Paul Ryan Whistling Past Reality

I just finished watching Paul Ryan’s convention speech and I was dumbstruck by this supposed policy wonk’s complete and obvious ability to craft a speech that was so at variance to the facts and then expect the voters to take him seriously. Let’s take a look at some of what Ryan claimed. 

Ryan talks about how Barack Obama has been in office for four years and even though he inherited a jobs crisis and a housing crisis he’s been unable to correct these problems. Ryan accuses President Obama of failing to focus on job creation in particular yet he never stopped to acknowledge the fact that at the depths of the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression the Republican leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, said that the single most important goal of the G.O.P. was “to make Barack Obama a one term president.” Looking back at the past three years I don’t recall any great effort on the part of the Republican Party to create jobs other than to continue to advocate for more tax cuts for the rich, the supposed “job creators”, who being the beneficiaries of the most liberal tax treatment since Ronald Reagan, don’t seem to have created all that many jobs anyway. And who were McConnell’s allies in this endeavor, the House Republicans, Paul Ryan, foremost among them. Thus at a time when the vast majority of Americans were suffering through the Great Recession the leaders of this country’s conservative movement put partisan politics above the common good and now we’re being asked to return these same people to power. What, pray tell, would lead anyone to believe that these same leaders, who put the American people on hold while they pursued partisan politics, will now address the needs of the rank and file American via a renewed attempt at trickle down economics?

With regard to fiscal matters, Ryan lectured the audience on the great damage done to the country by the Obama Administration saying that the president had run up an additional $5 Trillion dollars in debt since taking office. Odd but Ryan failed to address the fact that it was his party under George W. Bush that took us from surplus to deficit by starting two unfunded wars, cutting taxes for those who didn’t need one and the increased costs of Medicare resulting from a new prescription drug plan that was never adequately paid for. The great irony of Ryan’s whole diatribe is that he himself never stood against any of the aforementioned when they were up for a vote during the Bush administration. He railed against the auto bailout yet he voted for it. He spoke of a General Motors factory in Janesville that closed after candidate Obama promised that the plant would remain open and did so by ignoring the fact that that plant closed in December of 2008, before Obama even took office. He derided Obama for his efforts to fight the Great Recession yet Ryan himself voted in favor of the Wall Street TARP bailout and gladly accepted stimulus funds for his home district. He accuses Obama of walking away from the Simpson-Bowles debt reduction commission yet he himself voted against it. Oh and just one more thing, he was for earmarks before it became fashionable to be against them as his track record of procuring federal monies for his home district shows. 

Ryan raised the old “Socialist” boogeyman when he spoke about “central planning” but then he went on to say that he and Romney would put the government “back on the side of those who create jobs.” Pardon me but the Republicans have been carrying on for the past four years that the government should get out of the way of the “job creators” and not “pick winners and losers.” And as was to be expected, Ryan again raised the misconception that Barack Obama doesn’t believe that people build their own businesses. Of course Obama never said anything to that effect, what he did say was that private businesses benefit from public spending on infrastructure and education and to that there is no argument as the history of this country shows. Since the birth of the American Republic public spending on infrastructure improvement has gone hand in hand with economic progress. Funny that a guy who’s supposed to be so well grounded in economic theory and history would miss an obvious fact like that one. Ryan reiterated the fable that Obama believes that we can grow the economy via entitlements, again a claim that can’t be substantiated in reality. 

In speaking of his running mate’s record of public service Ryan alludes to Mitt Romney’s record as Governor of Massachusetts while ignoring the fact that the state ranked 47th in job creation, that Romney governed as a moderate, that he crafted a healthcare plan that is the template of Obamacare, individual mandate and all, and, he ignored Romney’s flip flop on abortion. Ryan praises Romney’s turnaround of the 2002 Olympics while ignoring the fact that Romney received between $400 to $600 million dollars directly from the federal government and approximately $1.1 billion dollars of indirect funding for transportation infrastructure improvements. 

Paul Ryan would end his speech with an appeal to the American people to put partisanship aside and: “Let’s come together for the sake of our country.” Is he really serious in thinking that after his own party said that its goal was “to make Barack Obama a one term president” that his opponents will now, as if by magic, put the vitriol and the divisiveness of the past four years behind them and follow him, a guy who on the occasion of the most important speech in his political life would produce a soliloquy that only a politically ignorant listener could love. 

Steven J. Gulitti

8/30/12

Who’s Beholden to Foreign Ideas?‏

Ever since Sarah Palin ran around proclaiming that Barack Obama is a “Socialist” there has been an unrelenting effort by the right to portray the president as someone beholden to foreign ideas. Whether it flows from the fever swamp of right wing media or from the lips of Mitt Romney and his surrogates there has been a concerted effort to define the president as un-American. Furthermore there has been a noticeable lack of political courage among Republican Party leaders in denouncing these attacks. What’s even more interesting is that when it comes to being out of step with the American people a recent NBC / Wall Street Journal Poll shows that 54% of the respondents see Obama’s views as being in the mainstream vice 51% for Mitt Romney. However it might just be worth looking into just how beholden some of Obama’s critics are to foreign ideas and influences.
 
Let’s start with Paul Ryan and his conservative fellow travelers. A recent article detailing Ryan’s formative years, “Conservative Star’s Small-Town Roots”, stated of Ryan’s path to individual responsibility and maturity: “It followed him into college, where he immediately took a passionate interest in the canon of conservative economic theorists and writers — Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises — who inspired the up-and-coming generation of libertarian-minded activists and lawmakers.” Odd but with the exception of Milton Friedman there’s not an American among those from whom Ryan draws upon for his fundamental principles. Both Hayek and his mentor von Mises, were born in the late 19th Century and are major contributors to the Austrian school of economic thought. Ludwig von Mises formulated his theories in a world where there were relatively few industrial but many agricultural or undeveloped economies. India was a still a British colony, Brazil largely agricultural and China was still dominated by European spheres of influence. Globalization as we now it today was unheard of and hardly imagined. The ideas and influence of von Mises would significantly affect Friedrich Hayek.

Ayn Rand was born in Czarist Russia in 1905. As Jennifer Burns, a Stanford professor, points out Ryan’s affinity for Rand is somewhat odd as she would have found plenty to critique in Ryan: “Mr. Ryan’s advocacy of steep cuts in government spending would have pleased her, she would have vehemently opposed his social conservatism and hawkish foreign policy. She would have denounced Mr. Ryan, as she denounced Ronald Reagan, for trying “to take us back to the Middle Ages, via the unconstitutional union of religion and politics”…Mr. Ryan’s rise is a telling index of how far conservatism has evolved from its founding principles. The creators of the movement embraced the free market, but shied from Rand’s promotion of capitalism as a moral system. They emphasized the practical benefits of capitalism, not its ethics. Their fidelity to Christianity grew into a staunch social conservatism that Rand fought against in vain.” As Burns puts it, Ryan and the conservative embrace of Ayn Rand reveals “a window into the ideological fissures at the heart of modern conservatism.” To Burn’s observation one could legitimately add that Ryan’s affinity to foreign ideas, as propounded by Rand and others, may be more than a little out of step with American society today. Moreover, the essential economic question is, are economic theories formulated in an era before globalization still really relevant today?

Then there is the rhetoric of Mitt Romney who, when not defending his opaque tax history or policy specific free campaign, carries on about the virtues of capitalism and the history of our republic and how it is so very American and how Obama fails to see that connection. The odd thing about all this prattle about capitalism is that capitalism itself is a European idea with its roots in the 13th Century Italian and Dutch mercantile cities. The first joint stock company was founded in Britain in 1555. The use of contracts to formalize and regulate business transactions goes back at least as far as the Roman Empire. When one examines the technology and structures borne of capitalism: banking, ocean transport, steam power, railroads, suspension bridges and the factory system, to name just a few, all are of European origin or found there way to America via Europe. Beyond economics there are the origins of representative government itself. Neither democracy nor elected representative government is an American invention. As Fred Anderson points out in Crucible of War, the early resistance on the part of colonists in North America to the Stamp and Quartering Acts wasn’t for the purpose of parting company with the British Crown, it was because the aggrieved felt that their rights as Englishmen had been abrogated.

The socio-religious justification for capitalism itself is of European origin: “The development of capitalism in northern Protestant countries, such as the Netherlands and England, has prompted the theory that the Reformation is a cause of capitalism. But this states the case rather too strongly, particularly since the beginnings of capitalism can be seen far earlier. Nevertheless there are elements in Reformation thought which greatly help the development of capitalism. This is particularly true of the Calvinist variety of the reformed faith, which becomes the state religion of the Netherlands after the Great Assembly of 1651…Calvinism positively encourages the purposeful investment of money, by presenting luxury and self-indulgence as vices and thrift as a virtue. It even subtly contrives to suggest that wealth may itself be a sign of virtue.” Along with the religious justifications for engaging in money making there is the concomitant rise in the sanctity of the individual, a fundamental idea that predates the American Republic and which is essentially a European idea. When it comes to defending America many of the tools we use, iron hulled ships, tanks, rockets and the application of the airplane to modern warfare all have their origins in Europe. The first principles of aerial dogfights were developed by German ace Oswald Boelcke in WWI, the principles of the aerial bomber campaign came from Giulio Douhet, an Italian and the fundamental theories on armored warfare that the Germans would perfect and that we would copy came from Europe. As every American knows, it was German scientists who provided the brains behind our own space program.

The point of all of the aforementioned isn’t to be a primer on Europe’s influence on America, it’s to point out that the right-wing rant about Obama being beholden to “foreign ideas” is both illogical and contrary to history. As a simple matter of historical fact, America as a nation founded upon and influenced by foreign ideas, most of which either are European in origin or were transmitted to our shores through Europe. America, like Russia, is an outgrowth of Europe and that fact can’t be denied, no matter what the political spin applied thereto. The fact that Americans have taken foreign ideas and grown them into something exceptional, in no way invalidates the fact that America, regardless of political philosophy or party, has been fundamentally influenced by foreign ideas. The political ploy of making an issue of Obama’s affinity for certain ideas of foreign origin while denying that conservatives do the same thing is both intellectually dishonest as well as logically unsustainable. If anyone in this election could be pinned with the label “beholden to foreign ideas” it would be Paul Ryan. If Barack Obama is un-American for looking overseas for certain ideas than Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and the rest of the anti-Obama claque are as well. Perhaps many within the conservative movement would benefit from a refresher course on Western and American history. That said, in the final analysis, Barack Obama is no more un-American than is Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan, not if anyone’s interested in being honest that is.  

Steven J. Gulitti

8/21/12

Sources: 

NBC/WSJ poll: Heading into conventions, Obama has four-point lead; http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/08/21/13399788-nbcwsj-poll-heading-into-conventions-obama-has-four-point-lead?

Conservative Star’s Small-Town Roots; http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/13/us/politics/family-faith-and-politics-describe-life-of-paul-ryan.html?pagewanted=1&emc=eta1

Jennifer Burns: Atlas Spurned; http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/15/opinion/ayn-rand-wouldnt-approve-of-paul-ryan.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

HISTORY OF CAPITALISM: http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/plaintexthistories.asp?historyid=aa49

Evolution Of Contract At Roman Law; http://chestofbooks.com/business/law/Law-Of-Contracts-4-1/Sec-4-Evolution-Of-Contract-At-Roman-Law.html

FRED ANDERSON: Crucible of War The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766  (Knopf)