in February.
4. Read the writing of one of my favorite thinkers, Richard Dawkins. A Turkish court blocked his website last month.
5. Keep up with my friends Dan, Anne Marie, Ke, Angela, Janet, Will, Paul, Jess, and Kasia. A Turkish court banned their blogs today.^[1]

The Turkish government has censored over a thousand websites since May 2007, when the parliament passed Law No. 5651, which banned sites containing criminal content, violating Turkish law, or “infringing on the personal rights” of Turkish citizens. It also gave the state Telecommunications Board power to directly ban sites it deems obscene and offensive, and censor others with a judge’s approval.

Since the law went into effect, the board has received 24,598 ban proposals from the public, automatically censored 861 sites, and blocked 251 more by court order. Tayfun Acarer, president of the Telecommunications Board, explained the ban to daily newspaper Today’s Zaman earlier this month: “The duty of the state is to protect its citizens and warn them against harmful Internet content.”

Still looking to Europe as they drift further and further away.

---

[Back] There might have been one more entry here, were it not for an amusing typo on the part of the censors. The website “imbd.com” has been blocked since last April, which prevents access to a parked linkfarm rather than the Internet Movie Database.

The markets of Dr. Moreau

Now that the bailout bill for beleaguered semipublic mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac has been approved by the House and the President alike, the Senate is all that stands in the way of the federal government’s latest attempt to double down on moral hazard by rescuing firms deemed “too big to fail.”

There is no doubt about the first part of that description. Fannie and Freddie, which own or guarantee about half of all U.S. mortgages, are far too big. Thanks to special privileges and tax exemptions along with an implicit guarantee on their debt from government, the companies swelled from firms intended to encourage home ownership and ensure liquidity into leviathans accountable for $5.2 trillion in American housing debt. The second part is probably accurate as well. A Fannie-Freddie failure is a devastating prospect for the economy — but a well-designed rescue plan could provide an opportunity not only to shore up a shaky housing market but to dismantle two of its biggest sources of systemic risk.

Unfortunately, that’s not what the American public will get. With the exception of more rigorous capital requirements and a possible amendment offered by Sen. Jim DeMint that would prohibit the firms from lobbying legislators, the bill is little more than a blank check from the Treasury attached to an even bigger bailout for homeowners. It may tide the twins over for another day, but it won’t fix the massive problem of private gains and socialized risk, the crowding-out effect of F&F in the market for safe home loans, or the regulatory capture that enabled the firms to keep shoddy books and operate with a tiny amount of capital on hand. If there is a fate worse than nationalization, Congress has found it.

Most free-marketeers, myself included, have a natural reflex to shun government intervention of any kind. But against my instincts, I found myself agreeing with a leader in this week’s Economist, proposing that a proper policy response ought to “secure the gains for taxpayers and treat Fannie and Freddie like one of their own mortgages, by nationalizing them, breaking them up and selling them on.” A failure would be very, very, bad. In the long run, a bailout that solidifies moral hazard and fails to fix incentives will probably be worse. Thus, it seems the most responsible solution would be to take over the firms for a brief while and immediately dismantle them.

Of course, following the dirty deed of nationalization, there would be a natural tendency for government to attempt to hold onto the power to guarantee home loans. Thus, any such scheme would have to have rigid rules requiring a sell-off as soon as possible. But if a nationalization-privatization plan is the quickest, safest way to get rid of F&F without hugely screwing both taxpayers and homeowners, I might be able to get behind it.

This leads to a more interesting question. Hands down, I prefer market institutions to government ones, because they will almost always have fewer unintended consequences and better overall outcomes. I also prefer markets to the weird government-market hybrids that account for much of the “byzantine amalgam of market and state institutions enmeshed in a thicket of regulation” that we call “the economy.” But under what conditions are the somewhat predictable problems of government ownership preferable to the less discernible difficulties of frankenmarkets like Fannie Mae? In many cases, combining the awesome power of capitalism with the awesome stupidity of government seems like a sure path to disaster.

I can think of a few examples where this is the case. Credit rating agencies, which were allowed to become de facto regulators responsible for some of the subprime mess. The bizarro-world of U.S. health insurance, mired in principal-agent problems and distorted price signals that prevent providers from profiting and consumers from bearing costs. Defense, where wasteful contracting practices on the part of big firms like KBR have helped fuel a trillion-dollar war. But there are plenty of examples on the other hand — school vouchers, for one — where the evidence supports success.

There’s certainly no template for a perfect hybrid beyond designing institutions that aggregate as much local knowledge as effectively as possible. But the worst consequence of frankenmarkets is that they are too often conflated with real free enterprise, which simply isn’t true. In the eyes of many, however, the failure of Fannie Mae is no doubt a failure of finance at large, the waste from contracting in Iraq a rebuttal of “privatization,” and expensive healthcare proof that capitalism is broken. Perhaps it’s time to grab a pitchfork, storm the castle, and get rid of the frankenmarkets for good.

Opening the Metaverse, grid by grid

Neal Stephenson’s seminal 1992 cyberpunk novel “Snow Crash” coined the concept of the Metaverse, a networked, computer-generated world existing parallel to physical reality. Over the past few years, the ubiquity of the Internet has helped his idea come true.

Online games like EVE and World of Warcraft are rudimentary Metaverses, but they have clearly defined roles and rules for their users, unlike the open ideal of the Metaverse. Last week, Google jumped into the virtual world market with Lively, a service that offers cartoony, 3-D chat rooms embeddable in websites — another incarnation of the Metaverse idea.

But the closest analog to the Metaverse by far is Second Life, a virtual world with content created by its own users and a thriving online economy. In fact, the creator of Second Life was inspired by the Metaverse, and as graphics cards, internet connections, and processing power have grown faster and cheaper, Second Life has come closer and closer to a persistent virtual alternate reality.

The speed with which Second Life has gone from a crude, glorified chat room to a full-fledged Metaverse is remarkable. Consider this: in 2004, a year after launch, most of the world looked something like the image below — crude, angular, and a little grating.

Today, the most detailed corners of Second Life look more like this:

(via Mylena Aquitane)

See here for more stunning virtual locations. What’s more, this lifelike, often breathtaking Metaverse was built by its own users, who created the world piece by piece with an internal scripting language. And it’s not just the graphics that have spontaneously evolved into a detailed world through user interactions. Second life has a complex economy with a GDP estimated in the hundreds of milions of dollars and an emergent culture that’s even spawned a unique breed of online pranksters-cum-terrorists.

One event last week, however, may mark a turning point for the Metaverse. Tuesday, developers at Linden Labs, the creators of Second LIfe, successfully teleported avatars from the Second Life grid into an external world located on an OpenSim server, the open-source equivalent of Second Life’s closed system. That means that Linden Labs, the organization that has long set the rules for the Metaverse economy, controlled its virtual land, and hesitantly attempted to govern it, may soon exist alongside any number of competing, interoperable virtual worlds.

The Lindens, as the developers that serve as the world’s de facto ruling class are known, have been mostly hands-off about intervening to bring order to Second Life, making it something of an anything-goes libertopia replete with gambling, guns, and squirrel sex. However, as the world’s popularity has grown, the Lindens have caved to external pressure from users and real-world regulators and implemented a series of rules, including a ban on gambling, regulations for virtual banks, and a prohibition on simulated adult-child sex (although, curiously, not hot human-on-hippo action).

OpenSim offers an alternative to government by the Lindens, allowing users to change jurisdictions as easily as they can teleport outside the official grid. As OpenSim servers become more common, competition between virtual governments (or the lack thereof) could have all sorts of interesting effects on the Metaverse.

But will virtual worlds and virtual governments ever be able to compete with the real thing? Along with the Metaverse, “Snow Crash” envisioned a future United States of competing, decentralized sub-city-states called “burbclaves,” which could well be the result of OpenSim’s influence on the virtual world. A well-encrypted system of virtual burbclaves could potentially create an online anarcho-capitalist alternative to meatspace transactions (unless, of course, it’s regulated out of existence by real world governments).

An interoperable grid is a crucial part of creating an open, unregulated cypherpunk future — and considering the success of Second Life, it may arrive sooner than we think.

(cross-posted at Airstream Futuropolis, my extra-geeky blog)