Compromise Between the Right and the Left

Compromise: Are our arms long enough to reach across the chasm?
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A commenter on the post Economic Questions: Is Everyone Fooling Themselves? was concerned about the ability of people on the Right, such as myself, being able to find some compromise with the Leftist part of the population. The commenter Chease wrote:

Thinking about compromise, it struck me that you seem to be concerned about leftist policies in two very different ways. One way is that they are economically hazardous. This may be true. However, you also seem to recognize the general danger to society posed by certain left-wing philosophies, such as a partisan “scientific” technocracy superseding free speech. I too see the danger in this. Moreover, I see that these two separate facets of leftism, call them economic and philosophical, are strongly connected to each other by virtue of their common supporters. So how might conservatives negotiate these twin threats? It is my belief that if the left, or any “group” is not able to achieve one goal, they will press for the other goal all the harder. And a key factor in negotiating is how much you value each of your own interests, and where you[r] interests, and those of the opposition overlap. Pardon me for taking the liberty, but I imagine that there is very little overlap between the society that you envision as your own chosen one, call it society A, and the philosophically leftist society where free speech is seen as more dangerous than climate change, which I will call society B. I would now ask you if there might be relatively more overlap between society A and a third option, society C represented by moderate economic leftism, where the economy may be somewhat weaker, growth somewhat slower, but the core value of free speech is still celebrated. I believe that if you are able to see any overlap between your position and the opposition, such as a mutual respect for property rights, rule of law, and free speech, than it behooves you to at least consider compromise on what might be a less important issue, such as ideal economic management, very carefully. It is also my belief that if one always digs in one’s heels, and believes that to give up any ground on any issue is unacceptable, the basic currency of civil discourse and representative government is forfeited.

The Need for Compromise

I must give my grateful thanks to Chease for suggesting such an important subject for consideration. For a deeply divided people plagued with an almost violent struggle between different views of reality, the discovery of compromises with which most of us can live is the only eventuality that can allow us to continue as a republican democracy. I broached this subject at least once before in The Need for Dialogue. In that post I expressed my belief that the search for compromise could not be limited merely to the intellectual, economic, and political elites who lead us. All of us must participate in this great national dialogue about how to find solutions to our increasingly nontrivial problems. Whatever our individual intellectual capacities, each of us must think about our common problems to the limits of our capabilities; when we meet these limits, we are then obligated to push them outwards through study, thinking and discussion. The obligation to do this comes from our duties as citizens of a representative democracy. It is as important a duty as the duty to defend our country in wartime.

Our elites, particularly the political elite, are supposed to represent us. But how can they do that if they do not know the thoughts and the preferences of the people? Please note I used the plural in referring to thoughts and preferences, as total unanimity is not only impossible, but is also not to be desired. Even among the most wise and well-educated, error is all too possible and probable to simply ignore disagreements. I alluded to this problem of connecting with the elites in the post Globalization, Xenophobia, and Donald Trump. We are currently witnessing a full-blown revolution against our ruling elites, which has given rise to the candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. In discussing this revolution, I wrote of possibly the single most important advantage of a representative democracy over any form of autarchy. If this were an autarchy of some sort, such a revolution would result in the shedding of blood and the loss of a great many human lives. When ancient Chinese emperors lost the “mandate of heaven”, there generally was no recourse for the people other than armed revolt. In a republic all that is required to stage a revolution is to hold an election in which the majority of people support the changes.

Finding ourselves at a time in which a revolution is breaking out, we will use this coming election to change some of our governing elites, and to inform the ones that remain what we want from them. To perform this duty with any degree of responsibility, we will have to engage each other in discussion and thought. We must reason with each other about the actual nature of social, economic, and physical reality. It is the natures of these realities that determine which approaches provide actual solutions to our common problems. However, there can be no compromises for solutions without having our disparate world views at least partially overlap.

Only once before in our history did we utterly fail to find an absolutely necessary compromise, a compromise that was in fact impossible. The result was the American Civil War, in which 750,000 lives were lost. If you were to add up all of the American dead from all of our other wars, you would obtain the horrible sum of 681,000. (These figures include American civilian casualties.) We are currently very far from a situation in which a new civil war is probable, but the rage and contempt between political opponents seems to be rapidly growing. Paraphrasing the words of Abraham Lincoln in his first inaugural address, we should consult with the better angels of our nature.

The Conflicting Views of Reality

What are the views of reality that are creating such conflict in the United States? At the very coarsest ontological level, there are essentially two groups of world views: those of the people who want to increase the powers of government, and those of the people who want to sharply limit those powers. The former, for want of a better word, we will call “progressives”; the latter we will call “conservatives”. There are all sorts of objections to using these two words as labels, not the least of which is that many would question how progressive the “progressives” are, and just as many would not believe that “conservatives” are very conservative. Nevertheless, they are the most commonly used terms, and most people know pretty much which groups of people are meant by the two labels.

I have already written on what I see as the most basic assumptions about reality the progressives make in the two posts Progressives’ Basic Assumptions and The Complexity of Reality. There are at least four of these basic assumptions, and I summarize them here.

1. Capitalism and free-markets are inimical to the material well-being of the people.
2. Ordinary people lack the power to withstand what progressives view as the rapacious oppression of corporations and of the wealthy “1%”.
3. Ordinary people lack the necessary knowledge and understanding to cause effective change, even if they had the power to solve their own problems. Therefore, it is the burden of the progressive, university educated nobility to do all the necessary thinking for the common people.
4. Reality is simple enough that educated, intelligent people in government can sufficiently control it over the entire country to do more good for society than harm.

These four assumptions are ones I have perceived in what progressives have written and said. They are necessarily a bit of a caricature, but I think they are still fairly accurate. One can see, given these assumptions about the world, why progressives would want to centralize increasing amounts of power, particularly economic power, in the government. If government is to be used (under progressive control, of course!) to protect and better the lives of all the people, it must have the power to perform the tasks assigned to it.

Conservatives, on the other hand, are much more skeptical about the capability of government to do good. As conservatives see the situation, the biggest part of the problem with using government to solve problems is it possesses the coercive power of law. The second biggest part of the problem is the mind-blowing complexity of reality, which makes it very probable for government to make a great many mistakes in attempting its solutions. These mistakes, when they occur, are then forced on all of us by the coercion of law.

In The Proper Functions of Government I compared progressive and conservative views about the proper nature of government, and I listed conservative basic assumptions as I perceived them corresponding to the progressive assumptions. They were as follows:

1. Capitalism with free-markets is not only the most conducive organization of an economy for the material well-being of the people, they are the only way an economy can run with prosperity continuously for a long period of time.
2. As long as government does not assist any corporations to obtain monopolies in their industries and the rule of law is enforced, ordinary people have the power to withstand economic oppression from anyone.
3. Although ordinary people often, but not always, lack knowledge and understanding of economic and social phenomena, they are the ones who best understand their own particular problems. Although some may lack knowledge and understanding, it is not because they are stupid, but because they have not given the time and effort to study and understand.
4. Reality, both in its social and economic aspects, is so exceedingly complicated that if a government tries to control it, it succeeds only with pure, dumb luck. Any government efforts to solve social and economic problems will more likely than not be counterproductive.

I later found confirmation in the fourth conservative assumption with the discovery that social systems in general, and an economy in particular, are chaotic systems within the meaning of the mathematical theory of chaos. I wrote about this in the posts Central Planning for Chaotic Social Systems, How to Solve Problems in Chaotic Social Systems, and Chaotic Economies and Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand.

Possibilities for Compromise

With these conflicting ideologies of the progressives on the Left and of the conservatives on the Right, how much overlap can we find that might encourage compromises? Initially, I have to say I can not see much. Indeed, severe constraints on possible compromises both in time and assets have been created by the results of past compromises and government programs. Let us first look at these constraints.

Last August I wrote about how federal spending increases had halted from 2010 through 2014 in the post Federal Budget Deficits and Spending Restraints. This was partially because of TARP repayments from Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac,  and assorted banks and corporations, especially for 2009 through 2013. These repayments are considered to be “negative expenditures” that reduce total federal expenditures.  After 2013  there was little TARP contribution to these “negative expenditures” on the budget. From 2013 on, most of the budget restraint was due to the budget sequestrations authorized by  the Budget Control Act of 2011, signed by Obama as a compromise with the new Republican House. The bill specified that sequestration would begin in 2013, and the cuts would be evenly split between defense and non-defense expenditures. This situation, lacking any new budget deal, would continue to 2021. The sequestration was supposed to give us a breathing spell before financial disaster truly hit us, giving us a chance to correct the problems,

Unfortunately, this time-out only lasted until the beginning of this year. As his last act before leaving Congress, House Speaker John Boehner pushed through a budget deal that increased spending, equally divided between defense and domestic spending, by $50 billion in fiscal year 2016 and an additional $30 billion in fiscal year 2017. Then, barring any new budget deal, sequestration would snap back in July 2017. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has told us in their annual budget and economic outlook report that the budget deficit will again begin to rise this year – approximately 5 years early – after six years of decline. This was not supposed to happen until 2021 when sequestration was to end!

After 2021 the financial situation becomes increasingly grim. The spending is programmed to skyrocket again because of the entitlements – Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. In their report the CBO tells us

As a percentage of GDP, the deficit remains at roughly 2.9 percent through 2018, starts to rise, and reaches 4.9 percent by the end of the 10-year projection.

Starting with sometime in the 2020s, the spending for the entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid), will begin to take so much of the GDP that it will start to crowd out all other government functions and investment in the economy. The Heritage Foundation projects entitlement spending at 34% of GDP by 2035. However, this leaves out Obamacare, which should be an expensive and growing entitlement by then if it is not repealed. The Heritage Foundation probably also assumes a GDP growth rate of our longterm average of over 3%. If we have entered an age of secular stagnation with a long term average GDP growth of 2%, the entitlement crisis will hit far, far sooner.

All of the previous analysis leaves out payments of interest on the national debt, which itself grows directly proportional to national debt. If the debt is not retired, the interest on the debt itself will grow exponentially with time. When will interest payments swallow the entire federal budget? Right now the middle of the 2020s seems like a very safe guess.

Given these constraints on federal fiscal policy, how much room is there for compromise between conservatives and progressives? Given that the federal government will financially self-destruct within the next two decades, would compromise resulting in more spending even matter? How likely is it that conservatives can persuade progressives to reduce government spending? Failing any such persuasion of progressives, can the American electorate be persuaded? The future existence of our country depends on how we answer these questions.

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